[Necromancer]

Hospitality

When you find the next bridge, shoot the wooden plank in the gears to let it drop, then cross over to the hospital. The first thing you’ll have to do here is fight your way down a lengthy hallway full of zombies and Combine soldiers. Duck beneath the windows to avoid the gunship fire, and be sure to chuck an object through the door protected by the mines to blow them before heading through.

At the end of this hallway, you’ll come across another challenging fight: a one-on-one encounter with the airship that’s been dogging you for the past few minutes of gameplay. You should know the drill here: in order to knock the airship out of the sky, you have to hit it with rockets, and luckily for you, the soon-to-be-dead rocketeer at the far end of the room will drop a rocket launcher for you. Unfortunately, the room is going to be disintegrating around you as you fight, which will often prevent you from seeing the airship at all; the wooden walls won’t really protect you, either, since the gunship can just shoot through the planks and hit you instantly. It also magically knows right where you are at all times, so good luck hiding from the gunfire!

Your assets? Well, you have the aforementioned rocket launcher and three crates in one corner of the level (although two of them will start out on the upper level here). All of the crates contain health upgrades, so if you’re running low, look for them to get charged up a bit. You also have a rocket box on the second floor of the room, and you’re going to need to stick near it if you want to take down the gunship.

The basic pattern here is to fire your rockets up through any holes in the ceiling, let it zoom up towards the sky, then pull it back towards you by moving your laser on top of a nearby piece of wood. As it rotates around in the sky, it’ll draw the gunship’s fire and force it to try and shoot the rocket down. You’ll probably want to use a few rockets to blast sections of the roof off, at first, which will let you attempt to paint the gunship with your laser sighter and knock it down. Just don’t forget that you can open the locker while your rockets are still in midair; just quickly look at it and hit the open button, then resume your aiming. After six or seven hits (on Hard difficulty), the gunship’ll go down and you’ll be on your way.

Moving On

After Alyx grabs her shotgun, you’re going to face an extended run-and-gun sequence through the upper levels of the hospital. Nothing too difficult; just more zombies and Combine. Let them kill each other whenever possible, and sort through the rubble to find any leftover weapons.

When you reach a group of zombies banging against bulletproof glass, examine the end of the hallway to find some more enemies, then turn back to deal with the zombies as they break through. After killing them all, head through the door to find a hole in the ground, then drop down to reach a little water puzzle.

Alright, it’s water. There are plenty of barnacles in the area, so your first order of business is to kill them with your pistol or shotgun. There are plenty of them around, including a few that haven’t dropped their tentacles yet, so be sure to check the ceiling for holes and fire away accordingly.

Here’s how things are going to go: there’s a switch to activate the electricty that’s semi-hidden on the platform at the top of the stairs that descend into the water. Flipping the switch will also electrify the water itself, though, which causes a problem for you, since the only way to move to the door involves jumping from the platform nearby, which dips into the water when you stand on it. Since you can’t survive more than a few seconds in the water, this is obviously problematic.

The solution? Flip the switch into the off position again, then find the blue floatation device directly across from the dipping platform. Grabbing it with your gravgun will let you suck it underwater and place it underneath the end of the dipping platform, which will prevent it from dropping into the water. With that done, flip the switch back on, jump from the end of the platform to the metal grate, then jump across the pipes to the enclosed room and from there to the platform near the open door.

Abattoir

When you link up with Alyx once again, you’re going to come to another drop-in room with a toxic zombie wandering the halls below. Before you drop down into the room, kill the zombie and all of his headcrabs.

After you drop down, you’ll have a couple moments of rest before the zombies start appearing again, so take advantage of that to place the flip mines on the rack near the two doorways (simply alt-fire grab them with your grav gun, then drop them by a door; they’ll automatically turn friendly to you when you do so). When they come down, numerous zombines will come at you, so try to keep them off of Alyx, and shoot them with both barrels of your shotgun when they pull out a grenade. It can be tricky to survive here, but you have no real options except to fight your way out. If one door opens sooner than the other, then you might be able to head through it to maneuver a bit before the other one opens, assuming you manage to kill the incoming opponents quickly enough. There are going to be a few zombines here, so be extra careful about their grenade-dropping habits. You may want to try pegging them with a crossbow bolt to kill them instantly before they have a chance to pull one out.

Around the corner from here, you’ll come to a hallway with numerous flip mines and a couple of turrets set up to overwatch it. Although it’s been set up to halt your progress, you’ll still be able to use it to your advantage. As you move up the hallway (sprinting from doorway to doorway to avoid the turret fire), the flipmines will be activated by the zombies that come your way, eliminating most of them without a problem. When you reach the end of the hall, pull the plug on the forcefield with your gravgun to move on.