Three Fourths Home: Extended Edition

I won’t spend too long over this piece of shit. I spend £1.50 on a quick completion that nearly bit me in the ass because of shitty development and poor ownership of issues and this review will serve as a review of the problems with indie games. But first, Three Fourths Home.

Three Fourths Home is a... Visual Novel game. That’s right, it’s a book game. Basically a game without the game element. Although that’s a little unfair but more on that part later.

My main issue with the game is that shortly after I purchased it in a sale, all of the achievements became bugged and no one could get them. I had to wait until it was safe to play the game again but even after it was safe, all of the people that played the game while it was broken could not gain the achievements. The developer did eventually manage to implement a fix but the whole thing just stank of people who were unable to communicate with the public and constantly blamed Microsoft for all their problems. At the end of it all (September 2016) the developer deleted their Twitter account due to the amount of messages the gaming community was sending them. Poor, poor customer service.

Speaking of poor and lazy, that’s a summary of the game element of the game. Clearly a lot of effort has gone into painting the picture of a family in distress, and a protagonist you just want to hate, but the gameplay element is pressing right of the directional pad. The second part of the game (which I imagine comes from the ‘extended edition’ part of the title) adds an additional game play function... walking left. Oh, and it puts you on foot rather than in a car which adds an unnecessary amount of time to the game due to the slow character movement. This extended portion however, does see you making decisions for yourself as you are able to get on one of several buses that come past.

The story itself can be summed up as depressing. And pretentious. I’m all for the creative arts but I didn’t find this one emotively engaging and in my opinion, there seems to be an increase in the amount of protagonists who are horrendous people. How are we expected to engage with characters if they are completely unlikeable and, in the most part, unrelateable? This is 90% of a narrative experience. If you fail to create immersion and engagement then there is no point in telling a story. However, I’m fairly certain the developers knew this as the story is really short. Despite this, I fell asleep twice during my first session of playing it (and it should only have taken one session to start with).

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

So a short game and short achievement list but they don’t half drag it out for the 1,000 points. Aside from completing the main story and the epilogue, you have to complete the epilogue 3 times, read through all the crap in the extras menu, listen to all of the pretentious music on the radio (you can turn the TV off while this one plays out and it takes about an hour!) and doing some other things to trigger a different cut scene at the end. This is where you essentially get the ‘good’ ending where not everyone thinks you are a massive twat.

That’s it which is good because by the time you have done all that you will be reaching for the delete button faster than you previously thought possible.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Three Fourths Home is my first venture into the visual novel genre and it hasn’t exactly warmed me to these types of games. Everyone will have their own opinion over whether this works but I think a game should be a game first and pretentious idealist bollocks second. Three Fourths does the latter first which is why I won’t recommend it. Or anything else [bracket] Games develops for that matter.

Saints Row IV

Saint’s Row and Saints Row: The Third have now been completed while I’m slowly working through the arduous progress of getting all of the multiplayer done in Saint’s Row II and now they have released Saint’s Row IV on Games with Gold. I couldn’t help but pick it up and start playing it straight away... despite the fact I had already got it on the One as part of a compilation – which means that Saint’s Row IV will be the second game after The Wolf Among Us to have two completions on my gamer profile.

In Saint’s Row IV, you pick up where you left off in the last instalment although it’s fantastically more ridiculous as the leader of the Saints is about to become President of the United States. Fast forward to you actually being the president, and then the world is then invaded by aliens. The aliens conveniently abduct the leader of the Saints and the entire crew before destroying planet earth and flying off. This is a massive far cry from the Grand Theft Auto clone that was the first one of the series – it just continually refuses to take itself seriously.

The main body of the game sees you fighting against the alien forces within a simulated Steelport created by the aliens. The alien abduction is basically a framing device to make the gameplay as weird as fuck. You have ‘superpowers’ and crazy weapons in the simulation as you fight back against the aliens by trying to crash the simulation. However, it all feels a little pointless as the aliens have already destroyed earth so you have nowhere to go even if you do win.

