Aegis Descent: Aegis Descent Guide (inc. Achievements)

This section’s for anyone who saw this in their library and decided to check the guides for inspiration. I do that. I don’t know if it’s weird, but this one’s to you.

Aegis Descent claims to be a deeply replayable roguelite but really isn’t. That’s not to say it’s bad, mind, but expectations ought to be managed. Aegis Descent presents you with permutations of the same campaign and generally asks you to get better at recognizing and solving its fairly limited set of combat arenas. It’s a fun loop to figure out how to beat once, or even a few times, but 100%ing it asks far more of you than that.

At my modest skill level, I had my first clear within eight hours and completion within thirty. It’s not the worst grind out there, and it’s a shame the game didn’t get a little post-launch love. If you’re distinctly better than I am at more Unreal Tournament-speed shooters, the actual meat of completion is 11 successful runs of around 20-40 minutes apiece against scaling enemies.

Aegis Descent does a deeply terrible job of explaining what it’s about, so this guide is going to offer a small description of various mechanics before going over stuff I found particularly useful and then finishing up with the achievements.

It’s you! All the gadgets on your HUD are operational, and (for better and worse) Aegis Descent expects you to rely on them more than you might expect. From left to right:

Thermometer: Measures your heat. Every weapon generates a certain amount of heat per shot, and you passively cool off when not firing. If you max this out, you go into emergency cooldown mode, which you never want to do.

LOWER BAR
This is your ammunition – held / loaded, for gun / cannon / artillery. There’s also a loading indicator between the values. These are all replicated around your crosshair, and you should use those for reference instead.

UPPER BAR
Battery: You use your battery for dash and hover actions, as well as the Disruptor. The Disruptor can only be used if your battery is in the glowing blue section, while your maneuver actions can be used as long as you have any charge left. Running out of this can be a death sentence.

Radar: Incredibly important. Enemies will ping red and pickups will ping yellow; this is helpful for finding the last enemy standing to clear rooms as well as being critical for anytime Destroyers get into the mix.

Health: Split into segments. Health pickups will only refill to the top of the current segment, but repair stations can fix entire segments. There’s a bonus segment above the health bar that fills horizontally if you pick that perk, and above that is a light telling you if you’re hovering at the moment.

Progress: This bar just shows how many Events have been processed. You can largely ignore it.

THE RESOURCE DANCE
Much of Aegis Descent is based around balancing all of these. Your ammo, heat, and battery all provide ways to deal damage to enemies, via:

• Gun: Infinite ammo, but low damage; essentially converting excess heat directly into damage.
• Cannon: Limited ammo, but high damage per heat. Can be your mainstay weapon over guns.
• Artillery: Limited ammo and usually poor heat efficiency, but high damage. The burn option.
• Battery: The Disruptor is your emergency button, but at huge battery cost. The Dash does a surprising amount of damage and can even be spammed as a melee option to convert battery directly into damage.

It’s all worth using. Don’t run out of anything if you can help it.

The game’s 44 achievements map to 44 awards in-game. Each of these has to be claimed manually from the Awards screen between runs and progresses you down a track that unlocks new pilots and weapons, as well as one perk for each weapon and pilot. These should come thick and fast early on, but if you’re looking for inspiration on quick ways to get up and running, I’ve sorted out some of the easiest achievements in a later section.

Except for one padlocked perk per weapon and pilot, most perks will start listed as a big old question mark. You have to be offered it in a run and choose it, as an unknown perk, before it will be listed in the loadout screen. It’s generally worth taking the unknown perks as early as possible to build out the database so that you don’t get any surprises when attempting harder runs.

Perks have two notable quirks to them. Every perk has between three and five potential levels to it, and can be upgraded using the Victory Points you naturally accumulate by killing things and completing rooms in a run. When you are offered that perk in a post-stage selection, it will be at whatever level you have raised it to. If you’re offered that perk a second time afterwards, it will be at a level +1 to whatever you have it raised to, even if that’s 4/3 or so. As such, you should focus the perks you intend to take first so that they’re stronger when you get them, simple as that.

