All of this imposing darkness adds strategy as well as atmosphere. Locating your enemy is no longer enough; you must also learn to distinguish and target their form in the fog and shadow. Step into a patch of light and you become easy prey, spinning wildly in place while trying to figure out where the shots are coming from. In fact, we discovered that sound - the echoes of footsteps and weapon reloads - often guided us more than our sense of sight.
Dark Town's other striking contrast with Pirate Fortress is its height. Instead of spreading horizontally, it soars upward to the roofs of buildings and burrows downward into basement tunnels. If the Dilapidation map's virtual elevation feels like four or five stories, this feels like twenty. And both your opponents and the precious radar outposts that reveal their location can be spaced out correspondingly vertically.
Good thing we had our trusty, standard-issue grappling hook with us. For such a unique and potentially fun tool, it sure gets underused on the other battlefields. Thankfully, Dark Town forces you to master the hook if you want to climb and rappel up to the best sniping or hiding spots.
With some delicacy - and luck - we even managed to maneuver a mech (called Vital Suit or VS in Lost Planet) to these high vantage points. We made a lot more noise doing so, but raining a blizzard of white-heat missiles onto the unsuspecting players below was well worth the racket. Until they had died and respawned a few times, most of them didn't even think to look up. And when they did... that was when we leapt off the precipice and came crashing down on them with several tons of murderous mass.
Good thing we had our trusty, standard-issue grappling hook with us. For such a unique and potentially fun tool, it sure gets underused on the other battlefields. Thankfully, Dark Town forces you to master the hook if you want to climb and rappel up to the best sniping or hiding spots.
With some delicacy - and luck - we even managed to maneuver a mech (called Vital Suit or VS in Lost Planet) to these high vantage points. We made a lot more noise doing so, but raining a blizzard of white-heat missiles onto the unsuspecting players below was well worth the racket. Until they had died and respawned a few times, most of them didn't even think to look up. And when they did... that was when we leapt off the precipice and came crashing down on them with several tons of murderous mass.
