Crimes and Punishments: Sherlock Holmes (Xbox ONE)

I ummed and arred about getting this one. The last Sherlock game was a raging disappointment in terms of characterisation. By the end of the game, having to listen to Sherlock talk was almost insufferable.

Thankfully Frogware seemed to have taken some kind of feedback (I’m sure it wasn’t mine) on board and the Sherlock present in this game is actually likeable. Sherlock and Watson actually have a relationship that could be considered friendship and there is a respect present that was horribly absent from the last game. It makes the characters far more relatable – in terms of Sherlock not being a cunt and Watson not having to absorb an abhorrent level of abuse that makes any relationship unbelievable.

The games itself is a point and click adventure game with several puzzle aspects thrown in. You take Sherlock through six cases that are stand-alone but also linked in some way. I think I managed to get half way through the first case before resorting to a guide though. Some of the connections you have to make are quite obscure.  I did dip in and out of the guide when I needed to but the game makes that cardinal sin of forcing you to follow the route it wants you take even if you figure out the answer anyway.

That said, the most intriguing and different element of the game is that it allows you to reach the wrong conclusion for the investigations. I found this to be an excellent addition to the game play mechanics as it added a non-linear element.

Another feature of the game play is that Sherlock has developed Spider-Sense which can be toggled on to allow him to... be Sherlock and notice stuff that others have missed. I understand it but it seems a bit strange to have to ‘activate’ Sherlock’s ability to be Sherlock.

Visually it offers more than its predecessors but that’s to be expected from the next generation. The music is in keeping with the time period for the game which is great and I also didn’t notice it as a negative in the background.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

With 25 achievements on offer and no DLC, it’s a relatively straightforward game. 10 of the achievements are related to the main story or completing the main case sequences. Of the remaining 15, there are 2 that you really have to go out of your way to get - getting all possible conclusions and achieving the maximum personality rating.

Finding all possible conclusions is the difficult one. You have to gather all evidence available to identify all of the wrong conclusions too so rushing to the right answer and accidentally pressing the wrong button can result in you needing to replay a case. It is an easy as pressing x instead of a to do this.

The maximum personality one is difficult in its vagueness. You have to pick the same options for all cases to either condemn or absolve the criminals. This isn’t as straight forward as clicking ‘condemn’ or ‘absolve’ at the end of a case as the possible outcomes aren’t that clearly labelled. Again, it’s another one where one miss-click will ruin your progress.

Downloadable Content – N/A

So to sum up it’s an easy and relatively quick completion with a guide but without a guide it would be quite ridiculous to find everything you need. That’s the glory of the game though – it’s as hard as you want to make it for yourself. I would recommend it over the others if anyone wanted to try out a Sherlock Holmes game.

Game of Throne: A Telltale Games Series

If you ever want to complete a game quickly don’t play a game with your partner. In fact, if you want to complete a game quickly, don’t play a TellTale game is probably better advice!

I love A Game of Thrones so when TellTale announced they were doing a game, I was all over it. That was back in December 2014 when Episode 1 was released. I finished Episode 6 in December 2015. A year. A year to complete a game that could be completed in an afternoon if started once all episodes were released (and not played with a partner). This also shows how far behind I am with my reviews, even more so than when I initially wrote this one.

Anyway, ridiculous release timescales aside, there is a game to play here... sort of. Another point and click adventure game but a game nonetheless.

When I say ‘play’, what I mean is ‘interactively watch.’ There is nothing really that needs doing as the game is basically one long quick time event. As with most TellTale games, there are several dialogue choices you can make which can lead to several different outcomes, however these aren’t really all that different (I did have to read up on endings online to find this out though).

Game of Thrones follows the story of the Northern house of the Forresters after the red wedding and how they are trying to survive in the Game of Thrones world with Ramsey Snow trying to have them destroyed in typical Ramsey Snow fashion. The whole game is story-driven so there is not really much more I will say about it. If you want to find out about the story and moral choices, play the game.

The game itself, to be frank and honest, is an absolute joke. If you are going to spend ages releasing episodes for your episodic game, the least you can do is make them crash free, glitch free and graphically acceptable. The game is none of these of these things which is more than disappointing. It’s unacceptable. I don’t understand what makes a developer think that they can get away with some rushed bollocks after promising the public they will deliver. It’s more the fault of Microsoft and Sony for allowing it but what do they care, they keep getting our money. Maybe it’s our fault? But how are we supposed to know it’s shit without paying for it?

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to say. Play the game through making any decision you want and don’t die. There is nothing that requires you to go off the beaten track to get anything extra. I didn’t have the patience or will to play through the game again to get a different ending and I doubt many others would either.

So once again, they could have expanded the play time with a more diverse achievement list but they chose not to. It feels more like they couldn’t be bothered to do it more than they thought the story was strong though. Laziness would be in keeping with the glitchtastic gameplay, freezes and graphical defects.

Downloadable Content

You have to pay for each episode but it’s not really DLC in the true sense. People still moaned about it though. You know the score with these games by now – if you don’t like it, don’t play them.

It may seem from the above that I hated the game. This isn’t true. I thought it okay considering all of the above but only okay. It’s no Walking Dead or Wolf Among Us, and I think they realise that seeing as they have released another 2 Walking Dead games. I sincerely doubt fans of this game will see a follow up until December 2018. With the last episode released in 2020.

Enchanted Arms

JPRGs used to be quality gaming experiences back in the day of Final Fantasy VII. So much so was my nostalgia for the genre that I simply had to get Enchanted Arms for the Xbox 360 2 years after it was released. Okay, so maybe I didn’t get it straight away but I did play it as soon as I got it.

However, once I got it and started playing it, I committed the RPG sin of getting stuck and then never playing it again. As time passed me by and my achievement hunter OCD kicked in 2011, I kept looking at it thinking it should be an easy finish. All I have to do is pick it up and start playing it again. But that involved revisiting the point at which I was stuck balls deep into a game I haven’t played for 5 years. Then 6 years. And so on. And I kept putting it off. Anyway, I eventually got my courage up and dived in to the game again this year.

