Upon launching the game the two main modes of play available are Campaign and Freelance.

To make up for the lack of something like a printed instruction manual here is a breakdown of each mode.

Campaign is our challenge to you as developers but we start you off gently. The first thirteen missions are explicit tutorials that restrict you to just one loadout.

[Sidenote: all mission names are song references - [b]here’s a spotify playlist as an alternate listening experience to Makeup And Vanity Set’s excellent electronic music[open.spotify.com][/b]]

Campaign missions are all single-map endeavors that have one of three main objectives: kill the captains, destroy marked buildings, or eliminate enough of the hostile enemies on a map. Objectives are visible in the top right of the screen. When the main objective has been fulfilled, the exit gate will be open.

As you complete missions, names change from blue to pink, with a diamond indicating that a loadout for that mission has been successfully completed.

Mission names in dark red cannot be accessed until the preceding mission has been completed. Only one loadout completion from a mission is required to access the next one in the list.

As you get further into the campaign, sets of missions will become available, but keep in mind to access the next set you will still need to clear all mission names in blue at least once for the next set to open up.

The Mission menu will tell you what sort of objective you will have to complete and comes with a short briefing, sometimes from characters within the fiction who only ever appear in these short snippets.

Double-clicking a mission name or clicking Loadout will take you to the loadout screen. Unless you go to the trouble of modding the game, mission loadouts are all preset and cannot be altered. For the mission FRENCH MAID, there is only one loadout available: Ripley Snell’s Canavan.

Completing a map with any of a mission’s available loadouts will reward you with the loadout first completion award on your earnings statement after successfully exiting.

This is a one-per-loadout bonus. Loadouts that have been completed already in a mission will be marked with a diamond icon on the loadout selection screen.

In the screenshot above, the diamond indicates it has been completed with the Touro, but not the Huss, Rounder or Chook.

In most missions you will get up to four different loadouts.

It was mentioned earlier that vehicle loadout choices in Campaign mode are preset. This is because they act as a sort of difficulty modifier. For example, the Treehouse is a very straightforward option since a stack of cars on tank treads is not at all subtle. To make up for being a massive target, the Treehouse has large amounts of health and shields to tank incoming fire, plenty of ammunition to flatten most of the map, not to mention the Audio-Kinetic Pulse available on cooldown. Choosing the Mongoose for the same mission, however, means players will have to avoid direct assaults and instead get better at flanking and mastering the use of Active Camouflage to get the drop on unsuspecting enemies.

Take note that if you want the second rarest achievement in the game, you’ll need to clear all loadouts from every mission.

Previously this achievement was much easier to attain because the campaign originally ended on “I’m Always In Love” but we kept updating the game over the years and added more missions that made the campaign much harder to finish. If you manage to get Diamond Collector in 2024 then this is a much tougher accomplishment since the D, E, F and powersuit mission sets have been added.

Freelance is a roguelite mode where you get to make your own challenge with content you unlocked via all that money you earned in Campaign. Though you can play Freelance exclusively to earn cash, running through the tutorial missions will give you plenty of spending money to get you started. Unlike Campaign, Freelance lets you choose your own loadouts and play around with weapon and vehicle variety.

Freelance-exclusive maps all use spawn nodes instead of Campaign’s placed NPC spawns. What this means behind the scenes is that the enemies that can appear are pulled from about a dozen spawnlists per faction - not counting the special wildcard spawns. By contrast in Campaign, any time you enter a mission, the same number of units will always appear because they have been manually placed. When a Freelance map is loading, the game checks what difficulty you are at, and fills in those spawn nodes based on whatever the spawnlist happens to be. In addition, some freelance maps will start the player from one of several points.

When you click Freelance for the first time you’re presented with this screen:

Freelance presents you with six tabs:

• Pilot
  
• Vehicle
  
• Primary
  
• Secondary
  
• Special
  
• Operation

Each of these tabs contains a list of things that can be bought with the money earned in game by either double clicking an item in the list or clicking the Requisition button.

Pilot is your chosen Brigador for the run. The pilot determines the overall difficulty of an operation as well as what multipliers get applied to your Earnings Statement when you finish an operation. Fan favorite(?) Norman Osberger starts at difficulty 1 and is capped at difficulty 1, meaning the hostile units that spawn are very weak (or perhaps the three factions are too scared to send their best…). As a result of the lack of any meaningful opposition, Norman will receive no victory bonuses or multipliers.

Efigenia Tseng, on the other hand, starts at difficulty 1, caps at difficulty 4 and with each successful map in an operation the spawn difficulty increases by 0.5.

This means that by the sixth map in an operation, Tseng will reach the max difficulty of 4 and the max payout multiplier will kick in. All the pilots have different bonuses and multipliers. Note that if you decide to use Johnny Five Aces in a Freelance operation and want to make a profit, choose the shortest operation possible, because he earns less and less with each successive map and will reduce his victory bonus.

Vehicle is where you choose whatever vehicle you want to deploy on the operation. By default, you have the choice of one loyalist mech (Touro), tank (Prowler) or agrav (Buckler) - each with different weapon hardpoints.

Depending on the vehicle chosen, successful operations will also apply the vehicle’s payout multiplier to the earnings statement.

The Primary and Secondary tabs are where you choose what weapons you want to place on your vehicle’s hardpoints. What fires from the Primary is by default bound to left mouse button, and right mouse button is for the Secondary. In the Touro’s case it has a Main and Turret hardpoint, meaning it can equip the Zeus railgun on LMB and the Bully laser on RMB.

