Actually, I came UP from the bottom, fighting my way through the basement, killing every single soul down there and up the stairs (lots of black hands!).

I too stopped counting the number of my own deaths after a while, and it was really frustrating. I checked how close I could get before the cut scene started playing. Then I thought "why not just kill those creatures in the cages, stupid me!!" *smack* and so I did. But I still had 4-5 black hands to take care of in addition to Petrova..

After a few more deaths, I discovered the reason those 2 health packs are behind you . Here´s what I did then, after the movie:

Had my ion cannon ready, killed one of the black hands while backing up and down to take cover, picked up the health packs as I was really low on health during the 2 seconds or something taking so many hits from them (and Petrova, I think). Then moved down a bit and into the wall. 2 black hands came down after me and I killed them with 2 shots from the ion cannon. As soon as I could get an opportunity, I got upstairs again and ran like he11 to get inside the cage on the right side. As sonn as I got inside I could save (!!) my position and peek around the corner and kill the last black hand and then Petrova, which was not much of a fighter anyway

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