Knight Squad

With the whole Xbox Games with Gold programme, it’s now possible to get 4 free games a month. Needless to say, this creates a massive backlog of unplayed games behind buying games you actually want to play and games you are currently playing. I’ve actually been quite choosy with these on the 360 but I’ve pretty much taken every free game on the Xbox One. One of which was Knight Squad.

I had seen a few of my friends take this one on and it looked to be quite a quick completion. I was right and managed to earn all the achievements in an afternoon.

Knight Squad is an Arena Battle Game where you play as a knight fighting against other knights in various arenas with a set of game specific rules. You pick up lots of different power ups to take the fight to the other knights in said arenas.

In addition to fighting other knights there is also a challenge mode where you fight against different creatures which are reminiscent of the boss fights from the classic Zelda games. This was by far the most single player fun you can have in the game and my only disappointment was that there weren’t more of these challenge levels.

The game is cartoon in design and is viewed from the top down. You fight in a 2D field as well which is a change of pace from most modern games. There’s not a lot else to say about the way it looks. It doesn’t pull any punches and doesn’t try to do more than it needs to which is no criticism.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

Considering it only has 15 achievements, surprisingly some of them are worth 0 points. This feels a bit pointless but whatever, I’ll run with it.

The achievements themselves are either quick hits where you have to meet certain criteria, challenge mode related or grindy, but obviously not too grindy otherwise it would have taken more than an afternoon to do.

I kicked off my 100% completion quest by getting three achievements relating to power ups. Some of the power ups get progressively better if you pick up a certain amount of the same types in a row. There is one for getting a unicorn by getting horse power-ups; another for running at the highest speed by collection feet power-ups and another for controlling 8 minions at once which means you have to pick up two minion pick-ups at once. There is also another one for throwing a boomerang and then not catching it again for 10 seconds which can be done in the same way on the right level.

These are all really easy as you can set the AI to the lowest difficulty level or, if you have two controllers, play against 1 other human player and idle. Using a second controller is the easiest way to get all of the non-challenge related achievements with the exception of getting 1,000 kills.

Speaking of using a second controller, it’s the easiest way to get the Crystal Prospector and Master Excavator for destroying 25 Crystals in crystal rush mode and for destroying 5,000 walls respectively.

Playing through Challenge Mode was the best bit but surprisingly most of these achievements are the zero pointers. You only get points for completing the last three which doesn’t make a lot of sense. Why not have the achievements be worth less but have all challenges earn Gamerscore?

After all that is done, there should be three left for getting 1,000 kills, getting exterminator for killing seven other knights quickly and another one for getting three kills with one shot with the laser gun. The first two can be hammered out in a Juggernaught match on The Bunker level. The laser gun one is arguably the hardest at it relies on luck rather than skill but it can be obtained most easily during a Gladiator match on Melee King. Gladiator is essentially king of the hill which means all the other knights will be in a similar position making it easier to score three kills.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Knight Squad was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. It reminded me a lot of classic Zelda from the SNES era, especially the challenge modes. I like that despite having a strong focus on versus gameplay, you can earn all the achievements without multiplayer as well - massive plus points. The biggest disappointment was the shortness of challenge mode. Some extra awesome boss fights would have been a welcome addition as well as adding extra challenge.

Assassin's Creed Syndicate

So this is probably the newest game I’ve played in a very long time and the first of my Christmas 2015 collection to hit the completed list (this shows how far behind I am with reviews.)

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate shows that sometimes developers do actually listen to people that buy their games. There is no multiplayer that, in my opinion, has blighted the franchise since Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. Blighted might be harsh but it’s certainly an unnecessary addition to the franchise.

Syndicate follows the story of Jacob and Evie Frye, two already established assassins who travel to London to thwart the plans of Crawford Starrick, a Templar Grand Master who is after the Shroud, another piece of Eden. There is also some modern world framing but you are required to a lot less during these sections that you were in Rogue and Black Flag, let alone the stuff you had to do with Desmond Miles. They are basically just cut scenes now. I’m not sure if this is a good thing. I kind of enjoyed having an interaction with the modern world but I guess not everyone else felt the same.

It’s graphically and musically excellent, I have to say. The only real criticism here is that the generic guards repeat their lines a lot and they are all overly aggressive for no real reason. While this isn’t so much of an issue for the first few hours, as with all Assassin’s Creeds if you are playing it to completion, you will be playing until it’s insufferable.

The gameplay is also strong. Another piece of feedback on franchise seems to be that having to climb buildings all the time was boring after you’ve done it 100 times. Quite early on in the game you are given a grappling hook which makes getting across the city and up the tallest buildings a piece of cake. It real terms, this cuts at least 10 hours off of a full completion, if not more.

However, it does do the standard Assassin’s Creed thing of introducing three or four new items to kill people with, which is all very blah. The most notable thing about the game, and the franchise in general, is that we have almost moved completely away from the stealth element of being an Assassin. If you are spotted by guards, in most circumstances you can kill your way out of trouble and once there is a big pile of corpses, no one seems to care. And can you blame them? Who in their right mind would take on either of these two when they can singlehandedly massacre a small army and walk away like nothing happened?!

