Juju

One day I was thinking to myself, ‘I haven’t played a decent platformer for ages,’ and I was scrolling through the most recent bout of Xbox Live sales and came across Juju. A quick glance at my True Achievements profile told me that it was a moderately easy platform game so would fit the bill perfectly. I have to admit that it wasn’t particularly high up my next to play list, but I finished Crash Time 4 and couldn’t be bothered to get up and put another game in console. So I just played Juju as it was installed on my Hard Drive.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really pay much attention to the opening scene of the game. There is a purple bear and he looked happy. I may have fallen asleep. So I then started to play it and the first thing that grabbed my attention was the main menu. Now, the usual main menu will have various words like, ‘New Game’, ‘Settings’, ‘Load Game’ and maybe sometimes ‘Credits’, ‘Achievements’ and ‘Quit.’ Juju has none of these and instead offers a series of symbols which can be down to your own interpretation as to what they do. Basically it’s down to gaming knowledge to know what to click on so I don’t know what a child is supposed to do in this situation.

The basic story is that you have to save your father (a giant panda) from some evil bat thing call Calypso and rebuild some kind of wooden stick that has powers or something. Juju has three main abilities at the start of the game; dashing, jumping and playing the bongos – a unique and pointlessly annoying game mechanic – and you have navigate very slowly through a variety of different environments, jumping from platform to platform, and fighting giant bosses that your small purple bear has no right beating.

The gameplay caused me a great deal of discomfort. As I’ve mentioned above, Juju moves retardedly slowly to the point where getting anywhere is an episode in frustration. Thankfully most of the levels are quite short and are only dragged out by the fact that you have to collect loads of pickups as you go. After playing games like Tomb Raider I think I can now say with some confidence that the connection between me pushing buttons to make Juju jump or dash, and Juju actually doing these things is slightly off and this resulted in me dying a lot. Trying to do the same jump five times and getting five different results was really annoying and this was a frequent occurrence.

There is also an apparent co-op element and I actually read a short article on the game where the creators said they had tried to create something that wasn’t too easy for some gamers but not too hard for others. However, having finished it, I think the creators imagine those two gamers as the same person. Having to combat the shitty controls during the harder optional levels – which are shockingly more difficult that the main game ones – was an episode in screaming for me. So a poorer gamer, i.e. a child, would probably cry. And I also don’t think a child would find the main game difficult at all. So what I’m saying is it was a nice try but it failed spectacularly.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 19 Achievements

There are 19 achievements to get while playing Juju and 8 of them can be obtained through main story progression.  There are 4 achievements for doing specific things while playing the game; hitting 3 enemies with one dash; making 4 enemies dance at once; completing a level without losing any hearts (without being hit) and getting through a level without picking up any pick-ups. This last one is actually quite challenging as pick up are pretty much everywhere and you have to avoid them all.

There is one achievement for completing a level in co-op and because I have no friends I’m willing to subject my compulsive habits to, I did this replaying the first level with two controllers.

The last six achievements are for getting all the coins and completing all the bonus levels. This is where the game goes from stupidly easy to stupidly hard thanks in part to the games controls. At one point you get the ability to swim underwater and while underwater levels are constantly slated in many other games, this really does take the biscuit. You have to swim away from instant death as bear than can only dash away in a straight horizontal line whilst having to avoid seemingly unavoidable obstacles which would otherwise be avoidable if you could dash diagonally. Really irritating.

Having to collect all the coins was really, really repetitive. There are three secret teleports in every level that take you to one of six different mini game-like collect-‘em-all puzzles. There are 72 teleports throughout the game and only six mini-game variants. Doing the same six levels 12 times each isn’t exactly excitement central.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite all the repetition, Juju is still a relatively quick completion. That doesn’t say a lot about the game though considering how repetitive it is. The difficulty curve between the main levels and unlockable levels is really jarring. By itself this isn’t a bad thing but I think it’s down to the level designs not being in sync with the controls available so it’s a design failure in my eyes.

