ABZÛ

I had an original reason for starting this one. I recently decided to take part in a True Achievements site challenge where I had to earn an achievement from each letter of the alphabet in order. This works in that you get an achievement beginning with the letter A, then the letter B and so on. You can unlock other achievements in between but they won’t count towards the challenge. When I got to Z, I only had one achievement across all of my games that qualified – Zombie Repeller from Halo 3. This looked to be too much of a pain considering the alphabet challenge was timed so I opted for a new title. With the Zen Master achievement, ABZÛ fit the bill.

ABZÛ is an underwater exploration game where you are a diver who is swimming underwater, exploring and making friends with lots of different sea life. There isn’t really any reasoning behind the story but it is sort of revealed that there are some strange problems in the oceanic world and it’s up to you to save the ocean.

The game mechanics involve swimming and finding stuff and you can also interact with some of the larger fish to swim with them. It’s more about the journey than the gameplay and the oceanic world is well crafted with lots of attention to detail. I didn’t get stuck on any scenery (one of my gaming bugbears) and I didn’t get lost all that much despite the in-game world being quite big.

The sound effects consist of generic watery style music which at first is okay but after a while it starts to wear thin despite the fact it’s a relatively short game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

A short game and a short achievement list to boot. There are various things required to get the 100%. The first thing you can do is jump out of the water. The next thing is to grab a big fish and do a flip. Later in the game, you will come across giant squid and you can ride these too for another achievement.

There is another achievement for bursting through 15 schools of fish in jet stream sections where you go really fast. After you have done this bit, there aren’t any more specific achievements to get until you complete your collections of stuff. You have to find all meditation points (this is the Zen Master achievement) and while you are meditating, you need to watch a fish eat another fish for another achievement. This is irritating because it’s not down to you, the player, whether or not you get this as it’s totally luck based... but thankfully seems to happen a lot.

There are another two collection achievements for releasing all fish from hidden pools and finding all the sea shells. This last one is a bit of a funny one as there is one shell hidden in the end of game credits which you can pick up as it’s an interactive scene.

There are two unavoidable ones that relate to the story and another one for riding a blue whale until it jumps into the air.

The last one I got nearly caused me to have a rage blackout. There is one small section of the game where the water is frozen and you can jump out of the water on to the ice. This is meant to trigger the Artic Explorer achievement however many people, including me found that this didn’t work. Luckily, and that’s all I can describe it as, I replayed the level, went there again and hung out for the long haul. It popped eventually but it’s still a bit shoddy. As you can tell, I clearly don’t like it when things don’t work the way they should.

Downloadable Content – N/A

ABZÛ is a straight forward completion - glitches aside - that offers light enjoyment without any major challenges. It’s one for the achievement hunters and doesn’t offer much in terms of replay value.