Saints Row: Gat of out Hell

A while ago, I committed to doing the only online achievement in this game with my friend who did Saints Row II with me. It’s taken a while for us both to be available at the same time but we finally managed it at the back end of my Bean Dive so I added another game to my backlog. Not to be fully bogged down by a host of unfinished games, I cracked straight on with the rest of the game as soon as I finished 6 out of my 8 Bean Dive titles.

Gat out of Hell picks up where Saints Row IV left off. The earth is destroyed, and the Saints are sailing through space just chilling. The next thing you know, the leader of the Saints gets kidnapped by the devil and it’s up to Johnny Gat (and Kinsey) to bust in to hell, murder a bunch of demons and bust him out of there.

The storyline is almost pointless in terms of how stupid it is but what the Saints Row series offers now is just hours of wacky fun… for the most part. More on that later. The gameplay is the same as Saints Row IV. You gain some super powers, grab some guns and go around completing challenges and taking over sections of the map, called New Hades. Along the way, you meet notorious characters from history such as Blackbeard, Vlad the Impaler and Shakespeare?! Yes, apparently Shakespeare was inherently evil and hell-worthy according to the Saints. Once you’ve taken over most of the map, you annoy the devil enough to face him in battle and once you beat him, you complete the game.

There’s not much to it really – there’s the standard faire of activities and take-over set pieces, the most notable changes being the challenges that involve flying with your new-found demon-slash-angel wings.

Graphically it’s the same as Saints Row IV and doesn’t really need any more. I had a couple of crashes and got stuck on scenery a few times but all in all it’s a fairly solid build. Musically, it does have a soundtrack but like Saints IV you won’t hear any of it because it’s infinitely easier to travel using powers. The background music becomes very repetitive towards the end though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

For the most part it’s a fairly straightforward achievement list. There are only two missables, one for collecting five orb thingys without touching the ground and another for completing an Extraction Facility on a motorcycle. The hardest part of this last one is knowing it’s an achievement (it’s not a secret but you need to read the list) and getting a motorcycle. Vehicles in the game are a bit weird in that there’s only about 5 or 6 different ones and if you need a specific one, it will never show up.

The in-game unlockable abilities are great because you can unlock a collectible indicator which shows you where all the collectibles are. I love it when games do this as it’s then about you collecting all the shit rather than having to search the entire map for the one you missed (I’m looking at you Crackdown).

The rest of the achievements are easy to get but the biggest issue with it is that it’s grindy and repetitive. It would have been nice if the game rounded itself up nicely, but the fact is after you have done everything that Gat has to offer, you will mostly likely have another 10 hours of grinding weapon and power kills on enemies to do. And even this wasn’t enough to get me to the 20-hour mark required for what was my final achievement - for playing for 20 hours. I unlocked this last while asleep as I left it rack up gameplay hours over night.

So the biggest problem with Gat is that it doesn’t have enough content to match it’s achievements and Saints Row IV had double the play time requirement too. It’s just a bit disappointing.

Multiplayer

The only multiplayer requirement is to play co-op online for 3 hours. It doesn’t have to be in on go but that’s what we did and we also used the time to get all of the missable achievements. And it’s always fun to play with friends. I’m just glad I had one rather than having to find a random to play with.

Gat out of Hell was an enjoyable game for around 8 hours or so and this time flies by. After that though, to get the rest of the achievements, it’s a grindy slogfest that will bore you half to death.

Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series

I’ve taken a new tact to getting my unplayed games completed. I’ve targeted completing the 30 ‘easiest’ games in my collection on both the Xbox One and Xbox 360. I wasn’t keen to do these in order, so I asked my friends again to pick numbers to go through. I think at the time this was number 2, where number 1 was the easiest. That’s to be expected from the Telltale series.

The Enemy Within continues from where the first game left off with Batman fighting crime and taking names. The Riddler is up this time and after the opening scene, it transpires that there’s more than just the Riddler terrorising Gotham. The Enemy Within sees the birth of the Joker in this universe and the conclusion seems to imply that we won’t be seeing any more Batman games from the Telltale boys.

There’s not really a lot else to say by now. The stories are multiple choice dialogue games where you can choose to say one of three things or nothing at all. This one felt a little longer than the other games though but I’m not sure if this was because I keep playing them late at night and falling asleep or they were just longer. I found myself taking between 2 and 3 hours to finish an episode rather than the usual 1 to 2.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

Play through the story from start to finish and you will net all the achievements. Except one word of advice is to not skip the end credits at the end of episode 5. I did this, and the final achievement did not unlock as there is a post credit cutscene and for some bizarre reason, despite this not being the end, it doesn’t have a checkpoint and I had to play the whole of the 5^th episode again to get the last achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While I quite liked the game overall, it did drag on a bit and you spend a lot more time being Bruce Wayne than Batman. And that last achievement glitch irritated me beyond all measure. This is one for the Batman fans and not necessarily achievement hunters, although it remains a straightforward easy completion.