Crash Time 4: The Syndicate

As per my Crash Time 5 review, I played Crash Time 4 out of sequence order due to online multiplayer and taking the opportunity to get them done when it arose. These two games highlight exactly why if you want to see if a series is good, you should only get the first game and buy the others if you like it. I wasn’t particularly enamoured with Crash Time 4 but it was better than 5, though that’s not saying much.

Crash Time 4 follows the story of Ben and Semir as they attempt to take down The Syndicate, a bunch of supposed criminals who never get out of their cars, spend all their time driving around the city and park in strange locations. Seriously, other than the police telling you they have committed crimes, there is no proof that these guys do anything more than speed and commit the occasional parking offense.

My biggest problems with game revolve around the gameplay elements. It’s better than Crash Time 5 in many ways – you have a semi-open world to explore which means the story is less linear, but you are made to do the same things over and over again. My bigger gripe with this is the police radio you have and how needy every other fucker on the force is. You will be contacted asking for help a disproportionate amount of times even when you are on your own missions. What’s annoying about this is that if you accidently accept an incoming cry for help – easily done by pressing the wrong button – you will abandon your current objective and be criticised for doing so!

The main part of the game is arresting all of the members of The Syndicate. To do this, you have to pull them over to take them into police custody but to actually arrest them, you then have to do an escort mission to take them from the police station to the jail. You can escort a maximum of three Syndicate members at a time and if you catch too many at once, they will either escape (how?!) or get let out because you don’t have enough evidence to hold them (despite the filmed majorly destructive intercity car chase catching them in the first place).

Here is an average 10 minutes of gameplay doing a police transport mission:

1. Start driving a police transport mission.

2. Radio goes off informing you of a stolen car. This gives the option of abandoning the police transport mission. You ignore it.

3. Radio goes off highlighting suspicious location. You ignore it and carry on with the mission.

4. Radio goes off telling you that the stadium has been bombed (for the fifth time today, I might add) and that some Americans are there. All squad cars report. You ignore this because it’s the fifth time it’s happened in the last hour so there can’t actually be a stadium left.

5. You start wondering why you haven’t arrived at the destination yet. It is always the same destination so why does it take a disproportionate amount of time to get there? It varies from mission to mission to get from the same place to the same place.

6. You will be attacked by two criminals who you can arrest by stopping them.

7. You arrive at your destination. None of the problems that happened on the way there are relevant but you have another two people you have arrested that need to be taken to prison.

8. Go back to step 1 and repeat.

Steps 1 to 7 comprises about 60% of the game. Another 30% is putting up surveillance cameras and driving to supposed criminal hideouts (which are illegal parking spots at worst and private garages at best) and the remaining 10% is doing the actual in game missions. Sadly, the only way to complete the final few missions (of which there are 5 total) involves getting to around 80% completion. So you will have to do a lot of escorting and camera-putting-up to do just to complete the main game.

The most annoying thing out of the above though, is the fact that the radio keeps giving you new shit to do but will make you quit your current objective. Pressing the wrong button at the wrong time will make you quit your objective without any ‘are you sure’ prompt which is fucking annoying but there you go. It only happened to me twice though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 39 Achievements

Shitty gameplay aside, there are still achievements here so let’s get this over with. There are 5 achievements for the main storyline and you’re bound to notch up most of the situational achievements along the way. There is one exception to this and that is the game’s one missable achievement. You have to take out 10 of your opponents and this is harder than it sounds because it is so easy to simply pull people over using the pit manoeuvre.  To take them out, you have to damage them enough to stop them and this is made difficult by the fact that you car takes damage when you are damaging the bad guys. Thankfully 10 isn’t too long-winded a number to get to but if you do what I did and target this at the start, once you’ve done it, the rest of the game flies by.

After getting all of the situational achievements and beating the main game, including setting up all cameras and getting 100%, you will still have a few things left to do. All of which involve driving for a long time. Makes sense as it’s a driving game right? A lot of the stuff has just been copied across to Crash Time 5 like drive on all tracks, drive all cars and drive 1,000 miles but Crash Time 4 drags it out a lot more.