Other vehicles have different hardpoints. The Buckler has two auxiliary hardpoints, meaning it can dual wield Jerichos if the player so chooses.

Special is where the player chooses what they want on their middle mouse button. The Smoke Projector is given for free but many players might opt to purchase the Audio-Kinetic Pulse for its ability to delete units, even at the highest difficulties.

The last tab is Operation. Operations are “runs” of maps. Your objective in any Freelance map is to either destroy all the orbital guns, kill the marked captains, or remove ~70% of enemies. Once you do any of these, find your exit and progress to the next district.

In Campaign you only have to contend with one map at a time and you don’t have to worry about how much health or ammo is left when you exit. Freelance instead tasks you with completing operations. Most operations are two or more maps, and the player’s remaining health, shields and ammo carries over between them. Depending on your chosen Brigador pilot, each successive map may increase the difficulty, pitching you against more lethal forces. Be warned that if you get eliminated, you’ll still get some money, but the SNC’s funeral expenses will take the majority of your earnings from any operation.

Like the other tabs, a handful of operations are available for free, but more complicated operations are gated behind a fee.

Some Freelance operations like the three-map Outer City allow you to exit early. This means after clearing the first map you can proceed to Estrela Verde Spaceport, which is marked with a dollar sign in the map selection menu, and you can attempt to cash out.

If you instead clear as many districts as possible while also not taking too much damage, then this will be reflected in your earnings statement at the end of a run.

The rarest achievement in the game is found in Freelance mode and to obtain it you need to clear Closed Casket Special, which is a run of 39 different maps. CCS does not have an early exit option. Good luck.

[N.B. From watching our more experienced players, a CCS run on the highest difficulty pilot will take you somewhere between 60-90 minutes to do. [b]Resign & Resume was added to Freelance back in 2021[/b] making it possible to actually quit the game midway through an operation and return later. This save system is very limited, so be sure to read the post for details on how it works.]

Since you can choose your loadout and difficulty, Freelance mode lets you create whatever challenge you feel like. Want to turn your brain off and watch destruction unfold? Pick any ultra class vehicle and let the auto-firing weapons do the rest on a single random district. Up for a challenge? Try Precursor James in a Varlet with twin Donkeys.

While players are able to choose the overall difficulty of an operation via pilot and vehicle choice, there are a few things they cannot fully account for. Below is a screenshot of the same map of the same operation with the same loadout on two different occasions.

Visually, each map’s lighting will alternate between a couple of variants to change the mood of the space. In terms of gameplay, depots will randomize what ammo they dispense. In the first image above, it will refill cannon rounds; in the second it will refill machine guns. Though the ammo depot locations are fixed on a map, the ammo type they provide is not. If you’re short on rounds during an operation - be careful! The next map might not have the ammo depot you need.

To determine the enemy opposition for a map in an operation, the game flips a three-sided coin and picks one of the three factions. This means even in something short like Outer City you can face off against Loyalists, Corvids and Spacers over the course of one operation. What units turn up in a map depends on the current difficulty level. Exceptions are pilots that have exclusive spawnlists like Hugh Armbruster, who only ever fights against Loyalists.

However, even this has an exception: there’s a roughly one in six chance of a map loading an alternate spawnlist. These alternates can be… interesting, depending on the difficulty. We don’t want to spoil the surprise as to what spawns in, but for those curious: since the alt spawns are all only a single “faction”, each difficulty level of this “faction” is made up of either Loyalists, Corvids or Spacers. This means pilots like Armbruster can still fight non-Loyalists if an alt spawnlist containing Corvids or Spacers is chosen. It is possible to remove the wildcards entirely via the debug panel if you find this immersion-breaking.

Finally, all spawnlists, even the alternate ones, were designed by Stellar Jockeys so that the experience is at the very least manageable. If you have successfully taken on the F-set of campaign missions, you should be able to comfortably deal with MAX difficulty freelance operations.

The following is a list of things in Campaign and Freelance that don’t come under one easy category:

• Artillery weapons are barely tutorialized in the campaign and not even available for most of the preset loadouts. However, since artillery weapons have both a high arc and inherit vehicle momentum, they can be flung very far and cause tremendous damage from a distance completely from behind cover. This means by the time the enemy AI comes to investigate where you fired from, you can easily reposition somewhere else out of sight.
  
• The Smoke special has more utility than you might expect. Enemies do not fire blindly, and what smoke grenades do is temporarily block enemy line of sight (but not enemy pathing). This means the more advanced option is to not spread smoke at a distance but as close as possible to your vehicle, allowing you to hide still within your smoke clouds and calmly take on enemies swarming you.
  
• All campaign missions are also available to play in Freelance mode with any loadout you choose, free of the constraints of the loadout choices. The mission names are all listed in ALL CAPS whereas operations are not. Campaign missions in Freelance mode still use the placed spawns, meaning they are exactly the same as the campaign version. Yes, we know you can abuse this to make obscene amounts of money very quickly with specific pilots and missions.
  
• Looking to get into the games industry? While the D and E set were made by the original developers, the F and powersuit set of missions in Campaign (and the Grave to the Rave operation in Freelance), were created by experienced community members, some of whom now work with us full time.
  
• Closed Casket Special combines all freelance maps and most of the campaign maps into one operation. So long as you can get past all the freelance maps, the campaign maps should be less stressful since they do not use spawnlist nodes.
  
• Want more tips? This-user made guide goes into full detail on the game’s mechanics.

In addition to being part of Steam’s Endless Replayability fest until May 20th, our merch store has gotten a fresh coat of paint. Take a look at our wares[shop.stellarjockeys.com].


https://store.steampowered.com/app/274500/