King's Quest

King’s Quest is the last of my eight Bean Dive games that will be fully completed this side of 2018 as the other 2 involve lots of online grinding and some stuff I potentially won’t be able to do. Time will tell…

Anyway, King’s Quest follows the story of Graham… or Gram as he is referred to by most of the cast that can’t seem to say Graham, as he recalls the stories of his youthful adventures to his grandchildren. The first episode of the game, which is the pre-DLC game, focusses on how Graham becomes a knight by winning a tournament.

The game play has you move Graham around the relatively small open world town of Daventry – a town name I hated throughout my time playing as it sounds a little bit like a domestic cleaning product. The general aim of the game is to find items to use to complete your quests, and occasionally make dialogue choices.

In terms of what King’s Quest offers, its essentially 60% story, 40% puzzles. Some of the puzzles without the use of a guide would be tricky to figure out but it’s all reasonably fair in terms of allowing you the freedom to figure everything out – there is nothing that’s massively obscure.

Without ruining the game, there’s not really a lot else to talk about other than style and music. The graphics are reasonably cartoony which suits the story telling aspect and the music goes with it quite well. It’s also telling that I played the game and all DLCs for nearly 25 hours and the music didn’t get annoying in the slightest.

Achievements – 1,800 Points – 53 Achievements

Right, so while King’s Quest is probably listed as an easy completion due to its gameplay and story focus, getting all the achievements in one playthrough is a bit of a task. This is because 34 achievements are missable and not related to the story and it requires a few tactical saves to reduce unnecessary play time.

For the main game (episode 1), there is a lot of pissing about you need to do to net them all. There are 17 Achievements in the main game with 13 random things you need to do. A lot of these, and a theme for some of the missable DLC achievements, involve you having to repeat a dialogue or action over and over again to get all of Old Graham’s changeable dialogue to be played. Or dying stupidly which causes one of those, ‘oh wait, that’s not how it happened!’ moments that make the death just part of Graham’s awful memory.

Downloadable Content

There are 4 DLCs which extend the story of Graham’s adventures from the first episode. I’ve said before with these style games that I don’t consider the additional episodes to be DLC but this one carries 1,000 points from the from the first episode alone with another 200 on offer per additional episode.

The first two DLCs require partial multiple playthroughs to get every story outcome with achievements attached and the most frustrating part of the hunt was having to play through a story game for a second time. Thankfully though, the cutscenes are fully skippable and this showed how the short the game is if you skip through the fuzz.

From episode 4, things take a drastic turn from jovial to horribly dark storytelling. It becomes even weirder when the dark turn issue is resolved, and everyone just carries on as afterwards as if nothing happened. I won’t go into more than that but it’s at this point that Graham’s character stops being charming and comes across like a massive twat.

Things get even more weird in episode 5 and even more depressing when we reach the end of the story. Most of this last instalment feels a lot like playing through Graham’s onset of dementia. It’s dark but also a brave move addressing a very real, heart-breaking issue that people go through and actively capturing it in gameplay.

King’s Quest was a slog at times – especially during the second and third episodes where I had to replay a large portion of them. But overall, it’s a solid story game that asks questions of the players towards the end. I would definitely recommend it for a relaxed playthrough just for the story alone.

Your Toy

Your Toy is a game on the American market that showed up on an easy achievement list thingy and as it was pretty much free in the grand scheme of things, I thought why not give it a go?

I have to say from the moment I started playing, I thought that Your Toy was a horrible game. The basic premise is that you have thrown away a toy bear, perhaps by ripping it in half or something, and the entire game appears that this wonton destruction has created this nightmare you now face. You spend the majority of your time running from a bear monster thing that chases you, and the rest of the time solving puzzles that are so obscure that only the diehard trial-and-error enthusiasts will see out without the use of a guide.

In terms of gameplay, the most frustrating part of it is the ridiculously slow and laborious movement speed of the game’s protagonist – or teddy bear killer with no soul, whatever you want to call him. Getting from room to room, and even getting around the same room, is sheer frustration. There’s also a zoom function where you can look at stuff, and sometimes this is the only way to interact with things. That’s pretty much it for the controls, the whole thing is a just a bizarre adventure game, if you can call it that.

Another note on the puzzles, as well as being convoluted they also change from one game to the next and several people have reported that their puzzles have become incompletable. When this sort of thing happens, it makes the convoluted nature of the puzzles look more like bad game design.

Looks wise, it’s not easy on the eyes. It’s very gun-metal grey and shitty brown for the most part despite being about an angry decapitated bear in what appears to be a nightmare situation. It wouldn’t have killed them to introduce some colour here and there.

Music wise, it goes out of its way to be creepy in keeping with the nature of the game, but due to the poor gameplay and unengaging ‘story’ the background music becomes more of an annoyance that atmospheric.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

The achievement list for this one is a mixed bag between story related achievements, stuff that’s totally missable and some real luck-based bollocks that all games could live without.