It was as expected, I had no idea how the game worked anymore and spent the best part of two hours trying to get to grips with the control system again. Once I did, however, it all came flooding back to me and I was able to get out of the tight spot I was in and finish the game a mere 15 hours later - a small amount of time in JRPG world. That said, my total play time was double the average so I sucked this one up big time.

The story follows Atsuma who takes the Japanese-English conversion award for Most Annoying Protagonist by a country mile. He is whiney, stupid and never listens even when wiser characters are giving him advice. In fact, he goes on ignoring everyone right until the end of the game. I’ll cover this in the achievements section because it irritated the shit out of me.

Atsuma has got something wrong with his arm that means he is a secret destructive weapon of some kind. It could have been explained to me but the beginning of the game was so far away from me completing it that I can’t remember what was and wasn’t said – for more information on the story, use Google. But basically he goes on a quest to save his friend after the Ice Queen attacks his home town. Along the way he makes some new friends, makes some enemies and finds other people who are also annoying, but nothing compared to Atsuma.

The gameplay mainly focuses around a grid based combat system and uses random battle encounters as its way of dealing with combat. Random Battle Encounters is now archaic based on any new RPGs I’ve played recently where you can see the enemies in the field and chose to avoid them. That said, it worked for Lost Odyssey which was pretty good so no complaints about random battle encounters from me. The grid combat system makes more sense in general fighting principles. You take it in turns to move and then strike, which adds a much more tactical element than I’ve seen previously.

In addition to your main party of four humans, there are hundreds of golems to collect which will fight alongside you. This again makes the tactical possibilities and outcomes almost endless. This can have its own issues though as you can be spread quite thin and finding the best combinations to win fights could be time consuming in its self. That said, the combat is quite forgiving in that you can win the majority of fights by using the core of the main human characters.

The sound effects are annoying. I won’t say more than that. The world design is intricate but it’s not expansive. There is no world map and the exploration is limited to three dimensional planes which limits secret and optional location areas. They still built in the ultimate dungeon though but I will confess to not completing it – there wasn’t an achievement requirement me to do so.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

All of the achievements are earned by playing through the main story which is why they are all secret. However, there is one massive caveat to this. Toya, who is one of Atsuma’s friends from the beginning of the game, is being controlled by the Ice Queen. At the end of the game he will ask you a question. If you answer this question in a certain way, you will cut off the main story before you can get the last two achievements available to you if you don’t have back up save files.

So two pieces of advice; always have a back up save and follow Atsuma’s idiot personality to the end or else you will lose out on 30 hours of gameplay and have to replay the whole thing from scratch. You have been warned.

Downloadable –N/A

Enchanted Arms is a mediocre JPRG with irritating characters and questionable storyline. It doesn’t offer replay value but then again I can’t think of a JRPG that does other than Final Fantasy VII. This one won’t live long in the memory though and I’m glad to see the back of it.

Beyond Eyes (Xbox ONE)

This game popped up on a friend feed and looked like a really easy quick completion. Destiny is going nowhere fast mainly due to my apathy of not wanting to find other people to play with and Borderlands has only recently been completed so I thought I would treat myself to an easy 1,000 points. I was right on the easy but it came at a price.

Beyond Eyes follows the story of Rae, a ten year old girl who was blinded by fireworks. After the accident, she is visited by a cat called Nani (not the former Manchester United footballer) on a semi-regular basis. One day Nani stops showing up so it’s up to the blind ten year old to find out what happened to the cat... HANG ON, WHAT! A ten year old blind girl is allowed to go wandering off by herself because a cat that isn’t even hers stops showing up? Rae has got bigger issues than a missing stray. She has the most fucked up careless parents in the world.

Anyway, poor parenting aside, the gameplay sees you exploring the world as a blind girl does – using sounds to determine her surroundings. The more you explore the world, the more colour comes into it and more of your surroundings are revealed. You come across many things in the world which are only identified as you get close to them. It’s kind of effective as a gameplay mechanic however, some of the levels are really hard to explore... given the fact that Rae is blind. Chapter 5 is the most frustrating because the colour covers itself over after you have explored it making it nigh on impossible to work out which way you are meant to be going.

The sound effects are there to drive the game but given the fact that Rae is blind and it’s supposedly all you have, the music causes the game to become quite depressing before you finish it, despite its short length.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

With only 10 achievements I would have thought this was a quick one but the way I played meant that the first achievement I unlocked was for completing the story. The majority of the achievements are secret and involve having to do something in certain chapters with only two exceptions.

The first one that was a pain was finding everything’s true identity. It’s a pain because it’s quite easy to miss things in a game where the main character is blind and it does become time consuming exploring everywhere because Rae moves at about 0.05 miles per hour. The last thing I found was the dog, which carries its own achievement, and the reason was this was that I had to take the blind girl directly towards a dangerous unidentified snarling beast... only to find it’s a nice doggy. Bullshit. Why would I want the blind girl to have her face ripped off by a dog? For an achievement called Bravery of course!

The last one that was a semi-pain in the ass was finding all of the Nani experiences (and no, these are not experiences found on a football field). These relate to Rae’s apparent ability to sense where her cat friend has been previously and some of these are off the beaten track. This doesn’t really make any sense because you are following Nani so why would you need to look out of the way of the main path?

Downloadable Content – N/A

In summary, Beyond Eyes offers a short and unenjoyable gaming experience that doesn’t make any sense in terms of parental care or the real world. It becomes depressing after about an hour and is even more depressing come the end of the game. Zero replay value and in terms of content it’s not worth paying more than £10 for.

Borderlands

So Borderlands is one of the more critically acclaimed games I’ve managed to complete recently. Apparently loads of people love it because... reasons. I will go in to those reasons shortly, however if you want to save yourself the bother of reading the rest of this review, I thought it was a bag of wank. And the reason I’ve started the review this way is because I wish someone has said to me, ‘here you go, you can have the achievements. You don’t have to play the game.’ It would have saved me a lot of bother.

Firstly, the story. You are one of four generic, personalityless douchebags on a bus on some kind of search for some kind of treasure on the unoriginally named unoriginal planet, Pandora, which is basically a rip off of Mad Max or any other obligatory post apocalyptic fictional environment.

