LEGO Star Wars III: The Clone Wars

Story 4/10

To be perfectly honest, I had no idea what the basis was for this game which, in terms of the Star Wars timeline, takes place between Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, so I had to look it up and found that there is currently an animated TV series. As I had never watched the series, I found it hard to relate to any storyline that was taking place in the background in between the LEGO related fun which caused me to switch off. I thought the cut scenes were a lot less engaging and humorous at the ones in the game’s predecessor.

That said, I did enjoy the clone/droid battle that takes place on the opening screen. It is quite amusing.

Picture 8/10

This one has to go up from Pirates of the Caribbean because the graphics have been given an overhaul. The look of the game is a lot smoother and they’ve made a lot more out of the destructible objects element. When you destroy objects, instead of the LEGO bricks disappearing almost instantly, they hang around for a bit and very often get in your way which is much more realistic, although I’m not sure fans of the series play the games for the realism aspect... but more on that later.

Sound 8/10

Not really a lot to say here, it sticks to the Star Wars tradition with a little up-tempo version of the all-familiar soundtrack and it is very fitting to the game.

Gameplay 4/10

Things can get a little samey in the LEGO world, especially when you are on number three in a series relating to the same franchise. I’ve got a lot of respect for the fact that LEGO Star Wars III tries to mix things up.

There are now two elements to the main game. You have the standard normal levels where you battle through various LEGO environments to fight bosses and save people. However, now you also have these ground battle environments where you have to fight across a load of enemy bases and have to destroy certain buildings or targets.

In short these new additions are really... boring. These levels add an unnecessary exploration element to the game which slows it down. On top of this, if you strive for the 100% completion, you have to do these types of battles twice for both the good and evil sides which I found to be a royal pain in the ass, unnecessarily repetitive and soul destroying.

There are also space missions on each planet which are another repetitive ball-ache where you have to fly around in space destroying various bits and pieces.

Picking up from where I left off earlier, the new destructive blocks that constantly get in your way may be an improvement in some areas but they also hinder the player’s ability to sensibly navigate through levels.

Also, they seemed to have changed the functionality of how the force is used. When using the force you can now move things around freely... in a constricted kind of way. Getting these objects to where you want them to go can be frustrating but it is also quite forgiving in places. However, there is one level where you have to build a stairway out of four LEGO blocks and the user-friendliness of the force was so bad that I could not select the blocks I wanted to move despite trying to stand in about four-hundred different positions. This produced a lot more than the usual expletives to come pouring out of my mouth.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 48 achievements

The biggest problem I have with LEGO Star Wars III is that it is similar to Soul Calibur in that I was done with new stuff about 5 hours before I got to 100%. The last bits were grinding out the stupid space missions and ground battles which was a bit boring to say the least.

The achievements themselves, bar the last two, are quite varied and force you to try most aspects of the game in order to get them all.

I want to take a moment to talk about codes, those useful little things which can aid gamers to get to full completion without having to work too hard.

In LEGO games, you can collect Red Bricks which give you special abilities such as invincibility or stud mulltipliers. I don’t consider using these bricks as cheating if they are unlocked through gameplay, especially as they remove a lot of the monotonous aspects, such as having to replay ground assaults because you constantly die and run out of time. However, I do consider it cheating to use codes to unlock the bricks and I was quite surprised to see that using the codes does not disable the achievements like they do in lots of other Xbox360 games.

The amount of studs you need to unlock all the red bricks is really high and it takes a while to do even using the stud multipliers as they become available. So I don’t really like that my hard work and effort can be mimicked by someone typing a few codes off the internet. Oh yeah, and there is an achievement for unlocking all the red bricks which is incidentally called ‘Cheat!’

Downloadable Content – N/A

Summary

It’s not as good as LEGO Star Wars II but it is another alright game to pass the time, especially if you don’t want to think too much about what you’re doing. This will probably be it for me on the LEGO front for at least another year and unless the next LEGO game I play is remarkably different, I doubt I will post a... a long review about it.

Soul Calibur IV

Story 8/10

What I like about the Soul Calibur series is that they make a lot of effort developing their characters with background and history. Each character has their own back story and alignment depending on whether their intentions are good or evil.

