Overview:
-Estimated achievement difficulty: 4/10
-Offline: 20 [200]
-Online: 0
-Approximate amount of time to 200: 10-20 hours
-Minimum number of playthroughs needed: Multiple (See "Extra Credit").
-Number of missable achievements: None.
-Do cheat codes disable achievements?: No cheats
-Does difficulty affect achievements?: You need to use two skulls for two achievements (which can stack); Vidmaster Challenge and Skull Combo
-Glitchy achievements: None
-Unobtainable achievements: None
-Extra equipment needed? : None
-Is there DLC? : Yes
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Operation Hydra
- Difficulty: 2/10
- Time to 50: 2-3 Hours
- Unobtainable: None
Introduction:
Halo: Spartan Assault is a top-down, twin stick shooter that tasks you with playing as Spartans Palmer and Davis as they work to stop a Covenant invasion. The game has been released on both Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 devices, allowing you to jump into the Halo universe in a new format.
Playthrough 1:
In your initial playthrough you will want to focus on getting the mission-specific achievements and using all of the weapons and armor abilities in the game for their associated achievements. You will want to diversify you arsenal a bit weapon-wise to work on getting all of the medals as well during this time, although you'll have most of the medals by the time you beat the campaign. If you feel confident, you can also focus on gold medal-ing the campaign missions your first time around to save you at least one repeat of the mission later on.
Playthrough 2/Clean-up:
Every mission in the game has three unique challenges that you must complete in order to gain progress toward "Extra Credit". You will also need to work on getting gold medals in each mission for "117," which will require you to reach a certain score in the mission. The scoring doesn't always work hand in hand with the challenges, but either way you'll need to replay most of the (very short) missions multiple times to finish up the remaining achievements. Thankfully, the game is enjoyable to repeat, just like the regular titles in the series.
Easy Cross-Platform Achievement Unlocks:
If you have this game for both Windows Phone and Windows Phone 8, there is an easy way to unlock most or all of the achievements. For each of the following achievements, unlock them on your preferred platform and then do the following on the other:
- 117 & Tour of Duty - Get a gold on mission A-1
- The 6 complete Operation _ achievements - Replay the last mission of that operation/those operations
- Pension Plan - Earn any experience points
- Distinguished Service - Earn one more medal
- Weapon of Choice - Get one more weapon kill
- Powered by MJOLNIR - Activate any active armor
For "Extra Credit" and "A For Effort" it is recommended that you unlock both of them separately, and at the same time, if you have both games as syncing cross-platform may cause an issue with the achievement unlocking on the other platform. The example of this would be completing all 75 challenges on W8, the game syncs with your WP8 game so that shows 75/75 as well, yet the achievement does not pop. If this does happen for you, your best bet is to do one of the weekly challenges.
Thanks to MathGuy42 for the breakdown on cross-platform achievement unlocking.
DLC: Operation Hydra
Playthrough 1:
During your playthrough of the new DLC missions, work to get gold on the missions that don't have mission-specific achievements, and do the mission-specific achievements: Silver Tip and Vidmaster Challenge 2.0. Getting all golds on all of the new missions will grant you Tour of Duty and simply finishing the missions will give you "Complete Operation F."
Clean-up:
After going through once, you can either go back and redo levels to get gold, if you haven't already, for "Tour of Duty." During this time, you will also want to work on all of the mission-specific challenges for "A for Effort."
[x360a would like to thank Shiftie for this Roadmap]