Wolfenstein: The New Order (Xbox ONE)

This is another example of me playing a series out of order but the original Wolfenstein for the 360 is such a fuck ass of a game I won’t be getting to that any time soon. Wolfenstein: The New Order is a solely single player experience which pushed it up my Xbox One ‘to play’ list. A list which is growing faster than I thought it would.

The New Order has a story routed in a twisted version of World War II where the Nazis win and apparently have access to advanced technology with mechanised dogs and giant destructive robots. You play as War Hero B.J Blast... Blashko... Blazkowicz? Is that right? Anyway, you play as B.J. – William to his love interests – as he tries to turn the fight against the Nazis by killing the evil, scary Nazi General Deathshead.

The storyline is well crafted and the set pieces are good, but the one major issue is big boring B.J. himself. Many of the other characters are quite colourful and have a lot of personality but not B.J. He sounds like he is just not bothered a lot of the time and his facial expressions are, well, expressionless. His monologues nearly put me to sleep on several occasions.

Graphically, New Order is one of the prettier games I’ve played and I would go as far as to say it’s almost flawless in its presentation. There were very few instances of me getting caught on scenery or scenery providing my enemies with an unfair advantage. Musically, it is also vey in-keeping with the steam-punk theme and is eerie and epic in equal measure.

The gameplay, I have to say is probably one of the best I have played in a long time, especially in the FPS genre. It feels very fluid and very rarely messed me up. You have a choice of several guns and carry grenades as a secondary back up so it uses a lot of traditional qualities however, they had what I consider a non-standard cover based system. If you stand B.J. facing a wall near a corner and aim your gun, he will naturally lean out to shoot around the corner. I found this to be much more intuitive and seamless than having to press A to enter cover and then press another button to leave cover and it is more in keeping with what you would do in reality.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

There are three categories for the achievements in New Order; collectibles, perks and difficulty playthrough.

Now, as you all know I’m not a fan of forced second playthroughs unless it makes a massive difference to the story or game experience so thank you Bethesda for having the Uber difficulty available from the beginning. I honestly don’t know what it’s like to play a game through on an easy difficulty anymore. New Order however, I found quite forgiving on its toughest level. It certainly didn’t give me more trouble than some of my other completions. That said, there were a few bits which gave me cause to scream.

In one level, I was messing around trying to get a perk upgrade and got shot to shit... right at the same time as I hit a checkpoint. This meant that I had to do the next section of the game with no margin for error. Needless to say I died several times with lots of swear words.

Once the hard playthrough is done, if you were thorough and picked up all the collectibles, you won’t have much left to do. If you were amazing (unlike me) you will most likely have some skill achievements left to unlock. If you are completely like me, you will most likely need to replay most of the levels to get all the collectibles as well. Playing on the lowest difficulty to do this after playing on Uber is like playing with invincibility activated.

Other comments I’ve seen suggest that you only need to complete the last mission on Uber to get this one but that felt really cheap so I didn’t go for it.

I managed to play through the entire campaign without unlocking the first perk for demolition which involves killing two enemies with one grenade. Watching me handle grenades in FPSs is a painful experience. I am about as capable of throwing a well placed grenade as I am at, say, having a baby. That said, this is obviously nowhere near as tough as the grenade achievement in Matt Hazard.

Anyway, so once you’ve completed the game in Uber mode, you will need to complete off the remaining perks and collectibles if you didn’t get them in the first play through and this is very simply done on the easy difficulty level. You can also reload checkpoints to stack kills for the perks which removes the grindy element to anything you have to do which is a major plus point.

There are two missable achievements for making a moral choice but this happens at the beginning of the game so it’s not a multiple playthrough issue. Although that said the multiple choice actually will produce a slightly different gameplay experience, It would only have made a slight difference to the story though which is probably why there isn’t a multiple playthrough achievement requirement.

The last achievement I earned was for solving the fourth enigma code. To solve the enigma codes you need to get a certain set of collectibles and then solve the code in the extras menu. They are basic mathematic problems which you can solve by using the internet... or working it out for yourself.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I thoroughly enjoyed playing New Order despite B.J.’s constant monotone and lack of character. Had that not been an issue for me, it would have turned a very good game into a great one. The next instalment is out now and I will definitely be playing it on this evidence.

Rayman Legends (Xbox ONE)

Many games have taught me lessons over the course of my gaming lifetime. Rule number is to avoid anything associated with EA and if you are ever in a situation where this is unavoidable (Mass Effect for example) make sure you finish it within eight months of release to avoid them screwing you in the ass.

Rayman Legends taught me never to let anyone play on my profile and to password protect my profile in case they log on when I’m not there and unlock a random achievement forcing my massive OCD to kick in and make me finish the game.

Rayman Legends involves Rayman (and his friends once you unlocked them) going into various paintings to rescue Teensies, some kind of weird blue creatures. You also have to beat the dark creatures who were responsible for imprisoning them. The levels are in 2D sidescrolling format but despite this, finding all the Teensies on one run through can be quite challenging.

Aside from the main levels, there are also bonus levels that require you to race through as quickly as possible, either killing enemies or being chased by a wall of fire. These are some of the more challenging aspects of the game and take a lot of practice to get right.

The cartoony graphics are in keeping with the fun nature of the game and to be fair to it, it doesn’t take itself too seriously. When you are racing through a castle jumping and sliding in rhythm to Black Betty, it can’t really get any better can it?

There are two other aspects to the game outside of the main painting levels. The first of these is a multiplayer mini-game called Kung Foot where you have to kick and punch a ball into an opponent’s net . The other consists of daily and weekly challenges which see you compete against the entire Rayman community for trophies. You unlock these as you play for a total of 4 challenges, two dailies and two weeklies.

A point on the music. Pushing for 100% completion of this one will have you listening to the in game music over and over again... however, I never started finding it irritating which is very strange because any other game that has over 70 hours of gameplay would have me spitting in fits of rage and reaching for the mute button.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

This takes a long time to 100% and will have you doing the challenges long after completing the main game. Most of the achievements can be encapsulated by striving for 100% completion of the main game objectives. This involves unlocking all the Barbarian Princesses, saving all the Teensies and reaching the Lum target in each level.

