Downtown
Floyd has set up a new fort in Downtown, located in the north at an abandoned theater. This is the most spacious of the forts in the four districts, but also the most wide-open. OD can approach from basically any angle, and the places you need to defend are fairly far apart. Still, your selection of weapons and Traps is broad and powerful, a far cry from the ragtag arsenal you deployed during “Amptastic!” Combos like AK-FU equipped with Burn, Baby, Hair Spray Bomb equipped with Twist of Fate, and Pulse Mine equipped with Rocket Man give you meaningful stopping power against even dozens of OD at once.
Your Trap potential is devious, too. You can simply rely on the wicked twists of fate produced by Pandora’s Box Traps, which virtually always do something really nasty for the opposition. Whether a troop of gnomes or a rain of bowling balls or a hateful rage cloud, Pandora’s Box rarely disappoints. You can set up two or four Tesla Traps in a grid, creating a giant area you can essentially electrocute on command. You can place Señor Freeze Traps by barricades, guaranteeing that most minor OD will be frozen in their advancing efforts. Or you can place Grind Cooker Trap after Grind Cooker Trap all connected, creating your own custom grind lines. There are obviously many more possibilities than this, but the point is that between your Traps and your guns, you can put something terrifying together to throw at the onrushing mutant mass. If you stay moving and you have a combat plan, you’re most of the way to succeeding already.
During this Night Defense, you won’t be guarding Vats but rather fuse boxes. Three fuse boxes power the concert, which all good factions of Sunset City—the Oxfords, Troop Bushido, the Fargarthians, and Las Catrinas—attend in good spirits. They’re in especially good spirits because they know you’ll be guarding them! The fuse boxes are powered by—wait for it—Overcharge, which means that (of course) the OD are going to be snooping about. Which is not to mention that the band is going to make a lot of noise once the show gets underway, which will only attract even more OD. As with Overcharge in Vats, you only need to survive the defensive stands with at least one fuse box working to be OK.
You must defend against two major waves. For the first two minutes, you have to hold off standard OD while the crew preps for the concert. For the next two minutes, the battle intensifies, with Muggers and Herkers showing up alongside the usual Blower, Popper, Gunker, and grunt suspects. Remember that you just received the Pulse Mine weapon for finishing the previous Mission; if a fuse is under attack, just fire a Pulse Mine or two on top of that fuse. Now any non-Herker that touches the fuse will get torn apart by pulse waves. You can also manufacture this effect elsewhere by first launching a Captain Ahab spear into something to generate an Overcharge pool, then firing a Pulse Mine into that pool, which creates about 10 seconds of minor OD haplessly lurching right to their deaths.
Completing this Mission opens access to the four-part Quest series “Taking Back The Streets,” which sees action in every district. Although this wasn’t a Vat defense, you’ll still earn new Amps from Floyd, along with unlocking access to the Theater Night Defense Challenge.