RAGE 2

This achievement stacks with
This solution focuses on an NG+ run. Some tips below will apply for NG. My general advice would be to go one run through first on Easy or Normal, then NG+ on Ultra Nightmare, because to 100% the game achievement wise involves visiting most-to-all areas in the game, and for an Ultra Nightmare run you will want to keep exploration to a minimum to reduce frustration. An Ultra Nightmare NG+ run will take you about 6-10 hours, depending on your general level of luck getting through the main story without dying constantly. Once you get a feel for the difficulty this isn't too hard to clear - you will likely find clearing out bandit dens etc more frustrating than the main missions.

You take a lot more damage in this difficulty, so start practicing your defibrillator QTE and ensure you always have Health infusions close to hand. Luckily, in NG+ you carry across all weapons, ammo, cash, components, Feltrite, MB cash and Project Points.

Preparation

Important Warning: If you have already finished the game, before starting NG+, open a previous save from your first run through (you may as well make it your last save - so you can keep all the items you collected), change your difficulty to Ultra Nightmare, then get the game to autosave. When you start NG+, you will be prompted to choose a save file to base your NG+ against - select the latest one, and make sure that difficulty is set there to "Ultra Nightmare". There are multiple reports that starting NG+ on a lower difficulty and then changing the difficulty once you start NG+ to Ultra Nightmare carries a risk of not validating the achievement once you finish the game the second time.

Note that you will need to have finished the main story and opened all 12 arks before you can start NG+. Visiting Arks again in NG+ just give you weapon skins, so unless you feel the need for cosmetic upgrades, you can skip those.

If you hadn't already upgraded your health capacity to 150 via the Cyber Doctor in Wellspring, look to do that ASAP, potentially before you begin the NG+ run. You will also want to want to get your Damage buff up to the maximum (5 upgrades), and the Overdrive as high as you can (I was able to upgrade it 3 times out of 5.) You will also want your infusions and abilities fully upgraded.

An extra tip, thanks to HamsterLV: If you own the TerrorMania DLC (it's 500 Rage Coins (USD$5) to purchase in-game), completing this on easy first will give you a fully upgraded Sword which can be very useful for your Ultra Nightmare run: with its charge attack, hold for a second, then release and it sends a ranged horizontal attack, that can kill tough regular enemies in 3 hits. It even stuns enemies and kills shield guys.
HamsterLV blazed through the game on Ultra Nightmare doing this: behing cover, charge sword, pop out, release ranged attack, pop back in. Repeat until enemies are dead, move up.

Game Play

The game breaks down into roughly 3 parts:

Part I: Meeting Marshall, Loosum and Kvasir, and completing one mission from each.

Part II: Getting to level 5 in the Marshall, Loosum and Kvasir projects.
Kvasir will likely happen naturally as you move through the map and come across data pads and ark chests, and any other icons with blue labels (such as fallen rangers.) Loosum requires you to complete orange locations, such as Automated Sentries, Gas Stations and Road Chokers. Marshall requires you to complete pink locations, which are mostly bandit dens. Level 5 for each person is 800 points, so you can pick harder targets for Marshall & Loosum to get to 800 with fewer locations that need to be explored, or if you find those too hard, do more of the easier locations.

Part III: Once you reach level 5 with each person, they will issue you one more mission each to complete. Once those are complete, you will then complete the final mission, Project Dagger.

You will want to return back to a Trade Town after each mission to restock on weapons/infusions/components. For the Part II section I found I could generally hit 2-3 locations before needing to restock (mostly for ammo).

Using the Phoenix to travel around is essential; at some of the bandit camps you can use the gatling gun and/or dual cannons to take a lot the enemies out while still in your car, then clean up the rest afterward. Note that your vehicle also takes significant damage in this difficulty.

Combat Tips

Your general combat approach will be around keeping your distance and strafing. Even Goons at close range can knock you down from 150 to 0 health in 2 or 3 shots. The Hyper Cannon becomes a defacto sniper rifle, and the Smart Rocket Launcher is also useful for taking out enemies at long range. Grav Darts are also useful and can take most (but not all) non-boss enemies in a single gravity sling shot, depending on the range.

The Slam, Vortex and Shatter abilities are also useful in various combat situations. The Slam is useful for groups of smaller, weaker enemies. Vortex is useful to give you a few moments of breathing room if you managed to capture several enemies in its pull. The Shatter ability is mostly useful for Goons who are holding shields, and in the final boss battle. At this difficulty level Shatter will not kill most enemies (unless they've been substantially weakened first.)

In Part III especially, you will begin to find Overdrive more useful. The Authority mutants that can fly/float that have energy weapons will rip you up really quickly, but the Charged Pulse Cannon + Overdrive takes care of them very quickly. Overdrive infusions even when upgraded only lasts 20-30 seconds but will definitely get you out of a jam.