Apparently there is meant to be some kind of playful humour to the game and the cartoony look sort of tries to be back this up, but at the end of the day, no cartoon effects can numb the pain of gun metal grey and pooh brown environmental backdrops. If the ‘dialogue’ was meant to be humorous, it fails on an epic level. For a start, there isn’t enough of it. The game even tries to trick you into thinking there is a lot by showing two characters with actual spoken lines talking at the beginning of the game and then nothing of note for the next ten hours. I’m not even over-egging these two character’s involvement, it’s minimal.

My point is that the story doesn’t add any immersive value to the game. Anyone who loves Borderlands for the story or colourful characters needs to wake up by playing Saints Row.

Sound and graphics have a lot less bearing on my enjoyability with a game these days but the sound can really ruin it. Borderlands does okay in this area. The sound doesn’t take over, which is exactly want you want from the game that endeavours to keep you playing for over 60 hours, and it remains relative to the environment for the most part.

Now the gameplay... I’m not really sure how I can go about this without upsetting the entire world... I was expecting a game filling with lots of colourful enemies with a lot of variety while I go about killing them with a wide variety of weapons. The reality is you fight, in order: some guys; some dogs; some birds; some other guys; some weird aliens; more guys; more dogs. That’s it for the variety throughout the entire game with the exception of two boss battles. Whoppie.

In terms of the guns, this is just a fuckass of a game. Everything drops guns, even the birds and the dogs. However, none of them are any good. I really struggled to get genuine better weapons throughout the game and it even has a colour-coding system to tell you that some guns are better than others, except when they aren’t. Which is all the time. I had a orange weapon for ages despite the fact that it was worse than my green gun because it was rare and worthless, like I was expecting it to transform into some super enemy killing badass weapon just by holding on to it. I mean there is no way to improve or keep your favourite guns, they just become irrelevant and then get replaced by new similar ones.

Another note on the weapons is that they don’t have much variety either other than they might come with an elemental damage effect which you cannot unequip or change. They also have supposedly humorous names as well but at this point, I was just thinking that the game was up its own ass.

Achievements – 1,750 Points – 80 Achievements

Now one of the main concepts of Borderlands is the fact that it is meant to be played with others in a co-op setting but about 90% of the game and its achievements can be obtained through solo play which I’m all for. However, I think half the reason the world felt so empty was due to the fact that you are supposed to play it with others so that there would be at least one other person who isn’t a total psycho to keep you company.

I specifically targeted the co-op only achievements first to get them out of the way. There are only 7 out of the 80 achievements that actually require you to play with a co-op partner and of these six, only one of them requires you to play with other people and not use a second controller. Basically you have to play online with people to get it as it is a viral achievement for playing with the creators.

As I mentioned earlier there are four different characters you can choose to play as and each one of them comes with an achievement  to use their special ‘power’ to kill a certain amount of enemies. As you don’t get this skill until level five, it basically means you have to play the opening of the game four times. Not cool guys. Not cool.

There is one notable achievement out of the rest that’s more interesting for its name than anything else. If you succeed in jumping on the head of an enemy you will do a small amount of damage. If you succeed in killing said enemy, you will earn the achievement, ‘My Brother is an Italian Plumber,’ an obvious reference to the Super Mario franchise.

The rest of the achievements in the main can be obtained just by playing the game and completing every mission you come across it’s really hard not to be able to do this. Unfortunately, there is an achievement for attaining level 50 as part of the main game. You do however unlock the ability to play through the whole game again to get to level 50. This was an option I didn’t need to use though because of the copious amounts of DLC.

Downloadable Content

There’s a grand total of 4 DLCs to extend the Borderlands adventure which made my late playing of the game an advantage for getting the level 50 achievement.

The first of these is Borderlands’ own interpretation of the zombies theme that seems to be a requirement of every franchise for the last ten years. You visit Ned’s Zombie Island and have to complete a bunch of missions, the most painful of which sees you collecting zombie brains. You have to collect a total of 435 by shooting zombies in the head and collecting their brains; a concept that doesn’t make any sense. If you shoot them in head, surely you would destroy the brain?

The second sees you take on Mad Moxxi’s Underdome, a concept so Mad Max, it may as well have been called Thunderdome. This one is designed for four players to take on waves upon waves of enemies. Even if you do this the easy way (get to level 50 and then plug in a second controller with a level 1 character) it still takes in excess of two and a half hours to complete just one of the things you have to do three fucking times. It’s a grind-fest made worse by the fact that there is more attempted hilarity in the dialogue throughout which, after your first two and half hour run, will grate on you worse than a... cheese-grater.

The third instalment of the DLC is the one which attempted to fuck me over – The Secret Armory of General Knox. Playing online with others, something you are encouraged to do I might add, will cause the game to glitch if you end up with people using mods. At this point, every fucker out there uses mods. What happens is that it will add all missions you haven’t yet got to your mission list and if you haven’t completed all of the missions after finishing the main quest line, it makes it impossible to complete all the remaining missions in the DLC. There is a way around this though but you have to either break the graphics to get through the door or modify your save file to remove the glitched missions – something that is against Microsoft’s terms and conditions. Needless to say I was not fucking impressed that playing the game normally caused a requirement for me to stack 100 medikits against a door that won’t open in order to complete the game.

The fourth and final DLC, Claptrap’s New Robot Revolution, sees you go up against all the annoying Claptraps – complete with totally annoying dialogue – so they can annoy you while you kill them. This was actually pretty straight forward with the exception of the collectibles. You have to kill so many claptraps to get all of the rare drops from said claptraps of which there are 68 to collect. However, once you have collected say all of the oil cans, they will still continue to drop. It’s basically another 6 hours worth of grinding out kills to get all the items required which succeeds in making the game stop being fun, something that Gearbox have become experts at.

That above covers every area of Borderlands that pissed me off... pretty much the entire game after the first ten hours or so. I don’t get why people think it’s fun and I don’t understand why people still play it online doing the same thing over and over again, but to each their own I guess. This kind of rubbish certainly isn’t mine.

