Drop Bears! and Spartan Takedown

Today’s Halo 4 challenges include a rather vanilla “Spartan Takedown” and the amusingly titled “Drop Bears!” Read on to learn how to snatch these to War Games Daily challenges in no time.

Drop Bears! 2750 XP

An Australian legend as well as a meme made popular by Joystiq.com, the drop bear is an interesting creature. You don’t actually get to see a drop bear anywhere. It’s more of a situation where you become the drop bear.

To get this challenge, you must “Assassinate 3 Players in a single match.”

In a normal game of Slayer, this might seem like an almost impossible challenge — attainable only by the upper echelon of professional gamers. The key is to realize that Slayer is not the only game type in Halo 4 War Games. We need a game type that has a lot of targets and one where the opposing players are distracted by something (and therefore not aware of us sneaking up behind them).

Fortunately, 343 introduced the “FFA Throwback” game type this week. A mix of oddball and king of the hill, this free-for-all game type is exactly what we need to get these assassinations. Every other player on the map is a target, and they are (hopefully) all distracted by the stated objective of the game — either to hold the hill or carry the oddball. While this challenge will still require some skill, “FFA Throwback” game types will make it much easier.

Spartan Takedown 1350 XP

If you’re playing War Games today, you probably will get this challenge without even trying. What do you have to do?

“Kill 20 Players.”

It doesn’t matter if they are in 20 kills in the same match or different matches. It doesn’t matter what game type. Just 20 kills sometime within this 24 hour time period.

But if you’re in a rush, here’s an idea: work on both challenges at once. It’s very possible to get both Drop Bears! and Spartan Takedown in on match. For instance, I was just working on the Drop Bears! challenge in a FFA Throwback match of King of the Hill on Abandon. I was just focused on assassinations, but I still got 18 kills in that one match. With a little bit more umph, you could easily snag both challenges in one match.

Other Challenges

Once you grab the two daily challenges, remember there’s still time for the weekly challenges and the monthly challenge.

The monthly challenge:

“To the Victor Go the Spoils” (17343 XP): The biggest challenge yet is about to expire, so if you haven’t grabbed it yet, you’d better get to it. For this jackpot of experience points, you have to “Win 117 matchmaking War Games matches.” (In case you were wondering, the 117 is part of Master Chief’s call-sign and 343 is the developer of Halo 4.)

The Weekly Challenges (expiring 12/2/12)

War Games:

“To Be Precise” (4200 XP): “Get 80 kills with a Precision Loadout Weapon.”

“Threading the Needle” (6450 XP): “Kill 16 Players with a headshot in a single match.”

The SWAT game type is good for both of these. For “To Be Precise,” the only weapons available in the match are precision weapons. “Threading the Needle” is also slanted towards SWAT since the head is the target. All you have to do is drop 16 opponents in one match. String 5 matches like that together, and you’ve got your 80.

Campaign:

“Let’s Get Mythical!” (2000 XP): “Complete any Campaign Mission on Heroic or higher difficulty with the Mythic skull.”

“Alone in the Infinite” (4750 XP): “Complete Infinity solo on Legendary difficulty.”

With some of the Campaign Weekly challenges, you can knock both out in one mission. While technically this is possible with these challenges (i.e., play Infinity solo, on Legendary, and with the Mythic skull on), it’s almost unbearably difficult.

A faster way to do it is to play Infinity without any skulls on (except perhaps “Grunt Birthday Party” and “IWHBYD”) and to play another mission with the Mythic skull on. Whenever I have a choice of missions to complete a challenge, I almost always will pick Dawn. It’s simple, straightforward, and short. And since you don’t have to go through it solo, I partnered up with a buddy on Xbox LIVE co-op, and we fought through on Heroic in about 10 minutes.

If you need any help on these missions, be sure to check out my Halo 4 Video Walkthrough. I have this walkthrough on Halo 4 Mission 1: Dawn, and this walkthrough on Halo 4 Mission 4: Infinity.

Spartan Ops:

“Shield Break!”  (1500 XP): “Kill 70 Jackals.”

“Destroyer of Grunts” (1100 XP): “Kill 100 Grunts.”

Since Episode 4 (“Didact’s Hand”) was released this week and features mostly Covenant enemies, these challenges are both very easy to achieve by just playing through the missions. If you play through with co-op multiplayer, though, remember that you only get credit for the Jackals and Grunts that you actually kill. If you are having trouble getting your numbers up there, you can always play the Spartan Ops solo. That way you get all the kills, every Chapter. If you really want to take a relaxed approach, you can even play on “Easy” difficulty and still rack up the kills.

What about Waypoint?

You’ve probably noticed that the Challenges section of the Halo 4 menu features a category for Waypoint challenges, but there still haven’t been any challenges in that category. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens there.

In the meantime, we’ve got our work cut out for us. Happy gaming.