Mission 12: Ritual de la Mental
The real enemy are identified. Anemone and Devil Doll take a walk into the Connection's mind, while the Stranger's base falls under attack.
Part 1
The first part of this mission sees four characters of your choice defending the telepaths as patrolmen and soldiers pour into the base.
The patrolmen are tough. As well as being able to withstand a lot of damage and possessing conventional firearms, they can use Density Alteration, Weakness Detection and Power Nullification to soften their targets up.
Squad Selection
King Zero gets some bonus soldiers accompanying him again here.
My top choices are Ace (area electrical attacks and speed) and Chaos (AlCuBUS is way too fast for the Patrollers and great for bringing down a squad of them). Either the Spider or the Fly open up a few good moves too. If you haven't already experimented with Ace and Spider's SUPERTASER combo, this is a good time to do so, as it works brilliantly againt squads of patrollers.
Special commands
The military forces enter through either end of the base. Near both ends there are a group of electrical turrets that can be activated by anyone by using the ACTIVATE command on the small turret control boxes nearby.
There is also a teleporter near the starting position to enter the further end of the base - anyone can use this to quickly traverse the base.
The Hunk and Tart robots in the main lab can be activated by either the Spider or Fly to fight on your side (and become recruitable characters after this mission.)
As in the last mission Miss Amazing can be useful for her ability to raise the fallen and her bullet-proof skin, although she's very vulnerable to the soldier's gas grenades.
Part 2
Devil Doll and Anemone appear inside the Connection's head, and can gain further information on each member by defeating them and interrogating them.
Both DD and Anemone behave quite differently from normal in the mental plane and possess fairly limited powers. They do have a couple of combo moves available:
MIND SHIELD Like their regular mind shield, only here it protects against ALL attacks, since everything is an expression of mental energy here.
PSYCHO-CHAMELEON Turns both characters temporarily invisible.
The level centres around four rooms and a central chamber. Each of the outer rooms contains a connection member, who must be defeated and interrogated before acces is granted to the central chamber. Once interrogated, each Connection member's life story is told and becomes visible as giant comic book pages.
The connection members appear originally in energy form - damaging them too severly not only fails a seoncdary objective but causes psychic antibodies to spawn that attack the heroes. To avoid this, let DD do all the direct attacking - her DISASSEMBLE attack will unravel them slowly and gently compared to anemeone's more violent DISRUPT attack. If antibodies do spawn, they can be taken down with a telepathic scan.
Simon Hart
Simon starts off in a room full of junk, which will start throwing itself (and your characters) around violently if you enter. Once the junk storm starts, get out and let him come to you- sneak attacks with the PSYCHO-CHAMELEON combo work well.
Sondra Strange
Sondra lives in a maze with teleporter pads that must be used to cross it - stepping on the pads will cause the characters to automatically teleport. Lead DD and Anemone through separately- its easier and if Anemone gets hypnotised she can't harm DD this way.
To enter Sondra's room you have to solve an exploding Tic-Tac-Toe puzzle. Use the MIND SHIELD combo before making a move - this will protect you from the explosion if you do lose.
Jo Tau
Jo's room is surrounded by turret-like eyeballs that fire off energy pulses. Use PSYCHO-CHAMELEON to sneak up on her, as her tractor beams make it impossible to pull off a successful combo defence once she's seen you. The turrets deactivate once she's down.
Gabriel Horne
Gabriel's room keeps changing and can be difficult to navigate - once again sneak up onhim and take him down.
Once all four characters are interrogated, the fence opposite your start point dissappears, allowing you into the central chamber. The Connection fetus is in here - once its seen you it will pursue you slowly and surely in an attempt to drain your energy. If it catches up with you its generally a mission fail pretty quickly, so run. Going back through Sondra and Gabriel's rooms is not recommended, since they can take longer to navigate and the characters there will slow you down using their mental state attacks.
Jo Tau can slow you down to some degree, but judicious use of the MIND SHIELD should allow you to get through safely.
Once both characters have escaped through the portal they entered through, you've won.