Ok, but let’s actually talk about it.
So the first thing I noticed is that chaining works differently to what I expected. I kind of just thought it would “pass through” targets as long as it was hitting something, but it’s more of an angled-bounce effect, so it won’t always chain as spectacularly as above. In many situations it was difficult to get it to bounce at all, in fact. It seems to like metal - I don’t know if that’s hardcoded or if some property of barriers and armored chickens and the like makes it prefer chaining from them. But it makes sense and I don’t want that aspect to change.
But, even though I definitely don’t understand the mechanics behind it (someone please figure it out) and I don’t know how to maximise it, it feels at least somewhat… intuitive, I guess.
The chains did seem capable of pushing kinetic objects like feathers pretty well though:
Coward Chickens will kill you unless you are ready for it - the chain means they are all hit simultaneously and as such produce a wave of white in your direction. They were especially lethal in Squawk Blocks (which, to my surprise, were actually not as good as you’d expect for LF - it seemed better for waves where hitting multiple chickens at once would be typically difficult. Stuff like Bend it like Beckhen and Chicken Roulette were easier than they usually are, as was Three-By-Three where all the chickens were really tightly grouped.)
I also struggled much more than I was expecting in a supernova. It wasn’t unusable, like, say, a laser cannon would be, but it wasn’t easy. It could not chain into the Bossa Nova from outside, but it was chaining between the invincible outside coating chunks.
It did not want to chain off comets at all (not that it needed to) but it did chain off bubbles, which was more useful than I expected.
Interestingly, it seemed to be able to chain across multiple nodes of the same boss:
This did, at a glance, appear to be doing increased damage
although I really should have been using a damage indicator and also allowed me to occasionally chain attacks of the arms, dealing damage from positions that I normally would not be able to. It was a pretty negligible amount, though, and I feel like that time would be better spent letting it cooldown (which, by the way, you’ll need to do a lot - this is easily the weapon I’ve felt most tempted to overheat by far.)
Speaking of which, the mechanic where manual fire
doesn’t chain is really nice and I don’t want that to change, it allows you to fire quick bursts at individual targets while it cools off and encourages hold-to-fire use that is congruous with it’s visual.
I struggled much more against a Crazy Squawker (by the way, has anyone seen the “old” squawk block boss since it’s been added???) and it actually reached the bottom when I was not using my bomber (one of the few scenarios where the bomber seemed to be superior was in boss fights). Generally speaking though, LF was rubbish for boss fights, but that was to be expected, I think.
Let’s talk bombers.
So, despite the images I posted above, LF with bombers isn’t all that great. It’s certainly better than the
majority of the alternatives, but at no stage did I feel like I wouldn’t be better off with twin plasma rifles. In addition, getting that epic four-beam thunderstorm requires at least power level twelve - it’s definitely not worth it below that. It also obscures the screen like mad - four strips of bouncing white lightning were regularly enough to even conceal brightly coloured weapon change gifts, let alone eggs, which is a handicap the slow-moving bomber definitely doesn’t need.
But this is my first bomber and I’m trash with it anyway so take all that with a grain of salt.
I definitely felt like the weapon was more suited to play with other spaceship types and had quite a lot of fun with it despite the fact that it’s not ideal (and I crashed a lot using it). It’s more viable now, although I’m not convinced that it’s at all balanced, and will probably only be grabbing it after I hit power level 20 (after which it was definitely a good weapon, three beams were much better!). I suspect that otherwise it needs slightly more “oomph” still.