You have to win 50 single races and in order to unlock all the cars in the first place. You have to complete loads of ‘championships’ in career mode because these cops take part in illegal street races during their down time apparently. Once you’ve done all this, there will still be 2 achievements left – for racing 30 laps each around two different courses. You will have already covered 1,000 km by this point so these achievements are totally unnecessary. The last one I got was for doing an off-road course with pebbles that if you slightly touch them, will send your car flying into the sky. It takes between 45 minutes to an hour to do just one of these two – so basically an additional hour and a half of boring gameplay if you want the 100%.

Multiplayer

There are 9 achievements for online play compared to the three on from Crash Time 5, which suggests that these guys realised that online for these games is a bag of wank. For Crash Time 4, you have to play in three different modes. You have to win 20 deathmatches including one without dying - easy if you set the kill count to one. You also have to win 20 checkpoint races and 20 normal races. I boosted this with someone else and it takes about 5 hours with two people trading wins. To be fair, 20 is a nice number compared to some of the others in online gaming but I still find this stuff unnecessary.

Downloadable – N/A

Crash Time 4 was missing some of the humour from its successor which is disappointing because it’s not strong enough to take itself seriously. The arcade racing style is forgiving which makes it playable but it’s not massively fun.

Crash Time 5: Undercover

I imagine this is a massively obscure title. Not very many people have played it, or the rest of the Crash Time series, but I thought I would get them all as the announcement that they are no longer making Xbox 360s is bound to mean a price hike in obscure games. I have recently gone through my list of games to get and splurged some money on some of the more obscure ones which will hopefully yield more completions.

Anyway, Crash Time 5. I’m going out of order and the reason for this is that I didn’t release (because I didn’t check) that Crash Time 5 and 4 both have an online multiplayer. Crash Time 5 was the easier game so it got completed first.

Crash Time 5 follows the story of Ben and Semir, two German American undercover police offers who are trying to take down 8 drugs and weapons couriers. The entire game is controlled behind the wheels of cars so this is all just framing for a racing game and the premise makes no sense at all. First, you have to do undercover missions for the guys you are trying to catch. Then you have to go racing. I still don’t get this. Why the fuck would some bit-part gangster hire you to do something and then you go off to do some racing, not for money, when you could be doing some drug running or something? It makes no sense. Not even winning the race means you are more likely to be chosen to do some work for the evil guys but even if that’s the case, why are the races on racetracks rather than checkpoint races across the city? This would actually test your ability to drug run rather than circuit race but whatever, we’ll run with it I guess.

The dialogue in the game is so bad it’s laughable. I assume that as the developers are German, that this is down to poor translation but sometimes what’s being said doesn’t tie up with the subtitles which surely means that the American voice actors didn’t even read the scripts they were given. There are also some bizarre sounding sentences. When you are winning a race by a long way, some guy will say ‘Your rivals are a long time coming.’ What does that even mean and what the hell was it translated from?! I get that it’s a small company but couldn’t they have paid someone from England £50 to read through their translations before releasing the game in English speaking countries? There’s not masses of dialogue and I personally would have done for them.

The gameplay is very arcade in its racing style which isn’t necessarily a bad thing but there are several issues I had with the racing events. The game suffers from Mario Kart syndrome in that even if you do get really far ahead (and your rivals are a long time coming), you will get pegged back really easily if you make one mistake. This is incredibly annoying when it happens on the last lap of a six lap race. The sand pits are also ridiculously unforgiving and if you do go into one by mistake, the game either slows you down to two miles an hour or respawns you 50 metres backward on the track. As I said above; stupid.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 32 Achievements

There isn’t much to the achievement list but it still takes a while to get through everything mainly because the main story takes an age to complete. There are 11 story related achievements which are unavoidable if you play through the ‘career’ mode and you will get the majority of the weapon achievements along the way as well. You will most likely need to grind out a few road blocks and shields though as you don’t get a lot of chances to use them.