For instance, the highly excellent Heat Sinks generic pilot perk offers 25% faster cooling and upgrades to 50% / 75% with Victory Points. The first time you’re offered it in a run, if fully upgraded, it will be at level 3, and give 75% faster cooling for the rest of the run. If it rolls back into a second selection later, you will be able to temporarily upgrade it to 100% faster cooling for that run, and it will not appear in any later selection pools.

The second quirk to perks is that some are built-in. When you equip a weapon or pick a pilot, you’ll see 1 (for a weapon) or 2 (for a pilot) perks listed alongside them, always the first ones in the weapon/pilot’s perk list; for instance the Combat Pilot’s Agile perk. These are always active at the level you have them, but still have an upgraded version that can be bought during a run to push them to the next level. I’m bringing this up here because it’s important for the weapon section later. You can think of these as the defining features of the weapon or pilot, and may as well put Victory Points into your favorite ones since they’ll be always active as long as you have that weapon or pilot equipped.

Here’s the meat of my advice, such as it is. You can make it through Aegis Descent on any difficulty with any build with enough skill. For those of us without infinite skill, here’s one scrub’s breakdowns.

Combat Pilot: The offensive option. Think of him as the berzerker, and you’re right. He’s got a bonus to Victory Points, but besides that, he doesn’t have anything to keep him relevant on higher difficulties, and you’re here to conquer Ascension 10.
Perk priorities: Poor guy’s perks just aren’t very good. You may as well put a few points into Danger Money, since it’ll pay for itself and you have to use him for a while, but spending Victory Points elsewhere is usually the better move.

S.E.R.E. Specialist: Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, if you’re curious what the acronym is there for. He’s the defensive option, and he’s incredibly strong at that. He’s not my pick for an endgame run, but I can see a world where he’s yours. His primary deal is turning your health bar into 3/2 chunks for insane sustain if you can’t stop taking stray shots.
Perk priorities: Chunkier Chunks is the defining perk for this guy, alongside Scrap Repairs to a lesser extent. The former is the aforementioned sustain perk, and the latter forces extra hull drops if your current section isn’t full; together they essentially mean that you have to make a single mistake totaling a third or half of your hull to have any permanent effect.

Intelligence Officer: The economy option. She builds up all sorts of weird interactions, and her fixed perks are awful, but she has the strongest perks by a huge margin. Her biggest deals are regenerating battery and getting free rerolls and getting free damage. She’s really very good.
Perk priorities: Battery Regeneration is absolutely, and I mean completely, insane. With it, your dash and hover become essentially infinite, which is exceptional for avoiding damage in the first place, and you can open up every fight with the Disruptor to clear the board to also avoid incoming damage. This perk alone makes her almost a better defensive fighter than the defensive fighter. Besides that, Event Slowdown is very good in later Ascensions, and Know Thy Enemy is a massive damage spike for clearing out trash – it does track kills made before picking the perk, no need to be offered it early.

Generic perk priorities: Heat Sinks is probably the second-best perk in the entire game. Scrap Collector helps with the final achievement grind, and Disruptor Boost provides a good combo with the Intelligence Officer, but it’s pretty poor before her. Winner Winner pays itself off pretty fast if you’re in the specific case of being able to beat the game and also needing to grind Victory Points. Anything else is pretty much a vanity project.

Phalanx: Kind of the worst of all worlds. Its niche is largely for clearing the smallest enemies, who are by definition just not much of a threat, and providing modest heat-efficient DPS to anything larger. Soften Target eventually makes them usable, but by the time you have that unlocked and upgraded, you’re also unlocking better guns to use.
Perk priorities: Soften Target. It’s the only thing that makes the Phalanx competitive.

