Xbox Fitness

I know this isn’t really a game so this review is probably just going to seem a bit like me showing off the fact that I actually completed it (only 172 gamers have done so as at the time of publication – I was the 74th) and to moan about Microsoft.

Xbox Fitness is not a game. It’s a fitness program that launched with the Xbox One but it carries achievements. When I started playing it, I thought that I was fairly fit and how hard could it be? Well I answered that after doing a 30 minute Mossa fight workout which pretty much left a puddle of sweat on my lounge floor. So hard. If you do it properly.

I continued sporadically jumping in and out of it every month for ages – I tend to do a lot of exercise outside of the home so I didn’t really fancy doing more exercise after playing football or squash. However, all of that changed around a year ago when Microsoft announced that they would be shutting down the Xbox Fitness program with effect from 1 July 2017.  This sparked outrage from the Xbox community, many of which had paid for content from the program. Microsoft were forced to refund these users for all of their paid content due to a breach in the terms and conditions – that the workouts would be available for life. This is probably the only time a gaming company has not taken the ‘service may be removed at any time’ line and played off that.

Anyway, the year’s advance notice (6 months in terms of the free content which stopped being available in December 2016 – the only content I had) was enough to push me to start working in earnest to get this one finished – and also meant that I was forced to abandon my pilates workouts in favour of more ‘achievement-beneficial’ workouts.

Achievements – 1,825 Points – 31 Achievements

Everything the base game asks you do is nothing compared to the additional achievements added via title updates.

There are four things you have to do – earn workout stars, complete stamp cards, win friend challenges and gain height through jumping, squatting and climbing apparently... there wasn’t a lot of climbing involved and I’m not sure what even constitutes climbing.

Completing the stamp cards has a very cheap work around. One of the workouts gives you 4 stamps when you complete 9 workouts but after you complete 8 workouts, if you quit out of the workout as soon as you can, it gives you the stamps but not the workout completion so you can rinse and repeat this FOR HOURS until you get to 100 stamp cards complete.

You also have to win 200 drill challenges against friends which was actually one of the easier things to do once I started working on the harder ones. By the point of winning this achievement using a combination of fight, dance and recovery workouts, there were only two achievements left to get and two of the most notorious ones I’ve won – Peak Performance and Run the Day. Peak Performance was the last one I unlocked and is for climbing, jumping and squatting for 100km. In order to get 1km a day I had to do three 30 minute workouts a day. Every day. For nearly three months. It’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve done for achievements if I’m completely honest.

Real Downloadable Content – N/A

Xbox Fitness was an experience in terms of a completion and one that benefitted my personal fitness in the long run. Unfortunately no one will even be able to play the game again following Microsoft’s decision to remove it from service. It’s a real loss for the community too and quite a lot of people enjoyed and invested a lot of time into it. I’m sure Microsoft have their reasons and I’m sure even more sure they are business related.

Portal 2

I broke a cardinal rule with this one which is playing games out of order but my friends had raved about how good Portal 2 was so I couldn’t help but dive in when I saw the game in the local CEX store.

Portal 2 follows the story of Chell, a girl who wakes up from stasis in the middle of a crisis at the Aperture Science Enrichment Centre, a place that it seems has been built simply to test people’s ability to complete computer game puzzles. The Centre is falling apart and, with the help of the weird floating eye robot Wheatley, Chell must escape the facility lest she die.

On the other side of the coin, GLaDOS, the centre AI, is trying to kill her and just wants to continue putting you through all of the portal challenges that the game centres around. However, failing these challenges will result in death anyway so there is a real impetus to not fail these.

The game’s main strength is around the puzzles and their ingenuity and use of a physics engine which adds an extra dynamic to solving them. That said, for the most part, there is one way to solve the majority of the puzzles and only a few instances where they are multiple ways to reach the goal and these alternate routes are mainly down to abuse of the arena rather than having multiple purpose-built routes to the exit.

The game also gets a lot of praise for the characters and ‘dark humour’ but I didn’t really find it funny. I thought it was more silly, especially in relation to the near death experiences, and in some cases it’s a bit childish and some of the lines can be found on the playground at primary school.

 Graphically it’s also nice to look but it doesn’t do anything special. That said, when the gameplay is as solid as this, it’s hard to care what it looks like.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Right so on to the good stuff. A lot of these will unlock just through playing through the game but there are a load of achievements for doing certain things at certain times but none of these are overly complicated once you know how to complete each test chamber. There are a few notable mentions for some of the more trying ones.

There are 2 collectible related achievements where you have to read all doors in a certain chapter and smash a load of monitors in another chapter. Finding the monitors and working out how to smash them was fairly trying and required some thought and planning.

The hardest achievement, outside of co-op, was to complete Test Chamber 10 in less than 70 seconds. Even knowing how to do it, it still took me several attempts to get the timing right for some of the jumps you have to make.

Outside of the main game, there is also a specially dedicated section for co-op. This is why I put off playing the game for so long as it’s best done in local co-op and I don’t have enough local gaming friends... I did manage to get some help with this though. Me and one friend ran through the first three chapters and I managed to finish the rest of the game on my own using two controllers and ninja juggling skills. However, ninja skills aside there was still one achievement I could not do by myself and that was for completing 3 co-op chambers in the Mass and Velocity course in under 60 seconds each. For this I had to loop in the Missus to run the other player to get to the end in time. She is not a gamer in any sense and it took a long time just to get her used to using both analogue sticks at once! Dedication.

There are two online ones and one that required a session. You need to hug three people from your friends list and complete the first part of the co-op with someone who has never played the game before. This second one, I did using a second account.

Downloadable Content...

It doesn’t have achievements but there is a challenge mode DLC which is essential for the chamber specific achievements as it allows you to play the individual chambers without the story. This cut hours off of the time it would have taken to complete Chamber 10 in less than 70 seconds without it.

Portal 2 is a solid gaming experience. I didn’t enjoy the humour but lots of other people did and apparently I don’t really get Stephen Merchant as a funny man so maybe it’s just not for me. It would still be a welcome addition to any Gamertag though.