Achievements – 1,300 Points – 56 Achievements

I managed to get this done, including DLC, in just over 60 hours. There’s a lot of random crap that you have to do that mostly goes towards your 100% completion so I won’t go into too much detail about collectibles and story missions as the collectibles get marked on the map and if you bought the game, why would you not do the story missions as a minimum?

There are also the side missions and the standard, ‘get full sync in the main missions,’ but Syndicate does what Unity did and doesn’t actually require you to get the full 100% sync for the game. Syndicate goes one further than Unity though as it doesn’t require you to get all of the chests spread across the landscape of London.

For the random achievements though, there are a few things you have to do which make you go well off the beaten track. The two most notable are for shooting 50 enemies before they shoot at you and destroy 5,000 destructible objects in a carriage.

There is supposedly a counter shoot function that can be used to make shooting the 50 enemies easier but this hardly worked for me and I ended up doing a lot of them manually. The carriage one is an absolute fuck ass though. I’m guessing that the only reason it’s an achievement is because they introduced the carriage driving as the main game play gimmick and they will make you use it and use it a lot! I was actively trying for this for most of the game and only unlocked it at the end.

Downloadable Content

There is one DLC which is actually quite cool. It takes place several years after the events of the main game and sees Evie try and hunt down Jack the Ripper who is portrayed as a misguided assassin. There are seven achievements to go with it which see you use new skill sets to instil fear into your enemies, and complete a new set of missions.

The bizarre thing is there is an achievement for getting 100% sync in the DLC, not the game as before. I’m not really sure why but it was quite fun so I was happy to do everything anyway.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is a very safe game that doesn’t push any major boundaries of the franchise and goes a little bit further by appearing to deliver on feedback given by the fans of the series. Getting rid of the multiplayer made this a very enjoyable completion. Ubisoft have announced this will be the last main stream Assassin’s Creed for a while and it’s a good memory to leave behind.

Magic 2015 - Duels of the Planeswalkers

A friend of mine recently got me playing Magic the Gathering and I enjoyed the collecting part of it more than playing the actual game; almost a reflection of my actual collection of games. Well, that’s not particularly fair, I do like playing games - I just don’t have enough time to play them all.

Anyway, after playing for the card game a bit and getting to grips with how it worked, I thought I would give the computer game version a go.

Magic 2015 attempts to have a storyline of types – you are on the trial of Garruk the Worldslayer and you travel across various plains, which are symbolic of the card game series,  in order to track him down and stop him from destroying the universe. Along the way you fight duels against other decks which have specific skill sets depending on what plane you are in.

That basically takes care of the story. When you start out you pick a card set depending on how you want to play and as you win duels, you get more cards to alter and change your deck to make it better – just like the card game, except without having to spend any actual money.

As it is just a card game, there isn’t really a lot of graphical animation to comment on but they have put a lot of effort into it to be fair. The sound effects are also really cool. The background music fits the epic fantasy setting of the magic universe and considering I spent over 50 hours playing the game, it didn’t ever irritate me.

My one criticism is that they don’t half draw this shit out. 50 hours is a cumulative effort for everything I outline below but I can’t help but think it could have been half of that if they sped up the animations a bit. Even though I had most of the effects turned off to speed it up, turns still took an age despite knowing what I was going to do before I did it.

Achievements – 1,100 Points – 35 Achievements

To start with this is a real slow burner. There are achievements for clearing the various planes of which there are 5 and a few achievements for actually setting up the game, completing the tutorial and getting your first deck sorted.

As well as clearing the planes, picking up cards and shaping a deck, there are loads of situational achievements for you to get. Now, the great thing about this game is that it allows you to do practice duels against your own decks. This means that you can set up a deck that can’t cast any spells or creatures and get these yourself without having to worry about random chance playing a factor.

Outside of these, you also have to clear all Explore Nodes which are present in every plane and have some challenging duels in them. The best way I found to beat all nodes is to set up a deck with Battlegrace Angels who have an ability to give you life when they attack alone. They are strong and they can fly which means you should win most of the fights relatively easy – assuming you get the right cards of course!

That leaves only three achievements that were massively time consuming. The last single player achievement is for collecting all the cards from the main game. This basically means play explore nodes until you don’t get any more cards and this is where battles start to feel excessively long and painful. But not as painful as...

Multiplayer

The multiplayer wants you to win 100 battles. Even if you are exceptionally good at the game and have the best deck, this process will still take in excess of 8 hours to do. I have the help of a certain gamer to trade wins with and we managed to do it in about 14 hours, give or take so this is a long haul no matter how you look at it. And any long haul really sucks the fun out of the game.

Downloadable Content

There is one DLC with 5 achievements which sees you take control of Garruk’s deck and play against decks from the plane of Alara. You have to beat the plane, collect all the cards from the new plane and add a card from the DLC into one of your main game decks. There are also two more situational achievements to get but one of them has to be earned on Alara as opposed to a practice deck.

Magic 2015 – Duels of the Planeswalkers was a fun and rewarding experience for me right up until the boosting online matches which destroyed it. I may look at one of the older or newer Magic games if it doesn’t have such a high number of online wins... but first, to play some more games I actually own!