Javelin: Fortunately, the second gun you unlock is pretty great. The Javelin runs warmer than the Phalanx, but does actual damage to compensate for it, and can become your primary weapon if you get Heat Sinks and enough gun perks offered.
Perk priorities: All three Javelin-specific perks are essential, as they all give bonus damage with essentially zero downsides. You may as well upgrade them in order, since Point Blank is always active and Thousand Cuts is mostly useful for boss-killing when you have multiple gun perks to back it up.

Vulcan: Phalanx+. I don’t really rate it, but if you want to go hard into guns, this is probably your best bet. Wild DPS, wild heat generation, almost a liability if you get the wrong perks, but tremendously fun if you get the right ones.
Perk priorities: Sustained Fire from the generic section is more important to Vulcan use than any of its actual perks. The fixed one, Wind-Up Merchant, is terrible – fully upgraded, you won’t even break supply boxes before the gun fully spins up. The other two Vulcan perks are fine, though.

Blunderbuss: Your shotgun. Deceptively weak the first time you take it out, but possibly the strongest option with one small realization: the fixed perk just directly increases firepower at all times. By default, the Blunderbuss only fires 10 pellets; upgrading Buckshot fully increases that to 30, which does just mean a direct tripling of damage done. It also sports a quick reload, fairly low heat use, and almost zero wind-up. This is by a distance the best sidearm, but with a slightly lower theoretical ceiling compared to the Javelin. I’d rather spend my perks on the heavy stuff, though.
Perk priorities: Upgrade Buckshot ASAP. I mean before you even use it. It’s completely useless before you do. Everything else is gravy. One fun interaction is that Combat Choke and the generic Sighted In (70% spread reduction and 30% accuracy improvement, respectively) do stack additively for some reason. If both are fully upgraded and you get both in a run, all 30 pellets from each shot will come out in a single bullet-sized stack to make it a far stupider version of the Javelin.

Generic perk priorities: Rapid Fire is by a distance the best perk in this bunch. After that, Rising Damage and Sustained Fire, followed by Sighted In. You can mostly ignore the rest unless you really like the Vulcan, in which case Hair Trigger is a must. Hair Trigger suffers from being completely worthless for the Blunderbuss, though.

Gustav: Serviceable. It’s the worst of the three cannons, but only because whatever you like out of the Gustav, one of the other two will do the job better. I never brought it after full unlocks, but did bring it occasionally before then.
Perk priorities: Contained Blast and Boss Killer, if you get them together, can make the Gustav into your one-stop shop for shredding bosses. The fixed perk is, unfortunately, just not very good.

Longbow: Big explosions, but has to charge up. The explosions are real big, though – big enough to damage the final boss behind his invincible shell just by hitting the outside of it, enabling the silliest clear of the final room possible. The Longbow’s big downside is that it’s ultimately offering a lesser version of a Battery Regeneration-fueled Disruptor, but it’s a very good cannon for your first few clears. Think of this guy as your default defensive-play cannon.
Perk priorities: Blast Intensity is essential to making sure the Longbow can actually clear rooms and make its charge time worthwhile. The other two perks are niceties, with Shockwave helping out hugely against bosses and Destroyers.

Quick Shot: I called the Longbow your defensive-play cannon. Here’s your offensive-play cannon. The Quick Shot fires quickly, has high impact damage on a small AoE, and leaves enemies on fire. This fire does a lot more damage than you’d expect and stacks on multiple applications. This is the most flexible cannon and only really suffers in that it doesn’t oneshot gas canisters for speedy hazard room clears.
Perk priorities: All three perks are very good and should be upgraded left to right and prioritized in that order in-game. If you get them all and the generic Blast Wave in a run, a few Quick Shots into a room can just turn into a horrible fire cascade that clears it just as effectively as the Longbow would have, as the big guys burn out and transfer all that burn to smaller guys who are entirely killed by it and transfer it even further back.

Generic perk priorities: Fast Rounds is bad, and I don’t really rate Second Wave too much. Everything else is worth upgrading. Follow Up and On Point together can turn either the Gustav or the Quick Shot into a boss obliterator, especially if combined with a few of their own perks. Hot Shot is probably the single highest impact cannon perk but can fundamentally change how you use it due to the crippling heat penalty.

