Hunting and Abilities

Overview

Your guide to hunt the creatures of the void to get the most out of competitive play.

Introduction

Hi guys, I’m back with my tactical guides and this time, I will show you how to hunt in Sparkle 2 Evo! This guide is a revision from the guide “Glowing Squids”, and is improved to give you a more spread out overview of what your sparkle can really do in the game.

Well what I will show you is some general tips on hunting, followed by how to specifically hunt simple squids under time and objective pressures, and how to tackle on of the two giants of the game, Octury and Squid Worm! 🙂

General Hunting

In its early levels, Sparkle 2 Evo wants you to master three things (easier in PC mode):

o Manoeuvring the crevices
Crevices are gaps between chunks of joined reef streaks in the water. These can contain tight or loose spaces. What you need to visualise and practice is spotting which crevices are possible for passage and which ones are not. For practice, I suggest fullscreen window as your mouse will not go out of the screen. Additionally, there is no difference how fat your sparkle is to how well you can manoeuvre past the gap, however, depending on how long your creature is, how well you turn in the crevice itself can be different.

o Gauging eating speed of your sparkle according to your intended pick-up destination
This is by far the most important skill to learn in competitive play mode with AI. The best eating rates are in order: green, blue, red. Conversely, speed is the other way around: red, blue, green. Blue sparkles are somewhere in between for this guide, and it has the ability to make competitors avert you…which is a little bit useless since there is no love sim in this game.
Green sparkles are gluttonous, with its ability to create a vacuum field to devour food. Since its movement speed is slow and its eating rate is high, a constant hold of the mouse button with short breaks for movement works quite well to get any food in front of you.
Red sparkles on the other hand are made for speed hunting, with exceptional 360 rotations to get the food that you missed – usually this compensates for the creature’s low eating rate. For me, I would usually position myself well behind the food, then launch, then position again, then launch and so on, since a linear movement would not work with the slow eating speed anyway. Oh and double tap its head to unleash its NOS thing.

o Controlling how much of what you eat.
For this skill, use the RADAR. It is by far the most useful thing to see where food stuffs are, and trigger it by switching in and out of voids (scroll mouse!). Depending on what sort of evolutions and abilities you would like to get in the next stage, you have to control what you eat. It’s a little bit like eating junk food and being fat really. Technically this isn’t always practical, but ultimately you are what you eat.

Levelling

This is my pretty little sparkle, ReneG8. It is the result of numerous well-thought planning of eating different coloured foodstuffs and the order of each cell consumption…..
Just joking, ReneG8 is pretty much what you would call a “mucked up” character, as I fed it almost every colour I found in the game. You don’t want to do this…

Now I can’t give you an exact formula as to what kind of sparkle species would result from eating which kind of food species in which order. But what I can give you is a tutorial on how the levelling works.

RULE 1
Each line on the genlab genetic base pair connection consists of 5 levels that you would need to complete. Let’s call this one PHASE. To complete each phase would mean that you would level up, changing your morph into the more dominant colour depending on the eating pattern of your sparkle on the last PHASE. Note that this morph is non-permanent.

RULE 2
Each level bead is achieved by the most dominant colour your sparkle eats. For example, if you eat 10 blue, 5 red, and 5 green, the level indicated at genlab would be a blue bead.

RULE 3
Stage progressions are permanent. These are the times where an overall calculation is made by the game of the number of beads pertained in each PHASE. The resulting collection of evolutions (B, G, R) will differ by these factors.

Now the game “advises” you should eat only one colour at all times. I say experiment, and see what kind of creature you can evolve! Good luck!

RULE 4
Your final sparkle will have stats that differ depending on each level colour you have accummulated, as well as how long you have used each colour’s skill. Here is an example of how you can control what stats you want, shown by my leech KireiAutumn:

Glowing Squid Hunting

So how and why do we hunt for these swimming uteruses?Why – because it is a good source of food for both game modes, as well as the AIs never seem to have the initiative to start the kill on creatures. Keep in mind that AIs would still eat these squids, but usually only after all the floating foods are gone.

STEP 1 Do not hit its empty faces. You will be cast above the void. Look around to see if there are any competitors around. Have you heard of the term “killsteal”? They will do just that.

