Part 4: Drilling the Point Home

VIDEO: Chapter 1 Boss Mission

Last time we stopped short of entering the boss mission for this chapter. Now it's time to see exactly what the humans are up to so far from home, this deep in Krill space.

The meat of this small update is going to be the video, as there's only so much to show and say about the flying and boss segments without getting repetitive or forced.



The mission starts you off flying at very high speeds through this underground tunnel. Safest way to get through is to not move and just hold the fire button until the section slows down.



The details in here are pretty neat. It's pretty good at making it look like there's a big human installation down here with lots of buildings and stuff.



Enemies in boss stages are quite heavy on EXP drops. The normal enemies here drop between 5 and 10 exp, meaning that if you're killing enemies at a decent pace, you should get at least 1 level up just getting to the boss. Unluckily, they're pretty tough to kill, each of them taking between two and four hits to kill, making killing them in droves tough unless you unload bombs on them.



There's some small corridor navigation too. Luckily, the game doesn't throw enemies at you while you're in them. (Not yet at least)



If you look on the right, you can see the path sloping down. Boss Missions are different in that the path can also go diagonally instead of just pure horizontally.



There's a wall in the way! Luckily, the layers move to let you through.



I actually had to record the video twice because the first time was me remembering what was and was not solid, meaning I crashed into just about every piece of scenery... As such, I nearly died just getting to the boss.



This part is a pretty big dick move by the game in that you are unlikely to survive this if you've never played the game before, even less so if you aren't using free movement cannon. You have to use your gun to dig through this dirt and then fly through the subsequent path. Now does it look like your ship would fit in here? No, so most everyone, myself included on that first recording, would try to make the path two tiles high. but if you do that, you crash because there's not enough time to dig away the dirt on two levels of tile. So you'll either crash a lot getting through here or discover by chance that you can survive in a one tile high tunnel.



And then right after that is the boss so if you took a lot of damage in the digging portion, you're in danger here.

The boss itself is a drilling machine that follows the beams in the background as its path. This is why Free Movement Cannon is useful, in that you can potentially hit it no matter where it goes and can also hang out in the center while waiting for it to re-appear when it goes offscreen.



It might not be immediately obvious but this is one of the drawbacks to the Free Movement Cannon that makes it not so preferred by me overall. To fire forward you have to be not moving or moving forwards. In a game where enemies come from the right and you can move in all 8 directions, it's inevitable that you'll need to move backwards to put some distance between you and enemies. With free movement cannon, doing this results in you simply moving backwards without hurting enemies as you retreat, something that has caused me to crash into enemies plenty of times after retreating and thinking I can get enough shots in to kill the enemy before it hits me. Same idea here with this boss. The more you damage it, the faster it moves. To hit it, you have to move towards wherever it is currently, allowing maybe one or two shots to hit before you need to retreat. In this shot I'm retreating because it's moving too close to me but can't hit it with my gun.

(Now if I were smart I would have remembered the B weapon, the default, firing-forwards gun, but since you RARELY have need to switch to that, the button goes largely unused the whole game.)



Eventually I kill it and it drops about 400-500 EXP, getting me another level up. Look at all that EXP. And there was more offscreen too since I killed it as it was leaving.

And now we're back out on the surface.



: Pretty liberating, eh!
: Nothing about that felt good.
: While you were flirting with that clanking monstrosity, I did a little reconnaissance. I think your Earth people were digging for the same thing we were searching for ourselves. I was able to secure their Scanning Tool, as well as their readings. They're much more accurate than ours.
: Leave it to us humans to take the least subtle approach.
:I'll take the readings, you hold onto this tool.


: The SCANNING TOOL should be easy enough even for you. Press the L or R button to switch from your GUN to that TOOL. The scanner will activate automatically. Give it a try on the way back to the starbase. I'll see you there.

Join me next time as we get relocated.