Sidewinder: Homing missiles! They run a little too hot for the damage they do, but they’re still super useful once you get a few perks going. These guys are your go-to if you need a hand dealing with Hornets and Destroyers, and don’t slouch at killing bosses either.
Perk priorities: Target Acquisition first, then Electro-Jammer as soon as possible. Applying Shock to enemies is the entire reason to take the Sidewinder, shutting down their ability to counterattack and, especially for Destroyers, giving you time to finish them off. Note that bosses are not immune to being shocked!

Nahvert: This puzzlingly-named weapon is your grenade launcher. Right click to bloop a big, slow shell through the air which explodes on impact. Sort of similar to the Longbow / Quick Shot paradigm, this is the offensive weapon for when you just don’t have time for locking on, compared to the Sidewinder’s more defensive play. Contrary to what you’d expect from a grenade launcher, the huge majority of the damage done is on impact, and the perks reflect that. Note that you can keep the button held to fire up to six grenades before reloading, or spam it to get them out slightly faster – this is enormous for boss and nest kills.
Perk priorities: Bullseye and Compact Blast, if you get any combination of them and the generic Heavy Payload or Like a Boss, gets the anti-boss damage stacking out of control. Get those upgraded first, and you may as well get Far Shot appropriately upgraded to make it easier to aim.

Generic perk priorities: Genuinely, every generic artillery perk is worth maxing.

Anytime you pick a next area, you’ll be picking from these six options plus mysteries. Note the different shapes: a square is always combat and a circle is always shop, even in the case of mystery arenas. Shops offer you one free choice and then the option to spend scrap on a second purchase. Note that shops can bug out and offer you the paid choice first! If you fail to notice and take that, your game will soft lock. The options are as follows:

• Standard Arena: Kill enemies. Pick one from three perks when you leave.
• Elite Arena: Can either be an elite combat arena or an elite hazard arena; in both cases it’s just a harder version of that type. Pick any two from five perks when you leave.
• Hazard Arena: Destroy four gas canisters to win. Pick one from four perks when you leave.
• Data Port Cave: Perks. Perks cost between 150 and 350 scrap depending on the level of the perk.
• Repair Bay Cave: Replenishment. 200 scrap repairs your hull, while 100 refills your battery, cannon ammo, or artillery ammo.
• Intel Station Cave: Miscellaneous buffs, for instance giving you extra rerolls, adding more power-ups, or suppressing the next Event. Costs are between 100 and 170 scrap depending on what you want.

As with any game of this type, take the most dangerous route you can afford to take to maximize your perk selections, since that’s where most of your power will come from.

Wasp: Low-threat, basically no damage. Useful for achievements in this pre-set swarm you’ll see sometimes, otherwise can be largely ignored or spammed with guns if you’re trying to keep a hull segment from dropping. Dies incidentally to cannon fire, the Disruptor, or dashing vaguely near them.

Scarab Nest: Spawns Scarabs, which are just Wasps that don’t fly and pose even less of a threat. Dies to a single shot from any cannon. Depending on perks, might just die to a single dash or a single Blunderbuss shot. Medium priority just because spawners are annoying, but certainly not a real threat.

Scorpion: Bread and butter enemy. Flies around, shoots slow homing projectiles, dies to a stiff breeze. Can rarely fire a twin-linked laser that does absurd damage if you get caught in it, partly due to the burning it inflicts.

Elite Scorpion: I completely beefed this screenshot, wow. It’s just a Scorpion but red. Higher durability, more damage, uses the laser much more frequently. These guys can hurt if you ignore them.

Scorpion Nest: Hard to distinguish from the Scarab Nest at times, since it’s basically just the same thing but bigger. High priority target, since it craps out Scorpions infinitely, and those are only a threat in large numbers.