The hardest part of this is completing the invasion paintings. These are basically timed events and reaching the Lum targets in some of them is a real challenge. It does feel genuinely rewarding for getting through these as most of time I was within a second of failing when I finally succeeded.

Kung Foot has one achievement associated with it for winning one game. This can be done in local co-op so if you have two controllers it’s a real easy one.

Multiplayer

Now, I’ve categorised the challenges as multiplayer because despite you playing alone, you will need to have friends on your list to get some of the achievements and you have to beat a large portion of the community to get the others.

There are several types of challenges that you will be given. Some involve collecting as many Lums as possible without dying or getting as far as you can in some levels without dying. Others involve you having to get to a certain point as quickly as possible or collecting a set amount of Lums as quickly as possible.

Looking to the achievements themselves, you have to win a gold, silver and bronze cup from a challenge which is easy enough to do once. You also have to beat 30 of your friends’ times. However, if you have one friend on your list and they set a rubbish score on a challenge, you can simply replay the challenge over and over until you beat that same score thirty times. I’m not sure if this was the intention though but I haven’t seen any patches to change it while I was playing the game.

Now, after you have done all this you will most likely have two achievements left. One is for gathering 1 million Lums and the other is for reaching the final level of awesomeness. If you are going for the full 100%, you will get the Lums whilst striving towards awesomeness so I’ll focus on the last one.

Assuming you haven’t done any challenges after playing the main game and getting all the trophies there, you will need somewhere in the region of 1,800 points to reach the final level. You get points for winning cups which, after you have completed the game, are only available from the challenges. You get 1 point for bronze, 5 points for silver, 10 points for gold and a whopping 50 points for a diamond cup. As you can probably work out, this will take a while to do and that’s even before breaking down the percentages for obtaining the cups.

The top 90% of people who complete challenges on that day will earn a bronze. The top 50% will get silver; the top 20% gold and the top 1% will be awarded with the elusive diamond trophy. Even if you are amazingly awesome and get 14 diamonds for the daily challenges and 2 for the weekly ones that still only means 1,200 points for a week. That means you can complete the game in 1 and a half weeks if you are ridiculously good. I managed to get a really impressive one diamond trophy during my entire time playing the game which means I really suck. The more realistic goal is to aim for golds and even if you manage to get all golds, it will still take nearly three months to get the points required for the achievement. It took me 155 days to complete the entire game so I’m not quite at ‘all gold’ standard!

Downloadable Content – N/A

Rayman Legends was actually quite fun despite the fact I was railroaded into playing it. The challenges are one hell of a grind but they are at least varied which means you will more often than not have something different to do on it every day. I won’t be playing another Rayman game for a while now though – I’ve had more than my fair share!

Child of Light (Xbox ONE)

Another one of those discount purchases brought me face to face with the genre that got me seriously into gaming in the first place.

Child of Light is an RPG which follows the story of Aurora, an Austrian Princess who falls into a coma and enters the world of Lemuria which is being consumed by darkness because of some crazy evil queen. That’s all I will say about the story though as it’s the main driver and reason for playing the game.

Looks wise, it’s basically a cartoon fairytale with eerie music that matches your surroundings. It is great for creating the kind of immersion needed for such a story driven game. One more thing I will say about the story is that it goes back to the roots of RPGs where you have to read dialogue rather than it being given to you in over-the-top, unskippable cut scenes. This was a nice change of pace and actually got me to invest more in the characters and story that usual. The other unique thing about the story is that the dialogue is delivered completely in rhyme which must have been quite challenging considering its a twelve to fifteen hour game.

The gameplay consists of semi-random encounter combat where the enemies are visible in the game environment and can be avoided after a certain point in the game. This will be detriment though because when you get to the non-optional boss fights, you will get owned.

Levelling up consists of each individual character having their own skill tree which develops to gain new combat abilities and get better attributes. All characters gain experience from combat so you don’t need to worry about constantly switching party members to gain experience.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 27 Achievements

Only eight of the achievements are earned by following the story but the majority of them can be grabbed on your way to completing the game. The ones that aren’t storyline related are quite easily obtained with a few exceptions. Even the collectible achievements are very forgiving. For example, there are loads of chests scattered throughout the world but you only need to collect thirty of them for the achievement. In addition, you only need to collect 5 stardusts for another collectible achievement.

Completing the side quests is the only real time consuming thing away from the main story and for an RPG, it’s a short game so doing them is almost necessary to get your money’s worth. One of these brings back memories of Zelda as you have to take one item and trade it continuously until you get some gold. In Zelda it was a glass bottle but the principle is the same.

Of the 27 achievements, only two of them pose any real issues. The first of these involves having to interrupt three enemies at the same time. This can be quite frustrating as you have to use an ability that targets all three enemies and it has to hit when all three are in the interruption zone. This is exceptionally annoying if your ability only hits two of the enemies and random chance makes you miss the third one.

The last one I unlocked was the harder collectible achievement for getting all of the confessions. These are pieces of paper that flutter on the wind. There are only sixteen of them but the fact you have to collect all of them required me to do some playing after completing the main story. The world isn’t massive though so this wasn’t too onerous.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Child of Light offers a unique role playing game experience. The dialogue is well delivered and the combat is well structured. On a side note, I’m not sure if this was just many years of RPG experience but I never actually died on my playthrough and seemed to handle the boss fights at the correct level. This is brilliant as there was no need for me to level grind to get the most out of the story. It highlights how short the game is as I managed to get to the end only having fought 100 battles. That shouldn’t take anything away from it though.

Funk of Titans (Xbox ONE)

The Xbox Marketplace has become something of a drain on my wallet lately. There always seems to be about one-hundred 75% off offers going on every month at the moment. That, coupled with the fact that there are two free games per month means that the backlog is building quicker than I can clear it and with some sizeable gaming projects coming up (not to mention ones already under way) it looks like it will only get bigger.