There are a couple of miscellaneous achievements which are quite simple to get but one you may miss is for driving backwards for 200 metres as you don’t really have a reason to do this.

Outside of this, there are three sort of grindy achievements and one of them is just annoying. You have to drive in every car in the game and this isn’t too much of a problem if you continually use cars as you unlock them. You will still need to do some single player races after to get the last few but it’s much for muchness because of the last two. You need to drive for 1,000km which is also made superfluous due to the last one.

The last one I got was for racing on all the racetracks in the game and the reason for this is because for some reason, all of the races you were made to do in career mode don’t count. So you have to race them all again in single player racing. Why?? The races are pointless to begin with, so much so that the game doesn’t credit you for racing on the specific race tracks in career? Who knows.

Multiplayer

There are a whole three achievements for the multiplayer and they can all be gained in about 5 minutes. You need to win a match, win a Deathmatch without dying and play Deathmatch without dying. So basically win a first to one kill Deathmatch. The only hard thing about this is finding some else to play with as no one plays the game anymore – if they even did in the first place.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Crash Time 5 isn’t a quick completion but it is made funny by the dialogue stuff I’ve mentioned above. Ben and Semir don’t have much camaraderie in this one though and it seems like a cheap sign off of the series.

I wouldn’t recommend the series based on this entry. Crash Time 4, from my limited experience with it, seems much more diverse in the way it’s been made and I’m wondering what the earlier titles will have to offer.

BATMAN: A TellTale Series

So having acquired Skyrim and The Ezio Collection for Christmas and making a new year’s resolution to play games when I get them rather than waiting 18 months before thinking about playing them, I immediately set about getting balls deep into the remastered edition of Skyrim. However, it takes more than half an hour to install Skyrim so I thought I would crack on with one of the more recent Telltale games. Episode 1 of BATMAN was being given away for free so I played while I waited.

Considering the game is titled BATMAN, it should have been called Bruce Wayne – The Telltale Series as you spend very little time actually playing as Batman. You spend most of the time playing as the playboy billionaire and the storyline sees Bruce take on Harvey Dent, Catwoman, the Penguin and a new villain called Lady Arkham.

With all Telltale games, the story is driven by the decisions you make but I was immediately irritated by this in the first episode. There is a scene where you can chose to intimidate a bad guy into giving you some info or beat it out of him. I chose to intimidate him which involved not beating him up with a metal bar. The dialogue later on assumed that I nearly killed him which is so far removed from what I actually did that I stopped caring about the story outcomes from here on out.

The whole ‘story is derived from the choices you make’ has gone progressively downhill since The Wolf Among Us. The choices in this game essentially take you on a different course to the same inevitable outcome.

A further complaint is the loading times. I almost thought that Skyrim would have fully downloaded by the time the main menu initialised and this made me want to complete the game in as few sittings as possible.

What I did like about the game is the original take on Bruce Wayne’s family and the Gotham environment. Seeing the Penguin as a young man the same age as Bruce was very different as was Harvey Dent’s connection to Bruce from the outset. Other positives also relate directly as a comparison to Game of Thrones. This Telltale game felt a lot cleaner and more polished that this last one I played and there were nowhere near as many glitches or crashes. H ere still present but still, an improvement is worth mentioning.

One noticeable difference between this and other Telltale games is the sheer volume of quicktime events. Some sections string between 10 and 20 button presses in a row. These are quite forgiving though, in terms of the time you are given to do them and also there is no punishment for pressing the wrong combo as long as you get the right one before the time runs out.

The music and effects are very much in keeping with the Arkham series so, despite being completely different in terms of story, it doesn’t feel totally removed from the universe.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to say here. Play the game from start finish making whatever decisions you want and you will net them all. Again, it’s a little disappointing because it would have been nice to try some of the different paths and I don’t have the time or patience to play through the game again, not with so many other games I haven’t even started yet.

All in all it’s a solid narrative gaming experience if a little heavy on the quicktime events. A welcome addition to the Telltale series but further confirmation that nothing will beat The Wolf Among Us.