Hornet: Flies around annoyingly, has way too many hit points, and spams a tiny damage shard cannon that makes you more vulnerable to other attacks. Stops occasionally to sweep a laser around that’s less damaging than the Scorpion’s but still painful. Fairly uncommon, at least. The Sidewinder is perfect for taking these guys out, especially with the shock upgrade.

Elite Hornet: Hornet, but redder. More health, more damage, same patterns. Blissfully rare.

Destroyer: Priority number one the second you realize one of these guys is on the field. Genuinely worth burning a Disruptor charge if you realize one’s gotten close, even if you hit nothing else with it. Has two modes of attack: homing orange projectiles (that can be shot down) that do insane damage and shock you, locking your battery down and draining it; and a side gun that has almost no hit feedback but shreds your armor up close. A full rack of Sidewinders with any damage upgrade can kill one if they all hit, which is your best bet when it’s at a distance. Up close, try to disable it as fast as you can with a Disruptor or other form of shock – if you don’t have those, run the hell away.

Elite Destroyer: More of a threat than the game’s actual bosses. On higher Ascensions, can gank you before you even realize he’s there. If the threats menu lists an Elite Destroyer, glue your eyes to your radar and play defensively until you see him. Horrible creatures.

Turret / Elite Turret: Annoying little dudes that spam bursts of seven projectiles at you, stop to cool down, and repeat. Regular shots are red, Elites are blue. Elites do more damage and shock you, which can very quickly set up a death spiral if you were looking for a lurking Destroyer. Both versions die to a stiff breeze. Turrets have a different spawn logic to most mobile enemies: while their locations are predetermined, they will frequently only spawn in when you get close to those locations, meaning surprise turrets are somehow both possible and a problem.

Field / uh, Elite Field?: I have no idea what these are referred to as internally. Block your shots until destroyed, including insulating whatever’s under them from Disruptor blasts. If you stand in one, very slightly drains your health or battery depending on the type. Annoyances, not threats.

Gas Canister: Not an enemy, but the objective for the Hazard-type regular and elite rooms. Included for completion, why not.

Boss arenas are completely fixed, and the fights are very predictable, so I’ll go into a lot more detail on these guys compared to the other enemies.

This big boy is your first hurdle. He’s got a lot of health, but everything he does is avoidable as long as you play steady, and he doesn’t have any phases to contend with. Any metallic part from the conical mantle to the actual turret face will take damage from your attacks. He alternates between two attacks:

• He shoots a laser at you. This takes a few seconds to warm up, at which point it actually fires and the tracking gets significantly slower – but you don’t want to be in front of it. Dash to get ahead of the tracking or use the pillars to block it if you’re trying to conserve. Going under him can work in a pinch if neither of these options is available. If he’s shocked, only this attack will be disabled.
• He spawns a pile of Scorpion projectiles and sends them at you. Your guns can handle these in short order. If you’re very precise, you can dodge under him to get them to collide with the ground due to their mediocre turning circles.

Arena notes: There’s a cooling pool directly under him which you can use in an emergency. There are two random supply crates in the back-left and back-right corners relative to the start. A power-up can spawn in the back-left corner.

Strategy: Play it cool. This will be advice for all three bosses, but I must stress it: just play it cool. You can rush him down with certain combinations of perks, but as long as you stay on top of the homing balls time is on your side. Keep moving, and don’t be afraid to try cutting under him to get a bit of free cooling on your way by.

Three of these guys with separate health bars break out of the wall opposite you. They only have one attack, which is each one of them shooting a bigger version of Turret Boss’s laser at you. Since they stagger their arrivals, perfectly dodging all of them can get tricky, and getting hit by two lasers for even a fraction of a second will put enough burning on you to take out at least a health segment. Shocking the Worms disables their ability to attack entirely.

Each one goes down pretty easily, but each death spawns a one-time wave of reinforcements for you to deal with or ignore. This reinforcement wave always consists of two Elite Turrets on the wall opposite the Worms and either 1-2 Hornets or a small handful of Scorpions.

