Let's Play X-COM Enforcer Mission 7

My brother is of the opinion that this is The Worst Mission Of The Entire Game, and while I don't agree with him, it's a pretty strong contender.

The initial portion is fine. You properly meet Mutons and Reapers, but overall it's a pretty straightforward mission that's reasonably fun. At worst you might be caught off guard by fighting enemies that have real durability.

But that bit at the end is fairly infuriating. If the prison cell or whatever it is goes down, you instantly die, game over, restart mission. If you already know you can jump through the window and charge in, it's not so bad, though good luck finding the time to also run down the last BONUS letter, but for a first-time player it's entirely possible that by the time you figure out what's going on the cage has already lost half its health or something like that. The fact that enemies are willing to spawn right on top of it is fairly irritating, too, and the flying blade enemies in particular are alarmingly fast at tearing through the cage's health. The fact that it's at the end of an otherwise-fine mission is something of insult to injury; if it was at the beginning of the level, it wouldn't be so bad to have to trial-and-error through it once or twice, but having it eat an entire mission's worth of progress? Obnoxious.

I still rate it as less awful than the hovercraft simply because the hovercraft remains awful even if you already know how to do thing, but this is a pretty big misstep in Enforcer.

Anyway, I show off the Fusion Rifle in this mission. It's fun and I like it! It's one of the better weapons in the game at tearing through individual targets, but its sheer rate of fire also makes it a pretty decent weapon for dealing with crowds, and its upgrades magnify these two points: its shots bounce after the first upgrade, and with later upgrades the volume of fire massively increases. Bouncy shots mean that firing into a crowd of enemies you don't have to be overly-precise about your shots; probably any shots that don't immediately hit something will go bouncing around and hit an enemy anyway. Volume of fire of course makes it killier in general.

It tends to drop off in utility later in the game, but it remains good at killing bosses so it's not like it's a mistake to unlock it or anything,

See you next mission.