There are widespread merging opportunities in AOTCR, as you'll see here…

(7:48) Level 5 ('Assault on the Control Room') on Heroic. My tutorial BCM282 used one particular corner for merging but there are lots of others you can use, throughout the level. Here I show some examples and also have more fun, including a fair bit of rocketing. You can merge bodies in other levels too (including Flood) but I'm just dealing with AOTCR here.

Released May 7th 2018, gameplay recorded May 3rd-6th 2018.

00:02 (Cavern corner) To start with, here's the corner where I made the discovery (see my closing remarks for BCM282). It's a good place although there's a rock you have to work around. In this demo I merge two Grunts, already moved to the corner. Doesn't take long to get a nice harlequin effect. Two blasts later, I see that we've got a uniform appearance (orange in this case; it was always orange with these guys), which indicates a super-merging or very close. I apply one more blast to make super-merging almost certain - then do a quick bit of play.

01:38 (Opposite cavern corner) The opposite corner works just as well and has the advantage of not having a rock in the way (plus there are more covies on this side). It's the second place I used; an obvious place to test after that first corner. In this demo I use grenades and get some close-up views of the evolution as I seek to get a nice jazzy harlequin.

02:31 (Door frame corners) As I recall, my third merging spot was this door frame corner. But you've got door frames like this all through the level and they'll work just the same, so that's handy. Merging tends to be a bit slow I think (compared to those cavern corners), but they'll do the job. Here I make an exotic hybrid multi-Grunt with a total of eight blasts, while a couple of idiot Marines get in the way. In general you wouldn't want Marines around when doing merging work, but here I allowed them for entertainment value.

I'm not sure if the Grunts were super-merged. That's what I was going for, and I was looking for a lack of flickering as an indicator. But just before blasting the multi-Grunt out of the corner, I noticed a bit of flickering on one side, which wasn't a good sign. He held up fine under the subsequent blasting though.

03:59 (Tunnel entrance corner) The remaining corners in the movie are ones I found just recently when I went through the level checking places. This corner seems to work fast. Five blasts typically seem to be enough to super-merge, as demonstrated here on two Johnsons (one came in on the Pelican, one had a sniper rifle). The targeting is a bit awkward though, due to the sloped ground.

As with all the segments of this movie, I set things up with a handy checkpoint so I could do multiple plays and pick the one I liked best. Something I especially liked about this play was the rocket around 4:51, fired on the move. That sent the double Johnson to the ice patch (my target destination) very nicely.

05:18 (Bridge arch corner) Bridge arch corners like this seem pretty good. I have some good fun with a multi-Jackal here, blasting him off the bridge and hitting him with plasma fire on the way down (you can see some hit effects including blood). I subsequently reveal the constituents with a mid-flight blast.

The Banshee was obtained via Banshee grab. I moved two Jackals to the corner then checkpointed with a passage checkpoint, for doing repeated plays. As I soon found, it was common for just five blasts to produce a super-merging. In this clip you saw the final two blasts of five (I edited for brevity).

06:14 (Control room entrance corner) My final example is a corner at the entrance to the control room structure. It works well, and there are lots of covies nearby for merging. The clip picks up the action at blast 5. On blast 6 I spot a uniform orange appearance, so I do one more blast and then dismount, with high confidence that super-merging has occurred. Then I have fun rocketing the multi-Grunt down to the snow.

The Banshee was stolen from the bridge of course, and I subsequently used it to slay most of the covies up top. I kept a checkpoint delayed in order to set things up for producing this clip. I did quite a lot of plays, trying to get one with good rocketing action and in which the music came to a climax just after I'd got the multi-Grunt to the snow (to provide a good ending for the movie). Trouble was, the timing of the music climax was pretty random, so most of the time it didn't work out. This was a good play though.

Closing remarks Among other places I've managed super-merging, are corners in narrow passages and corners in octagonal rooms. But those corners include a sloping side and they seem pretty bad, with randomness playing a significant part. When it came to doing the movie, I wasn't having much luck getting a clip showing things working, so in the end I didn't bother.

© 2004-2020 by Rockslider