Welcome to the Mars Rover Landing walkthrough! This is one of those Kinect Fun Labs (ehh...free....), however it was my overall favorite one that I have played so far!
The point of the game is to go through the 3 stages of landing Curiosity: Navigation ('Guided Entry'), Descent ('Pyrotechnic'), and the actual Landing ('Powered Descent'). You will be graded on how well you do these and those 3 scores combined make your overall score. If you do perfectly, you will recieve a 5 star score and 'Flight Director'.
You will be playing a MINIMUM of 5 playthroughs for the 'Training Complete' achievement, however it is likely that it will take you more than just 5.
As this is a Kinect game, we have to go over the infamous Kinect Safety Rules:
- Be sure to hydrate
- Take breaks if you get frusturated! Come back in a little bit and it will seem SO much easier
- Keep the blood flowing - move around
- If you feel dizzy, sit out and watch the birds fly past your house
- The Guide button...This will help you tremendously in the first stage
Alright, here we go!
Here's a YouTube video from GolemDE that shows us the basics of what we will cover in our first playthrough and what the game looks like. While the language on the screen is in German, the spoken language is English, so don't worry if you can't read it.
PLAYTHROUGH #1
Before we do any of these first 3 achievements, it will be helpful for you to note the following: It is not required to get 100% on this playthrough or in any section, just passing the section will net you these! Allow this playthrough to help you get a feel of the controls and learn to expect what is coming up in the next sections. Don't worry about perfect scores, you will need to do multiple playthroughs anyway.
Guided Entry: This will be the first achievement you earn in this game. There will be a short cutscene basically detailing that the goal is to land the Mars Rover...and you start in space! Here is where your controller comes in handy. The guide button pauses the game (just press B to go back to the game). Everytime turbulence hits the rover (when it moves out of the circle), press the Guide button and move accordingly! The goal is to keep the Rover locked in the middle circle - this will also help you get 5 Stars which we'll get to later. Don't worry if you mess up the first few times, there's a minimum of five playthroughs anyway!
Guided EntryNavigated Curiosity through the atmosphere of Mars
Pyrotechnic: This involves the next three phases of landing (parachute deployment, heatshield seperation, and backshield seperation). The nice thing is that they work the same. There will be 4 boxes and multiple blue lines will lead to a respective box. Wait for the line to fill the box then as fast as you can, point your respective arm in that direction! Each stage gets increasingly faster in this section (parachute lines will move slowest, backshield lines will move the fastest). Again, don't worry if you didn't achieve 100%, still 4 playthroughs left!
Powered Descent: After the last stage has ended there will be another cutscence which places multiple circles on the surface of Mars, it looks like a target, impossible to miss. Like a target, the center is the best place to land, but we're not gonna worry about that for this playthrough. When your arms are up, you descend very slowly, leave them down and it's the opposite. You will hear annoying beeping, that is the game telling you that you are moving down too fast, adjust this by lifting up your arms. To direct the movement with both hands up, you can slowly drop one arm and the craft will move in that direction. If you drop your arm too much or switch back and forth, the craft will start swinging making it harder to land.
PLAYTHROUGH #2
I chose to do the 'Landing on Fumes' achievement next as it is pretty easy to master. Here is a YouTube video from goinpostal321 showing exactly how to accomplish it.
Landing on Fumes: This one is pretty basic, the goal is to land with 0 fuel remaining (check the bottom left corner of your screen). An easy way to do this, as shown in the video is to just hover right above the ground with both arms up, this will deplete your fuel. Once all of the fuel is gone, the rover will detach automatically, drop a little bit, and POP goes your achievement.
PLAYTHROUGH #3
The goal for this playthrough is to land on the center of the target on Mars.
Gale Crater: This achievement requires you to land the rover in the center of the zone. The easiest way I found to do this was to let the rover free fall for a bit, raise both arms, then SLOWLY move towards the center (if you move to fast, your rover will start swaying making it extremely difficult to get this). Once you're comfortable, you'll want to SLOWLY drop down to the middle. It is important to note that if you crash (rover doesn't stay intact) you will restart this last section. So if you are swaying too much or don't have enough fuel to go slow, feel free to crash and just restart this part!
Gale CraterSafely landed Curiosity in the center of the target zone
PLAYTHROUGH #4, 5, & Beyond
These last playthroughs will (hopefully) net you the last 3 achievements.
'Flight Director' = Perfect MIDDLE Landing (and pretty much perfect everything else)
'Integrity' = Perfect ANYWHERE Landing (and perfect everything else)
Flight Director: This requires you to recieve a 5 star rating. After each section you will be shown what your current score is out of 100/how many stars you have. You are not required to get 100/100 for this achievement, though the cut off point is pretty close to that (think 96+). Do NOT restart a section (example: crash the landing to restart it) as this will make you lose rating therefore not earning the achievement. If you are forced to restart a section, go ahead and restart the whole run.
Integrity: This is similar to 'Flight Director'. Full integrity means no damage to the rover. The nice part about this one is that you are not required to land in the center circle. Since you are going for the Integrity portion rather than 5 stars, you are able to land wherever you want. Think of how you did the 'Landing on Fumes', except instead of hovering and waiting for the fuel to deplete, slowly lower the rover onto the surface.
IntegritySuccessfully landed Curiosity at full structural integrity
Training Complete: It is likely that you have already recieved this one when going for 'Flight Director' and 'Integrity', however if you haven't, just do some more playthroughs until you reach 5!
And there you have it ladies and gentlemen! 50 Gamerscore and another Kinect Fun Labs game out of the way.