Saints Row 2

After months and months of laborious grinding, I have finally managed to add Saints Row 2 to my completed collection. The multiplayer and co-op were the only hold ups for this one and I’m glad to see the back of it, and all Saints Row multiplayer for that matter.

So the story of the second Saints Row follows on from the start of the first one in that you are a gangsta, in prison after being apparently double crossed. You are broken out and need to go on a mission to rebuild the Saints and take out three new gangs in the city of Stillwater. Alongside that you have the activity and reputation format that goes with the previous game. It’s basically a more polished version of the first.

The co-op requirement was totally fucking pointless. You have to play through the whole game with someone over an internet connection which adds a handicap in that it’s glitchy as fuck, randomly cuts and generally is a poorer version of the main game. With longer load times.

The gameplay is again a carbon copy of the first one and is basically a whacky GTA clone. There’s nothing wrong with this in itself but I did find the activities and missions a bit repetitive after a while and it makes you do most of them at least twice to the point where if you fail at the end, you will most likely scream or throw your controller against the wall.

Graphically it’s superior to its predecessor, however considering the length of time between release and this review I think it was good at the time but compared to more modern Xbox 360 releases, it doesn’t hold up very well and this is coming from someone who recently put a good 25 plus hours into the monotonous gameplay.

It has a fully licensed soundtrack with artists you may actually recognise compared to the guys who just wanted to kill hookers, do drugs and rob people in a really boring way in the last one and the soundtrack is actually one of the highlights. Driving around listening to Wolfmother is as a good in game as it is in real life.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 60 Achievements

Okay so this is quite the haul but most of it is a repeat of Saints Row, minus the multiplayer, in a new skin so I won’t go into too much detail over the single player requirements. You have to obviously play all of the missions, find all the shit scattered around the city, jump and fly through various bits and complete all of the activities – insurance fraud is a pain. There. Now on to the more irritating ones.

Like most games, there seems to be a requirement to do a certain thing a certain amount of times despite the fact that doing these things this amount of times does not benefit you in the slightest. You have to mug 50 citizens, gamble $500,000, shot people in the baaaawls 100 times, taunt 50 gang members and grab 50 human shields. It’s very grindy but helps towards one of the bigger achievements – play the game for 50 hours.

This is the main block of the single player but there are also some little things that need doing like singing along to the radio, throwing someone really far and surfing on a vehicle for a three star award.

Multiplayer

There is a big debate in the online gaming community over which online is the more ridiculous. Saints Row had a true skill system which could almost lock you out of the Kingpin achievement if you played and lost too many online matches in all game types. In Saints Row 2 there is no such system. Instead you have to play in this thing called Strong Arm where you get money for how well you do. In order to get the 30 multiplayer badges required for the Kingpin achievement, you need to play the online ranked multiplayer to accumulate nearly £800,000. When me and my boosting partner (massive shout out to H3rmitard!) were at the end of this, we were only earning between £5,000 to £6,000 per 15 minute game. So it takes a fucking age.

You also have another 20 badges to get from doing other things and we worked our way through all of these too. Most of the require you to rinse and repeat the same shit over and over again and it’s just sinfully horrible. The two worst badges are for spraying fuck loads of tags and the Arr... badge which is for playing the game on either the 19^th September (when I got it) or 5^th December. For pirates and ninjas day apparently. It’s utter bollocks.

I’ve already mentioned the co-op requirements and it was a massive cunt having to drag my ass through the whole game again in co-op, activities and all. Thankfully there was no requirement to collect all the fucking picks up and jumps again – that would have been far too much.

There are a few other multiplayer achievements but these all pale in comparison and are relatively quick compared to the Strong Arm shit.

Downloadable Content

There are two pieces of DLC for this one and both of them are horrible. They only offer a couple of additional single player missions and across both of them there are only 3 achievements for single player. The rest of the majority of the achievements are blah multiplayer but one adds to fuckassery above. Corporate Warfare introduces a Stuntman activity and you have to win 20 rounds in a co-op game. It takes FORVER to win 20 rounds and doing this with someone else is double that. It’s not even fun.

