Decision Point: Stay On The Ground, or Provide Air Support
This chapter revolves almost entirely around this Decision Point. The operative providing air support has, arguably, the easier role. They get a nice big gun and good angles on all of the hostiles along the rooftop. The operative on the ground has to play a relatively cautious game to avoid getting caught in the secondary explosions the chopper gunner will undoubtedly cause. They also can’t sit still—cartel mercs come out of the woodwork, attempting to surround the grounded operative and prevent them from taking out RPG users along the rooftop.
Stay On the Ground
Your goal is to cross the rooftop
and get into position to kill the RPGs that are harrassing your air support. This means fighting your way through a lot of mercenaries, which would be pretty time consuming if you didn’t have air support to begin with. Ideally, you shouldn’t have to do a whole lot of shooting yourself because your air support should be able to carve you a bloody swath through the enemy and hold their aggro while you seek out the HUD-marked RPG threat
. Note that the building the RPG user starts in can be entered, but beware of the large amount of explosive fuel barrels inside. It is probably safer to just throw a grenade inside.
In practice, it depends entirely on whether or not you are playing with a friend. AI Bravo is extremely accurate with the mini-gun, but he isn’t necessarily as aggressive at using it compared to how a person can play, and you might have to do a little more shooting of your own. Do not hesitate to use Overkill if it’s available, as it benefits both you and your chopper gunner.
Once you manage to clear the rooftop of all threats, you have to wait for the chopper gunner to shoot at a radio tower
, causing it to collapse toward the ground and serve as a bridge from your rooftop to the next one, where a pair of Mexican police officers are doing their best to hold out against a determined cartel counter attack
. However, as you cross the makeshift bridge, a cartel chopper flies in and puts a few rockets into your air support, causing it to crash onto the roof. Your gunner hangs precariously onto a piece of the crashed extraction chopper, holding off any surviving mercs on the roof. Get to him fast!
As you get close to the crash site, you will automatically leap forward to save your comrade, but the cartel chopper hasn’t had enough and moves into position to gun you down. Alpha and Bravo will draw their pistols, but you need to aim for the pilot yourself and ensure that he dies before you do. Once you’ve successfully taken out the cartel chopper, then you can go back inside the building
to continue your pursuit of the traitorous Salem.
Provide Air Support
If you’re in the air, your job is to clear a path for your partner on the roof so that they are able to cross quickly and safely
to reach the RPG threat
that will be harrassing you during the early portion of this battle. All targets will be marked on your HUD, which makes it a simple task to find and destroy anything that might threaten your buddy. Once the RPG is taken care of and the targets on the first rooftop are suppressed, you need to create a makeshift bridge for your partner to use to get to the second rooftop by shooting down a small radio tower
.
While you wait for your partner on the roof to cross the bridge, your chopper will move into position to allow you a chance to provide air support for some Mexican police officers exchanging fire with cartel mercs on the second rooftop
. Unfortunately, your joyride is cut short as a cartel attack helicopter blasts you out of the sky.
As you hold on for dear life in the aftermath of the crash, you must wait for your partner to get to you and pull you out of the wreckage. Afterward, the cartel chopper tries to take you out as you’re dangling off of the rooftop, and you’ll have to kill the chopper pilot before he kills you. Your ride out of Narco Hell is gone, but Alpha and Bravo hadn’t planned on leaving anyway—not before they’d dealt with Salem.