Layers of Fear

I had heard a lot of good things about Layers of Fear, enough good things to warrant buying it in a sale anyway. That said, it was one of those games I had no real intention of playing immediately. However I was getting fed up of spending ages deciding which unplayed game to start next so to get around this, I employed the help of my friends and a number based picking system. Incidentally Layers of Fear was the first to come out of the hat.

Layers of Fear follows the story of some painter who returns to a house with an obscure message – ‘finish it.’ I say obscure but what I mean is obvious. The painter has returned to finish a painting. Duh. Throughout the game you are haunted by images of some family and there is a constant link to the creative psyche and how you need to be fully mentally unhinged to be good at being creative. Essentially what this means is that the storyline is clichéd, pretentious horseshit.

Graphically it’s outstanding. A lot of effort has been put into the visual aspect of the game and there is detail everywhere. I played through the game three times and I can’t remember seeing any graphical cock ups which is massively refreshing especially from an independent production.

The gameplay coupled with the music is where it really works and it’s a team effort here. The slow-paced movements of the protagonist (if you can call him that) work with an interchanging environment that creates an immersive, engaging gameplay experience. There were several times where I did actually jump and some of this was before the game even got going.

Another nice little detail is the fact that the protagonist walks with a limp. As you explore the Layers of Fear universe it becomes apparent as to why as well so it’s well developed, well implemented touch... if not a little frustrating when you want to go somewhere quickly.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 27 Achievements

So on to the achievements. There are achievements associated with collectibles and for doing certain things throughout the game. There is chapter select which makes getting the collectibles relatively straightforward if you did miss any but there’s no real need to use this as the game requires 3 separate playthroughs for the 100%.

There are two weird ones that require some non-standard behaviour. You have to stare at paintings for an hour. In a painter’s house, not too difficult. You just have to remember to keep turning the controller back on when it disconnects after a lack of activity. There is another one for staring at a specific painting for five minutes which is a secret and was a pain in the ass for me as my achievement tracking stopped working while I was doing this so I probably stared at it for double the time required.

The one that really takes the cake is for getting the three different endings. And the reason is no one really knows how to trigger any of them. There are some videos which I used to get the others after nailing the supposed hard-to-get ending first after faffing about a lot; opening every drawer and cupboard in the game; not knowing what needed doing next; staring at paintings for an hour (that’s right) and dying not quite the maximum amount of times. The other ending guides I’ve seen say to do some of these things which contradicts the ending I got. The last ending I got was apparently the most common one it comes with two additional achievements for the finishing the game.

Downloadable Content

There is one additional piece of DLC where you come back to the house playing as the daughter of the guy from the main game. The storyline is shorter and involves weird flashbacks, less jump scares and a shitty torch.

One addition, which again shows the attention to detail, is the fact that she walks normally whereas the character from the main games walks with a limp. It’s a small thing but it would have been really easy to not bother and make the mechanics the same.

The achievements are essentially a short version of what was in the main game but there is a lot more faffing about needed to collect everything and get some specific endings. I didn’t know about this so I had to play it through it three times whereas if you do it right, you only have to play it through twice. There are another three endings to find but two of them can be done on the same playthough.

There is one annoying glitch in the DLC though. When going for the hidden ending, you have to collect nine pictures which then form a secret message. However, when some people do this, the secret message won’t appear even if you fulfilled all the criteria building up to it. There is a weird work around for this though which involves using the torch I mentioned earlier but this is the only blemish on an otherwise well put together gaming experience.

Layers of Fear is a good game for both narrative engagement and achievements. It didn’t feel like hard work or repetitive despite the requirement for three playthroughs which suggests that the length of the game is about right. For less than £10, it’s good value too.

Octodad: Dadliest Catch

I’ll be honest, I’m not even sure why I paid money for this one. I’m hoping it was on offer at the time because it didn’t feel like £5 worth of game. Anyway, the reason I started playing it was because I was flicking through my games trying to decide what to play while Skyrim installed (the remastered one – oh yeah!) and my step-son got excited about seeing Octodad in the inventory. I thought why not, but almost immediately regretted it.