To sum up, Saints Row 2 offers a solid single player experience with a sizeable but mediocre multiplayer tag on. If someone asked me to get all the achievements again I would tell them to fuck right off. I may be slightly crazy but I’m not a total masochist.

Minecraft: Story Mode

This one, I didn’t really understand. I bought it for the children and fancied playing something mindless one day so put it in, mainly to see what the fuss was about. Everyone seemed to be raving about this latest instalment of the Tell Tale Games’ point and click adventure series but I didn’t see how Minecraft could be turned into an engaging story.

Obviously it’s my opinion but I was not a massive fan of the storyline. You play as Jessie, a sexually ambiguous boy/girl who has some friends who want to win some kind of building contest. From here, the world gets threatened by destruction from the wither storm, a nasty thing with lots of heads that kills everyone.

The storyline gets gradually more depressing as you play and by the end I was struggling to pick up the controller to carry on. This is partly down to Tell Tale’s moral choice game play where it’s a case of, ‘in which way would you like to fail?’ This is what grinds my gears about all of these Tell Tale games. The choices you make never lead you to a good ending where everyone survives. It’s basically a case of choose who will die.

The main game (excluding DLC) is 5 episodes long and Tell Tale did their usual thing of releasing them periodically. I, however, chose to play it after all the episodes were released which meant I could do it back to back. In hindsight, this is probably why I found it so depressing.

Achievements – 1,375 Points – 50 Achievements

Now the initial release just includes Episode One but the main game is effectively the first five episodes so that’s how I’m choosing to view it. Looking at the achievements, there are some choices that were made which were quite confusing.

In Episode one, you have to make a lever when you are supposed to make a sword and complete all the chapters. Episode two actually had an alternate path achievement for acquiring two different characters so you have to play that one twice. Episode three has an achievement for talking to your pet pig over and over again until there are no more dialogue options. After that, there are no more different things to do and the achievement list reverts back to completing the episode and nothing more.

I know I’ve said this before but I don’t understand this approach. You have an achievement system; you sort of started using it... and then thought ‘na, fuck this’ and just continued to list completing the chapters as achievements. I don’t get it.

Downloadable Content

Tell Tale released a further three episodes for this shit which is more than they’ve done for any of their other franchises. You basically get stuck in a never ending circle of doors that lead to different worlds. Jessie only seemed to have ‘be a cock’ dialogue options which means you no choice but to come across as totally knob-jockey for three hours.

The achievements are more of the same –just complete the episodes if you can stay awake long enough to do so.

MInecraft Story Mode did nothing for me in terms of narrative engagement or exciting game play. I also found that it didn’t hold my attention which meant that I missed a lot of dialogue options. Not that it mattered as being missing all dialogue choices for the whole game wouldn’t have made me miss any of the achievements.

Agatha Christie – The A.B.C Murders

Having seen a few of my friends playing this, I thought I would carry out my own investigation into a game adaptation of Agatha Christie – a concept I thought was very weird. I was wrong about it being weird and, in fact, it was quite the boring experience.

You play as Agatha Christie’s Poirot and you are on the trail of the ABC killer, a killer who is targeting victims in various locales starting with the letter A, then the letter B and so on. This isn’t much of a spoiler – the clue is in the title.

The nearest like for like comparison I can make is to the Sherlock Holmes series and I have to say that the Sherlock games are a lot better. On Poirot’s investigations, you have to solve various puzzles, interrogate victims and suspects and piece together clues to reach a valid conclusion. The puzzles and interrogations are fine for the most part but piecing the clues together is very, very subjective and it suffers from the same problems as other games of the genre where it wants you to reach its conclusion without you making any of your own. I don’t understand this style of gaming unless building the functionality to allow you to take shortcuts, after you’ve worked stuff out for yourself, is incredibly difficult to build.