Thankfully Funk of Titans, available at 75% off, provided a break from some of the larger projects and allowed me to rack up a quick 100%.

The premise of the game is basically a bizarre take on Greek mythology. You play as Apollo – a black guy with an Afro who is all about the Funk. Sadly other music types have invaded the realms of the Gods and you must make your way to the disco to show the Titans the true music power and that funk isn’t dead. That’s all well and good... but what type of game is Funk of Titans?

You could be forgiven for thinking it’s a music rhythm game and it is anything but. The genre description merely says Platformer which I suppose is true. As Apollo you have you have traverse through several 2D sidescrolling levels. You automatically move in the direction you are facing and have two abilities; jump and hit. As you jump and hit your way through levels you have to collect gold discs, which represent the Godly funk music, and the occasional Pegasus idol that allows you to play a bonus level riding some kind of Pegasus Hoover thing.

Honestly, it is one of the weirdest things I’ve ever played. And I’ve played Deadly Premonition. Apollo is joined by his father Zeus who is the spitting image of the Matrix’s Morpheus; Hercules who is basically Apollo’s biggest fan; and Athena who is a carbon copy of Aretha Franklin.

When you are not running through levels or talking to your entourage, you must fight grunts in the arena which is essentially the half way point or each of the three worlds. These fights consist of a 60 second quick time event which is nearly impossible to lose. At the end of each level, you have a dance off in the disco against the Titans representing Pop, Rap and Rock and once you basically dance off with them and banish the inferior music, the game is over and you have saved the heavenly realm. Oh year... Spoilers.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 21 Achievements

As stated above it is a really quick game to get through and could probably be done in less than five hours. You have to clear all the worlds completing all levels without dying and collecting all gold discs. You also have to collect the Pegasus idol from each level and this is only possible in some levels if you have purchased certain weapons from the shop. There are three weapons you need to get all the idols but once you have got them, the whole game is plain sailing.

There are two achievements that require a bit of after-game play. As well as completing the levels, Zeus/Morpheus will give you challenges to complete along the way. Chances are you will need to play a few more levels after fully clearing the game to get these and if I’m being really critical, this is a weakness but only because I don’t like having to continue playing when there is nothing new to do.

Also one of the challenges involves having to go quite far riding the Pegasus Hoover and this is really, really annoying because you will ride the Pegasus and beat this distance marker about five times before the challenge comes up and it doesn’t stack. These are my only complaints in what is a really simple game though.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While Funk of Titans is one of the weirdest games I’ve played, it’s certainly not the worst and provided a good few hours of fun. Once you’ve completed it though it doesn’t really offer any kind of replay value and although I didn’t mention this earlier, the music is sinfully infuriating!

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China (Xbox ONE)

Due to the fast moving nature of the Assassin’s Creed franchise, I wasn’t really that surprised to see another title on the marketplace shortly after the release of Unity and Rogue, however I was surprised it was this close and also surprised at the different nature of gameplay.

Chronicles China is a 2D side-scrolling assassin adventure that follows the story of Shao Jun, the last of the Chinese order of assassins who was trained by none other than the Italian master Ezio Auditore da Firenze. After the destruction of her order at the hands of a Templar Faction known as the Tigers, she goes on a revenge mission, side-scrolling her way through China, killing all Templars that come across her path. Or not, depending on how you play.

The story is encapsulated by cut scenes featuring still images and text summaries before each mission which are totally optional.

The music and graphics are really good and it does feel like Ubisoft put a lot of effort into getting the fine details right and this is also reflected in the gameplay. I came across next to no glitches during my time playing the game and all of the fuck-ups were down to my own ineptitude at playing.

The aim of the game is to get through a variety of different areas getting past guards to assassinate your target. There are three ways you can go about doing this. The easiest way (in my opinion) is to assassinate your way to the target. Killing people without being seen means that you get around the strangely difficult combat and dead people cannot see you. Another way would be to hack and slash your way through the guards but not only does this mean you will die a lot but it also scores the lowest in terms of getting to your goal.

Despite the two ways being the most fun, they are not the way the game wants you to play. The highest scoring way of playing the game involves getting past all the guards without being seen and not killing anyone. You are given four tools to use as distraction tactics to achieve this.

Other than sneaking past guards and killing people, there are a few levels that require you to run through them as fast as possible and you are scored on your time. Thankfully, these levels allow you to kill people without incurring any penalties.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 18 Achievements

A good game it may be but is it completable? Well, yes otherwise there wouldn’t be a review. The nature of the game means that there is a set way of getting through it so practice makes perfect in this regard.

There are several cumulative achievements which make it a requirement to play the game in its three different ways. There is an achievement for assassinations and slide assassinations. You have to get past 30 patrols without being seen and without killing anybody and you have to escape alerts after being seen 30 times. The most frustrating of these ones involves getting crossbow guards to shoot each other by using evade to move out of the way when they shoot. You have to do this 50 times. Luckily there is an area in sequence 8 where you can spam this out in about half an hour.

There are two collectible achievements; one for collecting all the animus shards (standard) and another for collecting all chests. There are also three level specific ones for clearing sequence 5 in under 5 minutes, completing the optional objective in sequence 9 and clearing sequence 11 without being seen. This last one is tricky but factors in to the last achievements I will mention.

As I mentioned above, if you go through each level without being seen or killing anyone, and completing all optional objectives, you will get the highest score possible. Of course, there is an achievement for doing every level like this. Despite the fact that video guides exist, this still requires a lot of patience and you can always find better ways of doing some sections.

After completing the game, there is the option, and two achievements, for playing the game through on New Game Plus Mode, however after you do the achievement for getting through the game without being seen, New Game Plus doesn’t offer any additional challenge and it is actually a breeze. You only have to make sure that you get 100 helix kills with the ability only available in New Game Plus and the 100% shouldn’t be too far away.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Overall it is a very well executed game. It doesn’t have a lot of diversity in controls but this is a good thing in my opinion. Chronicles China has a set game plan and it executes it very well.

