I'm not sure if it's a coincidence or it's just become my thing now, but I've been "enjoying" a lot of tough RPGs so far this year. Not just tough in the sense that the difficulty curve is a little more K2 than usual, but tough in how there are mechanical or narrative reasons to encourage you to go as hard as you can for the best rewards. I started the year with a little game called Operencia: The Stolen Sun, which I played on its hardest setting for the sake of trophies, and wrote a blog marvelling at the level of twisted ingenuity behind a lot of its encounters. More recently, I've written about the deeper mechanics of Bandai Namco's Tales of Graces F and how it uses its reward-based adjustable difficulty to entice players to switch it up (or down) whenever the opportunity arises, and in last month's Dredge of Seventeen rundown I talked about how Piranha Bytes's Elex presents a tough but satisfying ordeal in taming its post-apocalyptic wilderness, even in spite of all its jank.

UnderRail might be one of the hardest RPGs I've played yet, and that includes all of the above. I spoke on that aspect in its "Indie Game of the Week" review from a few weeks ago, but since then I've been exploring further afield of the station base your protagonist calls home and encountering enemies that either require very specific tactics to defeat and/or are simply not worth the trouble. The titular Underrail - a cross between the Super Mutant-infested DC subway tunnels of Fallout 3 and the many irradiated terrors of the Metro franchise - is a subterranean nightmare factory where everyone and everything has become a master of survival out of necessity. As with the Operencia blog above, I wanted to outline a few enemy types and the way they introduce themselves (and the game over screen, repeatedly) to you. I don't think I've save-scummed in a game nearly as often as I've done in UnderRail so far, and encounters like the following are the chief reasons why.

(Duders, I swear, I just needed to get all this out of my system before I exploded.)

Bandits a.k.a. Humans are the Real Monsters

I adore a game that provides deep customization and specialization potential for your character(s), but more so for those who provide the same character building depth to its foes. The Underrail's most common antagonists are other people, those attempting to survive with the pragmatic method of killing everyone they encounter and robbing the bodies (and in some cases, eating them), and while you can get an idea of how they'll attack by their name - a "Bandit Smasher" is likely to roll up on you with a sledgehammer, for instance - they have access to all the feats and skills you might potentially have and are not to be underestimated.

The bandits I've met so far in my travels generally fall into three "clans":

• Lurkers: Those closest to the game's home base of the South Gate Station and most frequently found in smaller groups, or even solo. The strongest lurkers are the assassin types: those who have mastered stealth and employ brutal knife skills when close. I generally know when one is the area only after they've dropped out of stealth directly behind me and have hit me five times with Crippling Strike and bleeding status effects. The former doesn't drop your movement rate but your maximum strength, though if you're walking around close to your encumbrance limit it has more or less the same result.
• Ironheads: These guys are close to where I'm trying to get to next, a settlement called Railroad Crossing, and tend to focus on weapons produced through metalsmithing. That includes massive sledgehammers but also all manner of rifles and guns, including flamethrowers and grenades. Very much a distance game with those guys.
• Lunatics: The player has the option early on to learn psionic abilities at a significant maximum health cost - essentially making you a mage class - and if you refuse it for the sake of a different build (you really need to prioritize Intelligence and Will to be an effective psi-user) the Lunatic faction lets you realize what you're missing. They'll almost always start with a Telekinetic Punch, which stuns you for a round, and then play piñata with your inert form with a mixture of cryokinesis, pyrokinesis, and neural overloads. If you survive the first round you're either doing absurdly well or you're only fighting one of them.

Tactics: It all depends on the types of bandits you're fighting and your own build. I'm a sneaky sniper type, so I'll usually start by popping off the head of whichever one presents the biggest threat. That's after I've set some traps between them and me, ideally in areas where there's a bottleneck to exploit.

Something I learned fairly late into developing my skillset is that Throwing and Traps are absurdly useful against damn near everything. Thrown objects include knives (can apply poison effects) as well as caltrops (does damage and reduces movement) and grenades (explosive damage, but also includes flashbangs for incapacitating foes and EMPs for those using energy shields and weapons). Traps, meanwhile, include bear traps (stops an enemy in their tracks and does damage, and can also poison) and mines (bad guys go boom) and the latter has this fun effect where their explosive range can activate other nearby mines for a big old chain reaction of fiery mayhem. There's also EMP mines if there's ever an automaton on a set patrol route you'd like to take apart for scrap. I just found an acid mine, so I'm looking forward to springing that on someone soon.

