It’s been a long time so I might be misremembering, but I think one of the bad guys is carrying a large weapon, a sort of primitive minigun (really). Make a beeline for him, throw everything you have, and if you kill him you can pick it up and totally waste the others.
Or I might be totally deluded and someone else will come along with a much better idea. :)
In general though, in HZD you’re rewarded for using every tool at your disposal (although that might not be much at this early stage). Traps, different weapon types, sneak attacks, etc. Full frontal attacks are usually not the best strategy.
Edit: I should also mention that early in the game when you don’t have much you can use, make use of cover and pop out to shoot arrows. Fire arrows work really well on these enemies. There is always stuff dotted about the landscape you can pick up so you shouldn’t have much trouble crafting arrows as you go, and picking up more health stuff (don’t forget you have to activate your health pickups, it isn’t automatic).
Hopefully you have done some leveling up and farming prior to this point. This fight is a big step up. There are a few guys you need to be aggressive with, and the guy with the big gun. Use the environment, and stay alive.
This is not a game, at least at this point, where you want to fight close quarters.
Yep, use the environment. From what I remember, I hid and sniped them with a bow. There’s a raised platform that they start on and at the two sides is a wall you can hide behind. I took out as many as I could with the bow, meleeing any that came down until there were only a few and the boss left.
I did not take the gun but just used sprint between a couple of the rock outcroppings as I slowly picked off the closest people to me or those that ran around the corner near me. I’m not ashamed to admit I failed a couple of times here and just replayed it until I got it. I didn’t EVEN know about taking the heavy gun and picking it up.
And this is solid advice if you use your BOW instead of the big gun. I didn’t find out until way later in the game how useful the skill was. In fact it’s very worth spoiling, three of the best skills in the game are:
Hunter Relexes - slows down time if you jump. Like, you jump in the air and it’s bullet time. You can do it repeatedly like some idiot doing jumping jacks and use it to more easily make great aim with your bow.
Silent Strike - Crouch and when someone approaches you get the option to do this strike, the same when in tall grass, etc. It does an absolute ton of damage for early game and I still use it even late game.
Lure Call - Again when crouching/hidden/tall grass you use this with the F key once it is selected. And enemies, both machine and man, will wander right up to your hidey spot where you then Silent Strike them.
So in that particular battle you can squat and hide until they enter search mode, then lure call the nearest person, strike and kill, repeat. If you’re spotted, sprint away, jump into bullet time and head shot anyone nearby.
An also-ran mention to more skills:
Concentration - gives bullet time when aiming for a few seconds. Very useful.
Critical Hit - gives a devastating spear strike to enemies that fall down for any reason, usually when you do heavy damage with a shot.
You can certainly pass that spot in the game without some of these skills, I did. Just keep trying. Also, stick with it because the game opens up quite a bit after this battle and again even more not long after that when you’ll get the full map to explore.
Super late to the party, but man this is the game I was looking for. I kinda knew that from watching videos back when it was console only, but I’m super impressed 15 levels in. They took all the fun stuff of Tomb Raider, put a better story around it, and a much more entertaining random world to explore and hunt in. I also liked that there wasn’t much hand holding or gatekeeping after the initial half hour or so, the systems are so intuitive I didn’t even realize all I could be doing until I took the time to really click around the inventory/crafting interface, and then it was dead easy to do everything I wanted.
Newest PC patch adds DLSS, which should fix all performance problems for everybody with a recent Nvidia GPU. They also fixed the occasional stuttering, not related to GPU performance.
Damn, I know it’s in my PS4 backlog, and I don’t really need the game to look any better than that, but now it’s tempting to buy it again before I play it.
Dance with the one you have. My PS4 Sony exclusive backlog is still extensive, and it all looks great on PS4. I just need to make time for it between the latest Game Pass releases.
The PC port had lots of problems at release but now it’s clearly the definitive/best version. I wouldn’t buy it again at full price just to play on PC.