Bully: Scholarship Edition

I bought this one a long time ago and really wanted to play it. Rockstar have a habit of creating games I like and I really wanted to dive in but for some reason, I kept putting it off like some kind of massive project that I didn’t want to start.

This was stupid because the game isn’t actually that long and, it terms of quality deliverance, it’s not actually that good either.

You play as Jimmy whatshisface, the new kid at a boarding school after apparently being expelled from every other school he has attended. He immediately makes sort of friends with that guy Gary who you can identify as a twat from the get go. You also meet Russell, the local meathead who is only capable of saying his own name.

The basic story follows Jimmy who, instead of being a bully as per the game title, actually makes friends with all the social groups and kisses all the girls (if you chose to play for the achievements that is.)

As well as following the main storyline, you have to attend classes much like any school. These are basically mini-games that involve you having to do some Math, Science, English, etc, related exercise that makes you reflect on how difficult real school is. Once you’ve done both classes, you have very little time to do anything else before curfew, especially as the town is a minute’s bike ride away. A minute translates to an hour in game and this is one of my big criticisms. It doesn’t feel like you have enough time to do anything because like every other 15 year old, as soon as the clock strikes 2am, you immediately pass out.

The visual graphics are what you would expect of a sandbox game at the time, however the music is proper get-on-your-tits annoying. It’s repetitive, irritating, more annoying and lots of other mean words. The trouble is volume is kind of required for a game with dialogue so you are forced to listen to it. You also give a lot of involuntary verbal taunts when you are roaming and these become very tiring after Jimmy has mugged off someone for the 700^th time.

My biggest bug bear in any game is the control system unless of course it works. Bully doesn’t. I don’t know who came up with the idea but the camera is the right stick and the movement is the left stick and the two sticks don’t interact which means manoeuvring Jimmy to go in the direct you want him to while looking somewhere else is nigh on impossible. Thankfully it wasn’t so horrifically shit that I couldn’t get used to it. If the game is unintentionally difficult to play, that’s a major fail.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 38 Achievements

There is nothing tragically hard about the Bully achievements but some of them are ridiculously monotonous. The most monotonous award goes to either of the distance covered achievements. There is one for the bike, the skateboard and for walking. Whichever one you don’t focus on will be left at the end. Mine was the bike and I was required to just ride around for ages until this unlocked. You have to complete 100km on the Bike which is ridiculous considering how small the sandbox is.

You also have to buy all the in game items of clothing. This costs more money that you get from completing all the missions and errands in the game meaning that you have to grind out the same lawn mowing or paper route mini-games until you have enough money.

Grinding pretty much sums up all of the achievements here. The worst one is the one for picking 50 flowers. You need a flower to kiss a girl. You can only carry ten flowers at a time. You have to kiss ten different girls using flowers before you can pick another ten flowers. Rinse and repeating this process is a pain in the ass. The biggest pain in the ass in the game. By far. There is also a little thing that is extra annoying if you don’t know about it. When you complete the art classes, girls won’t take flowers from you because they already like you. This means you can only give flowers to one boy after this which would make the process all the more annoying to complete.

The last achievement I unlocked was for 100% completion because generally speaking, everything else you have to do is a requirement. There are also lots of hidden requirements which make this achievement a real fuck ass to complete. Thankfully it’s not missable and there is enough help around to get everyone through it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I would say that once I got over the controls, I enjoyed Bully for about two days. It was my sheer bloody-mindedness that got me to the 100% completion and I can foresee no reason for me to revisit the game again.

Monopoly Family Fun Pack (Xbox ONE)

I bought this one following on from Monopoly on Xbox 360 and found it to be a more up to date and colourful version of the previous instalment. The Family Fun Pack also consists of two games; Monopoly Plus and Monopoly Deal. As both were relatively short, I’ve decided to review them together.

There’s not much else to add to my review of Monopoly regarding the gameplay in Monopoly Plus, although it’s worth pointing out the games flow a lot easier in this version and they have removed the Monopoly Man along with his annoying comments and the tendency for the interface to stop working. The board is also more interactive than before. You can roll the dice to a specific strength and when you throw them down, they can also knock over your playing piece, much like in real Monopoly.

Monopoly Deal is an online only version of the game based on the card game of the same name. You have to compete against up to 4 other players to be the first to collect three different sets of properties. There are other cards that you get to try and disrupt the other players using abilities which include stealing their completed sets, forcing them to trade properties and making them pay you, which can lead to getting their properties.

Being an online game, I found the connection times in Monopoly Deal to be pretty poor. It also timed out on me three or four times after giving me a countdown telling me it was my go... but then didn’t let me do anything.

Also the game doesn’t require communication as it’s always versus each other so I don’t understand why I even had the option to listen to some of the idiots out there who are doing other things while playing, like talking to their girlfriend, shouting at their kids, something that seemed like doing the laundry and.... EATING!!!! One thing I’ve learned is that people who eat crisps while playing in a group with their microphone on are the most sinfully annoying people in the world. It’s even more annoying when they try to talk through a mouthful of crisps.

Achievements – 2,000 Points – 30 Achievements

Monopoly Plus is a nice easy run for 1,000 points. There isn’t anything that requires playing over Xbox Live so that immediately rules out the random chance factor of other people which I will come on to later.

The fact that it isn’t online-capable makes getting a few achievements really easy. Winning a 6 player game in local multiplayer becomes a breeze, as well as getting a property for at least 10% less than its original value. It also makes completing two colour sets in one trade easy, which would probably be impossible if playing with real people.

The rest can be obtained by playing with two human controlled players and making the game last long enough to fulfil the criteria. There is one exception to this though.

‘Precocious’ was the last achievement I unlocked and it requires you to collect rent during your first turn. So basically you have to roll a number, land on a property, buy the property and then hope another player rolls the same number as you. It is completely luck based and even having 5 other computer players, I still had to replay at least five times to get it.

Multiplayer

So Monopoly Deal is the other side of the coin where all the achievements have to be earned over Xbox Live. The problem with pretty much all of these achievements is that they require you to go out of your way to get them. This is where the random chance factor comes in to play.

