Levelling Up – The Basics

Welcome back to Levelling Up, the one stop shop to find some knowledge diamonds in amongst the rough journey to being a better player. But it’s in the self-discovery and understanding by practice and patience that we all grow as players and eventually get better.

So where is the best place to start? I felt it is important to elaborate on a lot of the issues back in the introductory post, the answer is right back at the beginning to see what spurred on the continuous sequels and from a story perspective that’s brilliant. But we aren’t here for the story, are we?

If the answer to the last question was “yes” now might be the time to stop reading. The best place to start for any fighting game is mission mode, or the equivalent. Here you will find some move inputs, basic combos and some more complex suggested combos. From there on out you can experiment, test out and get a good feel for the members of the cast that entice you. It might even seem silly at first because you are relatively familiar with the game already, or at least think you are. I for one was very much against training mode for a long time. I loved being in the heat of the moment and letting creativity take the place of optimised combos and a crucial understanding of my character’s abilities. It took a good long time for some friends to drill in the notion I should really practice instead of “just doing it”.

Over time you will start to get a feel for the character or team and then can you find your feet in arcade mode. Here you can start to practice your combos and test out what beats what in varying degrees of difficulty as well as slowly building up very low level knowledge of what the rest of the cast can do. Some of which you might have already seen or know because of the mission mode, other stuff will be new to you and come as surprise when you find that certain moves have great invincibility or blow through whatever you were trying to do.

But over time you will get better and maybe you will even have a friend or two who are at a similar level who you can practice with and play against each other. Always look for help and remember no question is too silly. Somewhere somebody knows the answer and will be willing to share.

Conversely to fighting games the FPS genre does has its necessities in the story. It is here you will find the basics and tutorials needed to learn to play the game. Through the progress of Halo 4 you are introduced to the new weapons and it is easy to understand their function and what they do as opposed to the massive surprise of picking up the incineration cannon and blootering yourself because you weren’t quite sure of what it does.

But fortunately for you the online world of Halo and FPS games are slightly friendlier to beginners and often offer a training camp of sorts where you can play similarly low ranked players before you get your first true taste of blood. If that doesn’t appeal, or it still seems like an uphill struggle to you there are always custom games with friends.

I guess that is all for now but it’s important to know that these are your bread and butter methods of getting better. They are outrageously obvious but overlooked by a great many. So be prepared to grind it out and get ready to level up. See you next time.