Arena notes: Shortly after the Worms spawn, two Elite Turrets will spawn on the opposite wall. These are the same locations the reinforcement ones will spawn in. There’s a cooling pool to the left of the entrance, under one of the Turrets. In the back-right corner relative to the entrance is always a hull repair crate, and there are two other random supply crates. A power-up can spawn by the exit to the left. Upon the death of each worm, a small supply pile (ammo, battery, hull) gets thrown behind the middle cover rock.

Strategy: I always dash forward to spawn the worms and then turn around to take out the turrets with cannon or gunfire. Depending on how you feel about dodging the lasers, you can work down all three worms at the same time to avoid the reinforcements entirely or try to burn them down one at a time. I find it depends on my build – with enough cannon perks it’s trivial to simply kill a worm each cycle, kill the resultant reinforcements, and repeat. I find it easiest to bait the lasers onto the lava lake’s “beach” and then hook along the beach and back up the slope to return fire. Do not trust the cover rocks – they will not completely block the laser from all angles the Worms can spawn in.

Bark’s worse than his bite. Overlord consists of two moving parts: an impenetrable outer shell that blocks all fire, and an internal core that takes damage but also shoots a constant laser out of any holes in the outer shell. The boss’s only attack is to spin that laser at a constant speed around the arena. It’s easy as anything to dodge.

Overlord’s difficulty comes in the phase changes. After receiving a certain amount of damage, the rotation will pause for a few seconds. When it resumes, new holes will appear in the outer shell with commensurately more lasers, and a wave of reinforcements will spawn, generally choosing two or three of 2-4 Scorpions, 1-2 Hornets, or a Destroyer. It does this roughly every quarter of its health.

Arena notes: There’s four quadrants to the room. On the near-left and back-right are raised platforms that you can use to dodge lasers; each has a supply box on top. The near-right has a little pass-through but is kind of a no-man’s land. The back-left is the easiest place to fight the boss from, and also has a few supply boxes. As the boss changes phases, the lava splitting the arena will drain to reveal a set of underground tunnels full of enemies. If you never go down there, they’ll never come up to menace you. Live and let live, I say.

Strategy: Once you get it down, Overlord is basically a free win. The fight always starts with a Destroyer and 1-2 Hornets flitting about, with Overlord only shooting one laser. If you don’t shoot Overlord, he will not progress. Keep this in mind all fight long: it only goes as fast as you want it to. Take your time cleaning up the guards, then head to the back-left quadrant. The pass-through behind the rock gives you significant room to maneuver and you’re completely protected from Overlord’s lasers while you’re behind it.

From there it’s as simple as anything. Apply damage to him – cannon fire is the best option – as often as you like. Whenever he stops, he’s summoning reinforcements. Take a moment yourself and scan carefully for any Destroyers. He doesn’t always summon them, but if he does and you don’t notice, you can just die horribly like that right at the finish line. Take care of the reinforcements, rinse, repeat. Depending on your build, you can get in front of the shell opening and burst him down when he gets to the final reinforcement wave with relative ease.

Bonus: if you lugged the Longbow this far instead of the Quick Shot, the AoE is large enough to hit the core even if you’re pounding the outside of the shell. You can just sit in cover, stare at your radar for Destroyer backstabs, and shoot at center mass over and over again until Overlord dies.

I’m loosely grouping the achievements into three categories: things that are directly related to clearing up to Ascension 10, things that don’t require any specific loadout that you can be opportunistic about, and things that do require a specific loadout or mindset going into a run. To my knowledge, there are two achievements where the actual unlock criterion doesn’t match the description: Time Run and Early Bird. I’ll cover them in their spots. CTRL-F if you want to find a specific achievement.

Clean Sweep: Complete an arena objective.
Boss Down: Defeat the Boss of the First Act.
First Victory: Complete all three acts.
You cannot miss these over the course of your first clear. Once you have these, Ascension unlocks, giving enemies small but stacking buffs as you clear up the ladder.