Firstly, you have to get a game with someone. This is fairly difficult even for what was a relatively new title. Then, you have to target an achievement. The first game I played I managed to get two achievements, one for being the first player to get a full set, and another for using a rent card on a full set. After that I had to target achievements.

Random chance allowed me to get ‘Helpful deal’ for completing two sets for me and an opponent by using Forced Deal. I got another for using Deal Breaker to win a game. It continues like this. You have to get specific cards and complete specific actions but this is all for nought if your opponent gets the cards to win the game.

Once you get down to one achievement, you are basically playing to lose in order to have the chance of satisfying the achievement conditions, meaning that for achievement hunters, there is next to no impetus to win a game other than two achievements that require you to win in a certain way.

I finally decided that enough was enough with six achievements to go and asked a friend (ukscoob) to help me out. It still took a while to get them just playing one game and we both had several opportunities to win the match and had to ignore them. Pointless.

Downloadable Content – N/A

So there it is. Nothing really new in Monopoly Plus and a horrible online experience in Monopoly Deal. Not recommended for achievement hunters who don’t like having to play against real people in luck based scenarios.  

Truth or Lies

I bought this one in the vain hope that it would be a fun party game, however I should have realised I was wrong for a number of reasons. Number 1; the game was released in 2010. Siri cannot understand what I say half the time, so how is some backwater Xbox game suppose to differentiate between me lying or telling the truth? Number 2; a quick scan of the internet would have revealed the game’s total shitiness.

There’s not a lot to the game. There are two game modes.

In party play, you get asked a set of generic questions depending on the suitability of players (kids, adults, cats, etc.) and you have to answer them truthfully to beat your opponents. This is surprisingly difficult because no matter how you answer the question, it is completely random whether you will register a truth or a lie. I could see this being particularly problematic for a young audience who don’t know that the game fails to actually register things properly and could lead to several fallings out.

The other mode, Hot Seat, gives the opportunity to be asked specific questions by your friends, however they are more likely to know if you are lying or telling the truth than the game.

There’s not really much else to the game, other than the obvious fact that you need a USB microphone to play it.

The only other annoyance, and it’s quite a big one, is that the narrative in the game feels the need to put in redundant comments based on the fact you registered a truth or a lie after every single fucking question. Just shut the fuck up for fuck’s sake!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 28 Achievements

It’s a fairly simple game achievements wise. Well, it would be if it was possible to actually lie and register a lie or tell the truth and register the truth. You know, the basic principles the game is built around but hey, we will persevere.

Most of the achievements are easy to get without this issue causing too many headaches or screaming, however there are always exceptions. Anything that requires you to do anything in a row is problematic. Registering three lies in a row was a particularly painful experience but the biggest challenge was trying to register a lie to every question in a Hot Seat round. I had to resort to finding deafeningly horrible sounds on Youtube to get this last achievement and put the game to bed.

A couple of other choice difficulties involved registering the highest scoring lie and highest scoring truth in a single round. Even with a dummy second player, this is still a challenge as you have no control over any of the answers given.

Another tricky one involves having to finish in the same placing for every round of a game. Again, this requires you to be consistent where the game mechanics don’t recognise you which could make getting this achievement a exercise in luck based frustration.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Put simply, it’s a horrible game that won’t give you any value in group play or solo play. The achievements are supposed to be easy but the game mechanics renders unlocking them more based on luck than skill. I can totally recommend not buying it and refusing to download it if it’s offered for free. It’s a total fuck ass.

Assassin's Creed: Rogue

The latest game in the Assassin’s Creed series was released on Xbox 360 while Assassin’s Creed Unity was doing the rounds on the One. Incidentally, Assassin’s Creed Rogue is the better game by far with less bugs, less France and a bigger boat. Well, okay, it has a boat whereas Unity does not.

The story follows the Assassin Shay Cormack, until he realises that Assassins are evil and decides to run away and eventually becomes a Templar. The most tragic thing about Shay though, is not his moral code but the fact that he is supposed to be Irish but, depending on what he is saying, this really does come and go. I’ve never met an Irish Assassin with a worse Irish accent.

Shay is on a quest to stop the assassins from killing innocent people whilst annoying everyone with his accent.  To do this, he essentially travels around the North Atlantic being a pirate. It’s all quite fun and combines the gameplay of Black Flag with... the looks of Black Flag and... okay, basically it’s an extension of Black Flag but Black Flag was pretty good.

The framing story, as will all Assassin’s Creed games involves you having to once again dick around in the offices of Abstergo trying to fix a server crash caused by the Assassins.

It doesn’t look at pretty as Black Flag was for me, probably because I played Black Flag on the One, and the game makes the graphical superiority of the next generation evident when put onto a screen. The sea shanties are back with some new ones and the classics which makes all the aimless sailing more enjoyable.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 46 Achievements

The thing I like most about the achievement list for this game is that they are all offline which technically means you can still finish the game ten years from now if you have a television that a 360 will work on.

Outside of the main game, there isn’t that much else you need go out of your way to do, however the game is big and will take you a long time to cover everything. There are a couple of things I had to grind out though.

You come across enemies known as stalkers at some point during the game. They are basically assassins trying to assassinate your Templar ass. They will attempt to air assassinate you but you can counter this (the first Templar in history to do so) and by doing so 15 times you will get an achievement. There is another one for counter killing 30 stalkers which goes into the same grinding category.

The most grind-tastic achievement is What’s Yours is Mine for looting 20 ship convoys. This is actually quite difficult. You can find the convoys by visiting taverns and getting intel, however the taverns will stop giving out locations after a while which leaves you alone to try and find them yourself. However, they don’t show up on the map very often. A few people figured out you can trigger spawns by fast travelling through a series of locations but I didn’t realise this until after I’d finished the game which meant that this was the last achievement I got and I had to work hard for it.

