If you ask nicely, the covies might even help you merge stuff. Most obliging!

(6:43) Level 1 ('The Pillar of Autumn') on Heroic. Continuing on from the area shown in the previous movie, I went up the stairs and used two more areas, this time to try super-merging Marines with crewmen. In the second I even got a bunch of Grunts to help!

Released May 31st 2018, gameplay recorded May 28th-29th 2018.

00:02 (Part 1 - Stacker plus guy in brown) As I head up the stairs, you might notice that the Marines are red on my tracker and they shoot me. That's because I went traitor in an earlier area to get equipped with frags, and I haven't been forgiven yet. After I get up top and kill some covies, Stacker turns up and I'm obliged to slay him. I subsequently decide to see if he'll super-merge with one of the dead crewmen. One thing you might notice during my work: there's a pistol near the corner but it never gets blown away. It's one of various weapons placed by the game and made blast resistant to ensure they'll be there for you to pick up.

01:19 For brevity I've cut about 18 seconds of looking for fresh plasmas in the wrong direction, though I did get one. I do better at the stairs, where a Marine seems to've been pinned down by the covies.

02:12 By now I reckon the two are super-merged; and this seems to be borne out by how they hold together as I blast them around.

03:14 I separate them, and at the end there's an evac broadcast from Captain Keyes which makes a nice lead-in to the next episode, further on.

03:31 (Part 2 - Marine plus guy in blue) Hurry hurry hurry! Gotta get to the lifepods! But first, how about another experiment? After making three Grunts run off, I blast the bodies towards a nearby corner, but the crewman bounces badly and lands quite far away.

04:00 The Grunts return but I make them run off again, then I have two more goes at getting the crewman into the corner. Both times go poorly. This was really one of my worst starts, in doing plays of this situation.

04:22 Here's where I start getting the Grunts to help out - by getting them to lob plasmas in a good spot. In all they deliver four blasts (three from the orange guy). The first gets things off to a fine start, and by the fourth I suspect the bodies have been super-merged, so I kill my grunty helpers - which gives me two plasmas.

05:35 Now I get the merging out of the corner, blast it around, and have a close look at the appearance; part Marine, part blue overalls. One blast gets him snagged on a wall. Area 51!

06:26 Eventually my grenade supply is down to one plasma and I use it to separate the two before hurrying off to a lifepod. Hope I'm not too late!

Closing remarks In regard to the lifepod area, I did plenty of plays (many not going well enough) but it wasn't for quite a while until I hit on the idea of getting help from the Grunts. Once I did, I soon realized it would make a good feature. Initially I'd got a play in which the Grunts just contributed one blast, which made for a brief moment of amusement. Later I got a nice play with two blasts, and I almost settled for that. But I did another session later and got a play with four blasts from the Grunts, which accounted for all the real merging work. That took the theme up a notch, so I used that play for the movie.

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