Versatility is the name of the game in UnderRail, or would be if its name wasn't already UnderRail, and the above two skills gives you the most variation for your buck. If you assassinate the ranged bandits first and then corral the melee ones into your bear traps and caltrops, you're likely to be done with the former before you'll need to deal with the latter. I'm not so great up close, and sniper rifles are way less effective if you move before shooting or are inches away from the target, so for now I'm relying on assault rifle bursts to deter those gettin' up in my grill.

Using the screenshot above as a visual aid, I'll break down a typical coward "resourceful tactician" approach to clearing a room of human enemies whom would otherwise have no problem wiping the floor with you:

1. The room on the right contains three enemies (it's not always easy to see the doors, but it's there where the wall goes diagonally up and right). Those four mines/traps are my own carefully prepared "surprises." The switch in the upper left corner sets off an alarm that'll force enemies to investigate the area for intruders.
2. My plan here, if it wasn't evident, is to hit the alarm to make those dudes come running. The first will hit the bear trap, forcing the one behind to walk around and hit the mines, thus ensuring the deaths of both. I was planning on sniping the third while in stealth from a safe distance if the mines didn't get 'em.
3. The plan did not go as intended. Apparently, hitting this base-wide alarm puts enemies in the "defensive" state, which means they run out and take cover behind the sandbags and wait for you to pass close. I had to snipe the first one, exposing myself, and then get some extra distance as they ran into the traps I'd set up.
4. The other issue is that two of the three were bomber/grenadier types: not only can they throw high-yield (read: instant death) explosives at you from a fair distance, but they're equipped with armor that negates some amount of explosive damage (presumably in the case of a critical failure on their throwing skill check).

Even the best-laid plans never seem to go right. It definitely helps to have improvisational skills in this game. Also, saving a lot.

Siphoners

Most critters are less intelligent than humans and will commit to some basic "get close and try to eat" tactics against you. These include rathounds (dog-sized rats), regular hounds (dog-sized dogs), and wild pigs: their usual strategy is to overwhelm you with numbers or, in the dogs' case, hold you in place by gnawing at your leg so their human masters can finish you off. Siphoners are some of the earliest foes you can meet that display some apex predator vibes, adapting specialized tactics that require you prepare ahead of time or make a break for the closest area transition.

Siphoners are big frogs that can potentially jump out of any area with water. They'll do so feet away from you, gaining the initiative and quickly getting close with their barbed tongues that do anticoagulant damage and will siphon health from you to them, hence their name. This makes it hard to cure the damage they cause and makes fighting them an uphill battle as they continue to heal themselves. Worse is that they'll sometimes start with a headbutt which causes imbalance (eliminates your dodge and evasion stats, often the only way lightly-armored characters can avoid damage) and occasionally stuns you for a round.

I wish I could say that I've never been licked to death by frogs in a game, but UnderRail has many ways of making you humble. What's really cool - which is to say, malicious - about they way they're used is that their stealth detection is awful, so if you go everywhere in stealth mode as a matter of course you might never see one. It's only when you've dropped out of stealth because you've registered this benign watery cave as a non-dangerous zone and would prefer to move through it faster that they suddenly make themselves known.

Tactics: They're not all that tough fortunately, so if you've got an effective means to fight enemies up close you can probably finish them off quick. What's important is that you don't try to run: they're fast, and you risk triggering other siphoner spawns as you jog past the waterfront.

Azuridae

Brain bugs. Likely the first psionic foes you meet. They stick to neural overloads - the basic psi attack - if there's only one of them, but Azuridae have a fun feature where they're able to augment each other's psi output if they're encountered in groups via a process called "psionic synergy." That means the more of them there are, the more effective their psi skills become. I just met a group that included an Azuridae Goliathus, which was a rhinoceros beetle the size of a Dobermann; I noped the heck out of there by staying in stealth, a tactic that has served me better than most frontal assaults.

Azuridae offer a fascinating glimpse into the way regular creatures have adapted to this world's world-ending calamity, whatever it may have been. Working together in colonies greatly enhances their stats and combat potential, and so they become a combat consideration based purely on the numbers they're sporting. Most any enemy type becomes more dangerous when found in groups, of course, but rarely to such a potent degree.

Tactics: Best way to defeat these guys is by kiting them if you can, picking them off one at a time from a distance. Failing that, getting up close switches their combat strategy from powerful psionics to relatively painless pincer attacks. They're tough to surprise because they're armored until they use their psionic skills, at which point their brains become exposed; thus it's only after they start attacking you with mind magic are they most vulnerable.

Burrowers

Burrowers are when you start getting into enemy types that are simply not worth the hassle and if the option exists to skip past them, take it. It's clear when burrowers are nearby because their eggs are everywhere, and possibly their quick little spawn also, and that early warning is all you need to either regroup with the right tools or just bail and find an alternative path.