Completing story mode with each character unlocks additional character biographies. What I like even more about this is that the game makes it completely optional as to whether or not you chose to read these additional stories or not.

Picture 7/10

Soul Calibur also wins points for how pretty everything looks. The character designs are great and they have even gone into exceptional detail with the extra weapons and equipment you can buy, each of which are beautifully designed.

The lever designs are also brilliant and some have destructible elements as well.

Sound 7/10

Now, I know what I said about Japanese companies and music in my Pro Evolution review, however the music in Soul Calibur is very fitting to the game. It didn’t come across as repetitive at any point despite the many hours I put into achieving 100% and I wasn’t driven to brain-suicide as before.

I think the main reasons for this are that it has a soundtrack with different music each time you play and the fact that you are actually playing the game while the music plays. The menu music is the same but instead of having the horrible J-Pop sound, it actually feels like you are building up to an epic battle.

Gameplay 8/10

I’m not really a massive player of fighting games however, I have liked the fluid combat in the Soul Calibur series since the days of Soul Calibur II. It feels a lot less clunky than a lot of other beat-em-up games and they always have a few varied game modes to keep you entertained.

Story Mode was a bit of a letdown though. Each character has five rounds to get through and even though they try to frame it around the individual character’s stories, it feels very thin in places; probably because there are 33 individual characters. Also it feels like more effort was put in to some of the more central figures from the series. For example, Kilik has a fight with someone called Xianglian and it’s kind of a big deal because he calls her by name before the fight. This doesn’t happen with any of the other characters.

The Tower of Souls is a little different and, in my opinion, the main challenge in the game. You have to fight your way up 60 stories of the Tower with variable challenges along the way. You get extra items for meeting specific criteria and it was very good at avoiding the easy trap of having a repetitive fighting game.

The online play it as expected, you have to fight other people in best of five matches. It does what it says on the tin and doesn’t try to be overly complicated, so as far as gameplay goes, it’s a tick in the box from me.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 50 Achievements

There are 50 achievements and it terms of variation, they have definitely gone all out. It almost feels like they have used the achievements to draw out the gameplay and this is something I do not have a problem with... to a certain extent.

There are two issues I had with these 50 achievements:

Issue number one; online achievements. I’m working on catch up so I played the online stuff after Soul Cailbur V was released. This meant that I was finding it very difficult to get matches. After about 3 weeks of trying unsuccessfully, I got a boosting partner to help me. However, for some bizarre reason as soon as we started boosting, every other person still playing Soul Calibur IV decided to show up, which of course led to more abusive messages coming into my inbox – voice messages this time too!

Issue number two; the Transcend History and the World achievement. As I said earlier, I don’t really go in for fighting games, probably because I’m not that good at them. However this achievement requires you to buy every item of equipment and all the weapons in the game. As I'm not very good, this meant it took me a lot longer with a lot more playing time than other people who were better than me, which means I would have naturally accumulated more gold than I would have if I had done everything first time. Despite this, I managed to get the other 49 achievements but still had to play the same stuff over and over again to get the required money to purchase the rest of the weapons. I think it was about 5 hours of grinding that was not that enjoyable.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I stand by the fact that Soul Calibur is one of the best fighting games series out there, but from an achievements point of view, it’s not an easy work through and the last achievement makes it feel like more of a slog than a reward. That said it is definitely doable and well worth cracking out again with friends on a rainy day.

Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth

This is one of the most hard to get games I’ve looked for when trying to rent and buy on Ebay. The reason is that it is acclaimed as the easiest 1,000 points on Xbox360 – a reputation it definitely lives up to. So much so that as a 1,000 point review, there isn’t really that much to say.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 5 Achievements – Quick and Easy

All you have to do is get a hit counter of 50. This is not a combo but simply getting 50 hits without being hit yourself. This can be done in about 4 to 5 minutes of gameplay which makes the rest of the game, from an achievement point of view, completely redundant.

This is only my opinion but I didn’t see the point in playing the rest of the game once I had earned all the achievements and it didn’t look like I would have enjoyed the rest of the game based on the small amount of it I played.