Spec Ops: The Line

So after playing catch up with some old games and scoring a quick completion on a movie tie-in, it was time to step up and take on something new. Spec Ops: The Line was a game I kept seeing come up in various internet video channels appearing in top ten’s and the like. In fact, Escapist game reviewer Yahtzee even gave it his game of the year for 2012. I don’t know if that says a lot for Spec Ops or very little for games in 2012. After all the acclaim, I thought I should give it a go despite my obvious avoidance of shooters.

Spec Ops: The Line follows the story of Captain Walker, a Delta Force Operative who goes to a sandstorm-ravaged Dubai to find out what happened to John Conrad, some dude who saved Walker in a past life or something. You are joined on your mission by Adams and Lugo, two wisecracking meatheads with guns.

Now, here is the key to why Spec Ops: The Line has attained so much acclaim. On the face of it, it’s a standard war shooter where you take Americans to foreign soil and kill foreigners. However, after the first few chapters, it’s soon revealed that it’s actually a harrowing tale of the horrors of war. There are a few twists of which you will have to interpret yourself but I won’t go into details because I am going to recommend playing it to others. Shocking, I know.

That said, the game does adhere to standard bland yellow, brown environment areas but that might have something to do with the fact that the whole of Dubai is covered in sand of the same colour. That said, some of the views of the scenery and landscapes are really something, but it’s kind of redundant in a game where you have to keep your eyes open for dudes who are trying to kill you.

The gameplay is always make or break for a game like this and it is more than competent in this area. When I started playing, I was immediately impressed by the fact that when I shot people in the head they actually died. Just like in real life! And not like in every other shooter I’ve played over the last few years. There was only one real problem I had when playing the game. I was on a cleanup run of the last few achievements and for some reason, enemies just stopped coming into the room I was in. The problem with this is that the door wouldn’t open until all of the enemies were dead. I had to get creative with my grenades to progress but other than that I had few issues with the gameplay. It’s an over-the-shoulder shooter with the option of changing which shoulder you are looking over. I thought this was brilliant although it does mean Walker is able to shoot with both hands. That’s probably the reason why he is a captain.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

To start, you need to do a minimum of two whole playthoughs of the game because the highest difficulty level, FUBAR, doesn’t unlock until you complete the game on Suicide Mission. Neither of these difficulties sound appealing and playing them, they certainly lived up to their names. I’ve played a few games recently that required me to kill 1,000 enemies and I’m pretty sure that the enemies in Spec Ops got close to 1,000 kills on me during these two playthroughs – no achievement for dying 1,000 times though, sadly. I found Suicide Mission difficult and I found FUBAR unforgiving.

One example of FUBAR being unforgiving is a section where you have to run through a corridor while being shot at by a helicopter. There is no way of doing this without getting shot and on FUBAR this means you will die unless you pick the exact line to run down. It was trial and error for self harmers. In the end I watched a video of someone else doing it to get it right.

Aside from FUBAR and Suicide Mission, there are another two achievements for the sensible difficulties and they thankfully stack. I still don’t agree with having to prove to a game I’m good enough for its highest difficulty though even if playing it was like smashing my head against a brick wall.

There are only 9 story related achievements but there are a lot of choice based ones which you have to pick one or the other and then replay the chapters to get the other one. This isn’t a massive problem when you have to do two playthroughs though.

Outside of this, you have to get all sorts of different kills with the various weapon types in the game. These tend to come through natural game play but if you favour specific weapons, you may need to target some of these after completing the game. For example trying to get shotgun kills on FUBAR when you are shit with a shotgun is stupid.

There are collectible items but these are really forgiving as there are only a maximum of 2 per level. There are also two achievements for doing stuff without dying and considering my FUAR comments, I think you can tell I lowered the difficulty to get these. The last one I got was Sierra Hotel for completing three chapters in a row without dying and actually I now remember that it was during my third chapter that the glitch I mentioned above happened. Thankfully my well placed grenades got me through otherwise I would have had to have replayed three chapters again – this would have not amused me.

Multiplayer

Spec Ops: The Line has a multiplayer mode and you won’t hear about it here because it has no achievements. Thank you Spec Ops, finally at last someone has learned that that having multiplayer achievements is not necessary – and in a shooter as well.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Spec Ops: The Line is a very good game that functions well as a shooter and has a rarely good story line to boot. The absence of multiplayer achievements is a godsend as well. The FUBAR difficulty level is by far the most challenging thing in here but it is very rewarding once you’ve bludgeoned your way through it.

Megamind: Ultimate Showdown

Every now and then you need a quick game to run through to make yourself feel good. Megamind fits the bill. I was able to smash through it in one afternoon and it was good that it wasn’t drawn out because it’s the not the best movie tie-in ever. I’m not going to waste too much time talking about how these games are just there to generate additional money from the franchise with no thought to decent gaming so I’ll move straight on.

I haven’t actually watched the movie but I am led to believe that Ultimate Showdown takes place after the events of the movie. You play as Megamind playing through various levels in order to find your inventions to get some DNA tracking machine working so you can beat the weird Superhero guy who is actually evil.