Life is Strange (Xbox ONE)

Life is Strange is an episodic game from Square Enix that focuses on the life of Maxine Caldwell as she experiences life at Blackwell Academy, an arts school for the criminally insane, wierdos who think taking pictures makes them the coolest people in the world and presumably a bunch of normal people who don’t feature in the game.

The story starts when Max (short for Maxine) finds out that she can rewind time for some reason. Kind of like the Butterfly Effect. She witnesses a shooting and rewinds time to undo the event. This sets in course a series of events that will change the face of the small insular world of Blackwell Academy as we know it.

It’s a game where the choices you make determine the outcome of certain aspects of the game. All I will say is that it’s worth playing and if you want to find out about the story I won’t ruin it here. However I will say this.

SquareEnix is a Japanese company and Blackwell Academy and the inhabitants of the surrounding area are American. Therefore, they have a very bizarre way of interacting with each other and a lot of the conversation revolves around being nice to people or being not so nice to people and quite often this leads to Max delivering some very fake dialogue. Fake to the point where I don’t buy in to what she is saying so I don’t think the other characters would either.

Other than that though, the game is well structured but a little slow in places. They do get the time travel aspect right though which is a very tricky thing to do.

The music in the game is massively popular with fans but from my perspective, it is a-typical of the depressing teenage years angst that seems to try to copy the OC. I found it depressing and overdone but I find that with most modern music so it’s probably a taste thing more than anything else.

Graphically it’s very pretty and a lot of work has gone into the facial expressions and vocal delivery. This makes sense considering it is a story driven, character focussed game and it’s nice to see developers focussing on the areas that make their game good.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 60 Achievements

There are five episodes in Life is Strange. I’m not going to consider the other four episodes as DLC and this seems to upset people that they have to pay for something over and above the first episode but there we go, to each their own.

There are 12 achievements per episode and thanks to ‘Collection Mode’ there is nothing that is missable. There are ten optional photos to take in each episode, each with an achievement (which makes sense as Max is a photography student) along with another for completing the episode and another for getting all of the optional photos.

Sometimes I would complain about the lack of variety in the achievements but for a story driven game with lots of different outcomes from your decisions, I think they have got this one right as it would take forever to cover all of the outcomes. That said, one of two achievements for different endings wouldn’t have hurt.

Downloadable Content – N/A (and whine all you like about it)

Life is Strange is a relaxing story-based game perfect for achievement hunters and casual gamers alike. There is some replay value once you’ve played it through just to see what different outcomes your decisions have, however personally I won’t be exploring these as I usually find the diversity is limited and overall, disappointing.

Pneuma: Breath of Life (Xbox ONE)

This was another offering from Games with Gold that also turned out to be a really quick completion. The game itself is supposed to be some kind of metaphor for the gamer within a game who has issues. I found the game to be underdeveloped, up its own ass and frankly annoying, all of which I will cover in the following paragraphs.

The game is undeveloped. There are six chapters in total which see you solve puzzles to progress. I’m citing ‘undeveloped’ as the key here because clearly their concept only gave them a few hours of casual content. And that’s without a guide to solve said puzzles. It’s short, too short even for my standards which is a shame because some of the puzzles were quite good. Others were fucktarded though so even 50% of the content they have isn’t worth the time it took to develop.

Up its own ass refers to the concept. I’ll all for innovative and original storytelling but to play a game as the subconscious of a gamer talking to itself about the world around it with the awareness of the fact the avatar is being controlled was just a step too far for my tastes. There’s breaking the fourth wall and then there is what Pneuma does – smashes the wall into little pieces and rams it down our throats.

On to the last subject – frankly annoying. As I’ve said, the ‘story’ is dictated to you by some guy who I can only imagine is the most annoying human being in existence. The narrative – and the content of the narrative for that that matter – is so chirpily delivered, that I found myself reaching towards the mute button after less than an hour of play time. The adjectives to really describe how irritating this narrative is have not been created yet so I won’t try and think of any new ones.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

There’s not much here to do either which is good I suppose considering the narrative comments I’ve made. Eight out of Eleven are obtained by completing the game – a task in itself.

Aside from completing the game, there are three additional puzzles to solve each with their own achievement. The most frustrating of these is the one which requires you to look at five paintings in order. This is annoying because it required you to replay chapters to do so. It feels like it’s only in the game to get you to play the game a little bit more than if you just set out to complete it. But can you really blame them when they have such little content to begin with?

Downloadable Content – N/A

As you can tell, I’m not a fan of Pneuma but I have seen some favourable reviews so it might be down to personal taste. Also I’ve seen some people describe the narrative as funny. To each their own I guess but I’m assuming they must have been able to enable subtitles to stick it out.

Lifeless Planet: Premier Edition (Xbox ONE)

Now the clue was really in the title with this one, but apparently I’m on a self destruction mission and need to play all of the most depressing games out there in a row. Lifeless Planet follows the story of the nameless American astronaut as he gets stranded on a... Lifeless Planet. The opening section of the game sees him search for the rest of his crew.

The sound effects and environments are as expected with the game title... lifeless. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing in this instance as it is completely in keeping with the theme of the game. It’s gun-metal grey and rust brown for a reason. Or in this case, faded yellow sand colour and dead plant brown but you get you drift.

The gameplay is where a game like this can really come alive. Unfortunately though it remains very lifeless. You walk around the game environment trying to solve puzzles involving rocks, lasers, the claaaaaaaaw and weird radiating power sources. You have a jetpack to assist you in making some jumps but you will spend most of the game slowly walking across desolate landscape after desolate landscape with no real way of knowing you are heading in the right direction.

I can’t tell you any more about the story without ruining what is a magical experience so I will leave it at that. However I will say this. I found the story aspect of the game to be the most enjoyable and it certainly made walking across the Lifeless Planet worth it.

The one thing that really fucked me off though, and I will cover this more in the achievement section, is the lazy development during the certain parts of the game. At one point I was casually walking through the environment after making a spectacular jump and then just disappeared through the floor my death. Not amused.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

Another relatively small achievement hall here but a few are worth mentioning. There are only three unmissable ones from playing the game from start to finish meaning that you have to go out of your way for the completion. Just how far out the way is the question though.