There are also four achievements for actually using cheats which was new. They aren’t too challenging or time consuming and all they do is have you repeat the same action a certain amount of times, some without dying. Not too tricky if you have a fully upgraded ship and character.

The last one I’ll mention is the one you get for completing all the legendary ship battles. I managed to do three of them but, try as I might, I couldn’t do the last one quickly. Instead of bashing my head against a brick wall for a week, I found out that you can win the battle using the invincibility cheat and unlock the achievement. You don’t get the rewards for completing them by doing it this way though – cheap yes, but effective nonetheless.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It took me around 35 hours to rack up all the achievements but on the whole, it was an enjoyable time. Assassin’s Creed Rogue still offers a similar experience to the first game. There is no reason to change the mechanics, just the location, and Rogue is a welcome addition to the franchise.

Need for Speed Rivals (Xbox ONE)

Not often does a game get so on my tits to have me screaming at the TV but Need for Speed Rivals managed to succeed where lots of other games have failed. I cannot believe the amount of crap that I had to put up with during the game but I’ll get to that later. First, the ridiculous storyline.

You are a racer or a cop in some bizarre area of the USA where there is a snowy mountain, arid plains and seaside resort within 5 miles drive of each other. Why they couldn’t have had multiple locations is a mystery. Ignoring geography for the insane, as a racer you have to... race and avoid getting arrested while some voiceover guy talks about the importance of freedom and that obviously breaking the law is a really good way to show ‘the man’ that he isn’t going to keep you down. This is fair play in a world where you can’t kill anyone but having head on collisions is fine.

As a cop you have to bust the racers. But there’s more to it than that. It seems to be a personal vendetta between the police and the street racers which is probably why the game is called ‘Rivals.’ But it kind of undermines the whole ‘we are going to arrest you for breaking the law’ when even the cops treat it like a rivalry. It’s not like gang rivals where you actively compete with each for fame and acclaim. The cops should be taking out the racers because it’s their job – not to prove a bizarre point.

Basically the premise is wank.

The music is a-typical of the genre in that it portrays all racing types as listening to music that would be more at home in most clubs. Because everyone that drives fast is an 18 to 30 type who saves all their money for the season in Ibiza apparently? The music has revealed a new found hatred of Bastille through that stupid Pompeii song. I’m not sure it’s called singing during the first minute or so. The other issue with the music is that it restarts whenever you do anything and it’s not very good at mixing up its soundtrack meaning you often get the first two minutes of a song, then another one, then back to previous song, then another song, then the first song again, then Bastille five times. You get the drift.

Graphically, it is actually good. The cars look great, the environment looks great. The only issues are what happens in the world.

I’m going to start with the Kinect functionality. Apparently NFS Rivals has a built in voice Kinect capability. Who knew? Also, who knows what the commands are? Apparently there are voice commands (or hand action commands, who knows) that make you: look behind you when turning a corner; change into panoramic view when being chased by several police cars; reduce the in-game quick menu to include completely useless options and my personal favourite, leave an event. I only discovered the Kinect had been my Achilles’ heel when I got booted from an event, restarted and started verbally complaining about how it had made me leave the event. Apparently ‘fuck you, you fucking game’, ‘fuck off’, ‘what the fuck just happened?’ and ‘leave event’ are all voice commands for the same thing. Also, the back of the box, which I’ve only just read today, states that Kinect voice is optional. But the where the fuck was the option to turn this off in the first place!? It certainly wasn’t given to me as an option at the start of the game and definitely wasn’t made clear. I only got around it by physically turning off my Kinect.

The next stuff is all just standard bollocks from a racing game. A couple of standout issues I had was that my racing car, even when cranked up to the maximum strength level, was still made of wafers compared to the other racers. Also, apparently, if I crashed into to a wall and was being reloaded onto the road, more than often than not, the game would face me in the wrong direction. Another thing is that while you are being reloaded onto the road, if you are hit by another car, you still take that damage which is just ridiculously unfair when you can’t do it to NPCs and the fact that you have a wafer car.

Another thing on the general concept of the game – it involves you having to connect to a server to play with other people. This is the default option. Despite this running off of an EA server, there is a host migration which can cause your game to be interrupted quite frequently. You can avoid this issue by playing in a private room and I found this actually made my gameplay experience better... however, it completely counters the point of the game in the first place.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

All that stuff above makes the game fantastically more difficult than it should be, however it is still 90% grind, 10% skill. You basically have to get to level 60 with both racer and cop factions, both of which are sinfully boring after you’ve gone through one set of Speed Walls.

Everything else can be done by playing through the game and you will get them by the time you’ve got to the end of the rest of the achievements with potentially three exceptions. The first of these involves banking 500,000 points in one go. This can be easily be done by replaying an interceptor event near a repair shop once you have high level Electrostatic Field and Shockwave. There are a few events set up like this so it’s not an issue.

The other two involve playing with a friend. You have to win a race against a friend and bust a friend. I had a friend who was kind enough to do this with me but considering that the whole game is built around an online community style of play, it’s surprising that there are only two achievements that require you to play with other players.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I wouldn’t recommend playing this game or starting it now. The back of the box warns: EA may retire online features, online services and downloadable content after 30 days notice posted on www.ea.com/1/service.updates. Considering the age of the game, this could happen soon and it would effectively mean the end of the game in its entirety. 

Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition

I had absolutely no intention of playing Minecraft but when I was between games, I thought I would pick it up and hammer it out in about an hour – that was the impression I was given by the really low difficulty that people seemed to indicate came with it. Plus, it only had 400 points as an arcade release so I also thought I wouldn’t have to review it. But thank you Mojang for proving me completely wrong.

Firstly, the premise. It’s one I don’t really understand. You are a blockheaded character in a block world and you have to harvest your environment by constantly punching things until they turn into smaller collectible blocks which you can then use to build other stuff, turn into other stuff or cook in a furnace to turn into other stuff. And all to do... nothing really. That’s it. There is no real end goal that you explore the world to find. There is the Ender Dragon but unless I missed something tragic during my time playing, it’s not clearly advertised as an end goal, even though I suppose it is? I don’t know, I guess I would need to be more invested in the lore in order to get it.

