Part 41: Operation Meat Touch

Operation Meat Touch


First off I'd say sorry for the delay, but hey the Oilers are finally out of the Playoffs so I was able to find Guavamoment again. Weirdly this video just would not compile in Vegas for me. For no discernible reason. I zipped everything up, gave it to Lune and he ran the exact same set up on it and everything was fine. So no fucking clue whats going wrong now, but thank you to Lune for helping save this one. Hopefully I won't need to do that again but there should only be 1 video left worst case anyway.

So about this mission. This is a unique level design and I like a lot of what they did with it. It's objective focused, stealth orientated, and it gives a much stronger vibe of resistance movement and sabotage than I feel from a lot of the other mission. A lot of the resistance movement missions are kind of like 'drop in, smash the place up, rescue a VIP, get out' and that doesn't feel like small guerrilla cell sort of operations to me. This mission is just get in, hack the gibson, and get out. I like it. The other really big thing is the pre-mission prepwork that can be done. Spending intel for in mission tactical bonuses was a cool idea and both Guava and I feel like it was a feature that should have been utilized more. It could have been used on nearly every mission with varying random bonuses given. This would have made Intel a more interesting resource for the game to award and spend more commonly. As is, Intel is only used to contact new regions and occasionally maybe buy something at the black market. With the theme of the game being guerrilla operations I think they should have expanded the Intel as a weapon idea and done more with it. Overall I'm not going to fault the game for it, but it does seem like something of a missed opportunity.

The actual battle side of the mission was pretty sparse this time around, but you don't always get to freely walk 95% of the map to the objective unimpeded. Often times the bridge layout is much less accommodating and the enemy placement is less forgiving. Something not well shown in my video is that fighting high end aliens with only half of your squad is dangerous. Having half as many actions to get things done with really makes every action you take count for a whole lot more than you may be used to. It's what makes the Intel bonuses so powerful. Like for example the bonus that gave every squad member a single use of Run and Gun for the mission; that can be huge in a situation like this mission. Fighting something like an Andromedan with only 3 soldiers is pretty dicey. I suppose this mission can turn out two ways, a stealth sneaking mission like I played out for the LP, or a smash and grab sort of deal like when I played through the game for the first time. In that case it's more of using all your consumables to smash through the couple of aliens as fast as you can and getting to the objective. In either case I have no doubts that this mission could play out very differently for everyone who tries it.