Vaporum

• Check your controls and rebind as necessary until you find something comfortable. Movement is super important and a bad move can send you into a pit or cornered with enemies chopping you to bits. Make sure you have it clear in your mind which keys are for strafe and which are for turning.

• Choosing your Exo Rig is important and you are stuck with that choice for the rest of the game. A quick overview of the rigs:
  • Combat: This turns you into a hit and run type, you want to get in, get your hits in and get out. Okay for beginners or people familiar with the genre.
  • Heavy: You turn into a tank character, great for going toe to toe. You can also do great damage later on as there are weapons that do more damage based off of your max hp. A great beginners choice since it allows for more mistakes.
  • Thauma: Your mage style gameplay. Using Gadgets for damage primarily. Probably good for a second or third playthrough.
  • Assault: Not a first time playthrough character type. You get a bit more XP, but you also need to lose health to do more damage, so more of a glass cannon situation.

• You will have a limited amount of Circuit Points by the end, 17-19 or so. Typically enough to max a couple skills to 5 and get a couple more to 3 if you want. You get a bonus at 3 points in a skill and a choice of 1 of 2 bonuses at rank 5. Point distribution is super important, don't waste points!

• Regarding the skills here's a quick breakdown
  • Weapons: Blunt, Blade, Handguns, Rifles. Pick one and stick with it. Keep in mind that Handguns and Rifles require ammo, so keep plenty in stock. Also, you can use weapons without investing points into that skill, however it won't be as effective. Keep melee weapons available if you go handguns or rifles.
  • Melee: Dual Wielding, Armorer, Blocking, Servo. If you want to Dual Wield or use Shields (Blocking), pick one and ignore the other. Armorer is pretty much HP buffs, but that's pretty good for all characters. Servo is more accuracy and evade.
  • Thauma: Thauma Catalyzer, Fusion, Complex and Elemental. In short in order, how quickly you can reuse a Gadget, how fast Energy (mp) regenerates, HP and MP bonuses and finally your own bad effect resistances and how long your bad effects last on enemies. If you aren't playing a Thauma character, I would ignore Thauma circuits with ONE major exception. Getting Fusion to level 3 gets you an 8% bonus on all experience gained once you get it, plus you regen MP when you take damage and also you get a Gadget slot. I recommend Fusion 3 for pretty much all builds and to rush Fusion 3 asap. The 8% exp bonus pays off by the end of the game. Along with that, there are items that you can pick up that will give you bonus XP when used. Save them until you get Fusion 3 to get the bonus exp.

• There are puzzles that require you to drop an item to serve as a weight, you can split off one unit of ammo from a bunch and that works just fine. Since you get dozens of bullets, they are great to use for any puzzles that require said weights.