The achievements are structured in such a way that you will need to do two playthroughs to get the most out of the game. The reason for this is that there are achievements for dying in various ways... and another for completing the game without dying at all. You can now see why my earlier falling through the floor fucked me off. What a complete waste of time it would have been to have got that far with a flawless run and have the game screw me in the ass. Thankfully it didn’t happen on my flawless run.

To cover off the death achievements you have to get killed by something mysterious, catch on fire and fall down. There is another achievement for dying in every possible way but the others are secret. There’s not many though so shouldn’t prove too troublesome.

After you have successfully died, there is the small matter of collectibles. You have to gather 15 science samples from the environment. Most of these science samples are actually rocks from planet earth which doesn’t seem to indicate a lot of science in my opinion. There is another for collecting twenty documents along the way and you should get this through natural progression.

Now on to some of the most serious ones, which incidentally includes the first achievement I unlocked. At some point you will come across an abandoned town and to get the first pain in the ass achievement, you have to spend 15 minutes there. Doing fuck all. Just standing around. You can’t even pick your nose as you are in a spacesuit.

This brings me on nicely to the last achievement I unlocked, at the same time as completing the game without dying. You have to complete the game in under four hours. During my first playthough I started wandering if this was even possible but after doing a complete run through of all the platforming sections I was able to nail this at my first attempt.

There is another achievement for playing the game for ten hours but this gets covered from the two playthroughs. I overshot considerably as well because I spent a lot of my first playthough dicking around.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As I stated earlier it’s an enjoyable story but the gameplay is so ridiculously repetitive and samey that it made the second playthrough not fun despite the fact it was a speed run. I won’t revisit it and I don’t think it’s one for achievement hunters but it’s definitely worth a run through for the story.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Xbox ONE)

Games with Gold on Xbox has caused my game collection to swell at an uncontrollable level now that they are offering four games a month across both platforms. It’s got to the stage where I’m actually glad to see a game I already have come up just so I know I won’t be adding to my collection. Who turns down free games?

Valiant Hearts: the Great War is a good one to come up though as it is a relatively quick and painless completion – gaming wise anyway.

Valiant Hearts is a fictional recreation of the lives of several different people during World War I. World War I wasn’t the most happy time period to live through and Valiant Hearts accurately captures this in a very emotive story driven game. I did have to spread it out over a few days though because it was far too depressing to plough through in one sitting. Not only the story has this effect but also, the music fully supports the theme as well. I’m not saying it’s bad. In fact, it is very good that the game is so emotive.

Gameplay wise, it’s another 2D sidescroller (which I seem to playing a lot of at the moment – really get the most of the power in my Xbox One!) mixed with puzzle solving. It’s generally non-combat which is great considering it’s a war time game, a real change from the norm. You do occasionally have to bonk people on the head though.

In terms of controls it is very nearly flawless. There was only part I got stuck on when I had to line up this gun thing with an explosive to destroy a door. For some reason I simply could not get the gun to line up with what I needed to destroy. It was the only time the controls were an issue for me though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

Playing through the main story will get you nine achievements. There are another four for collecting the surprisingly tricky to find collectibles scattered throughout the game world. That leaves seven achievements for doing a load of random stuff which is also secret for the most part.

There is one for petting the dog who will no doubt win the ‘gaming animal of the year’ award and this is probably one of the easiest achievements in gaming history. The dog is seriously the best part of the game. I developed a more emotive attachment to the dog than any of the main characters so it was nice to see an achievement surrounding him.

There are certain sections of the game where you have to escape from the Germans in a car. For these sections the game switches from side scrolling to downward scrolling as you race away from your enemies. There is an achievement for completing any one of these sections without taking any damage. I managed this on a single playthrough but if you don’t, there is no need to panic as the game offers loadable checkpoints at the beginning of each chapter.

Of the other five only one was problematic. One of the characters is a nurse and you have to complete quick-time events to bandage up people who have been hurt during the fighting. In my opinion, the hardest achievement in the game is for completing the hardest Quicktime event at the end of the game. It took me several attempts to get this right.

The last achievement I unlocked was for collecting all the historical items and as I said at the beginning, some of these were really well hidden. Thankfully the game offers chapter select to pick up the ones you missed.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I enjoyed Valiant Hearts despite its depressing nature. It was nice to play a war game where I wasn’t required to blow off the heads of enemies for ten hours. Hopefully Ubisoft will work on more games like this in the future. 

Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands

This is actually my second journey through a Prince of Persia title on the Xbox 360. I completed the original release of the game before my reviews started and if my retrospective Assassin’s Creed reviews are anything to go by, it’s probably not worth revisiting. To be honest, I’m not even sure The Forgotten Sands will get a worthwhile review. I was recently sick and kept in bed for a few days and one of those days was used to complete this game in its entirety.

The Forgotten Sands was released at a similar time to the movie tie-in (which is named after the original Xbox release, Sands of Time, also known as ‘The Good One’) starring Jake Gylenhaal, so it’s no surprise that the Persian Prince you play as looks eerily similar to the guy in the movie posters.

The game itself follows the story of two brothers. There is ‘Brother who Doesn’t Listen’ and ‘Brother you Play as’. As with any Prince of Persia game, Sand is evil and ‘Brother who Doesn’t Listen’ releases evil sand to try and defend the kingdom. Naturally this backfires and evil sand kills everyone and turns ‘Brother who Doesn’t Listen’ power mad. It’s then up to ‘Brother you Play as’ to save the day. With hilarious consequences. But not really.

The story arch is basically ripped and taken from any other game in history where there are bad guys and good guys and to be honest it looks very tired. On the subject of looking tired the graphics use the standard grey/faded yellow filter which is also old and unoriginal but then again, I suppose it is a sand themed game. The same can also be said for the music. It uses what I swear is the same score from the previous game, maybe with a slight unnoticeable twist.

The gameplay is very questionable, especially when it comes to the controls. Generally speaking, Prince of Persia games have two main things you have to do. Number 1; climb stuff. Number 2; kill stuff. I have no problem with the kill stuff mechanics which worked fine but the climb stuff mechanics can fuck right off.