The gameplay is very basic. You have a few different weapons that need to be used to navigate through the environment and they all have basically the same damage rate against the enemies you face. There are also boss battles which require you to work out the pattern of the boss movements and counter them - a fairly standard concept for this type of game.

Graphically it’s weak and one indication of this is that it’s hard to tell which environmental items can be destroyed and which can’t. There were several deaths I suffered owing to the fact that it was difficult to see what plane I was jumping in and missed several platforms because of this. Trial and error platforming is a fail in my book. It should be seemless and down to the player’s judgement whether you make a jump or not – not down to the fact that the camera positioning is balls. The sound effects were equally rubbish, generally because it’s aimed at kids and kids supposedly enjoy repetitive annoying noises.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

As I said, it was a relatively quick completion. You get 16 of the bad boys just for playing through the story and it is at no point challenging.

Aside from completing the game, there are also achievements for killing each boss without dying and another one for completing any level without dying. There is also something called BINKEY that needs to be collected to get upgrades. You need to collect 3,000 of it in one level which will net you 3 achievements. There is also another for collecting 150 BINKEY in the lair which you visit after every mission.

Once you’ve done all that, you will have 1,000 points and nothing left to do. Routine.

Download Content – N/A

Megamind will be over shortly after it’s started but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is a quick completion for the score-whores that offers little in the way of fun and replayability.

Resident Evil 5

This is another backlog completion for me. I originally completed the main game in 2009, incidentally the same year the game was released. If anything, this is not an advert for me to play games after they are released because I borrowed the game from my brother and gave it back. I didn’t even realise there was DLC for until I started achievement hunting and looking at my incomplete titles. Then I was immediately put of the idea of playing Resident Evil 5 when I saw that one of the DLCs introduced a multiplayer feature.

I know I’ve harpied on about this in the past but some games have no room for multiplayer and Resident Evil is one of them. I’m not talking about co-op play when I say this as the co-op element of the game is actually meant to be better than playing with the shitty AI. I’m specifically talking about versus multiplayer. The in-game controls aren’t exactly built for speedy versus action.

Resident Evil 5 follows the story of Chris Redfield, a man who literally has biceps as big as his head, as he goes after the evil Albert Wesker. Chris is accompanied by a candidate for world’s worst sidekick, Sheva Something. You travel through various environments, somewhere in Spain (?) killing zombies mutated with the Uroboros virus.

Resident Evil 5 drew a lot of criticism from the fan base as it plays more like an action shooter than a survival horror, but credit where credit is due, the controls do feel like I’m in control of my own destiny and the only thing I can blame death on is my own poor ability than poor controls.

That said, the game has clearly been designed as a co-op adventure as the AI controlling Sheva is just shit. She doesn’t assist when she is meant to, she dies really easily and then asks for help and to top it all off she will immediately use a health recovery item if she scrapes her knee as you lie dying in the gutter. Not good, fuckass.

Sounds effects and graphics are blah at this point but it also doesn’t help the series’ cause as a survival horror when there explosions every five minutes. It’s certainly not atmospheric and the fear factor goes out of the window by introducing excessive non-zombie monsters as boss battles. Again, it couldn’t be further from horror if it tried.

Achievements – 1,400 Points – 70 Achievements

I can’t really remember much of the main game other than being really pleased with myself for getting the 100%. Imagine my dismay when I found out that was taken away from me by DLC... and then I found out that the majority of the gaming community didn’t find the game that difficult at all.

Of the original 50 achievements, 22 of them are story related. You get one per chapter completion. Outside of these, there are a load for killing zombies (or Majini as they are known in this offering of the franchise) or for doing specific environmental things, none of which are missable and can be easily earned by replaying chapters.

There are also a few achievements for collecting stuff including all treasures, all BSAA emblems and upgrading all weapons. The hardest achievement is for completing the game on professional but if memory serves, you can use all your upgraded weapons on this playthrough which makes it more forgiving. I also like that the game rewards you for going out of your way by making this achievement easier.

Downloadable Content

There are 3 downloadable content packs. Two are extra missions and one is a Versus Mode which I’ll talk more about later.

The two DLC mission packs are Lost In Nightmares, which is quite cool as it sees you go up against Wesker in a scene from the start of the main game. The mission itself is much more survival-horror which was a change of pace from the main game. In order to get all achievements you have to complete it on Professional with an S Rank, hit Wesker with a certain amount of combos and collect all the hidden score stars. It is the easiest of the 3 DLCs.

The other mission pack is Desperate Escape which sees you take control of Jill Valentine and follow a scene from halfway through the main game. This one is more challenging than Lost in Nightmares but can be completed by, and this still makes me laugh, not actually fighting anyone. That’s right, you can run past 90% of the zombies and it’s pretty much the only way to solo complete the mission. You also have to kill 3 agitator Majini which you can do by meeting secret criteria, and kill 150 enemies on one playthrough. Thankfully these can both be done easily on Amateur.

Multiplayer

That just leaves the pointless multiplayer mode and associated achievements. There are two game modes; Survivors and Slayers. Believe it or not Survivors sees you killing other players and Slayers sees you killing zombies and staying alive, a naming convention choice I can’t understand but there you go. The achievements are fairly simple but ridiculously time consuming for what they are.

