[Necromancer]

Level 12: Archive

Make it to the last working cargo elevator

The first room of the archive introduces you to a new threat, the appropriately-named Spectre. These fellows resemble Locusts in outward appearance, except for the fact that they’ve come down with a mild case of invisibility. In harsh light, you’ll probably be able to spot them due to their Predator-like shimmering effect, but it’s generally easier to activate your CryVision goggles and track them by their heat signatures. If you feel a little underpowered for close-range fighting, don’t hesitate to use your rockets or the AG36’s grenade launcher to even the odds a bit.

After fighting off three of them, you’ll come into a room where scientists and mercs are skirmishing with a few Spectres. Kill the remnants of the fight and trade in one of your weapons for a Jackhammer, if you don’t already possess one. Shoot out the blue panels in the nearby...thing, and drop down. You’re likely to take damage if you just jump down and hope for the best; try to slide along the sides of the interior of the machine to avoid this. At the bottom, hit your night vision and take care of the two Spectres.

The rest of the doors here are locked, thus trapping you in a dead end...or so it seems. If you look at the water in the center of the room, you’ll notice that there’s a hole in the grating that’s been covered up by a wooden plank and a couple of metal barrels. Push the junk out of the way and float down.

In what appears to be a bit of Half-Life homagery, you’re going to have to swim through the passageway here until you come up next to what appears to be a reactor. Kill the Tridgen in the room and flip the switch on the wall to unlock the doors, then head back through the hallway to the room you just swam away from. Head through the door marked "Level 3" and take the lift down.

You’ll emerge into another firefight between Tridgens and mercs. Wait for the dust to settle, then suit up with whatever armor the mercs left behind.

The expansive room nearby hosts a dozen or so security mercs. As per usual, these fellows are packing helmets, rendering them less vulnerable to headshots. As such, you’ll probably want to make a loud noise near the hallways before the room and lure as many of them back to you as possible before Jackhammering them in the head. Your mileage may vary, but it can definitely help to weed out some of the multitudes before progressing into the room itself.

When you do move on, though, you’ll want to scout with your binoculars. You should spot a couple of soldiers on the catwalks towards the rear of the room. If you dropped your sniper rifle for the Jackhammer earlier on, you won’t be able to get a clean headshot off, but you can still use your AG36’s scope to pummel them with bullets from afar. They probably won’t move, or even fire back, since they’re so far away. Take them down before moving among the crates in the center of the room; the last thing you need is something distracting you from the soldiers among the shadowy boxes. If you’re intent on making an impression, you can fire off a rocket at these soldiers; one of them carries a rocket launcher of his own, so you likely won’t be missing any ammo afterwards.

The soldier along the rear of the room, besides possessing the rocket launcher, also drops a keycard when you kill him. Grab it and head through the nearby door to come face-to-face with a few more Spectres. The cargo elevator here is sadly nonfunctional, but it does contain a sniper rifle that will be useful in a few moments.

When you come out into the open, lie prone before the first little opening into the canyon beyond and start sniping away at any individuals that you can spot; there should be quite a few targets. Since you just passed a save point, feel free to go a little crazy and get a feel for what type of enemies are where; there are at least two mercenary snipers in this area, as well as a rocket launcher foe on top of the water tank way down at the other end of the area. As soon as you’re spotted, a cargo chopper will come in with a few troops. You can’t destroy it, but you may be able to get its mercenaries with a rocket as they rappel down to your location.

After the dust clears a little, you’ll be able to more thoroughly gauge the forces that you haven’t yet taken out. If you spot a Fat Boy at the other end of the metal walkway, and it doesn’t look like the soldiers there are firing at it, don’t waste ammo on it; this seems to be a repeatable glitch. He should disappear by the time you get a bit closer to the other side of the valley. Also, you may hear a helicopter sound as you walk towards the far door; this, too, is apparently a glitch, or just the sound of one of the helicopters that already left, as nothing appears to threaten you.

You’ll reach a save point before the metal doors that are your goal, and it’s a good thing, too, as another orgy of death awaits you in the room beyond. It’s not one of those generic, run-of-the-mill orgies of death, either, the kind that feature armorless mercs and a few Tridgens. No, this is an escalated threat, featuring a Fat Boys and numerous fully-clad mercenaries, replete with PG90’s, helmets, and grenades. Not quite a full-blown apocalypse of gore, but it’s early yet, and the Fat Boy can cause problems for players who happen to get too close. Don’t be one of them.

Unfortunately, the presence of a mutant won’t distract the mercs enough to prevent them from training their automatic weapons on you, so you’ll need to tread lightly. You can either walk into the room and withdraw as soon as the fighting begins, and wait until you don’t hear any more gunshots (which can take a while), or attempt to sprint to the right of the entrance and reach the doors at the far end of the room without dying. A standard method of dealing with mercs at long range, should you see any, is to flip on your night vision, immediately go prone, and use your AG36 on zoom mode to nab headshots. Despite the fact that they have helmets, headshots still drop a merc more quickly than do body shots, and if you click your attack button so that no more than three or four bullets fly out at a time, you should be able to retain some semblance of accuracy.

Your best bet, however, is to use rockets judiciously on your approach towards the door. You should have at least four from the guy atop the water cooler, and that’s really all you’ll have time to fire when you’re inside, but it should be enough to get you to the exit point unscathed. Well, that and a little luck. Begin by approaching the door from the outside on its far right extremity; when it’s opened up, pop over the ridge, activate your night vision, and start pacing along the room’s outside wall. When you see a merc, fire away. These guys are tough, but they’re not tough enough to withstand a close-order explosion, so feel free to fire at a nearby wall or the floor if you don’t want to risk missing a moving target.

When you reach the corner of the room, turn back inwards towards the metal doors and walk towards them. They’re actually not the exit - they’re locked - but they’re close enough to act as a good landmark. Where you really want to go is towards the crate that’s being suspended by a chain. Shoot the chain when you’re close enough to hit it, and the crate will fall through the floor, revealing a couple of vents. Drop into the hole here and head out through the eastern vent, continuing straight past the branch in the passage - all the fork here leads to is another exit from the same hole you just left. Eventually, you’ll reach a ladder heading up; flip the switch to call the elevator and congratulations, you’ve finally managed to complete the sole goal for this level.