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.

Another World: 20th Anniversary Edition (Xbox ONE)

This one turned out to be a trip down memory lane that I wasn’t even aware of. I have a vague memory from when I was very young of watching my brothers play this one. I remember watching constant deaths coming from the very first worm thing and then when you get past that, getting killed by the gorilla thing because you jumped on the rope first. I remember the cage as well, but that’s about it.

It was obviously before my time so I did a little research into the original. It was released in 1991 for the Atari and Amiga and the 20^th Anniversary Edition was originally released in 2011. This port for Xbox One made its way into our lives in June 2014 – and on to my completion list as of April 2015.

It is about as true to the original game as possible and I think that’s important for a game from the early nineties. There are too many remakes in this day and age, along with all of the carbon copy games coming out at the moment, and Another World serves as a reminder of what computer games used to be – fucking hard.

Now a lot of people would probably disagree with me there. Another World only has the one difficulty setting after all, but imagine playing this when it was out originally without the aid of the internet to support you - it would have been an absolute ballache. I gave it my best go but it is essentially an unforgiving trial and error game where you have to make your way through various life or death situations.

At one point, you get a gun which can not only shoot enemies but also put up a force field to protect you from the other enemies. Using the shield and shooting enemies is a fine art, especially during one point where you have two dudes shooting at you and you have to erect barrier after barrier while trying to kill them. I think I must have died 792 times and that’s just that one bit.

The pacing of the game is a bit weird but works. For the first three quarters of the game it is quite slow-paced as you solve problems and work your way around taking out aliens one at a time. Then, as if from nowhere, it’s all guns blazing for the finale as you shoot your way through bad guys to get to the end...

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

Now, due to the modern day helping hands, getting all the achievements is actually not too taxing and according to my post-game statistics, my total play time was an hour and thirty-eight minutes.

I also did fuck all else compared to the rest of the gaming population but I did go for a speed completion rather than a nostalgic playthrough. This became especially prevalent after the 792 deaths mentioned above.

I stress this because the majority of the achievements can be obtained from a standard playthrough. There are no collectibles so it’s just a run from ‘a’ to ‘b’. Due to short nature of the game, it’s hard to class any of them as missable however, there are a few that you have to deviate from the standard course of action to get.

The first one comes right near the beginning when you escape from the cage I’ve mentioned at the beginning. If you hang around, which kind of goes against the whole breaking-out-of-prison thing, a UFO will appear giving you the achievement ‘Secret UFO.’

Another one comes slightly after this where you have to go in the wrong direction in a lift (again, slightly against the whole escaping-from-prison thing) and look out of the window.

The final one comes just before the bit where I continually died. You have to fall to your death from the highest possible height. It is technically missable but if you are anything like you me, you will do this just for shits or out of sheer frustration from dying over and over... and over again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It was great to play a game I witnessed from my childhood but I probably won’t be playing this one again. The problem with trial and error games, especially ones from the 90s, is that they very rarely have different ways to get past the problems you face.

Night at the Museum 2

At the moment I am trying to spread out some longer, more difficult games with some quick wins. Night at the Museum 2 falls nicely into the second category. It was another game I was able to complete in the space of a weekend which is always a feel-good moment for achievement hunters.

I was left a little on the back foot with the storyline as I’ve never seen the movie. I enjoyed the first one though so I thought how bad can it be? You basically follow Ben Stiller as he travels around various museums meeting characters from the first movie and some new ones from this adventure. The ultimate goal is to stop Amunrah’s evil twin wax brother from using the tablet to bring other shit to life in order to take over the world or something.

The sound effects and graphics left a lot to be desired if I’m honest. The game was out in 2009 and looks like it wasn’t prepared for the 360 graphics engine – unforgivable nearly 4 years after the console was released.

Gameplay is a tricky one. The mechanics are very simple and you are introduced to all of them in one go at the start. You then have to recollect all the special skills as you travel through the museums. It is very possible to die which in a way, makes the game technically more difficult than Prey, but it is still a fairly troubleless completion. This is good as none of my deaths were actually down to gameplay glitches.

