Descent II Vertigo, Level 12, insane difficulty, cold start, full rescue, no death, 139HP at exit

Difficulty rating: 4 (very hard)

This level is very hard... At least it took me a while to find out the path to beat it.

It's hard because it won't give you strong weapons, so you must use vulcan, spreadfire and omega. Omega proved to be a nice bug zapper, but not too strong weapon overall.

The long matcen near the beginning can be triggered by going backwards in the middle of the room so tried to go at the sides in front of it, it can be triggered by returning from the blue door. It's a hard matcen because it can spit sidearms. I think a matcen that spits sidearms would be pure evil... Hopefully the designers didn't played this card.

One of the hardest parts is getting the blue key, a MAX camping near there, you must use flash missiles and vulcan, you don't have better weapons...

After you get the blue key, make sure to exit from where the force fields were, otherwise a matcen at the ceiling over the blue door triggers and it's quite tough to farm from there. That one can be triggered as many times you want when you come out of the blue door but quite risky to farm it for shields.

Once you got the yellow key you must farm the long matcen near the beginning once again, it triggers as you return from the yellow door. A lot of mechs including one MAX camps in the yellow area, I tried to destroy as many mech as I can through the grate near the blue door.

The red area is risky with lot of of tactical droids canaries. I tried to lure them.