The New Jackal Boss Fight Is Boring

As part of the Corpus remaster, we got an unexpected boss rework. While you’d expect that the Sergeant, bless his heart, would be the target, you’d be wrong. In fact, our boss remaster goes to the Jackal. The Jackal was always a simple boss fight. It consisted of shooting the Jackal and not getting blown up by rockets. Since it was the first boss fight in the game after Captain Vor, it was worth redoing, right?

Eh, I dunno.

The new fight is just as simple.

Okay, so, after a fancy cinematic in which a small MOA needlessly dies, you’re greeted by the Jackal, just like last time. It looks cool and is very shiny. The Jackal himself looks a bit cleaner and fancier and has had a nice paint job too.

The fight though is… basic. You shoot a limb, the Jackal goes invulnerable, you dodge lasers then stab it with your Parazon. While the Jackal itself is cool and the effects are cool, there’s not much else to it. Well apart from the fact that the Jackal is yet another boss to have nullifying abilities. Its stomp attack will remove various buffs.

For most of the fight though? The Jackal itself is invulnerable. The real danger comes from the occasional rocket barrage and the HUGE amount of lasers that are present after the first limb is destroyed.

You have to do this four times.

After the first stab with your Parazon, you get a very nice cut scene where the Jackal tries to escape. Of course, you race after it. By throwing your Parazon (which is attached to your arm) at it and being dragged along. It looks cool, but that’s it. You then continue doing the same thing as you did last time, just in a different room.

The only actual difference is that you have to shoot out a different limb each time, some of the cover explodes and the laser patterns change. That’s it.

At least you can cheese the lasers using your Operator.

Boring for a veteran, tricky for a newbie.

While all of this sounds rather dull and tedious for a veteran player, I genuinely wonder how a newbie will fare. After all, the Jackal is the first boss players will face after fighting Vor. You need to fight at Fossa to progress. Right now, it’s not too bad, since veterans are also doing the Jackal fight. But on their own?

I think newbies will be fine actually shooting the Jackal. But the huge amount of hard-to-avoid knockback will prove problematic. As will the high amounts of electric damage. Newbies don’t have the luxury of high health and high shields that we have, and it’ll only take a few hits for someone to hit the ground then get killed by the lasers as they struggle to orientate themselves. Those big red lasers actually do quite a bit of damage, and the blue fence-like electric fields are downright painful if you get thrown through several of them. At the very least, it’ll take a fresh newbie a few tries before they don’t get thrown around by lasers and stomp attacks.

Really, though, the only reason for a veteran to go back (aside from helping newbies) is for the blueprints for the new Corpus gunblade and Corpus rifle, the Stropha and the Stahlta. For a newbie however, it’s a bit of a struggle.

The fight is uninteresting.

At the end of the day, the fight is nothing special. You spend MOST of your time waiting patiently for the Jackal to stop spinning around. I get that the fight is supposed to be not too complicated and newbie friendly, but I feel like it fails in that regard as well. Sure, you learn to bullet jump and avoid lasers, useful for later on, but the damage dealt and the amount of visual noise makes it hard to actually, well, learn.

I don’t think the Jackal’s new fight is bad. I just don’t think it’s really… an engaging fight in any way. It’s all shiny lasers and stuff, with no real substance. Then again, that’s Warframe all over.