March of the – F@*& S^$T!

This was supposed to be a post about advanced tips and tricks to help you with March of the Living, because I was supposed to have beat it about five minutes ago instead of having everyone die on what I am pretty sure was the last encounter in the entire game after banging my head against it all week. 20 days. 15 hours of “practice”. If you want to fully figure out this game on your own through multiple failures then you may not want to read the following tips. Once I sorted these out I was (am) able to get to or near the end every time. There isn’t anything spoilerish about the story but just some fundamentals that once you know make the experience far easier to play.

Dammit. Still, here are some tips:

  • Travel: The blue places are the ones I visited. In early play throughs I would avoid cities at all costs unless an absolute necessity because the chance of scavenging anything useful without a big fight was low. It turns out, especially in the first map section, you don’t have to deal with overly hard zombies. You also still get your spoils if you kill them all, so even if it triggers an event just kill the zombies and you get your lewts. Doing this I was able to amass far more food and ammo than I needed for the end part. I would now suggest to hit ALL the cities on the first map, and on the second map take a route that has as many cities in your path as reasonably doable, and the third map avoid them. The third map has really, really hard zombies on it.
  • Fighting: It’s a bit boring but standard Rotters are a waste of ammo. Go up, take one swing, walk away 2 steps (that resets their swing timer), go back, take one swing, rinse/repeat. You can take on full packs of Rotters this way, 5 or 6 easily at a time. I still always used ammo on Grabbers and prioritize Screamers over all others.

  • Here you see that it is actually easier to just do it with one character. Put one off to the side to safety and get them all gathered up for an easy take down. Also – notice the rifle, shotgun, pistol ammo and food I have at this point.
  • Keep your group small. I found Barry at the end of the first map. The larger the group the harder it is to feed them all. It was just Barry and I all throughout Map 2, and by the time I found 2 more people (and my kid) near end of Map 3 I was almost done the game. Ton of ammo, ton of food. You can have as many as six people (and that would have been helpful at the end) but I literally didn’t find that many on this play through.
  • Don’t be a hero unless you have tons of supplies and feel good about it. The safest route had me allowing all sorts of people to die on my way to save my own son. Selfishness pays off in this game.
  • I don’t think this counts as a spoiler, and I was quite surprised that it ended the game, but you can’t let your son die. It’s instant game over. Not still survive and mourn, not even a cutscene. Just game over. I didn’t really like that part. The kid moves slow and can’t attack worth a damn. The screamers can outrun him so if you don’t drop them fast enough its bad news.
  • Never, ever flee unless you are going to die for sure. You lose items, ammo, food, people…. it’s not worth it.

Thematically I don’t fully agree with the “your kid is missing and you must save them, so take your sweet ass time and explore everything along the way to get the experience” <ahem> Fallout 4 <ahem> but that really is the only way to beat this game. All of my initial play throughs were rush through to get to him but I never had enough food or ammo to survive.  Figuring out the above tips made the game a much better experience overall, so put them to good use.

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