You have to kill 100 other players using the special melee finisher. You have to get certain scores and combos in both the single and team variants of both games and you have to win 30 of each of the 4 game types. This takes forever even if you have three friends to see it through with. The games are set at 5 minutes each and run for the whole time limit – there is no way to make it go quicker. This made me realise how long 5 minutes actually is. And because you have to win, it’s not like you can just sit there and pass the time either.

Resident Evil 5 got a lot of stick but the single player game isn’t actually that bad. It’s not survival horror but it’s not a bad game. The Versus Mode is unnecessary and a pain in the ass but I’ve done worse things for completions.

Cubot - The Complexity of Simplicity

I’m not 100% sure how I found this game but I was browsing around and saw that it was supposedly a very easy puzzle game. It was a very easy completion, granted, but it’s not an easy game but I’ll get on to that a bit later on.

Cubot is a puzzle game where you have to use the left stick to rotate blocks in different directions to get them into a set position. There are ten different puzzle sets each containing 8 puzzles which grow in complexity as you progress through them.

I managed to get to the fourth puzzle set before utilising the need of guide but I have to say that after a certain point, the complexity of the puzzles turns it into the most convoluted game of trial and error I’ve ever seen. I mean, if you have a mind that can move three blocks in three different directions around a 3D playing field comprising over 20 different moves just by looking at the puzzle, then you are genius who is wasting his time playing a game when you could be solving worldwide issues with the economy and global relations. Or be a scientist in the space program.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

It’s a pretty straightforward achievement list to accompany the game. There is an achievement each for the various puzzle beds and that’s it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Cubot is a simple game in terms of what you have to do but actually working out the solutions to problems would be hours upon hours of doing the same thing to figure out the correct pattern to solve it and this would also involve countless resets. In my opinion, it is nigh on impossible to work out the right pattern by playing some of the puzzles. The only real solution is knowing what to do.

Broken Sword 5

I originally played the first two Broken Sword games on the original Playstation back when games were nothing more to me than colourful interactive images on the TV screen. I’m not sure what happened between then and now in terms of the series, but I saw a few videos referencing the goat from Broken Sword 2 and then saw Broken Sword 5 advertised so I thought to myself, ‘why not?’

Broken Sword 5 follows the tale of George Stobbart, an American art insurance guy in Paris. A murder is committed in one of the galleries his company has insured and a painting stolen. His company wants him to solve the murder to avoid the insurance payout in typical American fashion. Meanwhile, George is accompanied by his sexy French friend, Nico as they try to do the right thing.

It’s another point and click adventure game (because I don’t play enough of them) with a lot less character interaction and more investigating scenes to solve bizarre situational puzzles. Some of the ways you have to solve things in this game are ridiculous. The most notable of these involves using a cockroach to replace a fuse by putting a paperclip on its back. How anyone would view that as a logical solution to the problem of an out of reach fuse, I have no idea.

The characterisation is quite good throughout. There seems to be a balance in that you end up liking the characters you are meant to and hating the French. With the exception of Nico and Sergeant Moue, all the other French characters are portrayed as total douche bags.

There’s not much else to mention about the game without devaluing it. The story is main driver and it is quite strong in this area. However, there is one issue. There is a song by a fictional group called the Hairy Lobsters and they have a song called Jasmine which is quite often played as background music wherever you go. However, this causes a problem in a game where is it possible to spend over 30 minutes in an area trying to figure out the next bizarre mechanism to progress through the game. The song grates. And I mean, really grates.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 33 Achievements

Firstly, as you can probably gather from a story-driven game, there are 26 achievements which you get for following it through to the end. The remaining seven are missable and on my playthrough, I did something which resulted in me having to replay 5 hours worth of the game. I didn’t find this very amusing.

Basically, what I didn’t realise is when you save the game, it saves at the start of the room you last entered so I lost all of the items i collected but didn’t realise this. This meant that I missed an item I needed about 2 hours later in the game to get one of the secret achievements. This was a real, ‘FOR FUCK’S SAKE!’ moments that was very verbally conveyed at the time.

Out of the seven missable achievements, there’s not really a lot else to mention, but there is a funny one relating to goats. Broken Sword 2 had a goat puzzle which caused outrage at the time because its solution was so much in contrast to the rest of the game’s puzzles. In Broken Sword 5, you can get a goat to talk and when you do, he reveals that his appearance is only down to the cult hype surrounding the goat puzzle from the 2^nd instalment. I thought this was a great piece of fourth wall breaking narrative that was worth the effort to get it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s an easy completion with a guide and doesn’t offer replay value. That said it is an enjoyable story experience, annoying songs and goats aside. Some of the scenes can be a bit drawn out and you have to listen to everything that’s said if you want to do it properly so can be quite demanding on the brain, especially if you are playing late at night (which I did).

Eternal Sonata

A friend of mine mentioned Eternal Sonata in one of our many gaming chats because someone he worked with claimed it was the most inspiring game he had ever played. Looking for a reason to start a specific game is normally the hardest part of actually playing a game for me, so I took this random conversation as inspiration of my own to get cracking with a backlog title from 2007.