Boss Tips



The achievement will pop after the credits and subsequent cut scene, after you talk to Lily and get up from the bed.

(H/T to You Stupid Pleb and Skrubits for some details above)

Just a big tip for anyone attempting this after a easy iron-man like myself.

Make sure you upgrade as much of your abilities or weapons as possible before attempting the NG+.

Due to the damage you will take from enemies it's unlikely you'll pick up much if any feltrite so upgrading once you've started your play through will be significantly harder to accomplish.

I started will only half the guns upgraded to top tier and by the end of the NG+ I still hadn't managed to finish them all due to the long range tactics the difficulty sometimes forces you to use. Longer the range the less likely you'll pick up any fallen feltrite.

One thing I completely underestimated was the use of overdrive and more importantly the upgraded overdrive stims. The final upgrade that activates overdrive combined with the ability to regenerate health will save alot of time and headaches.
They will make some parts of the game, the final boss in particular significantly easier.

Even with my poor amount of upgrades, 8 health stims I managed to defeat the end boss after god knows how many times so if your not prepared it is possible but I highly recommend setting yourself up for an easier playthrough.

I relied almost purely on using the hyper cannon to lick off a couple enemies before slowly working towards enemies with the assault rifle taking off heads as I go.
When I had to get close, I used the slug rounds of the shotgun to constantly knockback the enemies that way they won't get a chance to attack back.

One last word of warning! Watch out for enemies in a down but not out style position. The amount of times I died because someone laying on their back spraying in my direction was ridiculous!

I've decided to make some notes on getting this from scratch. There are spoilers as I assume this isn't your first play through else you're a maniac. The other two guides have some good advice and I will no doubt repeat some of it, so credit to those guys for their hard work, but everything here is all my own finidings. If you're up for the challenge and want to know how to start out from a fresh save like me, then I hope this will provide some useful pointers.

First of all it must be said that this is going to be very painful to begin with. You're going to need to get through the tutorial before you have any hope of making this any easier. To do so you will need to perfect your headshot game. So far, I've found the tutorial the hardest part of Rage 2 You have no perks, upgrades, abilities or the defib to help you, and the enemies you face will be tough. That's right folks dig in, put your hard hats on, because this is going to test your patience.

So down to the tutorial then. It's nails as I've said. One hit can take you down to 63 health, but more often than not you'll be down to 40 and looking at death before you've even realised you been hit. The way to approach this is to fight from a distance, remember you have no defibrillator for back up yet so death means death. You'll also notice you have no overdrive either and fighting enemies at a distance means that you'll only get a chance to pick up the odd bit of feltrite for health

Let's sum this up quickly. Remember, to beat the tutorial you will need to:
- Fight using as much range as possible.
- Learn to head shot your enemies. Enemies will take an entire clip to kill, or just a couple of bullets if you hit them in the head.
- Crouch. Enemy accuracy seems to be affected by crouching, but the difference at this point is negligible, but it's a good practice because later on you'll be crouching a lot.
- Use cover. A lot. Don't let the enemy get a bead on you, they'll quickly end your run.

Ok so you've beaten the tutorial, picked up your assault rifle and overdrive ability along the way. Now you're given the dash ability, which shouldn't be underestimated, especially when upgraded. So this is where it starts to get easier right? Well no not really. It going to be tough for a while longer yet. You'll remember from your first playthrough that the first stop is actually Highroad Block, a road choker. You could technically go around it but I urge you to stop here and complete this location. This has an enemy difficulty of 1 so should be fairly easy? *Snort* this took me a while and really hit home just what sort of challenge I was to expect. So tips then:
- Use the Phoenix to clear out the first wave. You will need to aggro the enemy by leaving the Phoenix to get the next lot of enemies to appear.
- Use the Phoenix (Yes I said it twice)
- Enter the structures to the right to get the enemies to spawn, head back to the Phoenix.
- Headshots
- Use the dash ability. After using Dash you will notice the next enemy shot usually misses and gives you a small window to focus a headshot.
- Complete the location i.e. find all storage crates and data pads.

Next up head to Gunbarrel. Pick up the quest from Marshall by all means but do not start it, you're going to need a lot of upgrades before this is close to doable. Theres a couple of things to do here, first collect the 3 bounty board missions. These are easily completed with just the Phoenix and will help you earn some early cash and feltrite for your upgrades. Next, check if you have enough feltrite to upgrade the constitution nanotrites and add a couple of perks. Each level of constitution gives you 10% bullet damage reduction, up to 40% at level 5 and you're going to need this if you hope to make much progress for Loosum's projects. Essentially, for now, you are going to be grinding for storage containers containing feltrite and cash.

