Heisenberg Boss Fight, Village of Shadows Difficulty, Resident Evil Village (Guide in Desc.)

Here’s how I beat Heisenberg on Village of Shadows difficulty. There’s no magic formula for this fight, as far as I can tell. I took out the three pylons from the elevator before rolling out and triggering the fight, so they didn’t get in my way. (That was on a previous attempt before the autosave, so not in the video.) I couldn’t find a way to avoid taking that first hit near the start. You can survive three hits—the fourth will kill you—so that initial hit left me with just two more I could take in the roughly four minutes it took to get through the first phase. I’m not convinced that blocking made any difference to the number of hits I could survive. One caveat is that, if you get pinned against a wall while Heisenberg is doing his sustained right-hand thrust attack, that seems to register as multiple hits, so try to move away to the side when he does that. Not much you can do about it if you’re already pinned. The barriers are your friend, once Heisenberg drops them. Try to move towards the center once he starts forming his barrier shield, so that they drop away from the edge and you can get behind them. Shoot his glowing head as much as you can with the machine gun while he’s powering up his barrier shield—if you don’t pop him before he’s done, (1) he’ll throw them out and you’ll take damage, although it doesn’t appear to be as much damage as his melee attacks; and (2) the barriers will stick in the ground at an angle, and the cover doesn’t seem to be as good. If you use the cannon you’ll interrupt him, but you won’t get the barriers, so try to avoid doing that—it may be better to risk taking the hits. Dodging is impossible when he advances with one arm raised. You are just too slow. When he comes at you with both arms down it is possible to move to the side and avoid the attack, but you still end up close to him and he often follows up soon after with a raised-arm attack that you can’t dodge, so you’ll need to have the cannon reloaded by then. When he’s coming at you, you need to stop him (obviously). You have three options: (1) hit him with the cannon, if it’s charged; (2) pop one of his three glowing weak spots with your machine gun; or (3) have a barrier between you and him, so he attacks the barrier instead of you. Generally, save the cannon for when he’s coming at you. But, if you still have a barrier between you and him, and you think it will save the barrier, it might be worth popping off a cannon round if it’s ready—the barrier will take the next attack, and hopefully the cannon will be recharged by the time of the third one. Better if you can also pop a weak point during that sequence, to give your cannon more time to recharge. Get a barrier between you and him as soon as they drop. Take a quick look around when you can and try to identify the next barrier you’re going to get behind once Heisenberg destroys the current one. Generally, keep shooting the machine gun at him, even if you’re not hitting his weak spots. But, if you need to move away quickly, stop shooting and move, as firing the machine gun slows you down substantially. Focus as much as you can on the weak spots. Once he’s coming at you, you probably won’t be able to destroy a weak spot with the machine gun from scratch, especially if he has one arm raised (he comes at you faster than he does with both arms down). Cannon rounds may do splash damage to his weak spots, so I generally tried to put them center mass in the hope of weakening as many of them as possible. In the video, I tried to hit the weak point on his raised arm with the cannon one time, which was a big mistake because I missed him entirely. I was lucky that wasn’t game over. When he starts building his trash whip (he’s powering up, but not building a shield from barriers) you need to pop a weak spot before he’s done. Otherwise, you’ll probably take multiple hits and it will be game over. I did manage to out-range the trash whip on one attempt, and that may be your only hope if you fail to pop and your cannon is still recharging. Once he pulls you up in the air, and dumps you out of your vehicle, you should be golden. Pump magnum rounds into his head when you’re on foot—just don’t blow it at that point. That’s my strategy, but ultimately it comes down to a lot of luck. The video shows approximately my 20th attempt at this. Maybe more. I got lucky with weak spots being damaged enough already to pop them when I needed to. I got lucky with barrier placement. If I tried to do this again, it might take me another half dozen or dozen attempts. Good luck!