Early Bird: Defeat the Boss of the Second Act.
The actual unlock criterion is to defeat the Worm Boss on Ascension 1. You cannot miss this, but you won’t get it when you think you should.

The First Step: Successfully complete a run at Ascension Level 1.
Halfway There: Successfully complete a run at Ascension Level 5.
Final Ascension: Successfully complete a run at Ascension Level 10.
You’ll get all of these over the course of your minimum eleven victorious runs through Aegis Descent. Settle into a build and keep grinding. My last five or so Ascensions were with the Intelligence Officer running Blunderbuss / Quick Shot / Sidewinder.

Line of Duty: Suffer a pilot loss.
Okay, technically you could miss this one along the way, but if you complete eleven back-to-back runs of Aegis Descent without a single death starting from nothing, you probably aren’t my audience.

Scavenger: In a single run destroy 10 supply caches.
DocKing: Find a Data Port and dock with it.
Hazardous Duty: Complete 5 Hazard Arenas.
Extra Ammo: In a single run find 20 Ammo Pick Ups.
Batteries Included: Acquire a total of 50 battery pickups.
Hull King: Acquire a total of 50 Hull pickups.
Perky: Acquire 10 or more Perks in a single run.
Salvage: In a single run collect 1000 or more Scrap.
These are all going to come completely by accident on any run that makes it even close to the end of the game. If you’re trying to scrape together Award Points for unlocks, these guys are your best bets very early on.

Gunner: Clear a Standard Arena using only your gun weapon.
Trivial to do in the first room. Just don’t fire your cannon, artillery, or disruptor. Any gun will do.

Death from Above: Hover for a combined time of a minute or longer in a single run.
Hovering is probably the least useful way to spend your battery, so it’s feasible you can get through a big chunk of a run without doing this. Still, a minute is absolute chump change and won’t pose any issue.

Perk King: Identify 50% of the available Perk types.
This is across all three pilots and all nine weapons. You’ll get this easily as long as you’re bringing different equipment occasionally. You do not have to identify 100% of Perks unless you really want to.

Shocking: Shock a total of 100 enemies.
The Disruptor: Kill a total of 300 enemies using the Disruptor.
Anything you hit with your Disruptor will be shocked, as will enemies hit by the Sidewinder with the appropriate perk. You’ll probably get the first on your way through the first few clears, and the Intelligence Officer makes the longer grind absolutely trivial to get if you don’t have it by then.

Killer Elite: Kill a combined total of 50 Elite enemies.
Go to more Elite Arenas if you want to fill this up faster. Despite me calling them that, “Elite Fields” absolutely do not count for the tally.

Power Up: Use a combined total of 50 Power Ups.
These are the little floating green guys. You should be grabbing them anytime you see them, but if you want to finish it up, the Intelligence Officer has a perk to add more powerups, and Intel Stations can add extra powerups to the map and show you where they’re going to be. They will appear as a little chevron in the lower-right corner of any arena that has one on the map if you buy that.

Mister Fix It: Dock with 30 or more Repair Bays.
Intel King: Acquire a total of 40 Intel Packages.
As stated. The latter is just a fancy way of telling you to dock with a bunch of Intel Stations, but each purchase (free and paid) counts rather than each docking session.

Demolition Derby: Kill a total of 500 enemies using the dash.
The Cannoneer: Obtain a combined total of 2500 enemy kills with cannon class weapons.
Big Spender: Spend thirty-five thousand Scrap.
Here are your long grinds. The dash is deceptively good and you should be apply it liberally to Nests and Scorpions, but 500 is still a fairly tall order. Big Spender is very likely to be your final achievement – I finished Ascension 10 with barely 17,000 scrap spent, and it took an additional 16 runs through the game at Ascension 0 to spend the rest while trying to maximize scrap gathered and spent.