The puzzles, while okay, aren’t going to win any awards for ingenuity but a few of them may win some points for obscurity, especially towards the end. Some of the puzzles required you to have some kind of psychic connection to the thinking of the developers as there was no real way to identify the steps required to solve some of them.

Graphically they have gone for a cartoony look and feel which is suitable for the game type and allows Poirot to look sensibly different from David Suchett. The music is also in keeping with the genre with the exception of the puzzle sections where an overly ominous track plays in the background despite the fact there is no punishment for failing or time limit to complete any of them – a strange choice.

The last comment I will make is that they seem to have tried to match Sherlock with how much of an asshole Poirot can be. He comes across as majorly condescending at times, especially towards Hastings, the one guy that is meant to be his friend. I don’t understand the need for these games to create a completely unlikable protagonist for you to play as. For me, this is a buzz kill and made this game a drag to get through.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

A welcome return to the 50 achievement format here but to get all of the achievements takes some planning if you want to avoid extra playthroughs. 32 can be obtained on a single playthrough without issue, however the other 18 are completely missable.

At least a second partial playthrough will be required as you need to make eight mistakes during the course of the investigation. There are counter achievements for taking the right approach but you only get one save so tactical saves won’t work and the mistakes achievement is cumulative in one playthrough. To get eight mistakes in one playthrough you need to get as far as nearly the end of the game so it’s practically two playthroughs that are required.

Agatha Christie – The A.B.C Murders

Having seen a few of my friends playing this, I thought I would carry out my own investigation into a game adaptation of Agatha Christie – a concept I thought was very weird. I was wrong about it being weird and, in fact, it was quite the boring experience.

You play as Agatha Christie’s Poirot and you are on the trail of the ABC killer, a killer who is targeting victims in various locales starting with the letter A, then the letter B and so on. This isn’t much of a spoiler – the clue is in the title.

The nearest like for like comparison I can make is to the Sherlock Holmes series and I have to say that the Sherlock games are a lot better. On Poirot’s investigations, you have to solve various puzzles, interrogate victims and suspects and piece together clues to reach a valid conclusion. The puzzles and interrogations are fine for the most part but piecing the clues together is very, very subjective and it suffers from the same problems as other games of the genre where it wants you to reach its conclusion without you making any of your own. I don’t understand this style of gaming unless building the functionality to allow you to take shortcuts, after you’ve worked stuff out for yourself, is incredibly difficult to build.

The puzzles, while okay, aren’t going to win any awards for ingenuity but a few of them may win some points for obscurity, especially towards the end. Some of the puzzles required you to have some kind of psychic connection to the thinking of the developers as there was no real way to identify the steps required to solve some of them.

Graphically they have gone for a cartoony look and feel which is suitable for the game type and allows Poirot to look sensibly different from David Suchett. The music is also in keeping with the genre with the exception of the puzzle sections where an overly ominous track plays in the background despite the fact there is no punishment for failing or time limit to complete any of them – a strange choice.

The last comment I will make is that they seem to have tried to match Sherlock with how much of an asshole Poirot can be. He comes across as majorly condescending at times, especially towards Hastings, the one guy that is meant to be his friend. I don’t understand the need for these games to create a completely unlikable protagonist for you to play as. For me, this is a buzz kill and made this game a drag to get through.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

A welcome return to the 50 achievement format here but to get all of the achievements takes some planning if you want to avoid extra playthroughs. 32 can be obtained on a single playthrough without issue, however the other 18 are completely missable.

At least a second partial playthrough will be required as you need to make eight mistakes during the course of the investigation. There are counter achievements for taking the right approach but you only get one save so tactical saves won’t work and the mistakes achievement is cumulative in one playthrough. To get eight mistakes in one playthrough you need to get as far as nearly the end of the game so it’s practically two playthroughs that are required.