Rather than rushing to nestle in the cozy embrace of the Spirit dropship as soon as possible, RC Master lets it do its own thing before hooking up just outside the barrier to go through together. This is, it’s claimed, a slightly more consistent way to get out of the level. He uses it to cut 11 seconds off the previous time by KroKus, for a new record of 8:29.

In his own words:

I don’t feel like I’m the best on this level: someone that’s better at slide-jumps could still probably improve this. But, I can do the Falcon skip much more consistently now so after landing the Legendary record only 8 seconds slower than the previous Heroic one, I wondered if I could be more aggressive on the fighting, and cut off some time from the Heroic record.

Most of it is as you would expect: run, get PP from first enemy, grab Falcon.

I realised that many of my issues with trying to do the barrier-breaking with the Spirit was that when you got in it, it had a tendancy to sway wildly from side to side unless you were perfectly centred. You can control it to an extent, but I felt it still lost you time if it happened. Instead, I flew ahead of the Spirit and only put my Falcon in between it’s arms after it had cleared all the rocks and trees – this seems to work quite well.

The trigger for getting locked in the Falcon seems to come much more quickly on Heroic, so I ditch it after the first drop.

Once properly inside the comms outpost, after the cutscene, I rush the Grunts, grab a Plasma Pistol and take out the Concussion Zealot Elite ASAP. Then it’s just a matter of cutting through the rest of the enemies as quickly as possible.

~RC Master