The controls are mind boggling to the point where, having just finished the game, if I was to pick up the controller again in an hour, I probably wouldn’t be able to move Octodad across a room.

Anyway, the premise is pretty fucked up. You are an Octopus pretending to be human. You didn’t misread that, you are an Octopus. And in the game’s opening you have to get married to a human woman. No one knows you are an Octopus and you have to con the world into thinking you are a regular human. Shit gets more fucked up in chapter 2 when two human kids pop out of nowhere.

Aside from trying to have a family and being afraid of the aquarium, there is also a chef who knows you are an octopus and keeps trying to kill you. I imagine it’s so he can cook Octodad or something but this never really gets addressed.

Anyway on to the juicy stuff – the controls. I understand that this game is supposed to have a back-to-basics style premise. The controls for Octodad enable you to control his right and left ‘legs’ and one arm which can stick to things. Sounds easy right? It’s not. They’ve couldn’t have made the controls more fucktarded if they tried.

When you start out, you are gently introduced to moving around and it doesn’t take that long to get sort of used to it but even then, you only have half control over the character. This is made worse by the fact you are penalised for knocking stuff over. I did wonder what it would be like to try and play a level without knocking any stuff over. It would probably make the playthrough about 20 hours longer than it should be.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

Playing the game is one thing but trying to gather the miscellany of achievements is something else. Basically you have to do a wild variety of different things and not a lot of them are directly related to the story - which is something I do like about achievement lists - however some of shit you have to do with the added pressure of shit controls is not fun.

I’ll mention some of my personal favourites and personal struggles with them. The first one was the secret gardener which tasks you with weeding the garden without stepping on any of the flowers. The path through the flowers is really narrow and the flowers are really sensitive to octopus proximity which isn’t great when Octodad handles like a reversing articulated lorry on ice.

There are two achievements that sort of ruin each other; one for dying and one for playing the whole game without dying. In order to die and get the Trim Your Moustache achievement you have to throw an item on to a branch and then get sucked into a mower. This is hard as throwing anything in this game is beyond ridiculous. Completing the game without dying however is relatively easy. If you play the game on easy, no one will ever know you are an octopus even if you squirted ink in their face.

There were another two that fucked me off due to the bad controls. You have to complete some kind of weird dancing game (apt for an aquarium) without missing a step and running up two escalators against their direction of movement in less than 30 seconds. Both of these tasks require a certain amount of dexterity and coordination, something that you can have masses of but the game won’t afford you any chances to use your own abilities.

And that brings me nicely onto the last one I’ll mention - getting all the collectibles. Now, I enjoy going off the beaten track but having a set of 39 collectibles that require you to be able to climb narrow things, jump and sometimes develop the ability to fly with a character that’s diametrically opposed to walking in a straight line is an episode of blood-curdling frustration. But I got there in the end.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Potential Spoilers: Now despite what I’ve said, Octodad is fun for about an hour but after that, it makes you want to scream or give up. However, if you do manage to get to the end of the game, the kids I’ve mentioned earlier work out you are an Octopus and actually ask the obvious question; why do they exist if daddy isn’t human? Too right. And after playing through the whole bizarre universe, it’s almost nice to see the developers acknowledge that their creation is beyond weird. 

Far Cry 4

Despite owning two predecessors to this one, this is actually the first Far Cry game I’ve played and I’m not sure what I made of the whole experience. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a very good, well constructed, free-flowing game but I’m not sure I enjoyed it very much and here are the reasons why.

Far Cr 4 follows the story of Ajay Ghale returning to his home of Kyrat after spending a lot of time in America acquiring a consumer-friendly American accent. Upon his arrival, he is greeted by the local dictator Pagan Min, the guy with the worst fashion sense in the country. As the start of the game, he invites you to dinner and then leaves you alone. Here you have a choice; wait for him to return which results in the end credits rolling, or get up and leave and embark on a 40 plus hour quest to take him out along with all his little lackies.