In order to traverse the environment, you have the ability to rewind time if you fuck up. If you have never played any other platformer, including previous Prince of Persia games, you will most likely be fine. However if you have played any other platformers, the controls in Forgotten Sands will make no sense. There is no jump button so you have to wall run up and across walls using the right trigger and, my memory is a little foggy, but I’m pretty sure the directional controls don’t actually do anything when you are free running and despite playing the game for several hours in row, I could not disengage my brain from the using the A button to try and jump in a given direction. This led to many deaths and in certain places, game over because I ran out of rewind power. I’m all for being original but don’t fuck with basic platforming principles. The controls appear to be different for the sake it, not because it makes sense.

Achievements - 1,000 Points – 40 Achievements

As I said, I finished this one in a day so there was no major challenges on offer, however there were some fiddly bits. The main issue with the game and its achievements is that there are no reloadable checkpoints and there are missable achievements because of this. Basically if you dive in and just go through the story then you will have to do multiple playthroughs. The joys of being ill was that I had time to read up on what I had to do before I started playing.

There are three bits which are missable. One is for collecting all of the sarcophagai scattered throughout the game. Some of these were quite hard to find and I had to use my rewind time ability a lot due to the shitty controls I mentioned earlier. The other two are for getting through both boss sections without taking damage. The one at the end of the game isn’t so much of an issue because you can reload this over and over again and continually finish the game, however the one in the middle I was glad to know about because I had to reload five or six times or purpose before I got the jumping pattern right. That’s right, this one is based on knowing what’s going to happen before it happens so it’s basically trial and error rather than skill which makes the whole not having reloadable checkpoints thing ridiculous.

Now, there is an argument that I perhaps shouldn’t have looked these things up before I started playing but the game is so sinfully boring that I couldn’t have faced another playthrough so I’m glad I did.

Aside from the missable achievements, there are quite a few for killing enemies in a lot of different ways. All of these can be obtained easily enough in the Enemy Tides Challenge with perhaps the exception of killing 50 enemies in a row without taking damage and definitely the exception of killing 20 enemies by kicking them off ledges. Again, these are two things you will need to know about before starting the game to avoid a second playthrough. The 50 enemies without taking damage can apparently be spammed at a point in the game where loads of bugs come flying out of the ground. I didn’t know about this though so actually killed 50 sand skeletons the hard way.

After completing the main story, the only thing I had left to do was complete the Enemy Tides challenge and get all my abilities. The Enemy Tides challenge is easy enough. You just have to fight through waves of enemies. The game records your best time for doing so.

After doing all of the above, I was annoyingly really far away from getting all the abilities. I had to rerun the Enemy Tides challenge 5 or 6 times to grind out the rest of the experience for the abilities I needed to buy. Judging by my excitement from the Saint’s Row the Third review about having a time balance with the achievements you can probably tell that this didn’t endear me towards the game.

And that was me done. Or so I thought. I had one secret achievement left that I didn’t know about. Like I said at the beginning I wasn’t one for multiple playthoughs but I was a little confused because the game had a difficulty level and there was no achievement for completing it on hard so I just went for it on easy to make my life... easier. In hindsight this was a mistake because the last achievement is for starting the game on normal but lowering it to easy once you have died. Incidentally, this was the one thing I didn’t look up before I started!

Downloadable Content – N/A

This game was a resounding ‘meh’ for me. I was glad to get it done it a day because any further play time would have been depressing. There is one more title in the Prince of Persia collection for playing the classic arcade version but I don’t think I’ll be touching that one for a while.

Saints Row: The Third

After the heavy shit that was Call of Duty 2 I fancied a bit of rest and relaxation or in other words a completely crazy gaming experience that couldn’t be further from reality. Saints Row: The Third delivers this with aplomb.

Now, I’m not one to play games out of order normally and this is no exception. I just simply haven’t finished the other Saints Rows because they have multiplayer elements that I have not done. Also, Saints Row: The Third was lucky to even make it into the console to start with. As you may have seen, companies that discontinue content that disable achievements are not getting on my Christmas list any time soon. However, Volition and Deep Silver have gone a ways to repairing some of the damage.

There in an achievement called Jumped In which became unobtainable when THQ when under back in 2013. Their website went offline and this was required to get the achievement. Deep Silver spent the best part of a year trying to apply a fix and they finally did it in September 2015. This was the catalyst that made me play the game.

On to the game itself, you play as the leader of the 3^rd Street Saints who looks...exactly how you want him or her to look. I spent the best part of my play time as a girl but more on that later. The story follows the standard story arch of ‘fall from grace.’ The Saints have everything. Then they lose it all because some other crime syndicate tries to take you out. Saint’s Row main stay, Johnny Gat (who looks completely different) gets taken out at the start and the rest of the game is basically about avenging him.

Lots of wacky shit happens along the way which is all in the name of fun... but after a while it starts to wear a little thin. Everything is over the top stupid to the point where the main character can be on TV talking about robbing and murdering like it’s cool and something to aspire to. I’m all for humour, and the first ten hours is pretty funny, but after that it goes too far in what it’s trying to do.

The same can be said of the soundtrack and unfortunately, Grand Theft Auto, has the edge here. There doesn’t appear to be very much in terms of variety either and it’s all very underwhelming and disappointing. It does have the edge over Sleeping Dogs though, as at least the Saints Row radio stations actually play different songs instead of glitching out and playing the same bit over and over.

The gameplay is the main area of excellence. It’s very fluid with combat and driving and they link together well. I don’t recall having any issues with navigation, however the game does suffer from the age old problem of sandboxes where lampposts are made of paper and trees will totally wreck your car.

As you play, you can improve your character with abilities and you can actually do this to the point where you can’t die or run out ammo. I’m not sure how I feel about this as it’s a reward for playing the game but it also removes any challenge from it. I was grateful for this towards the end though, especially when things got totally fucking ridiculous.

