I've been working on the online arena challenges and I'm scratching my head a little bit. Just did a perfect run in the first challenge (Forest Hunter), but my score (34.7 million) was 3 million short of the highest score on the leaderboard.
Since it's only a single level/world and I did get everything perfectly (all humans, non-interrupted human combo, all disruptors, beacons, visitors, secret exits, no hits, etc.) and in less than 7 minutes, I don't see how I can improve my score so much to account for these extra 3 million. There must be some wrinkle in the scoring system I'm not seeing here. Any ideas?
I got this score a few moments ago:
As you said, collecting everything is important, so is not getting hit as well as Time. In terms of points, 100k is the max you can get for time. That may be one area you can improve. Around 4:30 should give you 100k.
I think the biggest thing we all have trouble with is the order of how we collect humans/kill enemies. I'm going to use these 2 gifs I uploaded as examples:
Same area. In the first gif, at the end of the level I scored about 830k. In the second gif, about 818k.
There's a Visitor on this level. There are different ways to tackle this. One, you can play "normal" meaning when you spawn, take care of the enemies in front of you, while you pick up the first human. Then work on the middle enemies and grab the human, then work your way on the right side and finish all remaining enemies.
A 2nd way to go about this is dash through the first set of enemies to grab then human then (without killing anyone else) work your way to the right side where that 3rd human is. When you're far enough on the right side, you'll trigger the Visitors while still having all the enemies on screen. Depending on what powerups or secondary weapon you have, you can kill the majority of the Visitors without killing all the enemies around you.
As you know, when killing Visitors, you'll get a MP token. When you grab this and the human that's next to you, THEN kill all the enemies around you, you'll notice a higher score.
I hope this wasn't confusing lol. I think a video might be better to explain.
But yea, think of different ways to beat a level. Can you grab a MP/human token before killing enemies? If you know a level can be beaten quickly, try saving all humans and THEN kill everyone. Of course, you should be keeping your combo while doing all of this. Not an easy task!
I'm currently #2 on Techno Forest if you would like to check out my run. I'm EspanaJeff. The score I posted above was during an Arcade run so that's not the score you see on the leaderboards.