The music is the most horrendous aspect of the game by far. It’s a real ‘kill yourself’ theme. There is no get up and go to it. You are just aimlessly wandering around and the music makes you feel like there is no real reward to survival. Dying makes the music stop. Winning.

I don’t really have a lot else to say about the game. The mechanics are simple enough and anything that isn’t clear is well explained in the tutorial, I just don’t get it myself.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

So when I first started playing, I thought I would be done in five minutes and I would have been if I had a friend who was willing to help me. However, without a friend, it takes a very long time to get the On A Rail achievement as you have to collect enough resources to build 500m worth of train tracks. Unfortunately Iron doesn’t grow on trees and it takes a long time of exploring, building pickaxes, mining coal, mining iron ore, mining gold ore and mining redstone in order to build all of the materials required to craft a mine track of 500m. Oh, and you will need a mine cart as well.

There are 19 other achievements but they are all fairly straightforward and despite what some guides say, you can earn them all in the tutorial world.

There is not an achievement for killing the Ender Dragon in the original 20 Achievements

Downloadable Content

It’s a free DLC which will make people happy and it comes with 30 additional achievements for playing the game. There is more of the same stuff to do and chances are if you like Minecraft you have probably done it all already. However, there are a few ones that are problematic and I would probably still be playing the game if not for Deathdealer108 and Destroyer675000.

The first one is Sniper Duel which you get for killing a skeleton from 50 meters away. This is ridiculous. From 50 meters, you cannot even see the skeleton. This is where my friends come in to play. They have managed to capture a skeleton in a room and created a 50 meter long archery range. You had to aim somewhere in the sky in order to get your arrow to drop on to the skeleton and you had to do this twice with a normal bow to kill it. Doing it in the woods? Impossible. Another guide stated the best way to do it was to get 50 blocks of cobblestone and build a cobblestone tower directly below you after you find a skeleton, then simply shoot downwards.

Another one which I wouldn’t have got without help was the Zombie Doctor one. Deathdealer108 had managed to capture a zombie villager in a hut and had a convenient save slot and the right equipment to get the achievement, but I can imagine this would be a big ball ache trying to do it from scratch.

Selected others include killing the Ender Dragon and entering an End Portal. Joining someone who had already found the End Portal made this loads easier than it otherwise would have been.

The last one worth mentioning, as other people seem to have struggled with it, it is killing a Ghast with its own fireball. I think I got lucky with this. I used my potion of fire resistance and dived into some lava. The Ghast followed me in and I just hovered trying to swim out of the lava, level with the Ghast and just hit his fireballs until he died. This was also a lot easier than some of the videos I watched for it!

The last achievement I unlocked was for the playing the game for 100 in-game days which is the equivalent to 33 hours and 20 minutes worth of play. I did this after I finished my rail track and simply left it running over night for several nights until the achievement unlocked. I understand that this unlocked instantly after getting the DLC for most people as they had already invested this much time in it before. I’m not sure what they would have been doing though.

The only scenario in which I will play Minecraft again is if they release more DLC for it just to keep the 100%. I’m not one of these people who will invest time in it for ‘fun’ as I simply don’t see the ‘fun’ element. I can now officially say that after giving it a go.

Shadowrun

The reasons I’ve had for buying games over the years have been questionable at best. The most forgivable, in my opinion, are hungover purchases of which Shadowrun was one. I can’t remember the exact details but I think I got it as part of a 2 for £20 at a Gamestation sale at some point.

This was also before my time of checking out what the games were actually like as well. Had I known that 44 of 50 achievements could only be obtained by playing in live lobbies with random dickheads, I wouldn’t have bothered with it at all. Of course, I only realised this after I got the 6 offline achievements for training way back in 2011.

It wasn’t high on my ‘to play’ list by any means but then I saw one of my friends started playing it so I thought ‘why not?’ and joined him in several boosting sessions. Over the course of three months, I managed to hammer out the rest of the game.

Obviously playing with people all working towards the same achievements is very different from playing for real. Bearing in mind the game was released in 2007, I didn’t think people would actually still be playing it. I was wrong about that but as you can probably imagine, anyone still playing this game is ridiculous and will one-shot-kill you from 500 miles away just for sticking your shoulder out into the battlefield.

Now might be a good time to talk about the premise of Shadowrun. There are two factions, RNA and Lineage who are both fighting over some ancient relics. One faction has good intentions, the other has evil intentions. I can’t remember which way round it is but what it basically boils down to is a (up to) eight-versus-eight game of capture the flag. However, when playing online with the above mentioned dickheads, the idea of capture the flag goes out of the window and it’s basically a death match.

I wondered what was going on at one point when I actually scored with the relic only to be threatened with booting from the game! That’s a novel concept, I thought. Being kicked for playing by the rules. I looked it up online and apparently there is a thing going round saying how scoring with the relic doesn’t involve any skill and anyone that does it is a twat. I did read a rather good blog post saying how everyone that thinks this is basically a knob because if you can’t shoot someone carrying a glowing stick and they are unable to shoot you, then they are fucking shit and should probably find a different game to play.

Anyway, I play for achievements so how I go about doing that is the important bit, so here’s the lowdown on the majority of the achievements for Shadowrun and how you can get them with a minimum of nine friends.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

So we will kick off with the easy ones. There are six for completing the offline training which teaches you the basics of the controls and abilities you can use in Shadowrun. The rest of them require playing online in ranked matches and there are three major categories for the achievement types.

The first category is playing achievements. There are 4 of these for playing 100 games with each race and another for winning 100 games. This is no easy feat when you consider that each match is a first to six wins, one game can take up to half an hour not including loading screens. The boosting set up for this involves the person who is the dedicated server quitting out of the match. When this happens, it counts as a completed match and when you are on RNA, in certain game types, this also counts as a win. With 400 games to play, splitting the wins to get 100 is easily done and this is by far the quickest way of racking up these 5 badboys.

