Meet Your Maker: How to Beat “Killboxes”

That’s not a problem. I’ll accelerate your learning process so that you can start clearing tough brutal-difficulty rooms sooner. Just follow the steps below.

Don’t be scared of the spammed traps and whatnot. They can’t catch you if you’re moving fast and using your head. Unless you get snared by a claw or fly into a guard’s face or travel through the line of fire of a trap for an extended period of time, you’re going to just evade everything. Really, you can grapple circles around a lot of killboxes while all hell is breaking loose and you won’t take damage. It’s about using your movement and jumps and knowing that where you’ve just been is dangerous territory.

Do just that – get inside, fly around. Gather information. Identify the traps that you’re dealing with. Identify the different threats that make up the whole. Where are the sentinels? Where are the guards? What can be shot at without losing your bolts?

You can also use flash shields to give yourself a little bit of breathing room – but I don’t recommend it.

Note: If the killbox has a very low ceiling, just try to gather as much information as you can muster without entering the room. There’s less information to gather since there’s not much verticality involved.

What obstacles in the room have the largest arc of fire – what’s shooting at you no matter where you are? What’s modded with obnoxious effects like the lingering sentinel AoE or flamethrower napalm? Figure this out, and destroy these obstacles first.

How?

The same way you gathered info. Swoop in, eliminate one target, swoop out. Take a breath. You just made the killbox that much easier. One trap destroyed might not feel like much, but it is permanently gone (unless your run restarts).

Don’t be afraid to use your sword. You can get in close on ranged traps much more often than you think. Your sword deflects nearly everything, and you have the ability to choose your timing. Wait for a gap between shots, zip in, crush the target, and get back out. Alternatively, peek out, fire a bolt to destroy the target, then get back into cover and wait for the shots to stop flying at you. Then get out and grapple just to secure your bolt before you return to safety.

Repeat this process until you’ve created more safe ground on which to stand.

If it’s not a flamethrower, sentinel, piston, or modified spike trap, it’s gotta stop shooting at you after it fires once or twice. Grappling through the line of fire of un-triggered traps is safer than you think a lot of the time. Just waste their charges, and suddenly you just have a room half-full of inactive traps. Of course, this doesn’t apply to guards.

If you’re here to clear the killbox and not just grapple through it, then at some point you’re going to have to face the obstacles that are left. Maybe there’s 14 enforcers that are all on islands surrounded by corrosive cubes. There’s nothing left to do here but git gud.

Get comfortable with the rhythm with which guards (and guards modded with increased fire rate) shoot at you. Know what it looks like. Bait their shots, strafe away from where you’ve baited them, and swoop in for the kill. You might die in a single hit, but your custodian is actually a monster, especially with liberal use of the grappling hook.

Watch this spur-of-the-moment recording I made. Watch how I apply the steps above to beat this killbox. This resembles what your gameplay will look like with practice and practical application.

You signed up to play a game where other players are trying to kill you with their creations. The expectation of the game is not that players are out to make their bases fun by your subjective definition of what “fun” is, even if that’s an accolade you can hand out afterwards. They’re out to beat you. Stay cool.