I have to say that the selling point was completely over-egged and I’m still not 100% sure what the game was about. The alternative title for the game is Torasuti Beru: Shopan no Yume which translates to Trusty Bell: Chopin’s Dream, and while the second part is referenced through the entire game, I do not recall a bell appearing anywhere, Trusty or otherwise.

Anyway in some attempt to summarise the plot, Frederic Chopin, the famous composer, is on his death bed in the real world and is supposedly dreaming. The game takes place in this dream world and you initially follow a girl named Polka, a 14-year-old who can kill dangerous monsters with an umbrella. Later you mean Allegretto and Beat. I don’t have much of a problem with Allegretto. He is a 16 year old with a sword and an attitude reminiscent of many JRPG’s but Beat is an 8 year old armed with a gun. Seriously, what the fuck?! How irresponsible is that.

Firstly, as this is supposed to be Chopin’s dream, it doesn’t make much sense that we spend time with other characters away from him, which happens throughout the game. I can see that this has been done to drive the so called plot so not a massive issue – especially as I didn’t developed a liking for any of the characters. Chopin especially raised bile in my throat.

My other criticism of the characters in general is that they don’t half come out with some shit. Polka’s mother talks to her when she is like 5 and basically describes the world as being a pit of despair – is that something you really want to tell your 5 year old daughter? Allegretto also comes out with some shit about the darkness in the hearts of men which would be fine... if he wasn’t a 16 year old.

So my problem with the plot is that the characters are ridiculous and unrelatable and the story doesn’t seem to have any point to it. It is also interspersed with history lessons about Chopin’s life leading up his death which was weird and it really broke any kind of flow the game could develop and destroyed the escapism factor.

There was one character I did like called Claves but this was short lived. I thought she was a tasty piece of animated ass but shortly after she is introduced, she goes on a never ending monologue by which point I just wanted her to shut the fuck up.

Anyway, there is a game here at the end of the day and, as I’ve already mentioned, it’s a JRPG with a turn-based battle system. There are no random encounters and battles can be avoided by running around the monsters on the field. This is of course a bad idea though, because you will need to level up in order to fight the bosses.

The battle system involves 6 party levels which get progressively more complex as you progress through the game. It basically boils down to you having 4 or 5 seconds to deal as much damage to the enemies as you can and then they have a turn going at you. It’s not overly complicated and you don’t have to spend ages setting up a decent team. Once you get the three best characters with a combination of offensive and healing abilities, all battles become fairly straight forward even late in the game.

A side note on the music; I didn’t notice so much but when other people were around when I was playing, they commented on how sinfully irritating it was. It’s all too high-pitched to be considered nice background music which is all RPG music should be.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

Eternal Sonata is a slog to put it mildly. In order to get all 22 achievements, you are going to have to complete two 25 hour-plus playthroughs – normal and then Encore Mode. Following the game’s story will net you twelve of them and full praise if you manage to stick it out and get this far.

Like all RPG’s there is the optional ultimate dungeon and while Enchanted Arms didn’t make you do theirs, there are 5 achievements for playing through the optional dungeon in Eternal Sonata and then completing the game.

Now, there are 5 others for playing through the game a second time but hilariously enough you don’t actually have to complete the game again so I have no idea if there is a better ending and as per my earlier comments, I couldn’t care less. 3 of the 5 achievements relate to quest strands that, for some unknown reason, can only be completed in Encore Mode and these are simple enough.

That just leaves two collectible achievements and these are where the challenge comes in. I say challenge, like there is any way anyone is going to spend the time searching for all of these hidden items and add another 25 plus hours to a playthrough. No, by challenge, what I actually mean is planning. You have to collect 32 score pieces, some of which can only be collected in Encore Mode, and 21 EZI items which you need the aforementioned score pieces to get.

Score pieces carry over playthoughs but EZI items don’t so there’s no point getting EZIs on the first playthough. Also, there is no in game numbering system for the score pieces so you have to keep track of these manually and if you don’t, it makes 100% completion a much more arduous task.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As you can probably tell, I didn’t enjoy Eternal Sonata but I think it may be because I missed the point. I think it is meant to be some of the old ‘games as art’ situation and while some games pull this off, I felt Eternal Sonata falls short. In addition, towards the end I got the feeling that the game was actually patronising me for wasting my time playing it and also told me what I need to do in life to be a good person. I can accept these kind of comments from other living humans when I’ve done bad things but these imagined JRPG characters can go fuck themselves.

Batman: Arkham Knight

I’m probably getting a little ahead of myself with this review but I’ve finished the game and all the DLC as of 31 December 2015 (which shows I’m a little behind the times in terms of these reviews) so I’m going for it... failed. New DLC released in January but more on that later.

This is technically the third instalment in the Batman Arkham series as many claim that Arkham Origins isn’t a true title in the series because it’s made my different people. It also carries online multiplayer achievements which is why I’ve decided not to go there yet and focus on this newest release - and the correct chronological sequel.

Arkham Knight sees you become the Batman once again and with Joker gone, you are left to battle it out with Scarecrow, the lesser villain from the franchise, and then this guy called the Arkham Knight shows up on some kind of revenge mission to kill Batman.

