Xtra Spicy Enforcer Mission 10

I didn't really notice when I did this mission on Normal, but it's... a pretty poorly-designed mission. Professor Utonium never provides instructions -even asking for directions doesn't get you anything. What you're expected to do initially is just... wander around and kill enough enemies to cause a door to open up, but in every previous mission where enemies were spawning in without a spawner either you were perfectly able to ignore them or it was that one spot in the Giant Reaper mission where you got locked in after entering a contained space. Usually, Professor Utonium's lack of useful babble isn't an issue because you can just follow an arrow, but this mission takes that away and fails to replace it with a proper briefing.

And it doesn't even provide the arrow once you have opened the door!

The mission is also surprisingly nasty, though maybe I shouldn't have been surprised. The Cyberdiscs are the first time the game has introduced a non-Sectoid ranged enemy in significant numbers, and we've already seen how brutal Sectoids were. My first stab at the mission actually had me die in the first area due to sheer number of Cyberdiscs. My second stab -this one- still had me die when fighting the quadrupedal Chryssalids, and it was primarily due to the legions of Cyberdiscs fighting alongside them!

This does incidentally properly show off the goo effect. It's functionally the same thing as being hit with a freeze effect, including that you can still fire shots while immobilized. And while the Cyberdiscs were what killed me, the quadrupedal Chryssalids were still an important part of what made that final area nasty. It's a bit of blind luck that I ended up managing to separate them as I did, honestly.

See you next mission.