There are a few vehicle sections which were the most frustrating aspect of the game. To be honest I’m not sure why games even bother with obligatory vehicle sections. When most games put them in, they seem to be counterintuitive to the control system already in place. Night at the Museum 2 is no exception to this but they weren’t so bad as to give me nightmares. The only major drama was controlling the Lunar Lander.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 37 Achievements

There really in no drama here. You have to play through the game once and pick up all the collectibles to get 34 of the achievements and the collectibles are not that hard to find. I didn’t even have to use a guide and that says a lot.

One of the remaining three is for bagging all of the other achievements so effectively an auto-unlock. There is another for an optional puzzle in one of the museums and you remember the Lunar Lander I mentioned earlier? Well you have to complete that vehicle section without taking x amount of damage which was only a minor frustration but it still took me an extra attempt to get it – which subsequently unlocked the last achievement for getting all the others.

Downloadable Content – N/A

So that’s it. A simple game with easy achievements. End of. The only problem is the lack of replay value but that’s not really important from a 2009 game that I’m playing in 2015.

Unmechanical: Extended Edition (Xbox ONE)

The joys of the Xbox ONE is that there are a lot of new indie games that are being developed and made easily available on the marketplace. Even better is that there is now a requirement for all these games to carry 1,000 points worth of achievements. In a way this is a pain in the ass for me as it means that I have to review everything I play (I’ve sidestepped a lot of Arcade titles although to date I’ve only completed 11 games in the Arcade...).

Anyway, Unmechanical follows the story of a little helicopter robot thing that falls down a hole and has to escape from some kind of weird underground place with other strange robots and stuff. It’s a puzzle game where you have to solve kinetic problems to navigate through various rooms to get to the exit.

The puzzles themselves are clever but not unsolvable to my simple brain. This meant that I actually got a sense of achievement from completing it without having to look up anything on the internet – a rare occurrence.

The environments are intricately designed but it is still clear which items you can use and which items are just background. The music is equally fitting in its eeriness but doesn’t become depressing as the game itself is very short.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

As far as the achievements go, the majority require you to do something extra in addition to just playing through the storyline and this is another great advantage of the game being so short. If you miss one, it’s not a massive headache to go back and get them.

One such achievement requires you to throw a piece of coal into the air so that it gets some airtime before landing in its target. These are exactly the kind of achievements that add to the gaming experience. You should play through it once to complete it and then play through it again to do all the weird stuff to get the achievements.

There are also alternate endings for the extended episode, and an achievement for each, but again because of the short length of the game, this doesn’t provide any irritation whatsoever.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite all the good things I’ve said, it unfortunately has little replay value as with all puzzle games. Once you’ve solved them, they’re solved and you can’t really forget how they work to make the game a new experience.

I found the game to be some light enjoyment in the wake of many very serious games with no personality. The Xbox ONE marketplace is littered with such gems and I will be looking out for them going forward.

Prey

I have to admit, it’s a bit late in the day to be writing this one. I started the game way back in 2007 but then stopped for some reason. Anyway, I’ve recently been reviewing how to bring up my achievement completion percentage and only having 7 out of the 44 achievements for this one made it a prime candidate.

After about five minutes of playing I realised why I stopped. The game is horrendously boring and the main protagonist is about as likeable as a fungal nail infection. And just as interesting.

The game follows Tommy, a Native American who doesn’t like being a Native American and continues to whinge his guts up about the fact he hates his Native American heritage despite having conversations with his dead grandfather, gaining the reincarnated spirit of his dead pet bird and gaining the ability to walk in the spirit world. Yeah. Being a Native American sucks balls.

What happens is that Tommy is chilling in some dead end bar with literally no locals, debating whether or not he is going to tell the pixellated barmaid whether or he loves her. The next thing you know, he is being beamed aboard an alien spaceship full of aliens that are very deadly and experimenting on humans. Despite this completely out of the ordinary situation, Tommy continues to whine about his Native American heritage and just wants to get Jen (above referenced love interest) off of the spaceship. Never mind the fact that aliens have invaded the world. That happens most weekends.