Burrowers are insects the size of sheep with armored carapaces that, when they see you, start spitting poison barbs two or three times a round. Those poison values can stack, and if you're facing more than one it won't take long until the poison is draining half your health gauge per turn without antidotes. When they're not spitting at you they're spitting out babies, or at least eggs that hatch into spawn within two turns. The spawn don't poison you but will surround you and peck you with pincer attacks about five times a round each as an equally annoying substitute. Basically, if you love being filled with venom you'll love burrowers, but anyone else should come up with a strategy to avoid them or at the very least isolate and kill them individually.

The thing I like most about burrowers, and believe me when I say it's a short list, is that the first time you're introduced to the idea of them is during an early mission where you're raiding a disused station outpost with a few rangers from your home base in order to unlock its vault. Upon opening the vault, the raid leader takes one look at the burrower eggs within and says (paraphrased), "Nope, fuck that. Close the vault doors now." Absolutely no-one in this universe wants to deal with burrowers.

Tactics: What I've noticed is that spawn are attracted by sound but the big ones aren't so much. You can probably throw some caltrops around and toss a noisemaker to draw out and take care of the spawns quickly, or give them another grenade to play with when they're all grouped together. Energy weapons work best on the adults because they won't negate most of it like they do with melee and standard gunfire: I find my trusty taser very useful in slowing them down long enough to finish them off. Fire works well too, as it does with many critters: toss a molotov their way and they won't be happy about it. Honestly, though, they're not super fast or alert so just sneak past unless you need a whole bunch of burrower poison for crafting traps and caltrops. Better than them quilling you softly with their venom.

Crawlers

If burrowers are bad, crawlers are the result of a deranged mind devoid of mercy or honor. Under no circumstances should you ever stop to fight in a crawler-infested area. In fact, as soon as you realize what you've wandered into, it's best to reload the area transition auto-save and then quickly un-transition back the way you came. Y'see, part of the crawler's wonderful charm is that they're better sneakers than you are and will detect you very quickly unless your stealth skill is obscenely high, so you'd be just as effective trying to pass them in a cloak of shadows as an elephant would. What a crawler will do is remain in stealth until they're right on top of you, sting you once with an aimed shot, and then disappear into the ceiling where you can't reach them. Their venom will do significant damage over time and after it wears off it'll incapacitate you for two whole rounds. The moment that happens, that's when the crawler reappears, stings you several more times per round with an opportunistic attack bonus, and then vanishes on you again once you've woken up with several new stacks of crawler poison on you. And then they'll descend on you again when that batch of venom knocks you out. Incidentally, crawlers almost always attack in packs and have variants called Death Stalkers that are even stronger, faster, more observant, and apply a "hyperallergenic" status effect which hits you with a huge damage penalty if you try to consume any type of medicine. Oh, and all crawlers regenerate health every turn.

You ever meet a Dungeon Master in one of your nerd circles that has a real bee in their bonnet about overpowered players running roughshod all over their carefully-crafted adventures? Sometimes those DMs turn evil, and sometimes they go on to develop video games about post-apocalyptic underworlds. The crawlers were actually patched at some point to be even deadlier than they were already. I don't think I've actively hated a video game enemy type this much since the birds from Ninja Gaiden.

Tactics: If you absolutely have to defeat some crawlers (their poison is almost worth the trouble) I've found that bear traps and molotovs are the best combination. Let them know where you are - ideally in a corner with many bear traps set up nearby - and then toss a flare down so they can't hide in the darkness. When they're close, let them dance in the flames of your ire. The fire will not only skip their resistances and damage them severely but also scare the heck of them, forcing them to run away... unless they're currently stuck in a bear trap. At this point you can dispatch them however you want, though ideally several feet away from their stingers. One annoying thing to add to the pile with regards to crawlers and burrowers alike is that they're immune to their own and each others' venom, usually so effective when put on traps.

Mutants

I have to say I prefer the mutants in UnderRail to those in Fallout, though only barely. Mutants aren't a result of whatever apocalypse occurred to make the surface unliveable: most of the ones you meet turned out that way because of an experimental mutagen. (Unless the mutagen took out the surface too; I haven't got far enough in the story to find out.) Mutants, and mutated dogs, love their acid attacks: they'll attack several times at range, sometimes with blobs that hold you in place for a round though will at least let you act. Acid damage is no joke, since it slips by most resistances and can cause the corroded status effect, which decreases your defense values even further. Mutants only appear in very specific locations though, and I've yet to meet any just rambling around the Underrail caves or old subways - they're usually in disused laboratories and the like.