Achievements – 1,300 Points – 80 Achievements

There’s nothing I like more than a load of easy achievements that provide fun and variety to obtain. That’s what Saint’s Row the Third offers and it’s also very balanced. There is an achievement for playing for 30 hours and it’s possible to get all of the achievements in roughly this amount of time. No overplaying, no underplaying. This includes the DLC missions as well but more on that later.

The base game has the very standard 50 achievement haul. There are achievements for completing the main story, getting all the collectibles and completing all of the activities spread across the map. The activities are normally the hardest part of the Saints Row single player experience but these seem to have been dumbed down a bit. The hardest one I found was the trailblazing activity which involves racing through checkpoints while on fire (standard) but even the trickier course only took me three attempts once I got used to the direction I needed to go in.

A lot of the achievements rely on you having to get lots of money, for example upgrading all of your weapons, upgrading your stronghold, pimping out vehicles and the like.

Another one of the more bizarre achievements is for playing 2 hours as a male and 2 as a female. Obviously, when I started the game I created a male character and as soon as I realised there was an achievement for playing as both sexes, I went and got a sex change from the plastic surgeon and played the rest of the game as a woman. This also comes with its own issues because there is a limit to how many times I can hear the phrase, ‘I’m always on when it counts.’ Knowing exactly what this is referring to.

There is only really one missable achievement at the end of the first act as there is a multiple choice and an achievement for each option. A strategic save before can allow you to replay the mission to get the alternate achievement but considering it’s earliness in the game, there isn’t a huge time cost for missing it.

The last achievement I unlocked was for completing all the challenges which is a total ballache in reality. One of the challenges is for taking 50 hostages and to do this you need to steal a car with a passenger in it. You have to search the roads looking for these vehicles and 50 is very excessive and repetitive. Another is for destroying 30 Emus which are pieces of shit cars that are also few and far between. I got this one done by grabbing one and storing it in my garage and then continuously blowing it up – boring but the quickest way of doing it.

Downloadable Content

There are three different DLC extensions to the game and in my opinion only one of them is worth getting. I mentioned earlier that after you have played through the game, it starts to feel really silly. The DLCs take this to the next level as well.

Gangsta’s in Space I can only assume is a joke. The Saint’s as gang members gaining celebrity in itself is a ridiculous concept, but to actually have you play out a movie based on the Saints finding an alien and trying to do... something? I don’t know. It was so stupid I stopped paying attention.

 

The Trouble with Clones was equally as dumb. Some idiot supposedly creates a clone of Johnny Gat and you have to track him down and save him or something? Whilst drinking Saint’s Flow, the Saint’s Row custom energy drink. Bizarre and over the top so I didn’t find it at all funny.

 The only one worth playing is Genkibowl VII as it offers some semi-sensible fun, in Saint’s Row terms anyway. You basically have to play through variable instances of Professor Genki’s Super Ethical Reality Climax from the main game which just so happened to be one of the most fun parts.

So to sum up, Saint’s Row the Third offers 30 hours of play time of which about 15 to 20 will actually be enjoyable. If you are going for all achievements, the DLC will feel a like a poor addition. On the whole, I would say it is a solid seven out of ten and the average gamer will get to the end of the story before get bored/fucked off with the characters.

Call of Duty 2

For years now, my friends have been playing Call of Duty online and raving about how cool it is to play war in a fake environment, competing against arbitrary dickheads who hate losing. A quick search of the internet will reveal montages of rage quitters, screamers, and pathetic losers who will threaten to come beat you up for being better at a game than them. As per previous reviews, my sheer will to avoid said dickheads means I will more than likely never play an online Call of Duty title. This made Call of Duty 2 appear to be the only viable COD game for me to play.

Call of Duty 2 is the first Xbox 360 release of the series. It doesn’t have any online achievements, thus no need for me to play it online. During the campaign, you play as various soldiers of Russian, British and, of course, American descent as you re-enact some of the battles spanning World War II.

The thing I liked most about the game play is that a head shot actually counts as a fatal wound for your enemies even on the hardest difficulty. Gone are the heads of the future which can take 50 plus bullets without so much as a flinch from the enemy and I absolutely love it.

However, that said, and I will probably be criticised for saying this, the aiming mechanic is shit. I am playing a game, I don’t want a real re-enactment of World War II where my guns are shit because it’s World War II and the only way to fire an accurate shot is to get a sniper rifle or be close enough to the enemy to poke him in the eye.

There is not really much to the game outside of killing enemy soldiers and advancing to the next checkpoint. Sometimes you have to defend certain buildings when you are getting attacked from all directions and there are a few vehicle sections where you have to ride along defending the vehicle from enemies. These are some of the most frustrating bits of the game. There is also a separate tank level where you actually drive a tank but this was thankfully quite easy.

It’s an early game so the graphics aren’t breathtaking and the in-game environments are the tragic brown-grey that symbolise the era’s attempts at realism. Also I did find myself getting caught on every piece of the environment going which is painfully irritating in the middle of a gunfight. I don’t enjoy being a sitting duck in the slightest.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

As with many early releases, the game didn’t really play around too much with the achievement system which makes this section of the review relatively easy to write. There is no variety, no collectibles or no get x amount of headshots. You simply have to complete every mission. On the hardest difficulty.

I’m not going to pretend to be good at shooters. Far from it. If my job was to pick up downed allies and hold a control zone, fine. But killing loads of dudes is not my strong suit. Thankfully Call of Duty 2 recognises this your AI companions/cannon fodder, of which there is nearly always an unlimited amount, can do most of the killing and dying for you.

That said, the game is still an unforgiving bitch to complete on the hardest difficulty and I must have died at least seven-million times. Generally the checkpoints are forgiving enough but sometimes the game is just ridiculous. In most areas, there is a finite amount of enemies but sometimes, and on one level in particular, I had an enemy spawn in behind me and then instantly kill me from point blank range, stemming choruses of ‘fuck off, you fucking game.’

Downloadable Content – N/A

Eventually I bludgeoned my way through although my sense of perseverance took a serious hammering. Call of Duty 2 has not inspired me to step into the franchise. I may give another title another go in the future but it won’t be for several years I think.

Costume Quest 2 (Xbox ONE)

It’s always nice to play a theme game every now and then, especially around the time the theme is relevant. This was not the case for Costume Quest 2 as I played about it six weeks before Halloween but it was close enough to use this reference.

