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.