Gotta love the mutant zombie trope, but Underrail gets clever by making a distinction between full mutants and those still in the process of changing into them. The latter still think and fight like regular humans, using whatever weapon skills and feats they might possess, but generally look pretty similar to the full-on zombie variants who'll only ever fight you with acid sprays and unarmed melee and are that much easier to predict.

Tactics: Mutants are tougher than humans but not as smart. They're most effective at range so they might be a handful for a ranged character, but trying to melee them isn't clever either because their swings hurt and any damage will cause them to shoot acid blood from their wounds like xenomorphs. I'm not sure how much damage this damage-acid does - I'm not a close-quarters type - but I find headshotting them from a distance works just fine, as it does with most enemies.

Sentry Bots

You'll meet basic droids patrolling the hallways during that aforementioned raid mission, but the tougher sentry bots are ideally avoided: they kind of operate like the cameras and turrets in that they're obstacles to work around rather than take on directly. Sentry bots are very effective guards and use their own nature to their advantage by dropping flashbangs at their feet - which incapacitate you but do nothing to them - and then wear you down with their 9mm gun turrets as you watch the birdies fly around your head like a Looney Tunes character. There's also tougher variants called Plasma Sentries that hit with energy weapons and usually have shields, and I've even met something called an Industrial Bot which killed me in a single round with its flamethrower attachment.

I've always liked mechanical enemies in RPGs but they so rarely appear in situations where their inorganic nature is advantageous to them. Like having them patrol areas that are already full of toxic gas: you get double the bang for your buck if you're a malevolent level designer. Having them all equipped with flashbangs is a great idea from a design standpoint, less cool if you're hoping to fight them effectively as a player.

Tactics: If you have anything EMP-related the sentries are what you use them on, along with turrets you can't otherwise evade and maybe well-armed humans with energy-based gear. The thing with EMP grenades, and why you don't want to be caught in the blast, is that they remove the charge of any electrical device the target is using and then apply that as damage to the target as well. Anyone using a shield or energy weapon takes something like double damage from most EMPs. I talked about tasers earlier: they work as well on robots as they do on biological enemies, and any kind of electrical damage (there's an electrokinetic psi ability, for instance) is very effective also. What you don't want to do is let them flashbang you, because you'll be a sitting duck for however many of them there are.

The Rathound King

I'll just give a special mention to this guy because he was a real pain in the neck to deal with. Along with a labyrinthine lair which had something in the realm of a hundred different mine and bear trap placements - essentially using your own tactics against you if you're a trapper like me - the actual fight, if you choose to fight him, involves taking on the Rathound King himself (the highest level character I've met so far) and his entourage of powerful rathound minions. The dude is great at stealth and an expert trapper, so any "preparation" you do before the fight is usually moot: he'll just walk right towards you if you try to hide or will dismantle any traps you put down near him. He also has an insanely powerful crossbow and will likely toss a net over you to prevent you from running.

Trying to figure out how to defeat him at the comparatively low level I was at was an interesting exercise in resourcefulness. I could've been smarter still and just walked away after a few ill-advised attempts to fight him with honor, but then trying to fight anything with honor in the Underrail is a recipe for disaster. I'd later find out that I could've just talked to the dude and acquiesced to his demands and resolved the related quest that way, but having to navigate past all those traps had really sapped my patience down to nothing. Sometimes a dude wearing a big rat costume needs to die - Mickey Mouse mascots at Disneyworld excepted - and sometimes the rusty cogs and gears in my head will spin long enough to determine a way to make that happen.

Tactics: So this is where I show off by talking about how I cheesed this dude in the most cowardly way imaginable, which was to lead him away from his rathound guards by placing traps one after the other towards the opposite side of the zone like a breadcrumb trail. Once he'd been separated from his rathounds I closed the door on them so they couldn't follow and then waited until the Rathound King reached the end of the breadcrumb trail, where I'd left half a dozen high-explosive and frag mines clustered together. I then tossed a grenade at him before he'd disarmed the first one. It's remarkable the amount of damage numbers you get from an ambush like that: each piece of shrapnel from the frag grenades and mines has to have its damage calculated on top of the heat and force from the initial explosion. Numbers were still scrolling out of his smoking corpse several seconds after he'd already hit the floor. For poetic irony reasons I wish I could say that all those mines were his own that I'd recovered elsewhere from his lair, but my traps skill wasn't anywhere near high enough to recover them. I might come back for that bounty after a few more levels though. After all, traps seem work pretty well in this game...

I also scored some sweet barbarian Rathound armor out of it. Only lightly singed!

(NB: I'm seriously only halfway through this game so I can't even imagine what's waiting for me in the high-level, late-game areas. I suppose I'll find out the hard way.)