Scarecrow has apparently called in favours from all the other villains who aren’t dead so when you are bored of trying to stop Scarecrow releasing his fear gas into the city, you can take a side trip to take down one of the other bad guys. Or simply go around picking up the Riddler’s trophies which are scattered across the city in typical fashion. If I was a super villain, that’s definitely what I would do – go around setting up underground race tracks to test Batman’s Batmobile driving ability, and also throw around a load of trophies and only agree to try and stop Batman if he finds them all. What a load of crap.

I have to say that Gotham does look really good. The world is really well designed and for a sandbox, it is not too big and once you have the necessary Batman upgrades, you can get to one side of the city from the other in a matter of seconds. This makes the overall level design really player-friendly which makes a nice change.

Now, a lot of people cry their eyes out over the Batmobile and the fact that you have to use it for certain parts of the game. While I sort of understand this, I don’t think it should attract the level of furore that it does. I mean, yes they could have cut down on the amount it was used but they could have also made it a total shit bag to control through under development which is typically what happens to games when they introduce obligatory vehicle sections. Instead, the Batmobile is forgiving in its control systems and allows you to easily navigate through tight corners and through streets littered with debris. Some people complain about the ‘tank’ function, but honestly, it’s like any other control function in any game. It does work when you get used to how it works. People don’t often complain that the combos in Street Fighter are hard to do so why are people complaining about being able to control the tank function properly, which is basically complaining that they can’t press the right buttons at the right time.

The combat is the other main gameplay element and once again they have done a lot of work on making sure that it is as seamless as possible. It is very possible to get through most fights without being hit if you time your moves correctly and use the correct moves all the time. The game will punish you for trying to be cheap so if you spam a certain attack that is meant to be used on another enemy type, you will most likely get smashed up.

Achievements – 2,000 Points – 113 Achievements

Now there is a lot here so the first thing I’m going to celebrate is the fact that there are NO MULTIPLAYER OR MISSABLE ACHIEVEMENTS!

Right, now on to the main game. You can do most of the original 1,000 Points by playing through the main game and most wanted missions and completing AR challenges. If you get any DLC at all, the AR challenge stars achievement is a joke as you have so many opportunities to get stars across the board that if you suck at predator challenges (or don’t have the patience for them, like me) then you won’t actually need to do them to get the required stars.

The few achievements from the main game that cause people issues are the one for using 15 different moves in one combo, getting five perfect shots with the tank in a row without missing and completing every type of predator takedown. None of these gave me too much trouble and I think the reason that most people don’t have them is that they can’t be bothered to play for them. The 15 different moves is the hardest in my opinion and it carried a whooping 5 Gamerscore with it. Brilliant.

There is one achievement that requires you to play through the entire game again on New Game Plus, something that I found trying because I hate having to listen to the exact same stuff over and over again. I had also done all of the combat AR challenges by this point so not having the counter icon, which is the only noticeable difference between modes, didn’t provide that much of an extra challenge. This achievement didn’t require you to do all the Most Wanted missions again and it doesn’t respawn the Riddler trophies – again, this shows that the creators knew what they were doing for the most part.

Downloadable Content

At the time of writing there have been... hang on... 14 different DLC packs that carry achievements . The main game carried 69 achievements which means that 44 are on offer from the DLC – for another 1,000 points.

There is a lot here but a lot of it is repetitive. There are additional 5 story missions which carry one achievement each and another 5 achievements for getting AR stars in different Batmobiles. There is one title update DLC which requires you to get 21 AR stars with all the different characters you have unlocked. This isn’t particularly difficult but it is very time consuming.

Two of the best DLCs are A Matter of Family and Season of Infamy. A Matter of Family sees you take control of Robin and Batgirl in an abandoned theme park on the trail of the Joker. Season of Infamy adds 4 new most wanted missions to the main game. Both of these add value to the game and the hardest achievement on offer here is in A Matter of Family for locating all of the hidden objects. The tracker covers the entire map so if you can’t find one you could be looking for hours without a guide.

That just leaves the most recent DLC. Challenge Pack 6. They have released 5 other challenge packs (obviously) but none of these carried achievements and Challenge Pack 6 proves to be the most challenging part of going for the 100%.

All the nice things I said about the combat mechanics go out of the window here. The predator challenges are fine, if not a little confusing, and only take an hour or so to get through. The combat challenges however are another kettle of fish. You have to basically be a master at combat combos to get through all three of them. Crime Alley requires to the clear all rounds without getting hit. Three times. Monarch Theatre requires you to get through all rounds in one freeflow. 4 times. Iceberg Lounge requires to get at least a 400 combo against all kinds of enemies and then beat a boss fight.

In order to clear these challenges you need nerves of steel, patience, a really good temperament (and if you don’t, a couple of extra controllers) and least important of all, a sound knowledge of the combat functions.

There are ongoing discussions over which challenge is harder, Monarch Theatre or Iceberg Lounge. In my opinion it is the Iceberg Lounge because you need to concentrate for longer.