The story follows the four friends, Reynold, Wren, Lucy and Everett as they wear different costumes to combat the evil, and conveniently named, dentist Dr Orel B. White. Well, in reality, you only play as Wren and Reynold but Lucy and Everett are there too.

Basically Dr Orel travels back in time to stop Halloween from ever taking place. Because Reynold and Wren are kids and like candy, they embark on an epic quest through time to stop him and restore the timeline to its correct state. The plot is a little more in depth than that but that’s the overly complex gist.

Gameplay wise, it’s an RPG with turn based combat. You have several different costumes you can wear which all have different attacks and special abilities. There aren’t random encounters though which means you can avoid battles as much as you want. It’s advisable not to do this though as there are bosses which will require you to be a certain level before you fight them if you want to win.

The battle system itself is very basic. You play for most of the game with three characters; Wren Reynold and a ringer, and each character has their own assigned button to attack. They have one attack and one special attack and that’s all. You can also use Creepy Treat Cards to get special bonuses. You learn different ways to attack throughout the game but it doesn’t get more complicated than that.

When you are not fighting the minions of darkness, you are wandering around the game environment collecting candies and solving basic puzzles. My biggest criticism of the game is how many times my character got stuck on various items in the environment. It was slightly irritating but didn’t happen enough to ruin my day.

The music is in keeping with the Halloween theme but like any RPG, after a while it becomes very grating.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 18 Achievements

Everything can be done in one playthrough which can take up to 10 hours so generally it’s a relatively short completion. Most of these will be gained through natural gameplay but there are a few exceptions and one missable achievement.

The first exception, and one I ground out early on, is for using the clown horn 1,000 times. It’s pretty unlikely that you will find 1,000 reasons to use the clown horn, so when I read this I thought I would get it out of the way. Stick on the kettle and hit the B button 980 odd times. All in the name of fun.

Another one that you will probably do but may not is for upgrading three costumes. Upgrading costumes does make the game easier but if you choose not to buy them or don’t save the candy it could be easily overlooked.

The two optional costumes, Wolfman and the Solar System, take some finding and you have to go off the track to get them but it’s not too hard, you just need to know what to do. 

The missable achievement is called Hardcorn Mode and is for playing the whole game with the Candy Corn costume equipped.  You can be forgiven for doing what I did and immediately de-equipping it because Candy Corn can’t attack. It also delays battles because it simply has to pull out a one-liner instead of attacking which is a wee bit annoying. Anyway, I played for five hours before I realised this was even an achievement. My bad.

The last achievement I got was for using all of the Creepy Treat Cards in battle and I had to grind this out after finishing the game. Pretty boring, but again completely my own fault for not preparing by reading ahead.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Costume Quest 2 is fairly straightforward completion that doesn’t take too long. It was also quite enjoyable with a light-hearted story that didn’t take itself too seriously. Definitely a solid seven out of ten, gameplay environment issues aside.

Lego Batman 2 DC Super Heroes

I know I said I was off Lego Games indefinitely but this one was on my shelf and despite all my previous reviews, somehow I convinced myself that it would be another quick completion. Once again I was wrong but it’s my own stupid fault isn’t it.

 

The story follows Batman and Robin as they pursue the Joker and other villains across Gotham City. Then Superman shows up, gets a blowy from Robin, and makes Batman completely redundant as a hero. As much as I hate Superman – let’s face it, he’s a cheesy bellend – all of his powers mean that you can complete levels really easily when you control him and they are a bit of a struggle (more in terms of getting around than anything else) when you play as Batman.

 

The game play structure is just irritating now. Only certain characters can do certain things and Robin and Batman can wear certain suits to give them certain abilities, which seems to be the unique mechanic the game is built around. Despite being call DC Superheroes, other than Superman, the others only really show up towards the end and you spend most of the game playing as Batman and Robin. Kind of a misleading title.

 

The most shitty aspect of the game, and this will come as a real surprise, is the vehicles. The vehicles handle like winged elephants. This is compounded by the fact that you have to use the vehicles to race through checkpoints. Trying to turn the batwing thing to face in the right direction is such a ballache that any hope of racing through checkpoints quickly evaporates into thin air.

 

Other than the vehicles, there is a freeroaming open world bit where you can fly around as Superman and other characters with flying abilities. Flying them around is the biggest pile of garbage ever. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they learned the system they used here was balls  and rectified it by the time they got round to doing Lego Marvel Super Heroes. Basically, you have to use a direction indicator and hold down a button like an accelerator in a car. This makes collecting gold bricks – probably the main point of the open world – an episode in mind destroying frustration when every time you want to move forward an inch, your character just flies off in a different direction. That’s not even an exaggeration.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 37 Achievements

 

The last achievement I unlocked was getting 100% which is pretty damn good considering all the bullshit Lego games make you go through outside of that requirement. I’ve learnt from my time in the Lego universe and simply saved my studs to buy the stud multipliers first. This essentially eradicates the needless grind for cash to unlock certain characters to do things in free play mode.

 

I know I moan about this every time but having to play boring story levels twice to get everything is stupid. It would be better if when you play in freeplay, you can simply explore the entire level from the get go without having to do all the bits to get to the next section of the level. It would make the ‘second playthrough’ a lot more bearable.

 

Aside from striving to the 100% mark, something which takes a mind numbing 30 hours to do if you are rushing, there are some really stupid customary Lego game achievements. The most notable of this is for climbing to the top of Wayne Tower as a female character on the back of a gorilla.

 

There are also the generic ‘ kill the super villain with the right super hero’ and the now a-typical ‘you can play this game with a friend so we’ve put in an achievement for doing it’ achievements. It’s all very meh by this point.

 

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

It might be that I’m fed up with Lego games but I didn’t enjoy Lego Batman 2. The open world felt more like a grind than an enjoyable exploring experience. It’s a shame really because a lot of work appears to have gone into it but the game play frustrations make it feel rushed before being fully tested. I may give some of the next gen Lego a go and will only revert back to the 360 if I get really stuck for completions.