Tommy continues to be oblivious to the incredible things that are happening to him and is solely focussed on rescuing Jen from the spaceship, despite the fact that Tommy has the ability to use every single alien weapon going without any training and he doesn’t question this either. The aliens are killing every human they can find and Tommy is focused on the one thing that is important to him. Basically, he is a selfish dick.

There’s not really much to say about the sound or visuals other than that they are unexceptional and do not add any value to the game.

Now, the gameplay. The gameplay is where Prey wins more points for monotonous mediocrity. You start the game with a wrench and gain about six other weapons. You walk though different areas of the spaceship which all look very similar. There are vehicle sections which seem to have been put in because it was during the time when every game needed a vehicle section. The most confusing bit though, is the fact that the game mechanics mean you can’t die after the first 20 minutes of the game, removing any challenge or need to play the game carefully. This also negates the need for a difficulty level but they still put a hard mode for some reason. In hard mode, there are no health pickups which means you will be ‘killed’ more but just have to play the resurrection mini-game more often than on normal.

The whole thing is very underwhelming and has encouraged me to never to listen to one of my friend’s gaming recommendations again.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

Of the 44 achievements, 23 of them can be gained from slogging through the game on Normal. You can then, and only then, get another from playing it through on the already mentioned and completely redundant Cherokee difficulty mode. Not only is it not really that much more difficult, but it doesn’t unlock until you have already completed the game on Normal which just adds to the monotonous repetitiveness required to get to that 100% mark.

There are another three achievements for achieving certain things on the in game arcade machines. These include playing blackjack, poker and a strange Cherokee version of Pac-Man. These are not particularly difficult but they are secret and missable. Brilliant.

Multiplayer

After you’ve done all that, that just leaves the 17 multiplayer achievements. These can be broken down into three categories; playing ranked matches (and you have to win one), getting kills and getting kills with certain weapons. The strange, and forgiving, thing about these is that you can get Deathmatch kills and Team Deathmatch kills simply by playing Team Deathmatch. You need to get 250 kills in each so it’s quite easy to grind this out and along with getting the kills with each weapon it doesn’t take too long.

The only reason that the achievements for the multiplayer are easy though, is due to the fact that there is literally no online activity for this game anymore. This means that the only way to do it is to find someone else to help you. Or use two 360 consoles. Another forgiving thing about the multiplayer is that you can get the achievements with just two players.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Prey was not an enjoyable experience for me. It’s a very forgettable first person shooter experience but that’s probably easy for me to say as first person shooters aren’t really my forte. It was praised for its original concept which I believe relates to the spirit walking aspect but it wasn’t very well utilised and in my opinion, felt very flat. It has no replay value as the multiplayer is non-existent.

Assassin's Creed Unity (Xbox ONE)

Another chapter in the Assassin’s Creed universe sees us move away from the America and journey across the Atlantic to France. We play as Arno Dorian, a French guy who has a bit of a thing for his prepubescent friend, Elise.

The premise is that Arno is partly responsible for his mentor’s death and thus starts a journey of revenge to avenge the death he is responsible for. As expected, he gets caught up in a battle between Templars and Assassins and ends up joining the Assassins. I would say spoiler alert but it’s not called Templar’s Creed now is it.

Visually I thought the game was very good. The city is very nicely developed and intricately put together and the free-running is much improved from the disaster that is known as Assassin’s Creed III. You cannot climb all buildings though, which is frustrating but a little more realistic that being able to climb every building going.

The sound effects are an issue for me. Unity is a long game to play and after a while all sounds effects become annoying. However, several members of the community have pointed out that Unity is quite broken and I have to say, both the audio and visual components appear to suffer from lack of development. The first half, give or take, is pretty good (hence my comments above) but after that you get audio loop issues, graphical problems and cut scenes not displaying properly at certain points. That said, I didn’t think the issues were half as bad as people made them out to be.

The gameplay, on the whole, was pretty good too. Other than the occasional fuck up with Arno’s ability to behave normally, it was pretty clear sailing. I am basing this on over 60 hours of gameplay so it’s relative, but I will still point out the issues I had with it.