Overall, Batman Arkham Knight is a very good game and a rewarding 100% as it stands. However that DLC has taken it out of me. I don’t think I can revisit the game even if they released another pack (although we all know if they do, I definitely will.)

Saints Row

That’s right the first one. After my completion of Saint’s Row The Third, I felt compelled to go back in time and round up the remaining achievements in the original. I only had the multiplayer left as with a lot of games, so it was a major drag but I got there in end and with it, one of my statistically toughest completions to date.

Saint’s Row follows the story of some dude who joins the Third Street Saints and works his way up the ladder to become one of the more important members of the gang. Gang activities include wearing purple, listening to horrible music and generally being obnoxious to members of the public.

The one bright side of playing as your created character is that he doesn’t actually say anything when you are free roaming which beats the hell of the shit that comes out of the Saints Row the Third’s character’s mouths.

The single player game play elements essentially have you complete Grand Theft Auto style missions and bizarre activities like escorting prostitutes while they entertain clientele and everyone’s personal favourite, committing insurance fraud. More on that later.

As I only really played the multiplayer recently, I can’t remember much else about how good the graphics were but they look very dated now. The worst thing by far though is the music, especially in the menus and waiting for games to load. It’s like they got the collection of the most unsuccessful or failed rap artists that can only ‘sing’ about getting ‘hos’, taking drugs and committing murders in the most basic ways. It’s honestly horrible. I remember thinking it was shit at the time but as the series got bigger, it’s really noticeable that they invested more in the music in the sequels.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 43 Achievements

Having looked back over the single player achievements, there isn’t much that was easy other than completing the main storyline and taking over the enemy gang territory.  There are only 6 that relate to the main story.

Completing all the activities for the Racket Lord achievement is one of the toughest achievements simply because you have to complete all levels of insurance fraud. This is one of the most unforgiving activities ever. You have to throw yourself in front of cars and get hit but to achieve the scores necessary to complete it, you have to be really good or get insanely lucky. From memory, I was the latter.

After completing all the activities, I still had three single player achievements left to get. Taking 50 hostages was one of them and it is as frustrating in this as it was in Saints Row the Third. You have to steal a car with someone in it and then extort the hostage in a police chase fifty times. Fifty times is excessive to say the least, especially when it’s down to chance that passengers will even appear in the car.

You also have steal 30 boxes from shops. This can only be done at night so you are limited with time before you have to wait again to do it some more. The worst part about this is that I didn’t even know it was a thing until I had completed the game, meaning I had to sit around waiting for night time, several times to get this done.

The last one I got was for earning $1,000,000 which probably shows that I wasn’t the best at the game as I expect quite a few others would have got this with minimum after-game effort. I didn’t even have it after doing all that fucking around with the boxes.

Multiplayer

If ever a game type didn’t need multiplayer, open world sandbox Grand Theft Auto style games don’t. I’ve never understood why they feel the need to ham multiplayer into everything and Saints Row was one of first games to do it.

There are twelve achievements associated to the multiplayer element. Of these twelve, there are two individual co-op missions that each carry an achievement. I was lucky enough to find someone who was really good to carry me over the line with these.

The basic premise of the versus multiplayer is that you need to gain skill in one of the various game modes to achieve the rank of Kingpin. There are 6 different game modes to choose from and you have to play three of them for specific achievements.

They are all very onerous. I cannot fathom how much of the multiplayer you would have to play legitimately in order to get all the achievements but it took four of us a good 25 hours trading off wins and kills to get them all. You have to kill the pimp 50 times in Protect tha Pimp. You get two or three kill chances per game and when you factor in random people who actually still play the game joining and the fact the game won’t load with an odd number of people, setting up the matches itself is a painstaking process.

Once you’ve done that, you can move on to collecting and dropping off 500 chains. Again, this is excessive. You can score up to 30 chain drops per match with each match taking 10 minutes and with the same game-launch issues as with Protect tha Pimp, this becomes really fucking irritating after a short while.

Of the specific game mode achievements, that only leaves Xzibitionist for getting the car to level 4  50 times in Blinged Out Ride. This one takes the longest and I cannot see how one match legit could get a level four car with the shit you have to go through to boost it. It’s mental.

There is another for buying 100 items of clothing from the store but that’s easy coupled with how much money you get from the above matches and the fact there is a free DLC with loads of cheap items (still true at time of writing anyway). There’s also one for getting 100 headshots with the sniper rifle but that’s easy again with how many games you have to play and once you know the sniper locations.

There is also the Dominator achievement for winning 10 ranked matches in a row but that’s blah after all of the above.

The biggest pain in the ass though is the Kingpin achievement. You will get Thug, Killa and Gangsta along the way but these achievements are based on your position on the ranking boards which means you have to keep playing and winning your chosen game mode to progress and it takes forever. If you lose even one match, you lose more progress than reasonable.  You have to get to somewhere around the 1,100^th position on the leaderboard to trigger it and once you do, you will thank the stars that you don’t have to play Saints Row multiplayer again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Saints Row was actually a good single player experience and it’s a real shame that it took the developers 2 titles to realise that multiplayer is not the reason people buy their games. I wouldn’t expect to see a review for Saints Row II appearing here any time soon as the multiplayer for that appears all the more excessive.