Skaphander: Der Auftrag/Intruder



The intruder virus has disassembled core circuitry in this area's nexus and scattered the resulting parts to make repairs difficult. Your mission is to clear the sector, gather the parts, and reassemble the circuit board. Once that's done, you will have a limited window of time to leave during the transmitter initialization sequence.

This level is essentially a fetch-quest, with the five items you need to gather kept in five separate areas with opportunities to recover between them.

Entrance


You begin in the north in a minor tunnel broken up by a screen midway through. A debugger is provided, but your double eraser will suit you better in this level. On hard, clear the barnacle at the second corner, and on all difficulty levels expect a barnacle behind the pillar with a screen plus a clamp as you angle toward the nexus. Take care as you come in view of that room on hard since you will probably have the attention of one more clamp and one more barnacle.

Nexus


The nexus is a large octagon that you will be revisiting frequently since the board in the center is where you need to deposit four jumpers and a processor, and you can only carry one of those items at a time. As you enter, take out any viruses that notice you but leave the others aside for bit. (Do be careful of catching a barnacle's attention since any barnacles will be rising from below, a direction you might not expect.) Drive past the circuit board, the button, and the status screen, and ride the lift down in the south. Curl around to the west side to clear one, two, or three barnacles away, hold off on grabbing the second debugger, and ride the lift in the west up to the outside perimeter. Re-energize with the station to your right.

Left of the recharging station is a door to the gauntlet, which will be your first port of call.

Gauntlet


On entering the door to the gauntlet, you'll find that the hall branches in two. It's dangerous to let yourself be flanked from both sides, so eliminate the two or three clamps there if playing on medium or hard, respectively, before turning your attention to the left branch, which leads to the main room. Ignore the sounds of barnacles coming from below the floor for now, strafe to peek in the door, and dispatch one, two, or three clamps according to your paygrade.

A jumper is in sight, but, as you can expect from the commotion around you, this room is a barnacle trap, and while that might not be a huge deal on easy or medium, there's still something to be said for planning ahead and taking precautions, especially on hard. Plant yourself on the room's midline and spin around to face the door. The idea will be to follow the center seam backward to the jumper and then use turbo to bolt out of the room before the barnacles can respond. With a long, clamp-free hallway at your back and a chokepoint at the door, you'll be able to hold off the mob.

Once you're lined up, hold ↓ to back up over the jumper, watching the centerline to keep yourself aligned with ← and →. As soon as you see the message that the jumper is on board, the floor and outside hall will start to lower down to where 4, 7, or 11 barnacles are waiting in two opposing lines. Hold Shift+↑ and make a run for it. Even though you can't find the motion-sensitive door from above anymore, you can cut around to the left to where the clamps were and, once there, turn back to face your pursuers in relative safety. Use strafing turns to poke the Skaphander around the corners until you can get some barnacles in your crosshairs and let them have it. Should you run out of ammo, flee back along the northern path, which now opens up into the lower nexus right at a debugger with 120 energy. Having refilled, you can rejoin the fray.

When you think that everyone has been cleared out, dive into the gauntlet again with turbo and about face at the west end to verify your guess. If there are survivors, you will have blown past them and should be able to finish them now from a distance. Squash the bug, collect any items that you want, head out the tunnel and take a lift ride back to the circuit board. Use Space to place the jumper on one of the pairs of pins.

Though it hopefully shouldn't be necessary, if you do get barnacled in this room, your backup plan is to pull up your HUD map, shove your way out the northern branch of the fork, find the lift on the western outskirts again, use Space when next to it to call it down, ride it up, and then circle all the way around to the northeast where the repair station can remove the barnacle. It's a bit of a nail-biter, but if you came into the level with a protector, it should be feasible. If things get really hairy, remember that strafing uses far less energy than normal driving and still works to a limited extent even if your batteries die—that trick can be the difference between life and death.

For the second jumper you will be exploring the pillar rooms.

Pillar rooms


Ride the central lift down again, use Space to call the western lift to ground level, and ride it up to refill at the recharging station. Then head to the southwest wall to follow a corridor to the two pillar rooms, barnacle-infested spaces broken up by a total of 19 blocky pillars to give the viruses maximum chances to surprise you around a corner. You'll find zero, one, or two clamps along the path. When you get to the door, coast to a stop. On hard you can probably already see a couple barnacles; begin by bringing them down.

Now, a reliable strategy in a broken-up space like this is to slide along the outer perimeter with your back to the border so that you have fewer angles to cover and fewer chances to be caught off-guard. But you'll still have to periodically turn to look where you're going so that you don't sidestep into danger. Follow this pattern in the southeast pillared room, planting your back against the wall just left of the doorway and carefully sweeping for targets before checking that the next corner clockwise is clear and dashing there. Not counting the two barnacles already destroyed on hard, you should find one virus in this area on easy and three on higher difficulty levels.

When the southeast half is safe, make your way in the northeast room following a similar strategy to take out one, two, or three more barnacles there. Squash the bug, collect the jumper, and take the two avaiable recharges before heading back to the circuit board to place this second jumper just like you did the first.

As before, if you have the bad luck to get barnacled at any point in this segment, follow your HUD map out to the gallery and trace that walkway around to the repair station in the northeast. You have a lot more time to work with in this case because you're both closer and already on the correct story.