Having to reset my console because the character gets caught on scenery is simply unacceptable. I only had to do it once but there were several other times where it was touch and go. At certain times it was like Arno did not know what to do when he was in certain positions. It seems to be a problem with his programming in that the developers didn’t account for graphical black holes near some of their objects. My Arno got stuck on several occasions and even feel through the floor once (which leads to de-syncing and failing the mission) but this was at least better that having to manually reset because I can’t move.

The main bugbear I have with the actual gameplay is the shooting mechanic. To be blunt, it’s shit. To be more technical, they appear to have tried to make it simple but by doing so, have removed about 80% of its functionality. And I have taken the shooting tutorial, thank you very much.

Achievements – 1,300 Points – 57 Achievements

As with all Assassin’s Creed games, Unity has its own set of over-the-top collectibles. This time it’s chests and cockades for the win. There are so many – 128 Cockades and 294 Chests to be exact. This is not as bad as the first Assassin’s Creed, but still excessive, especially when you factor in that accessing the majority of the chests requires you to play a lock picking game. Also, there is no real reward for getting them all. Your hideout generates more than enough income to make getting all required equipment a breeze.

The other side of the main game achievements involves having to fully level your character and complete all of the co-op missions. I’ll cover the co-op missions in a bit, but for now I want to focus on how much of a ball-ache it was getting all of the other achievements.

Levelling up your Arno is a pain because, aside from all of the main mission sync points you can get, you also have to collect some points which are randomly scattered around the co-op missions. This can be a real pain because they don’t show up on the map, which is all well and good but when you are supposed to be working with other people to achieve a goal, moseying off for your own gain kind of defeats the point. That said, all of the sync points can be gained from starting private co-op missions by yourself, so they built in a way around a set up that was pointless to begin with.

Aside from that, let’s talk about glitched achievements. I cannot accept that now the Xbox One has achievement progress tracking (which I love) and all games are required to have 1,000 Gamerscore, that they would allow a game to fuck up its achievements. However, when trying to get the Know-It-All achievement for completing all training sessions, the achievement did not unlock after I completed them all. There is no argument for me missing one as you get a little tick next to the session you have completed. I looked it up online and found that when Ubisoft attempted to patch out a load of shitty issues from the release, they undid all of the progress gamers had made towards this achievement. This meant I was made to play though all the rubbish I had already done. Not impressed.

The rest of the game is fairly self-explanatory and not too taxing. Even the 100% sync of the main story missions was easier than previous games. One thing that does puzzle me though, is that you are not required to complete all of the side missions to get all achievements. I would have thought a 100% sync achievement would have been a guaranteed requirement.

Multiplayer

I’ve got to hand it to a developer that attempts to make a game’s multiplayer function redundant, especially when they were nearly successful in doing so. Unity has done away with Wolfpack and versus modes and only has the co-op missions and heists. There is an achievement for completing them all and all bar one of them can be done easily in solo play. There are also two achievements that required other players; one for getting 10 sync kills and another for reviving a co-op partner, all of which I managed to do without the assistance of friends (rare for me).

The biggest fuck-up with the multiplayer is that some missions require all four players to leave a certain area for the mission to complete. This poses a real problem as it opens the game up for total fucking pricks who will just stand around in the escape area to prevent the mission from completing. It happened to me on three separate occasions. During one of these occasions, I was actually able to witness a verbal spat between two such clowns and when one of the antagonistic motherfuckers quit out of the mission, the other one left the area. It was one of the most pathetic online displays I’ve seen (but I haven’t played a lot of CoD so that’s probably not saying much.)

Downloadable Content

There is one DLC for Unity and it’s the kind that I like that expands the single player story. As Arno, you visit the town of Franciade, gain a Guillotine Gun and try to uncover some more shit to do with the First Civilisation and stop Napoleon from being a massive dick whilst saving little boys and crying. While I like single player expansions, Dead Kings doesn’t offer anything new other than a new sequence and more collectibles. The DLC does require you to get 100% sync though, which is again strange when the main game doesn’t. Oh, it also comes with another two single player co-op missions to complete.

