Let's Play X-COM Enforcer Mission 22

It's a quick and easy boss fight. Mondellus has a moderately nasty melee, which can catch you a bit off guard I suppose, but honestly this level is pretty forgettable. Just strafe and keep shooting.

I don't really get why the Fat Guy On Treads boss archetype is something I see as routinely as I do. I've seen it in Smash TV and a bizarrely large number of shooters, with a little bit of variation of whether they're specifically fat or not (Doom 3's Dude On Treads wasn't, for example), and I've just always found it weird. Is it because it's simple to animate? Is there something about the image that somehow grabs people as particularly morbidly fascinating?

Enforcer making use of it is particularly odd. Mondellus really looks like he belongs in classic Doom or something, not as part of the X-COM universe, and unlike the Cyberbeasts I've never learned anything that would suggest some kind of it-makes-sense-in-context explanation exists. Sure, X-COM aliens make use of cybernetics, but there's a practicality or pragmatism implied in the details. Mondellus' design is just silly: if you're going to make these kind of cybernetic modifications, and you've got access to robotics, why not just make a robot? Replacing your limbs with treads and weapons is not some quality of life improvement and is just strange as a modification even if you desire to be better at combat: shouldn't there be armor for your vital bits, for example?

It's also another case where Enforcer not providing enough plot context stuff really hurts it. Why am I killing this guy? He's just hanging out in a football field. For that matter, why is he hanging out in this football field? What could the aliens possibly care about here that they've sent a one-of-a-kind enemy to go do... whatever he's supposed to be doing here?

It's an okay boss fight, with its flaws primarily illustrating the limitations of Enforcer's design. That is, the ice flinging boss was bad because the ice beams made the fight tedious without really upping the challenge, and the potential for an instant death from a fall wasn't forcing you to play carefully or anything, it just meant you could potentially die having nothing to do with the boss itself. Mondellus is a bit flat and boring because Enforcer's mechanics don't lend themselves readily to interesting boss fights. It's really better at hordes of weaklings with minibosses interspersed among them, so there's a bit of a strategic layer coming into play. Otherwise you're just stuck circle-strafing and trying to grab the pickups you want and avoid the ones you don't want, and that's more or less your entire boss fight, as a bit of a fundamental issue with Enforcer.

See you next mission.