As with any Saints Row, the gameplay is very clean. My only real criticism is that sometimes the rag doll physics can be a little too crazy at times and the difficulty curve is non-existent. It suffers from the same upgrade philosophy of the third game where you basically become indestructible with unlimited ammo, only this time it seems to happen even quicker. It’s also a bizarre change of pace that when you unlock super sprint, you no longer have to use cars as it’s faster to run. Mental.

Interestingly, for me, this made the game’s licenced soundtrack redundant but you did have the option to play music while running around – it was a simulation after all. I found this too immersion-breaking though, which I accept doesn’t make a lot of sense when you are fighting an alien race through their artificially created world.

Achievements – 1,200 Points – 70 Achievements

Where to start with this one... Missables? There are only two, thank God. One of them is for giving up on fighting the aliens and simply submitting during the middle of the game. You can be quite easily forgiven for not doing this. Why would you voluntarily kill yourself in a game for an achievement? Oh, and it’s a secret too.

The other one is basically for completing all the side missions for your homies before completing the game, however you get a ‘point of no return’ warning and you also need to do them all for the other achievements if you are going for the 100% anyway.

Another notable one, or at least it was for me, was the achievement for creating and sharing a character online as Volition worked hard to fix this, as per Saints Row: The Third. This is only achievement that requires an online connection.

The rest of the game is pretty much as per my Saints Row: The Third review, with the exception of one achievement which allows me to rant. Saints Row: The Third had an achievement that required you to play the game for 30 hours. I remember saying that I was quite happy with this as it allowed you to complete the entire game and DLC in roughly 30 hours. Saints Row IV wants you to play for 40 hours with less DLC content and a noticeably shorter main game – a tad annoying. The timing of my achievement unlocks shows this as well. I completed all the other achievements, inclusive of DLC and had to leave the game running over night two nights in a row to get the required time to complete it. Ridiculous.

Downloadable Content

There are two separate DLCs for this one. They are both ridiculous but, How the Saints Saved Christmas is possibly one of the worst DLC expansions I’ve ever played, even going as far as making that stupid space thing from the third one look good by comparison.

Again, I won’t say much more than that. The DLC achievements don’t have any notoriety and they aren’t massively different from Saints Row: The Third.

If you liked Saints Row: The Third, Saints Row IV acts as possibly the biggest DLC pack you’ll find offering more of the same at an increased level of craziness. It did get a little bit boring towards the end but not enough to put me off finishing the series. With just Saints Row II and Gat of Hell to go, the end is at least in sight.

The Wolf Among Us

I broke one of my gaming rules to complete the Wolf Among Us on Xbox One. I had already completed the game on Xbox 360 but it did not qualify for a review as Arcade titles do not have to have 1,000 Gamerscore. This changed when the Xbox One was released which required all games to have 1,000 Gamerscore and they also rereleased The Wolf Among Us. And made it free with gold.

Now, I knew I had already completed the game on 360 but I did find it quite enjoyable and it was free so why not?

I won’t talk too much about the storyline because it’s the main reason for playing the game but it is basically an original take on fairy tales where all the characters live together in a weird twisted version of our world. You play as Sherriff Bigby Wolf (yes, the big bad wolf) as he attempts to solve an ongoing series of murders.

A lot of effort has gone into the graphical depiction and characterisation of many of your favourite childhood characters and the voice acting is definitely one of the highlights of the game.

The general gameplay mechanic is the same as most TellTale games – see Game of Thrones – in that the way the story progresses and the way characters behave towards you are influenced by the dialogue and action decisions you make. Sometimes this does fall short though as you can see slight pauses between lines of dialogue that show something different would have been said if you had made a different decision earlier in the game. It’s not game breakingly obvious though so not a major deal breaker.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 35 Achievements

Another reason I cheekily chose to play this one again is that the achievements are really easy. All of you have to do for 30 of them is play the game from start to finish. I think I mentioned in the Game of Thrones review that there is scope to add replayability through the achievements but TellTale has chosen not to do this for any of their games to date. However, The Wolf Among Us does have an additional set of requirements.