I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed Unity apparently more than most of the gaming community who still revere it as a buggy piece of crap. I admit that the co-op missions were poor in terms of loading and quality delivery and the story line got lazy towards the end but it’s a solid seven out of ten and I think that’s the best we can expect from the current generation of triple-A titles.

Toy Story Mania

I have to confess, a few games were becoming a grind and I hadn’t had a completion for a while. Toy Story Mania was able to remedy that quite quickly though.

The game is basically a rail shooter that is advertised as being ‘Better with Kinect’ and I do not doubt this for a second. The pointer moves very slowly with a controller and I certainly felt that if I was armed with an actual gun (or variant), I would have been able to hit the targets a lot quicker.

That said, getting all of the achievements quickly did not present a problem with just a controller and due to the simple nature of the gameplay, it kept the glitches to a minimum which is something else to be grateful for.

Visually, it’s what you’d expect from a game set in the Toy Story Universe – everything looks like CGI cartoons except in 2D as the targets are cardboard cut-outs. There are five different shooting galleries to play in, each belonging to certain Toy Story characters.

Backing sound effects are typically awful to the point of wanting to turn it off. Having to listen to both Buzz and Woody give you time updates in exactly the same way become monotonous and makes you hate the sound of their voices. This is becoming more and more apparent with games – it’s like listening to the same CD over and over again. You used to love all the songs, but now the thought of listening to them makes you want to vomit. Toy Story Mania is a slight exception to that in that I wanted to vomit after only three hours of playing.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 49 Achievements

Generally speaking, each level has its own achievement where you have to do something specific and most of them can be cheesed. For example, the Bombs Away achievement for not hitting any bombs in Planetary Slash n’ Defense can be done by not slashing anything at all.

There is one level-specific achievement which could be slightly painful. The Crack Shot achievement requires you hit two targets at once by shooting another target into them and while I managed to get this on my first attempt (which doesn’t happen a lot, believe me.) I can see how luck can play a massive part in actually getting this one.

In addition to the level specific achievements, there are achievements relating to the power ups, mostly for scoring 20 hits while they are active.

There are two relating to avoiding and getting hit by pies and another pointless co-op one which can be done by plugging in a second controller and doing nothing with it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Toy Story Mania is a quick completion but it’s not really that fun. I can’t comment on the Kinect functionality, but hopefully it adds some replay value that is sadly lacking from playing it with a controller.

Trivial Pursuit LIVE! (Xbox ONE)

Trivial Pursuit LIVE! is a simply trivia game brought to you by American developers, Ubisoft San Francisco. The most notable aspect of the game, that is annoying from the outset, is the location selection. It always raises my suspicions when a game has an option to select English (UK) and English (USA) from as the first thing you do and in this instance, I was completely right. I always select UK because that’s where I am from so I do not understand why I had an Arts and Literature question come up regarding Archie and Jughead and nothing at all about the Beano or Dandy.

What is the point of having a specific English option if you are not going to have relevant questions? It sure as hell wasn’t for a language choice as I had to listen to the most irritating American* ‘quiz show host’ voice. If I have to hear the words, ‘Needa wedge, wanna wedge, gotta get a wedge,’ ever again I will most likely need mental help (if I don’t already.)

*A quick note that I do not find the American accent generally annoying. I’m sure if it had been a British voice, I would have been irritated by that stupid phrase regardless.

The game consists of either a three or five round game show depending on how much time you have on your hands. There are several different types of round. Quickstarter – a round where there are five questions and each subsequent question is worth double the points of the previous question. All of my friends complained about this. Grab Bag – A round where you have a grid of sixteen answers and only eight of them are correct and it’s completely stupid because as soon as you select a wrong answer you cannot continue even if there are correct answers remaining. Close Call – a round where you have five correct answers and the best answer gets the most points, which is really stupid because the person who is last always goes first. There are also blitz versions of the last two rounds where you all go at the same time rather than taking it in turns. Switchagories – a round where a players gets to select one of two categories and they get double points for getting the answer right. This is a horrible round for many reasons. If I had a choice between History and Arts and Leisure it’s like asking me to chose between wanking with sandpaper and sawing my foot off. What is the point of giving me an advantage for answering a question in two of my worst categories? Oh right, there isn’t one.

