Acquitted – Survival Tips

Some strategies I picked up from trying to get various achievements in Acquitted and attempting to survive levels after 20.

Tips to Survive

Note: Credit goes to iie-kyo

Alright, so you bought the game to support the developer – great, supporting devs that don’t hate you is a great way for us to learn to move on from our current divide. Now you actually want to play it, but you’re finding the gameplay incredibly difficult and unforgiving.

I do think the developers need to rebalance the game because it does have some issues with its difficulty curve, but there are several strategies I’ve come up with to last longer.

• Always keep moving – This is a given, but the enemies track you based on where you are. If you stay in one place, enemies will find an easy route to you and swarm you.
  
• Switch to the sword – Once you pick up the sword and have it available as a melee weapon, hit “3” on your keyboard and always have it equipped. The sword I noticed has a better tendency to OHKO enemies.
  
• Always keep a lookout for barrels – These are really easy to miss, and really easy to activate by accident if you use a weapon that spreads a lot of bullets (shotgun) or fires rapidly (minigun, assault rifle). As you know, getting caught in the explosion instantly kills you.
  
• You move the *fastest* with either your pistol or your club/sword out – This means press the F key to switch to melee if you’re holding a large weapon that slows you down (rocket launcher, chainsaw, minigun, etc). Just like CS, holding a small melee weapon lets you move at the maximum speed. You will sometimes need this to get out of a tight situation – hit F to switch to your fast melee weapon and swing your way out and give yourself breathing room.
  
• Run around the perimeter of the level – Earlier levels will allow you to move where you want, but as the levels progress, you will end up being swarmed and having junk thrown at you. The projectiles are fast and difficult to dodge. If you stay around the perimeter of the level, this herds both the zombies and the bosses into a line that follows you.
  
• Throw grenades behind you against bosses – Again, in the earlier levels the bosses move slower, but in later levels they move uncomforatbly fast. It is absolutely vital you maintain as much distance as possible from them because their onscreen presence often makes fights against the fodder more difficult.
  
• Your main weapons will the machine gun, shotgun, and minigun – They’re good for different reasons. The machinegun is great for smaller crowd control and for both close and longer range attacks. The shotgun works well for continuous use – make sure to reload when you have one shot left – the reason why is if you reload after spending that last shot, there is an additional reloading delay after you reload your bullets (when the barrel gets ♥♥♥♥♥♥). If you leave 1 bullet in the shotgun, that animation delay doesn’t happen. Chaingun is very much like the TF2 minigun – tap on it after you start firing to keep it constantly reved up, be mindful of the overheat meter. Chaingun pretty much wipes entire crowds out but leaves you highly vulnerable to projectiles and bosses.
  
• Energy drink tricks – If you pick up the energy drink, use this as an opportunity to pull yourself away from the mob as far as possible. Create breathing space for yourself. The energy drink puts you at a *set* speed regardless of your equipped weapon, so for a short time you can use slow and heavy weapons that slow you down (the axe, chaingun, chainsaw, rocket launcher etc) and to position yourself so they are most effective. Energy drink powerups are the perfect time to reload the rocket launcher for use.
  
• Priotize enemies – This is pretty obvious. Go after projectile throwing enemies first, especially ones that throw the molotiv cocktails and the piss/poop bottles that block your vision. Your next priority would be the guys who steal your stuff (guys in beanies with a gold chain and red shoes), and the rest you can prioritize for later. Bosses are a tossup – if you can get a shot at them, do so, but don’t go out of the way to kill them because it’s very esay to get yourself killed this way.
  
• Use your other “4” weapon items – The barricade you can set up can prevent bosses from making it through. The C4 is basically another grenade that has the stopping power of an explosive barrel. Use it to cover your escape route and time setting it off with enemies stepping over it. They won’t try to avoid it. Lastly, if you’re not concerned with your accuracy score, make heavy, HEAVY use of the automatic turret. They can keep a mob of zombies at bay, but it uses the same AI as the zombies themselves so sometimes it’ll fire at things out of its line of sight.
  
• Crowd control using melee weapons – Do NOT use the sledgehammer. It’s way too slow, and even if it can knock down hay barricades, Use the axe – it can usually take out 3 zombies at once and obviously it doesn’t have the long startup time. The axe can also interrupt and stun the landwhale boss to buy you time if you aim it correctly.
  
• Aim for headshots – This game has headshots (obviously) and the main thing is to try to aim for them whenever possible with your bullet-based weapons. It increases the chances you will one hit KO some enemies.
  
• Variable health – Enemies have variable health – the same enemies may take more than one hit to take down while others will go down in one hit. This adds a bit of unpredictability to the game as you can’t just go “this guy that wears the red shirt will go down in 2”.
  
• Abuse the pause screen if you get hit with pee/poop – The degenerates they are, you will end up being blinded by pee/poop, which is extremely dangerous at later levels. If this happens to you, hit escape to pause the game – this removes the pee/poop filter and allow you to see your surroundings. I have very little qualms about using this exploit considering how difficult projectiles in this game are to see coming and dodge.
  
• Don’t get baited by pickups – If you see a pickup drop but it’s in a crowd of enemies, do not go out of your way to grab it. You will most likely lose more armor/health than it is worth. Only do this if you have the energy drink powerup as that powerup makes you move fast enough to avoid most attacks.
  
• Sniper headshots on bosses – If you can headshot bosses consistently with the sniper rifle, you can do double damage and most importantly, stun them for 2-3 seconds, which usually sets them up for another hit.
  
• Always be reloading – Hit the R key frequently, even if you think you don’t need to reload. In the later levels you will end up activating a wave in the middle of your killing spree and be caught with your pants down when a horde of them spawn in front of you. Always assume you’re out of ammo. The shotgun is a good weapon to practice reloading between fights.
  
• You can still fire while getting hit – Just because you’re stuck between two zombies does not mean you suddenly can’t shoot. The game allows you to switch weapons, reload, and shoot even if you’re getting moved, so if you have to switch to a crowd clearing weapon (chainsaw) and get out of there. Remember to move as far as possible to make room.
  
• Use corners for cover – This is pretty obvious, but if you are getting mobbed by enemy projectiles, run out of their line of sight around a corner. Practice FPS-style peeking and shooting. Come out the corner, shoot once, go back into cover and repeat the process until the threat is eliminated.