London: River Thames

Burning Bridges

Get ready to dig deep into your reservoir of expletives. If you’ve been cruising through the game thus far, be prepared for a surprise or two: the final two levels here are way ramped-up, difficulty wise.

To start off here, you’re going to have to destroy two Stalkers and a Widowmaker. Sounds like a fair fight! Well, don’t worry, because it mostly is; there’s plenty of LAARK ammo in the area for you to work with. Each of the two buildings that you can enter will have four rounds on the upper floors, and there are two rounds in the ruined building that the Hybrids initially hold, as well as two rounds near a shrub on the street to the left of where you start the level.

Video Walk-through

Two Stalkers and a Widowmaker. Fun!
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The sequence here isn’t too difficult to figure out, but it’ll be way easier to know what we’re talking about after you die a couple of times. From the start point, head up and into the building on your right to find the LAARK ammo. You may want to use the Sapper on the bottom of the stairs to discourage any Hybrids from following you up. When the Stalkers appear, nail them with a couple of LAARK rounds; your soldiers may be able to finish them off with their fire, but feel free to add a third or fourth round to the dome if you need to destroy them. Grab whatever ammo remains in the building, then drop down to the ground and run down the street to the other building with two floors.

The same process plays out on the Stalker that approaches you. You may actually want to just let your soldiers fire on it while you guard the staircase, then move over and use your rockets on it; we’ve managed to destroy a Stalker with only two rockets after the soldiers have weakened it up. When it goes down, a Widowmaker will approach from the street near this building. If you manage to get down to the street as its coming, you can nail it with a few rockets, then finish it off with an Auger from the bottom floor of the two-story building, where you’ll mostly be safe from its mine-laying abilities.

Roofjumping

Collect any ammo or health you might need from the area before moving out into the alleyways beyond. To the left of the exit is a path leading through a garden, towards a long street with some mines and Hybrids on it. If you check out the right side of the street, you’ll see some M5A2 ammo; jump up there to find the Intel: Thames: Construction document.

With that in hand, head back through the garden and into the ruined building here. You need to jump from rooftop to rooftop, being wary of ambushes, until you can drop down into the alleyway where the Steelheads were located. Move from there around the building to its rear, where you can find the Intel: Thames: Demolitions document. Climb the stairs to move onto the roof, kill the enemies there, then find the path leading into another building across the way and kill the enemies there as well. One last group of foes will charge up out of the subways when you head down there, so kill them and move down to complete the level.

On The Ice

Time to clear out the subways. You start off with goodly amount of shotgun, Fareye, and Auger ammo near your starting position, so start sniping some Hybrids to thin their numbers, and use your shotgun to kill them if they pursue you too far. When they stop coming for you, you can hit the stairwell to the left to find a unit of health.

The stairwell to the right is heavily populated, with a couple of Steelheads and numerous Hybrids. There’s a box of Hedgehogs behind the rail car here, so if you’re full up on those, feel free to chuck some down to thin out the enemies a bit before using your Auger or Fareye to kill the rest of them. There’s also some health near the Hedgehogs.

Head up the stairs here, but pause when you hit the health and ammo boxes. One of the ammo boxes will be for your Sapper, which is perfect. As you head down the steps, a few enemies, including a Steelhead, will spawn behind the railcar below you. You can get a jump on them by laying down a bunch of mines below you before heading down. There are also some LAARK rounds in one of the subway cars here (the one that’s suspended in the air), so feel free to use one of those on the enemies as you proceed down. There are a pair of Steelheads that wait for you near the end of the rail tunnel, so take them out to finally reach a checkpoint.

Making A Fire

When you reach the river outside the tunnel, start proceeding down the path, but get ready to reload your checkpoint a few times, as the ambushes here are swift and often fatal. You do have a couple boxes of LAARK ammo ahead of you, so feel free to use the rockets on the worst of the encounters you face. You can find it when you wrap backwards up the path and bypass the two Steelheads in front of you; it’s near the fire. Move up the path and head through one more curve, then kill off all the Menials and find the tunnel at the far end of the ice to end the level.

Giant Slayer

The Stalker at the beginning of this level isn’t tough to deal with; just circle-strafe around it (as the case may be) in the Jeep while Cartwright dishes out hot lead into its underbelly. So long as you keep moving fast enough to stay outside of firing range of it, you should be fine. Finish off the Hybrids near the gate, then jump out of the jeep and head inside.

After killing off the Steelheads and Hybrids inside the base, you’ll have to hop inside a Stalker yourself for a tedious fight against an enemy Goliath, which is basically a huge walking tank. There’s nothing particularly special about this fight; it’ll just take a long time to complete. Your main weapon is going to be your missiles, so just hold down that right trigger throughout the entire fight! The Goliath, like your Stalker, will strafe from side to side, albeit a bit more slowly, so you’ll have to lead it a bit, especially if you fire on it from a distance.

Video Walk-through

It's tedious, but this routine fells the Goliath. Eventually.
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Keep in mind that the Goliath will wear your shields down quickly if it hits you with its weapons, of which it has three. It can launch a volley of missiles, fire a single large missile, or launch a slow-moving mortar in your direction. Well, all of these attacks actually move fairly slowly, so as long as you’re strafing away from it they should dodge you. In addition, feel free to hit the X button; it will give you a temporary burst of speed in the direction you’re moving. It’s perfect for quickly changing direction or dodging an incoming volley, but you won’t be able to use it twice in a row; it takes a few seconds to recharge.

For the most part, though, you should try to lead the Goliath around the large pieces of rock in the middle of the zone and use that to block its shots while you fire into the air to anticipate the placement of its legs as it moves. The video on this page will illustrate this technique fairly well. Again, the fight isn’t too awful when you know how to move, but it will be a fairly tedious exercise of holding down a button for three or four minutes while you wait for the Goliath to blow up. Unfortunately, that doesn’t even earn you a checkpoint; you’ll have to kill two more Stalkers before you manage to get a savegame.

Into The Tower

After the two Stalkers go down, head towards the area they came from to find a hangar bay leading into the tower. Two more Stalkers dwell outside, but if they blow you up, at least you’ll regenerate with full health. Kill them and all the Hybrids outside the base to open the doorway up; ram your Stalker right up into the gate to hop out and proceed inside.

One last challenge for you to face, as a Widowmaker will pop through the wall here and attack you and Cartwright. If you’ve got LAARK ammo, feel free to unload on it until it goes down. Otherwise, retreat behind the elevator on the far side of the area for some cover and unload on it from there. You’ll have plenty of Bullseye ammo, so feel free to tag its body and fire at it from around the corner.

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