The final round gives you two options and a statement and you have to select which of the options the statement applies to. Do this correctly five times (once if you are playing multiplayer with a single controller) and you get a wedge. The winner is the person who gets six wedges. Wedges are awarded for achieving various score landmarks throughout the game up to a maximum of four. You then get a wedge for each final round question session you get right.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

The achievements are not too hard for this game. The invention of Google makes general knowledge a piece of piss, especially when you can pause the game to look stuff up. However, several people complained about the answers to some of the questions but I’m at an age now where if they are using the internet to look stuff up, the chances are that they looked up the wrong stuff, assumed it was right and just pissed their pants about their own inability to utilise a search function to find the correct information.

There are six different categories for trivial pursuit and an achievement for answering 50 questions correctly in each category. There is one for answering every question correctly throughout the game, which can obviously be a problem if you get Close Call. The easiest way to do this one is to play a four player human multiplayer game as that eliminates the luck element from all rounds and leaves you free to answer away. You can also cover off Greedy Grabber by doing this if you get Grab Bag. Simply answer incorrectly with the three non-you-players leaving you free to try and select all eight correct answers in the grid.

All of the rest can be achieved on your way to winning 25 Gameshows which takes a lot longer that I thought it would, even by just playing three round games. The reason for this is that there is a lot of unskippable bullshit between rounds with stat attacks and updates on who is 1^st, 2^nd 3^rd or 4^th. After. Every. Single. Round. This is never amusing but becomes insufferable after game the 2^nd game you play.

You get this along the way but I thought I would mention some glitches with the Sense of Entitlement achievement. You basically unlock titles as you go along. There is a title for most things like answering all questions in a round correctly, answering 50 science and nature questions correctly, etc. However I managed to unlock the title for 50 questions for Geography but not 30 questions?? It’s clearly glitched and stopped counting correct answers for whatever reason. It didn’t stop me unlock the achievement though thank god.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Trivial Pursuit LIVE! is fun to play with friends but not by yourself. The achievements are a slog more than anything and I won’t be revisiting alone again.

Sleeping Dogs

Shamefully, it took me a long while between purchasing this game and playing it as it did get a lot of good reviews and, more importantly, was recommended to me by several people.

Sleeping Dogs follows the story of Wei Chen, an undercover cop going balls deep in the triad in order to destroy the drug trade in Hong Kong. He has at his disposal; the ability to kick anyone’s ass; the ability to carry just one gun at a time; awesome driving skills and more mojo than Austin Powers.

Everyone seems to think that Wei is on the verge of joining to triad and chucking in the cop scene despite your in-game actions of making loads of drug busts, killing rival gang members and avoiding hurting members of the public.

To be honest, about half Wei through the game, I wouldn’t have blamed Wei if he had gone triad. All the police types seem to hate him and think he is a loose cannon and all the Triads give you nothing but praise. But Wei is a man of his word and sees his undercover stuff through to the end, partly because one of the Tried dudes knobbed his sister or something.

I don’t want to focus too much on the story because it is very much worth playing the game through to see this for yourself. I found it very immersive and Wei is a likable chap in some ways.

Aside from his police colleagues, Wei also manages to generate a lot of dislike from the female population of Hong Kong. Basically he will meet a girl, bang her, meet another girl, bang her and so on. Some girls completely disappear from the game, others get kidnapped and sold and some find out about each other and give Wei a hard time. I thought he was a lad until one mission where you have to follow one of your supposed girlfriends because someone reckons she is cheating on you. When he confronts her, she is like, ‘So what? You are slagging it with that tramp from that other place.’ And Wei is like, ‘Baby that was for work.’ And I was like, ‘No Wei did you just use that excuse!’

The game itself it a face-paced version of Grand Theft Auto and there is nothing wrong at all with that. The open world is well designed and also not overly large. I mean, it’s large enough for you to spend a considerable amount of time exploring but no so big that will resent having to drive to the next town. In addition, you can explore nearly the entire map from the outset which is great.

