Any tips on how to deal with Face Huggers?

[Ivotas]

Hey guys, I'm currently on my Marine campaign Nightmare run and I'm embarrassed to say this but it's the Face Huggers that are causing me the biggest problems. Like by far. I'm currently on mission 2 and whenever I die it's because those damn little parasites get me. The thing is that most of the time I don't even see them coming even if the radar has picked them up and the few times I see them I'm literally not hitting them even though they are not moving and I'm having them in my crosshairs. At first I thought I'm just that bad but after failing it times and again it really appears that there's some messy hit detection going on with them, when I shot with my pistol. So I was wondering if I should actually switching to the big guns at the risk of wasting ammo or not? If I manage to luck my way all the way to the Alien Queen fight I always lose against the Face Huggers because at that time I'm going in with no Health Stems and a lot of them come at me. I don't dread the phase(s) afterwards but they literally are super difficult for me to deal with so if there's any helpful tips on how to deal with them, I'd gladly hear it out. Thanks in advance guys.

[BeautifulTorment]

There's really only 3 - 5 in the whole campaign that you really even need to deal with outside of the queen fight at the end of mission 2. For those, i just made mental note of where they were; perhaps watch a video of each level before trying it. For the queen fight, i just flamethrowered the eggs before they could hatch out and never stopped circling around the little arena you are in. 

Edited November 18, 2021 by BeautifulTorment

[Ivotas]

Thanks for the feedback mate. In mission 2 I actually know where they are outside of the Queen fight. It's just that some are really hard to see even when you know where they are i. e. the second one in mission 2 or the one right after the bridge fight. No matter what I do I always get jumped by them which makes have to use up a health stim. What I'm particularly interested is if we actually can see them jump at us and shoot them down in the air or not? I ask this because to me it always appears that they suddenly try to hug my face out of nowhwere.

 

Also about the first stage of the Queen fight. Do I have to take down all the eggs for the next stage to trigger or is it on a timer which means I could actually camp it out if I destroy the eggs that I'm close too?

 

Edit:
One more question if I may. I'm a little iffy on how to properly use the flamethrower effectively against the eggs. I tried to use burn them a little bit but the Face Huggers still hatched and tried to attack me (while being on fire). Then I tried to burn them longer which seems to have worked but I lost my fuel quite quickly. Of course I don't expect you to give an accurate estimate as to how many mini seconds is required to make this work but is it a matter of how long I burn an egg or is it more an effective range thing?

Edited November 19, 2021 by Ivotas

[BeautifulTorment]

In mission 2, the first one you see can spawn in 1 to 3 spots perhaps in that room before you adjust the sattelite thing. That one can be tricky to spot for sure. Just need to be alert. For all other facehuggers afterwards, I am 99% sure you can run past and ignore them. I am unsure if you can hit them out of mid air, but I assume so. Hard to believe, but i never got hit by a single facehugger in the whole game so I don't know what thr animation looks like.

 

In the first phase of the fight with the Queen, i blasted the eggs the entire time and did 0 camping. I don't believe it is a timer, but I think instead there is a threshold of X eggs that you need to break. Maybe 50%? 

 

This fight is the only time I used the flamethrower in the whole game. Its sucks. But for the eggs, i think you just need to burn each one from a closer range than you'd expect, and for a longer duration. I just did not stop shooting 1 egg until i was sure it was dead before moving onto the next. If you chip damage a lot of eggs, they all start spawning. So focus one at a time.

 

 

[Ivotas]

Thanks for the feedback mate. I envy you so much to never having to deal with how terrible the Face Huggers can be. I'm just bad at seeing or hitting them.

By that as it may I managed to beat mission 2 last night. Unfortunally I was just ineffective with the flamethrower and used the shotgun instead which worked wonders in the first stage of the Matriarch boss battle when dealing with the Face Huggers and eggs. Then in stage two the Pulse Rifle was better because of the grenades. I failed that part of the boss battle a couple of times though because I was running into too many obstacles when being on the move because I was panicking so much. The one time I didn't panic and pretty much toyed with the Xenos cirling around while finally having a sold grasp of the area I beat it. Super happy. Next is mission 3.