Sixty Seconds: Complete a Hazard Arena in less than a minute.
Nowhere near as hard as it sounds. There’s one Hazard Arena layout where all four gas canisters are visible up high from the start. Shoot each once with a Gustav and then exit as fast as you can. You can get out of these in under fifteen seconds if you’re quick.

Bumper Car: In a single run, kill at least 40 enemies using the dash.
Goes pretty quick if you’re trying to get it. Scarab Nests and Scorpions are your best targets, but Scorpion Nests can work and even certain positions of Turrets. Note that the damage is fixed on the dash, you don’t need to build up speed and can use it as an ad-hoc melee option if you need multiple hits.

Swiss Cheese: Finish off 5 Destroyers using Side Gun weapons.
This just means your guns. Only the last hit needs to be delivered using the guns. If you have modest gun upgrades and any gun besides the Phalanx equipped, you can either hit the Disruptor or use a Sidewinder with the shock perk and then shred them during the shock timer.

Heavy Metal: In a single run kill at least 100 enemies using artillery.
Two ways to go about this. If you want to get the Award Points quickly, fire a single Sidewinder at every Turret you see and you’ll rack this up easily. If you’re fine waiting, the Nahvert can be used to take out Wasp swarms once you unlock it, which will get you the kill count in barely five total shots. Your call.

Shell Shock: Kill 2 Scorpions with single Nahvert shot.
An annoying one on account of Scorpions’ erratic movement and the Nahvert’s fairly poor AoE. Try to go for this in tighter spaces, such as one of the arenas with an outer and inner circle. You can push a full-health Scorpion into another one with the Dash, leaving it helpless and at a perfect state of damage to be Nahverted. Knock two into a corner together, snap a shot off, and pray. You only need to succeed once, after all.

Hornet Lock On: Kill a total of 20 Hornets using Sidewinder Missiles.
You should be doing this anyway as a matter of course. It’s easier to shock and/or soften them with the missiles and then follow up with a cannon shot, but repress that instinct and fire a second missile volley to rack this up.

Having a Blast: Kill 200 enemies using the Blunderbuss.
Easy as anything, since the Blunderbuss is really good once upgraded.

Burn Them: In a single run destroy 20 nests using burn damage.
The only source of burning is the Quick Shot, and the description here is a little misleading. Anything the Quick Shot hits catches fire, but that burn aftereffect doesn’t have to kill the nest to count. What this really means is to destroy 20 nests using the Quick Shot in a single run, which is a hell of a lot easier to pull off.

Specialized: Complete 3 runs as a SERE Specialist pilot class.
Military Intelligence: Successfully complete a run with an Intelligence Officer pilot class.
Get these as you go. I did Ascension 0 as the Combat Pilot, switched to the S.E.R.E. Specialist for Ascensions 1 through 3, and then switched to the Intelligence Officer for the rest of the game. There’s no corresponding achievement for winning with the Combat Pilot.

What-A-Shot: Kill 10 or more enemies with one shot.
OP: In a single run kill 50 Scarabs using a Cannon weapon.
Splash Damage: Kill 10 Scarabs with one shot.
Perfect Timing: Kill 50 Wasps with one shot.
Thirty Birds…: Use the Longbow to kill 30 enemies or more with with one shot.
Remember: Wasps fly, Scarabs crawl. Go for them all as soon as you unlock the Longbow, but you might get some by accident on the way with the Gustav. There’s a room type that can spawn two Wasp swarms next to each other, hitting close to the edge of either will get you more than you need. For Scarabs, just run around a little while in the first room and then turn around and shoot the ground with the Longbow and you’ll probably pick this up without meaning to.

Time Run: Complete all three acts in 60 minutes of less.
Our other bugged one. In the game’s Awards menu, this correctly asks you to complete a run in 30 minutes or less. It sounds like a taller order than it is; I accidentally got it during my regular Ascension 4 clear, but if you’re done with the game and don’t have it, going back to Ascension 0 with a fully upgraded Intelligence Officer will be a complete romp.

Alright, thanks, bye.