Next go to the garage and purchase loads of ammo for the Phoenix. Do all 3 bounty board missions. You should be able to do these without leaving the Phoenix. A couple of times I had to get out and find enemies with the LB button and finish off them mission. Caution is advised however, one enemy can still finish you faster than you can kill them, so keep you health up, stick to cover, do not run out in the open, and keep crouched. Remember you still have no real abilities yet and you're weaker than a Fosters lager right now. Head to Wellspring and Lagoonys and pick up tasks from their job boards.

At this point I picked up Loosum's first quest, not realising that I'd have to fight enemies as soon as I entered the city hall. It wasn't too much of a problem, the goons were fairly easy here and certainly no where near as tough as the bandit camps, so if you feel confident in your headshot abilities by now go ahead and pick up this quest while you're here but be warned, you will have to do some fighting.

So, now is a good time to look at more upgrades. By now you should have a decent amount of cash. Enough for 1 or 2 items for the permanent upgrades to health, damage and overdrive. So buy some and head to the doc and permanently upgrade your health by 5%. What you also want to do is focus on completing the constitution levels before doing much else. Getting that to level 5. 40% bullet damage reduction is going to be the difference between never playing this game again, and actually making this game possible

Time for some exploration. My advice would be to start checking out the ? icons on the map in the twisted canyons. Some of these are simply exploration locations and typically yield 2-3 storage containers and and data pad. This will help you rack up the resources needed for the necessary upgrades.

I attempted the goon controlled gas station near Gunbarrel and although it took a few attempts I managed to kill all of the goons, and complete the settlement. Still at 2/5 constitution.

I attempted the level 2 bandit camp Gazcatraz at this point and had my arse handed to me repeatedly. I'm average at shooters so if you're nails, go for it, but I personally felt far to weedy to complete this.

So, time to get some arks completed. I started off going to .... To get the Shatter ability. It's the easiest ark so by all means get some practice in, but early in the game I found that Shatter wasn't that useful. What you can do with this ark is discover what to expect from future arks. Once you've fought your way to the ark itself and cleared all enemies, enter the ark, get the goods and ....oh crap more bad guys have turned up.

A good strategy here was to fight until the ark, and before entering, find all storage containers, datapads and ark chests (the latter are very important), make sure the Phoenix is ready for a speedy getaway. Enter the ark when ready, and what I found useful here was to clear the first wave of freshly arrived bad guys and make a dash for the Phoenix. Use rooftops if you can. This isn't going to work for the rocket launcher ark I'm afraid, if you head in there be prepared for a long fight back to your Phoenix. This should be doable by now, and you should be on or near 5/5 constitution.

Blackout. You'll get the shotgun on this mission, but even with all of our prep this is not going to be a cakewalk. It's easy going until you reach set of stairs, on the landing you'll have a work bench, cabinets with crafting resources and another set of stairs. You're going to get rushed. Handy for you there is an opening immediately to your left. It's easy to miss, so once again, after the final set of stairs look for this opening, head inside. There is a well with some feltrite at the bottom but for now, destroy the crates and move to the back behind the well. The muties can still hit you with ranged attacks, but you'll be safe from their melee. Which is good for you because melee is devastating, even with our perk and they don't use ranged that often. Keep baiting the muties, and run back to you hole, dealing with them from there. If I had to use my defib, I'd idle for 4 minutes to I had its use again. If you see a flaming mutie, don't had back to your hole, deal with it there and then. As long as you take the rest of the mission cautiously, you won't have a problem. Congratulations you now have access to the killed & destroy projects with a heap of points to spend. It's up to you how you spend them, but I think the no brainers are the melee hit grenades back to the sender options.

Wasteland celebrity. I dreaded this mission. Mutant Bash TV can be hard enough on easier difficulties if you haven't prepped for it. Thankfully it didn't seem to bad.

The race part of this mission is easy and doesn't require any advice.

Mutant bash then. Make sure that before you start this mission you have Kinetic Shield 3 unlocked in the constitution nanotrites tree. The first round is definitely the hardest. The rounds get easier and shorter as you go through. So, your 2 main weapons to switch will be your shotgun and assault rifle. I had the shotty upgraded with increased magazine size giving me 12 cartridges fully loaded. The trick to this is keep moving. Exploit the hell out of dash. If a mutant is coming towards you dash backward. Use the shotguns scoped fire to knock back muties, giving you plenty of space. If a mutie
jumps at you dash left or right. Prioritise the flaming muties in the tubes. If you use your defib hang around the corridors after each round to let that reset.

If you've gotten this far congratulations, the game will feel much easier from here on out. No more difficult that starting a new game+