During each of the episodes, you have to witness certain events or meet certain characters to complete all of the Book of Fables entries for each episode. Sometimes this sees you having to do alternate dialogue options for about ten extra minutes of game play but there is nothing so onerous as to make you play the whole thing twice.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As I said at the start, The Wolf Among Us is one of the more enjoyable story game experiences available on the Xbox One. If you haven’t played a TellTale game, this is definitely the one to start with. It offers the most originally and the more engaging characters that the series has to offer.

South Park: The Stick of Truth

I was intrigued by what the South Park game would offer. I assumed some whimsical adult humour that would keep me entertained for a good few hours along with an original story and expected level of ridiculousness. I got the latter two but not the first one.

South Park: The Stick of Truth sees you fill the shoes of douchebag, the new kid in South Park as he starts making friends and hanging out with all your favourite characters from the show. At first, it appears that it’s all to get your dad’s approval but it later revealed that you inevitably get caught up in the epic battle for the Stick of Truth, a stick that has the power to control the universe.

The reality, the Stick of Truth is just the central item to the kids’ game as they LARP around the town playing elves versus humans... or Kyle versus Cartman. The story itself is ridiculous and I stopped paying attention as soon as douchebag got abducted by aliens and anally probed. The story is about as pointless as a chocolate teapot as a driving influence for the game.

The sound effects and music work for about four, maybe five hours before it starts to wear thin and I think this works on the same grounds as the episodes – you wouldn’t watch a single episode of South Park over and over again for four hours. You would get bored. And that sums up the music and filler dialogue present through the game.

As I’ve said time and time again, the game play can make or break a game and The Stick of Truth is very middling, although lots of people would disagree. It’s an RPG with turn based combat where you can pick one of four classes at the beginning and your abilities that develop throughout the game are based on the class you pick. You cannot learn all the abilities to maximum level which kind of limits what you can do and making the wrong choice can make the game insanely difficult. On the flip side, you can also become overpowered – which is what I did by playing as a Jew.

Based on what I’ve said above, you can imagine me not being thrilled about having to do a second playthough but more on that in the next section...

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 This is where the fun really begins. It is possible to get all 50 achievements in one playthrough using tactical saves which if you enjoy constant jokes about poo and farts then all of the stuff I’ve said above doesn’t really matter. However I got about 10 hours in before I realised I was going to need a second playthough and a second playthough makes all of the jokes and music all the more unbearable.

The last achievement I got was for getting through the entire game without ending any battles with your buddies ‘dead.’ I ended a battle with a dead buddy after about 10 minutes of play and didn’t clock that I’d failed this achievement.

There are so many missable achievements for doing a variety of different things. Some of them involve having to collect everything, like becoming everyone’s friend and collecting all of the chinpokomon scattered throughout the town. Some areas become blocked off after a while (like the alien spaceship) and there is also a point of no return which makes both of these missable.

Others missable achievement involve you having to do one-time actions. One such action involved you having to shrink and go up a character’s ass and then summon said character to help you in a battle. Another, and this is one of my personal favourites, is for farting on the corpse of dead Nazi Zombie fetus (aptly named Too Far). You also have to watch your in-game parents have sex for 60 seconds, which is wrong on so many levels.

I could go on and on about the different missables but we will be here all day if I do. More than half the achievements are missable and while some of these are because of the point of no return, most of them aren’t and will require you to do something specific at some point in the game. I fully recommend a guide if you are planning on the 100% completion.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I guess the summary is if you really like the average South Park episodes, you will definitely enjoy this game, however if you can’t rewatch episodes it’s not recommended and will grate on you before the end. I’ll confess that I found it semi enjoyable but not for the whole game. It also doesn’t have any replay value either but that’s just my opinion.