Next, you will find the third jumper in the storage rooms.

Storage rooms


By now you know the gameplan: ride the south lift down, ride the west lift up, charge at the recharging station, and head for the next door, this one in the southeast. Behind it will be a poorly-placed barnacle on medium and hard, and following the path further in will bring you to one, two, or three clamps, so peek around the corner before barging into the room.

With the clamps downed, you should find yourself on the northern walkway overlooking a storage pit with a barnacle inside guarding a row of barrels. Pitch your weapon down and strike it, letting recoil raise your weapon with the target. Then follow the walkway around the pit and into a backroom.

This first backroom is inhabited by three barnacles except on easy, so mow them down as you enter and then collect the recharges from the west side of the room. Let the ones on the east wait until you strafe around the left corner to dispatch a clamp on medium or two clamps and a barnacle on hard. This is also a good time to grab the recharges in that northern storage space.

Now follow the path south and wipe out zero, one, or three barnacles according to the difficulty level. Pop up your HUD map and notice that one of the walls is marked as a different type. On easy and medium you can approach it and press Space to reveal a cache of resource items and a "Metal Lives!" poster. On hard, you can do the same, but back up in the hall as the false wall opens because two clamps are also inside, and you want to encounter them on your own terms.

With the secret cache raided, continue around to the pit's southern walkway and spot a silver bug. It's booby-trapped to open another false wall, as your HUD map's wall-type colorations will reveal. So back up hard immediately after squashing it to avoid fire from one, two, or three clamps inside that other closet. Clip them with gunfire as they poke out to look for you, and then enjoy a second stash of items.

To finish up in this space, you still need to find the jumper. If you ride the lift down from the southern walkway and glance behind the barrels where the barnacle was, you can spot it concealed back there. Run over and grab it, then ride the other lift to return you to the northern path so that you can trek back to the circuit board and place it.

With three jumpers down, the fourth is to be found in the shelves.

Shelves


As in all prior branches, come to the shelves with full energy and space in your inventory. This time there are no viruses along the path, but the moment you hit an intersection you will have one, two, or three clamps to deal with from the north. Focus your attention there, ignoring any danger from the southern side, since if you break through the clamps, you can scramble for the northwest corner to stay out of the reach of any barnacles at your back. Don't take the sixpack there just yet, but rotate south and hit any barnacles you have in tow.

Next, duck east to clean out one, two, or three clamps guarding a breakpoint. Returning the way you came, you can grab the sixpack if you're below 150 energy and then finish off the one, three, or four barnacles on the south branch to find a first shelf with data refreshes. A similar segment of the hallway just to the east leads you to one or two clamps protecting a shelf of recharges.

With your resources at full, continue to the heavily terraced room in the east. You should be able to engage everything from the doorway, which will be easier than trying to account for weapon pitch while moving through uneven terrain. On easy, "everybody" amounts to a single barnacle, on medium, it means two barnacles and a clamp, and on hard there will be three of each.

When the fight is over, sqaush the bug in the southeast, grab the jumper in the northeast, and take any recharges you see. Bring the jumper back to the circuit board to join the last pair of pins, recharging on your way back since you won't be coming this way again. Unfortunately, it turns out that jumpers aren't enough—the board's processor is also missing, so you'll have to lift it from the hangar.

Hangar


When you ride the southern lift down this time, don't turn right to the western lift, but orient yourself east to mirror that route. You will probably catch the attention of the one, two, or three barnacles sleeping here, but there's plenty of space for you to keep your distance, so they're not much of a threat. Once the barnacles are corpses on the ground, head northwest, avoiding the hangar entrace until you can get on its left side.

While the hangar in the northeast seems tactically uninteresting—it's just an open space after all—you do have one advantage in the barrel placed on the left side of the entrance. That barrel is tall enough to block the clamps' machine guns but short enough to be out of their line of sight and thus to trip them up when they rush you. So creep up on the hangar from the left, get the viruses' attention, and let them snag on that obstacle while you perforate anyone that breaks free.

In theory, all three, six, or eight clamps should come pouring out by the end since the ones at the front will tell those at the back what's up. But just in case someone was left out of the loop, do use a modicum of caution when entering. There are plenty of resources here, so fill up on everything, and snag the processor by the back wall. Bring it to the circuit board and place it in the center.

Escape
Even with all of the viruses gone, this level has one last surprise in store for anyone who didn't pay enough attention to their surroundings. With all the jumpers placed and the processor plugged in, you are now able to press the button to start the transmission sequence, but if you've been keeping notes, you know that the one unexplored area is the lift just west of where you came in and the tunnel high in the wall that it apparently rises to. Critically, that tunnel is above your current altitude, which means that you won't be able to get on the lift once it climbs too far.

So do press the button, but be ready to drive fast to the end of the causeway where you entered and turn west. If you're quick about it, you can use ledge-peering to see when the lift is about to come even with the causeway and drive on to it without taking damage, but if you're in a hurry or don't want to risk missing your ride out, you can just jump down onto it. If your aim is poor, recenter yourself to squash the silver bug. Then, when the lift reaches the top, squash the gold bug inside the room and cast yourself down the escape shaft.