Summary

It is definitely worth it for the achievements and the quickness but it definitely goes on the ‘to rent’ list. People are definitely keen to get these achievements though. It took me months of bidding on Ebay as I wasn’t willing to pay more than £10.00 for a game I wasn’t going to play for more than 10 minutes!

Pro Evolution Soccer 6

Story – N/A

It is football. The only real story is taking a team to the pinnacle of winning their respective domestic league – no Europe just the league and cup. There is also their own Pro Evolution Soccer league and cup competition but it’s so fictional, you can really draw any comparison to real life football.

Picture 7/10

It would be harsh to judge the first Pro Evolution by the modern standards and there is only so much to it you can look at. I think the likenesses are very good and accurate which is what I believe most people would use to rate the game in terms of graphics.

Sound 2/10

Pro Evolution is made by Konami which is a Japanese developer. As such, the theme music consists of the most annoying noises you can ever listen to. You don’t want to be hanging around in the menus when the ‘music’ is playing and this is made even more frustrating as the options you have to set up your team can take a few minutes to customise, which pushed my brain all the more closer to suicide.

The commentary is the best and worst thing about the game. It is brilliant for about the first five games however, from game six onwards the commentators run out of new things to say and then it becomes just as soul destroying as the music. ‘Header too!’

Gameplay 7/10

This is where the majority of football games pick up their points as you would expect. The obvious comparison to make here is to FIFA and, in my opinion, the football is a lot more fluid is Pro Evolution.

Also from time to time, when the players actually do what you want them to, you can play some pretty good football. The only trouble is that Pro Evolution seems to insinuate that the majority of professional football players make seven out of ten bad passes and, when through on goal, one on one with the goal keeper, will shot high or wide without any pressure.

There are also issues with how the other players you are passing to react to the ball. When your pass isn’t quite good enough, the player you are passing to will occasionally make absolutely no effort to get the ball and lose it to the opposition. If a ball is going out of play and you try to keep it in, your player will do one of two things; casually run after it and let it go out anyway, or chase it down only to get there and direct it out of play!

The other area when the game lets itself down is with the game modes. There is no European Football in the standard league and their own Master League is so unofficial it really took away the enjoyment for me.

However, it is one of the best games to play socially with friends and this is where it wins the points. There is nothing more satisfying that watching a friend scream, ‘COMON PASS!’ at the top of their lungs and it is even more satisfying when controllers suffer horrible deaths.

While local multiplayer is fun, the online element shits all over itself, but I can hardly blame the game for other people’s issues. I didn’t play the game online until recently and only to collect the online achievements. I met one person playing the game who was actually decent (in a sportsmanship kind of way).

I faced one guy who beat me once and then kept sending me messages saying he wasn’t going to play me again after his one win in a game where the conditions of match play can differ greatly from one game to the next. A couple of other people sent abusive messages after losing narrow games and others quit out after they started losing by a wide margin. The last one I don’t have a problem with, but there was one twat who took it to the next level. If you score an own goal you get to control the replay which doesn’t time out if you don’t do anything... so he scored an own goal and then walked away from his computer leaving me with two choices – out wait the guy or quit out. Massively frustrating and a hole in the online play – there should be a time limit on replays or better yet; stop players from watching them during the game altogether!

I decided the boost the last 50 wins as I couldn’t be bothered to wade through another 50 games (minimum) of shitty people. And for my trouble, I got another shitty message calling me a twat!

Achievements – 1,000 points – 23 Achievements

Online achievements are pointless - This is something you will see repeated across many of my reviews. If people want to show each other how good they are at a game (or how bigger twats they can be) they can do it in their own time in their own online environment. The online achievements for Pro Evolutions Soccer 6 were pretty straight forward though so it wasn’t too bad.

It does win further points over FIFA though by actually letting me get the online achievements – many FIFA games have closed servers making 100% achievement now impossible.

In terms of the offline achievements all you have to do is win all the leagues which is nothing short of time consuming and not that enjoyable.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

In terms of getting achievements I would list it as a definite no for purchase. It’s too time consuming, not enjoyable and if you like football games, one of the more recent instalments is much more value for enjoyment. I consider anything I have to boost as not worth it, but my OCD got me through this one.