Our Top Tips For Surviving Scars Above’s Harsh Alien World

Use your surroundings

Combat on this planet isn’t just between you and the creatures in your way – using the environment to your advantage can turn some of the toughest situations in your favour. You will often see little glowing balls of energy just ripe for reacting with the right elemental shot which can explode and deal huge damage. One of my favourite tactics when fighting monstrously difficult creatures on an iced over lake was to use fire elemental shots to melt the lake in front of them – they fall in, freeze solid and can be shattered in a single shot!

Experiment with the elements

Your arsenal in Scars Above is full of weapons that have elemental effects like fire and ice, and it’s not just the environment that can be affected by these elements. Struggling to deal with a quick enemy? Sling ice at it and it might start to freeze up, slowing down for you to catch your breath and take charge of the situation. If a creature seems to take damage slowly, try setting it on fire to do some gradual ongoing damage before switching to another weapon to deal regular damage at the same time.

Explore every path you can

Scars Above’s world is full of branching paths and each one of them is worth taking. Almost every path that doesn’t progress to a new area will reward you with worthwhile goodies like weapon upgrades and knowledge cubes you can use to unlock new abilities and traits for your character. These will be particularly important for achievement and trophy hunters given there are a couple of these linked to upgrading your character fully and finding weapon upgrades.

Upgrade your character ASAP

There are some immensely useful upgrades to purchase with your upgrade points which range from simple health and ammo upgrades to game changers like quick reloads and the ability to cheat death. If you regret choosing one upgrade over another you can reset your points allocations anytime, but if you’re diligent about exploring and scanning enemies often you’ll find yourself with plenty of upgrade points anyway.

Use your gadgets!

For a little while I wasn’t bothering to use gadgets as I unlocked them. Don’t make the same mistake – some of these things can be hugely useful in combat. You can get gadgets that spread flammable material that you can light up to get weak spots on big enemies or catch groups in the blaze. There’s another that holds enemies in place for a while so you can zip around them and focus on their weak spots. Gadgets can take the edge off an otherwise gruelling encounter.

Scan, scan and scan some more

The scanner is a gadget worthy of note too. It sends out a sonar-style wave and shows off points of interest. It’ll show you interactive objects, items to pick up, enemies and usefully – their weak points. It charges up quickly after use too, so no need to worry about wasting a charge!

Don’t be afraid to change the difficulty

Scars Above helpfully has a couple of different difficulty modes for if the standard difficulty doesn’t vibe with your skills or the difficulty is stopping you from enjoying the experience. I personally found standard to be a pretty decent mix of occasional challenge that was never overwhelming, but there’s an easier difficulty which makes you a bit harder to damage and enemies a little easier, and a harder difficulty that ratchets everything up a notch to test your skills.

So with these tips in hand, go forth! Acquire knowledge, apply the scientific method, make discoveries, and stay alive out there.

Scars Above is out now on PlayStation, Xbox and PC. Learn more here.