A lot of work has gone into the visuals and the various locations are intricately designed. That said a lot of the scenery can be problematic when exploring and I found I had a lot of issues with invisible walls when trying to get the collectibles. But it does look nice.

Sound effects can be broken down into two categories; voiceovers and music. The voiceovers are really good. The actors seem to buy in and invest in the story which is great and just adds to the immersive nature of the game. On the flip side, the music is atrocious. It’s not so much that the focus is on J-Pop (and everything sounds very Japanese), it’s the fact that it is almost completely broken. In the latter stages of the game, I found that the radio got stuck and was repeating the same 30 seconds of one song over and over again. As you can imagine, this was mind-destroying.

As it’s a Grand Theft Auto clone, there are several elements to the game play. The first one you are introduced to is free-running. The game opens with an action sequence at the end of which Wei gets arrested. You have to run through a market place, jumping over things, sliding under things, jumping over walls, jumping through windows and it is very effective for setting up the kind of gaming experience on offer.

There are also the standard driving and shooting elements but the way these combine is great for a game, but less so for realism. Wei can use a submachine while driving, looking behind him and is accurate enough to shoot out tyres at over 500 metres away as well as shooting guys off of motorcycles. Seriously cool – but not realistic. Not that it’s a major issue of course.

Aside from the GTA gameplay elements, Sleeping Dogs offers a greatly improved hand-to-hand combat experience. You can teach Wei new moves at the Dojo making him an unbeatable Bruce Lee style physical specimen. Once you have learned all of his moves, gunplay becomes obsolete and you can destroy everyone with your fists of fury.

The one major complaint I have about the game is the Wei in which the camera reacts when I’m trying to do intricate driving. For some reason the game assumes that when I touch the accelerator, I want to be looking straight ahead of me despite the fact I had just manually adjusted the camera to look in the direction I actually wanted to be looking in. It was so frustrating. Bad camera angles really kill a game for me. Fortunately, Sleeping Dogs was very good aside from this.

Achievements – 1,225 Points – 59 Achievements

Sleeping Dogs offers a lot of variety on the achievement front. The main story only accounts for eight of them leaving lots of scope. Outside of the main story, you can collect the vast majority by completing the skills. One of the overarching achievements is for getting gold in all your skills and this is where it gets a bit drawn out for the achievement hunters.

One of the gold medals is given for driving for thirty minutes at maximum speed. You cannot get a car capable of doing the maximum speed until later in the game (some crazy people may argue against this but it’s not easy) and the only way you can realistically drive for thirty minutes is to do laps of the freeway. It will more than likely be the last thing you do.

Another thing that is slightly tricky and repetitive is the Ultimate Fighter achievement. This requires you to get all of the Triad upgrades and this can only realistically be done by replaying the story missions, once Wei has learned more skills, to maximise your Triad scores.

There was nothing majorly difficult with the remainder of the game, it’s just time consuming -  but an enjoyable time consuming experience is fine with me.

Downloadable Content

Sleeping Dogs has two DLCs on offer which give you an extended playing experience. The Year of the Snake shows Wei take on some weird cultists as a beat cop. The achievements here are not too bad, the most taxing being finding all the evidence bags.

Nightmare in North Point is just plain bizarre. Supposedly, it’s a Halloween style level where everyone in North Point turns into Zombies and you have to take down the reincarnated spirit of some guy who was turned into catfood. It’s not in keeping with the rest of the game and I completely switched off from this.

This DLC comes with an extra five skills to get gold awards with and once again will have you driving around for an inexcusable amount of time looking for enemies to kill. The game had stopped being fun at this point, mainly due to the nature of the DLC than anything.

Despite the Nightmare in North Point DLC, I had a good time with Sleeping Dogs. I thought it was a very well executed game that didn’t try to do too much and achieved the right balance between story and gameplay. It tried to shoot itself in the foot with its DLC offerings and the camera behaviour while driving but only than that it’ a solid game.