OK, so what the fuck do I do to beat General Raam?
I’ve got the basic gist of it down: Lure out the Kryll by standing in a shadow. headshot him a couple times while he’s unprotected, run elsewhere when he gets close. rasputin says if you 'nade him the Kryll will go away for a moment, but I can’t get nades on him with any reliability.
It’s just hard as shit! There’s got to be something I’m missing.
Criticism: This is a terrible boss fight. The previous boss fights have all been really good with nice gimicks - the Berzerkers (who can’t be hurt, but cannot actually see you), the Corpser, etc. These are reminiscent of the bosses of God of War, where they’re almost a rewarding set piece rather than a big challenge. The challenge is getting to them.
Raam is the exact opposite. He’s punishingly difficult - far harder than anything in the rest of this game. I’ve tried to beat Raam at least fifteen times now. The sensitivity of the cover system doesn’t help - which is part of the problem. I want to sprint for cover far away, but if I brush up against something I duck behind it and probably get killed - either by Kryll, or by Raam’s Troika.
A big thing I harp on is how games “train” you - they teach you how to approach encounters in the context of their game. Gears of War trains you to stick to cover and don’t break it except in an emergency - when you get flanked. The Raam encounter breaks this training - you have to break cover in order to get him to lower his Kryll shield.
Speaking of - the Kryll shield is stupid. Up until this point in the game Kryll have been hostile to Locusts - they’ll tear them apart. Yet for some bizarre no good reason they’re protecting Raam?
Anyway, this boss fight is a pretty big letdown in what has been an utterly awesome game so far. I went out to dinner last night with rasputin and we spent a good chunk of the time talking about how amazing Gears of War is. The Raam fight is definitely a blot on this game.
If you’re playing co-op he’s pretty easy. Also a torque bow shot will cause the kryl to scatter then you just light him up with weapon fire, switch back to bow, repeat. Xaroc and I took him down twice last night on Hardcore, once for each of us as Fenix.
Act 5 in general was disappointing. I was hoping it would be the same length as the other acts, but it is very short in comparison. The train setting is also very limiting. I can’t imagine why they would choose to have the last epic battle go down on something so counterintuitive to the gameplay. There is very little room for getting creative with cover and positioning to get an edge on the enemies. You might as well stage the final scene in a narrow tunnel.
How did you get to the turret? Every time I went for it, the Kryll shredded me.
I found the best way to kill him was to stick him with a torque arrow (which scatters the Kryll shield for a bit) and then drill him with the assault rifle. A few iterations of that and he goes down.
delirium: I get the sense that a lot was cut from this game. At the end of act IV, with the escape on the APC - that huge monster shows up, chases you for a few moments, and is never seen again. That thing is an in-game asset that took resources to make; I suspect we were supposed to have a rail shooter sequence there but it got cut.
Likewise the whole train thing is like HUH. OK I drove the APC to this place and I guess I’ll get on this train wait what do you mean there’s a bomb on it? Oh, it’s our bomb… etc
Epicboy: I did it like this:
Hang out by the starting area - the low wall. Duck backward to get Raam to release the birds, then hit the cover and headshot him a couple times with the sniper rifle.
Repeat til he gets close - there’s a pile of pipes bisecting the area in front of you, when he commits to approaching by one side head up the other to the next bit of cover. He’ll release the Kryll, hop over the low wall and duck - recover health.
Hit the turret - try to move from one area of light to the other. There’s an area of light behind the turret, in front of the ramp on the way up - stand there and wait for the Kryll to go away. Then hit the turret and hose Raam down.
When I killed him the Kryll were on him when I got to the turret - he had to send them out and they took a few seconds to get to me, during which time I killed him. Honestly it took like 2.5-3 seconds to drop him.
Torque bow/AR sounds like a good combo; but I played the final act with my usual loadout (assault rifle for midrange combat + chainsaw; sniper rifle for long range stuff / dealing with boomers).
I crouched in well-lit cover and put a few perfect-reload headshots into him when he sent the Kryll after me. When he got close, I emptied a shotgun into him, then dashed to the other side of the area, through the light, and went back to the sniper rifle.
If you’re playing in singleplayer, telling Dom to cease fire helps, as it slows RAAM down a bit.
I thought he was trivially easy in co-op. I shot at him with the torque bow and my friend pumped him with the assault rifle. I had no idea there was any sort of trick regarding the Kryll involved.
Yeah, it does feel like stuff was removed. Like we get no ingame explanation of why Fenix was jailed, though if you read the manual you find it was because he went against orders and tried to save his father. That, combined with the fact that the essential seismic data is at Marcus’s freakin’ house, and you would think that there might be some sort of connection there but nothing is ever mentioned.
Or what about when Dom breaks Marcus out of prison and says “Things have changed”. What exactly has changed and why is it now OK for Marcus to go free? Furthermore, why is Marcus suddenly promoted to Lieutenant after Kim is killed? In the context of the game, Marcus seems like he would be the last person to be promoted of the group, but suddenly he’s top banana for no good reason.
Marcus is promoted to sergeant, actually. I presumed it was because Marcus has been getting shit done while Delta squad was pinned down, and Dom was mostly notable for keeping Marcus unventilated, but now that you mention it, it does seem like a foolish thing to do.
YOU GUYS. You’re thinking too much. Your machinegun has a chainsaw remember! Make with the killing!! Extreme violence and shiney graphics are supposed to overide your higher brain functions that pay attention to things like “plot” and “structure.”
Yeah, yeah, it’s a great game and all but what’s bizarre is that the writing that is actually there is actually very professional and pretty well done considering the constraints of the bald space marines who kick a lot of ass genre. So given the general level of professionalism in what’s actually presented, some of these plotholes really point to material and maybe some levels cut at some stage.