The gameplay is very solid and I particularly liked the shooting mechanics. The reason for this is something I’ve mentioned in other reviews – I like to be able to aim at someone’s head and actually shoot them in the head. Far Cry 4 does this very well which makes clearing out an outpost with a sniper rifle, or bow and arrow, an absolute joy.

One criticism is that the world is very large and it takes ages to get anywhere. Most of the roads and vehicles are useless and driving is fucking difficult so I ended up walking most places, especially when looking for collectibles. This really drags out the play time, especially for me who spent a lot of the time walking miles from an outpost only to die and have to start again. I think this is probably more to do with me sucking at the game though.

Another part of it I couldn’t get on board with was the characters of Yogi and Reggie. These were two of the most infuriating characters in gaming history. You encounter them, go on some kind of acid trip bender and wake up without any of your stuff... then you keep going back for more?! It makes no sense. And they are annoying characters who seem to be in the game just to make English people look like drug addicts.

Graphically, it’s lovely. It’s a very attractive world where everything looks amazing and it’s pretty much glitch free. A lot of work has to go in to making a world where you walk from one end of it to other without getting caught on scenery or falling through the floor. Bravo.

Musically, it’s very blah and bland, although effort has gone in to make it sound authentically Kyrati. On the sound front, the most annoying part of the game is the radio host Rabi Ray Rana. He calls himself a freedom fighter but doesn’t actually do any fighting other than spilling shit over his pirate radio station. All he does is bad mouth Pagan Min and does so on a very short loop and ends up saying the same thing over and over again to the point where I was so sick of hearing him say ‘the elephant in the room’ that I actively avoided driving even more despite the additional time it added to my playthrough.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 57 Achievements

Achievements wise there isn’t anything majorly difficult, just time consuming and a few you need to be aware of if you want to save time. For example, one achievement requires you to clear an outpost without being detected. This is much easier to do at the beginning of the game as there are less guards. If you miss out early on, you can replay the outposts to get this.

Completing the campaign fully will net you most of the main game achievements with a few exceptions. The more memorable ones for me were for killing a dude with an arrow from over 60 meters (I had to practice a lot to get the distance right) and killing two targets with one shot from a sniper. With this second one getting two guys to line up was a massive pain in the ass.

There are four grinding ones which annoyed me. You basically have to reply certain outposts to hammer out the requirements relatively quickly. You need to kill 30 enemies with an elephant, 30 enemies with mortar rounds (so you have to play an outpost with a mortar and set off the alarm), 50 enemies with fire and you have to distract 15 enemies with rocks. Considering the easiest way to clear an outpost is to sit back with a sniper, I barely did any of this and just worked on the achievements separately.

Multiplayer

There are two elements to the multiplayer; online versus and co-op. The versus mode only has one achievement but it requires you to finish a public match of each of the game types. It requires six players to actually start these matches and no one was playing the game when I wanted to so I had to get some friends to help get it – annoying when all you have to do is play a match.

The co-op was a bit stupid too. You can join anyone’s game but playing in co-op is much more of a friend thing to do. Playing with random people never works for me and I would more than likely end up playing with some fucking idiots, so had to get someone likeminded to get the achievements. The achievements themselves take less than half an hour to get if you do have someone so it’s not too bad. But still, it’s an unnecessary addition.

Downloadable Content

There is one single player DLC expansion that has you take Ajay into the Valley of the Yetis. It’s a weird additional piece of the game that doesn’t really make any sense as some crazy people are trying to kill you for whatever reason.

Thankfully the DLC is just a single player expansion of the main game with a new area to explore and new challenges to complete. I found this a real pain in the ass to get to the end of but I think this may have been because I was bored of the gameplay by this point and no amount of wacky storylines could change this.

Far Cry 4 is a very good game but I did find it monotonous and boring after a while. I guess no matter how good a game is, that can’t guarantee personal enjoyment. That said, I will be playing some of the other ones in the series with the exception of Far Cry 2. That one can jump of a bridge.