STEP 2 Take out the bulbs one at a time
Caution, after you take one out some blue ink that slows your movement by +80% will release, and you won’t even be able to turn properly. It is better to hunt glowing squids with the red or blue genetic tree, as it is faster and allows an interval to move just before the ink squirts. I suggest you position yourself in advance towards the other antler as it is escaping away.
Additionally, do not take it out when it is near the reefs – chances are it will hide for a long time in between the rocks and you will not be able to reach it. This would be annoying in vs AI.
After the slow is over, take out the other bulb. There have been reports that these bulbs only provide +1 blue foods, no matter the colour of the bulb, but I am uncertain at the moment. Then position your head to face the abdomen/tip.

STEP 3 Consume the squid
Eat the tip and you should hear a bright sound with the creature disappearing. Around 4-5 food stuffs of the corresponding colour should appear.

STEP 4 Absorb the bonus food
Do not panic and frantically rush for these (unless you are a green herbivore :P). Some competitors may appear – let them take one or two. Just be calm and follow the routine of what you would normally collect. Then move on to your next prey hiding your trace of annoyance…

Octury Deep

This is the level that amazes me the most so far, mostly because it is … so simple! And yet it feels like a boss fight at the same time. For those faint-hearted, please do not attempt this level, it may lead to aversion for octopi.

So, lets break this down into small steps as to how I approached this tako feast:

STEP 1 Eat its suction cups
Or whatever they are. Basically what you want to do is double click (or single click) on each shining circles on the leg, and your sparkle will slowly parasitise and move to cut the limb down off. Following this, your sparkle will be thrown by its tentacles’ agitating in pain, so quickly click on the next target to eat. Note that only the last circle on its way down the tentacle can be cut off; anything above will be too strong to eat.

STEP 2 Eat the intestines
Or brain. Or I am actually not too sure. I never did my major on marine biology, but start by swimming upwards towards the big head. Find two holes on the head, and enter one by movement. Once inside, click on each shining circles, the critical parts for the octury’s death, from the top down. You have to manually guide your sparkle, if I’m not wrong, here. You will know once you have eaten each point…

STEP 3 You have no more species to eat
Congrats! You would have unlocked the achievement “Giant – Octury Deep”!

And then here I am, dreaming of eating takoyaki.

Squid Worm

The squid worm is an underwater monster which would be about 2-4 times the length of your sparkle. Keep this in mind when you are adjusting your speed as you are hunting this creature slash boss. The only reason I can think of for eating this creature is to get the achievement “Giant – Squid Worm”.

STEP 1 Grind its scales
Alongside the squid worm’s spikes are tiny pieces of food stuff (uncoloured) of which are able to be ingested by your sparkles. This is the very first step to unlocking the next part of the squid worm’s body to eat. You will notice that the squid worm dives into an unreachable void after a short time of resurfacing, and only when it resurfaces then you can eat the scales. Approach the worm from the front “shoulders” quote and quote, and work your eating backwards towards the tail. This way, you will have more time eating the scales as the head will dive back in first. Use your creatures’ special ability! Reds! Use your frenzy mode to wreck the worm. If you’re a green, use your greedy eating ability to suck up all those pieces! If you’re blue, well, I have no solutions for you but be patient… After your thousands of tries (honestly this took me around 8-10 minutes unguided), quickly approach the tail for the next part.

STEP 2 Castrate it
Okay that might sound a bit gory, but you are not eating its tail, contrary to what many would say. Think about it.

STEP 3 Blind it
Now after eating its groin, approach the head until you get around its whiskers. Position yourself as you have practiced with other creatures in the past, and when the head resurfaces, target its brain. You will see a blinding light and the worm will be less responsive – slower above water and under water. Why do we need to do this? BECAUSE after 15 minutes of unguided attempts, I finally lost it and realised that the spine IS NOT accessible unless you do this!!!

STEP 4 Destroy its action potential
Head back to the end near the tail and start eating the shining spinal columns. Eat from bottom to top, and if done quickly this will save you waiting for it to resurface a second time. DO NOT PANIC! After all of the essential spinal connections are destroyed, its head is now accessible.

STEP 5 Eat the head.
I am uncertain if you need to do this. As I was eating the final spinal column, my red sparkle went to fast that I could not judge whether you need to eat the head or just the last spine to finish the level. Anyway if someone can confirm that would be great!
Then unlock the final boss achievement!

End

Thank you so much for taking your time to read my guide, I hope you have enjoyed it and found it useful in approaching the game Sparkle 2 Evo. This guide is only the second guide (done 28/01/2014) published for this game, so please do ask for my permission if you would like to use any of the information.
Please rate me with 5 stars if you want me to make more of these kinds of guides (I do play other games – check them out), and I will try and get back to any comments as soon as I can.
Enjoy your game!