Sorry about the delay in this post. I can't say that my future posts will be any more regular either, so please feel free to make your own volunteers posts.
So here we are, but where is here? According to Mece - excuse me - he now wants us to call him "The Doctor" - he has transported us to the vicinity of the medical laboratory – to a rehabilitation area. Funny, but this doesn't look like any rehab facility I've seen. In any case, his knowledge of the area has been compromised by the alien attack and you’re going to help him find what he wants. OK, we can probably do that.
We start the level in the southeast of the map, in a room with a pillar, continuing across to and identical room in the southwest corner, there is a nice little secret - the pillar in this room is hollow - tab on one of the sides and a door opens revealing an elevator that takes the player to a small cache of ammo. After collecting all the ammo, we must cross a perilous open area with a hulk, a couple of desert sharks and some friends shooting at us from above. Once this area is clear, we enter another complex with a lot of additional enemies to greet us. There is a 1X recharger off in a corner to our left that makes survival much easier. A stairway to our right will play an important role later on. Straight ahead is a door up high that we can’t reach - yet.
Off ahead and to the left is an airlock with a pair of incredibly frustrating doors. These doors raise ever so slowly, only to close very quickly. If you don’t want to find yourself trapped, you need to time your operation of the switches that control them so as to stop them just as they reach their zenith. Once inside, you’ll be assaulted by a ton of compilers. A switch around the back will raise a set of stairs, granting access to that raised door. While you’re in here, notice again the water tanks - we'll be walking on top of them shortly, but here you can see inside of them and there are fish swimming around. There is also a window into a lava pool that we’ll see the top side of shortly. Most important is a terminal with important backstory on the origin of water on the New Arizona moon and, more importantly, some history on the first explorers of the Plyscose system.
Heading up the stairs, you come to that lava pool, which you must now skirt around, and then pass through a set of zig-zag halls until you reach a large open room, from which you can head out on top of the water tanks (I like walking on water) and into a series of rooms below. Inside you will (finally) come to a pattern buffer, a terminal that is a repeat of the one in the compiler room and a long hallway leading to the southwest, where you will find a switch - the entire objective of all we have done so far. This switch raises a platform back in the open area at the beginning of the level. The player can now head back the way they came, up that stairway and leap across the open area to reach a new part of the level. The player must pass through a fast closing door (you almost have to lean on the forward key while tabbing on the door) and all the way around the periphery of a large circular room before you reach the entrance to it, only to find a single terminal inside. Surprise, The Doctor has found the medical research lab and is sending you to help him do his experiments.
Note to Matt and Andrew - the run from the one pattern buffer on this level to the exit terminal is extremely long. The next level has a high probability of early death multiple times over before the player will find a place to save their game. This leads to the frustration of traversing the same uninteresting path over and over again. You really need either a pattern buffer in the exit room or a more direct way in.
