The bosses thus far in this game have been a lot of fun. For many of them I didn't even realize that I was about to get into a boss fight because it wasn't telegraphed by some sort of obvious entrance to an area where there was going to be a boss on the other side.
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do not read this if you haven't played the game yet and want to!
When I did accidentally get into a boss fight, other than the first time when I hadn't yet picked up the sword and was facing him a stick in hand, I normally did pretty well. Two of the boss fights I managed to win on the very first try without really even knowing very much about their attack patterns. I think the programmer intentionally made their attacks quite easy to predict and telegraphed what they were going to to next. Plus if you play the game slowly and explore a lot, which is what I think was intended, you mostly will end up at bosses overpowered and with plenty of healing capabilities anyway.
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When you get to a golden door like this that you had to accomplish a number of things to make it open though, you'd have to be a fool to not realize that a big battle was waiting for you on the other side.
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Then, when you almost immediately encounter a save point just below a raised platform if you STILL don't realize this is a boss battle coming up I think there is very little chance that you made it to this part of the game on your own.
Once you go up to the top of the platform, it quickly becomes clear that you are about the face the largest boss that you have had to faceoff with at any point in the game thus far.
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The Siege Engine's attacks aren't really that difficult and they are telegraphed not just with visual clues but also with sounds that make it very easy to prepare to roll and dodge out of the way.
What makes the Siege Engine so tough is that despite its huge size it is actually really fast. Therefore, bombs or crackers that I would normally use to even the playfield a bit don't have much of an impact on it because it quickly moves out of the way. It also, unlike all other bosses up to this point, only has 2 vulnerable points: At it's head and at its "core".
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If you are able to get to the core, which isn't easy considering how much it flies around the battlefield, definitely do that. Striking this point of the body does more damage than on the "face" and you also don't have to worry about getting lazered in this position either.
one thing that Tunic does right is that if you simply make contact with this behemoth, it doesn't damage you. That is something that kind of annoys me about other games where you are required to get super close with your main attack. Why does simply touching something hurt you in almost any other game? Well, I suppose the programmer of this game was also irritated by this ubiquitous feature of other games because he excluded it from nearly all encounters in this game. In order for the Siege Engine and nearly every other enemy in this entire game to hurt you, it has to be actively using an attack to do so.
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Some of the Siege Engine's attacks can wipe out half of your health pool with one hit such as this charged laser shot but honestly, if you get hit by that you are too slow and your big brother probably handed the controller over to you for a laugh to see how badly you were going to get your ass kicked. I think the main purposed of this charged laser shot was because this is the first time in the game that I encountered destroyable environmental features. Those giant pillars will provide you with protection from this laser, but only 1 time.
I lost a number of times fighting this boss because all of my other strategies that I had utilized on the other bosses up to this point didn't work and I appreciate that the developer likely did this on purpose because he knew that all players were kind of falling into a routine of sorts and were all using the same method of dispatching bosses. I know that for me this was the first time I ever needed to mix things up a bit and it was easy enough to adapt.
Since the load time after a loss is very short you can get straight back in on the action and work on your strategy pretty easily in this game and this is another reason why I enjoy it so much. There are almost zero load times at all in this game and when you do encounter them, they are over really quickly. I think that was likely a point of great importance to the one and only developer that worked on this game.
Tunic is such a fantastic game. I hope that it makes Andrew Shouldice, the sole designer, a ton of money because this for me is how games should be made.