The second category is killing achievements. There are 17 of these to get, some for getting 100 kills for each weapon, (expect for the SMG for some bizarre reason) killing 100 of each race, (except humans for some bizarre reason) 2 for getting kills with Gust and Strangle magic abilities, another for getting 100 kills with Smartlink active and another one for inflicting 100 mortal wounds with the katana which basically means making someone bleed out by hitting them from behind. Fucking ridiculous to put into play legitimately but it’s the first of many that’s in this category.

The last category is the miscellaneous one and there are a few in here that are a worth a mention. The most obvious one is Godlike which you get for killing an entire team of six by yourself without taking any damage. How you are supposed to do this legitimately is beyond me. First you have to get all the kills without getting shot but you also get screwed over if anyone else on your team kills someone. Basically you have to be playing against six rabbits while being on the same team as a minimum of three cats to ensure that you get it. Not going to happen without boosting.

Another involves you having to die, get resurrected, have your resurrector get killed and then score with the artefact. Again, this is a very unlikely scenario to find yourself in playing in a live game and especially when you will be booted for scoring with the artefact.

Another feature of the game is that it lets you play with Windows Vista players as well and there are four achievements for playing with them. The problem is for three of them, it required certain members of our group to have PC copies of the game. It also took a long time to get up to 100 cross platform kills as we only really had one player per game round to score a kill on.

And last but not least is the Heavy Smoker achievement that had many people pulling their hair out over. The achievement description states that you have to ignore a lot of damage using smoke, but apparently it just means you have to use smoke for an hour. There is no tracking to know how much smoking you have done so it’s a shot in the dark as to where you are with it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I’m pleased I managed to get there with this one but I wouldn’t have been able to do it without the help of several over gamers out there. The most enjoyable part of boosting games is actually being able to have decent conversations and not deal with the dickheads mentioned above – so thanks to all for making this completion more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been.

The LEGO Movie Videogame

I know, I know, another Lego game. I was suckered into this one thinking it would be quick and easy when I saw that there were only 70 gold bricks. I was sort of right in some respects but very wrong in others. I didn’t pay for this one though, it was brought into my house by a child who was allowed to spend money for the first time. He could have got Skylander’s Trap Team but instead, I had to settle for a Lego game!

There’s not really a lot to say about the actual game. It follows the story of the movie to the letter, including cut scenes taken directly from the movie. The graphics are to be expected from a Lego game. The sound track is just as annoying as it was in the movie.

Gameplay mechanics introduce some new character traits but that is standard of any Lego game. It’s almost a pointless review in that that’s about all I have to say. There weren’t many annoying glitches and the bonus level wasn’t too onerous. Like I said above, there are only 70 gold bricks so compared to ones where there are in excess of 200, you would think it wouldn’t be too much like hard work. I would say it still takes 20 plus hours to complete though and it still suffers from the age old problem in that the levels are long and boring, you have to replay them to get everything and replaying them is a pain in the ass.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements

So what’s difficult about these? The short answer is not a lot. The only real problem I had was figuring out when I needed to use a certain character’s ability to get to the next area and Lego games often have a habit of making what you have to do as clear as mud.

In terms of all the achievements, you get 17 for just playing through the main story. The majority of the others are obtained while striving towards 100%. There are a few that are not which involve you having to do something with certain Lego characters.

There are three annoying achievements, two of which are very similar. There are two sections where you have to perform dance moves to Everything is Awesome which you are scored on depending on when you press the correct corresponding button. In order to get these achievements you have to score ‘Awesome’ for every move and a lot of the time this felt like it was the game’s opinion of what an awesome move was rather than my ability to time button presses correctly.

The other one is one that I regularly complain about. Collect 1,000,000,000 studs. What the fuck is the point in collecting all of this money when you have absolutely nothing to spend it on?? It’s not challenging, it is repetitive and annoying. If the Lego creators are trying to make their games less enjoyable, introducing shit like this is a good way of doing it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s a resounding meh experience. Again, it’s not the worst one I’ve played but not the best. I have Lego Batman 2 on my shelf but I need a long break from Lego games now so won’t be playing that for a while. I haven’t seen the kids play this Lego game for a while now come to think of it, so if it can’t hold the attention of 8 and 10 year olds, it’s clearly lacking something.

Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious (Xbox ONE)

To celebrate the 7^th edition in the fast and furious franchise, Forza decided that we needed to have a special edition of Forza Horizon 2. Now, normally I would play the games in order and as Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious technically comes after Forza Horison 2 I’ve had to break some internal rules to do this one.

The storyline follows some random racer dude as Ludacris takes him/her through missions stealing all the cars which, I imagine, are the ones used in the film as the final scene in the game has you drive them on to the plane which I’ve seen in the trailers (sadly, I have not watched the movie yet).

The visuals are actually stunning. It makes Forza 5 look bad in comparison. While, I’m on the subject of Forza 5, that game uses its in game music to blow its own trumpet over how good it is. Unfortunately, I didn’t think it was all that and the music just makes it seem really pretentious. It did look good though.

The music is typical of a racing game based on Fast and Furious in that it’s probably more at home in a Need for Speed game. Fortunately, I didn’t play the game long enough for this to become infuriating.

The gameplay itself was fairly simple for an open world racer. You drive around doing missions and the like and finding collectible boards, putting together skill chains... and that’s pretty much it. I honestly didn’t play the game long enough to find any major flaws but maybe that’s a flaw in itself. They have only really released it as an add-on to Forza Horizon 2 and I only racked up 3 hours and 43 minutes of play time. Maybe I will have more to say if I ever complete Forza Horizon 2?

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements.

Again there is not really a lot to say about getting these. Of the 25, 13 are awarded for playing through the main story. The rest involve having to do certain things over time but none that posed any real issues and certainly none that I had to go out of my to work for.

One that I thought would give me trouble was the Chain Reaction achievement for Banking a skill chain in excess of 50,000 points, however I ended up doing this during a mission with a lot of drifting anyway.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Another short review for a short game but I can’t really complain as it is an add-on which I paid, like, no money for.