You can get nine achievements from playing through the game without worrying about what you do and another 11 are missable. My favourite of these missable ones is the luck-based one for finding a key in the cave on your first try. The achievement is even called Good Luck just to really rub it in. To get the achievement, you must break a light with a hammer and the key is randomly in one of these lights. However, you can restart the checkpoint when you don’t find it and go through some of the longest stupid menu loading and loading screens I’ve ever had to sit through. At least it felt that way.

The last missable achievement is the big one for picking up all the items in the game. Obviously with this being missable it means that there are several items in the game that do not have a use. And looking everywhere in this game is slightly less fun that ripping out your own teeth.

I also experienced some achievement unlocking issues throughout but considering the shocking state of the Xbox One achievement system at present, I don’t think I can blame this on the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Essentially, unless you have OCD and a tendency for self-harm, use a guide when going for the 100% here. Better still, don’t play it at all. I can’t consider a game to be truly easy if it’s only easy with a guide as well. It’s difficult to find a recommendation here so I will just stick this one in the ‘avoid’ pile for all time.

The Station

With the easy games of my Bean Dive slowly coming to an end and the many, many horrible issues I’ve had with my hard drive on the Xbox One filling up (to the point where I’ve uninstalled Elder Scrolls online with its 90GB of space), I thought I would take the time to knock out a few of those smaller games I bought that auto installed on the drive that take a relatively small time to complete. The Station was the first of these that I started and finished in one sitting due to its easy list and short completion time.

The idea of The Station is that you are exploring an abandoned space station in search of survivors after a distress signal was sent out. Some aliens have attacked it and you need to find out what’s happened. This is no lead dialogue, the object of the game is to explore and find stuff. I thought the story was very meh right up until the end and I get the feeling this was the one reason the game was made. And I enjoyed it. It made the playthrough, despite its brevity, worthwhile.

Gameplay there’s not a lot to do. It’s essentially a non-combat walking simulator that’s better than the others because it has a story and doesn’t concentrate on art of fannying around with some highbrow other meaning bullshit.

Musically and graphically it’s atmospheric and pretty. It’s doesn’t outstay it’s welcome in terms of the music and if you don’t spend too long staring at the scenery, you are unlikely to notice the imperfections there too.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

With six of these being unmissable story related achievements and the other five being missable ones, there’s not a lot to talk about here. The entire thing can be done in less than an hour too.

The missable ones relate to solving puzzles, finding specific items and picking up all the audio logs. The audio logs are quite easy to see as they are big blue orbs. The puzzles were relatively tricky and involve some clever mind work but they, like many other things, are made easy with the use of a guide as they don’t change per playthrough.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Station, while being a quick completion with an easy achievement list suffers massively from overpricing. I got it in a sale for around £4 which is probably about worth it. It retails at £11.99 which, for an experience of less than an hour, simply isn’t worth it for the story.

Captain America: Super Soldier

I don’t know whether it was because it’s the game after I played Ben 10 but I actually really enjoyed this one. As far as movie tie-ins go, it’s probably better than the first Captain America movie, at least according to the critics. In contrast to the critics, I thought the first Captain America film was good but I’m one of the very few people I know that do. Captain America is the 5^th game of my 8 game Bean Dive but the last two won’t be published for a very long time, if at all. We will see.

Captain America: Super Soldier attempts to fill the gaps of the early part of the movie where Steve Rogers is leading his band of merry men against the Nazis in World War II. It gets this right for the most part and I cannot think of anything fundamentally wrong with the story.

The gameplay is very well put together in that you can get by with the basic attack and dodge actions, but it can be made a lot easier with use of the advanced counter and skill moves that you acquire throughout the game as you gain skill points. This is great because it feels rewarding to develop your skills rather than rely on the basic ‘punch him until he falls down’ tactic.

The only downside is that the levels are quite linear. This can also be viewed as a blessing though, as it makes getting the collectibles at lot of easier. I will cover this more in the achievements section.

Graphically it’s meh but it’s quite old now so that’s expected. The music and voiceovers and top notch, totally in keeping with the period and the voiceovers are done by the actual actors from the movie. All in all, a good buy-in!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

I even have good things to say about the achievement list. You get 25 for playing through the story so it always feels like you are making progress. There are several cumulative ones for repeating actions and killing specific bad guys, the most notable of these are for taking down 101 advanced enemies. There aren’t that many in a single playthrough, so there is a small grind required to unlock this one.

The collectibles are where the game scores points with me. There are loads of collectibles throughout the game and it does the two things I wish every game would do. Number 1; none of them appear in areas that you can’t revisit during end game - meaning none of them are missable. Number 2; they all become marked on the map when you complete the game so you know where to look. The only exception to this is the intel points but these can also be ground out using challenge mode.

Oh yeah, there is a challenge mode that you will need to get golds in all challenges to get some more achievements. However, there is only one that is challenging and that’s more because the platforming is fiddly than it’s difficult to complete.

The last achievement I unlocked, and the only real imbalanced one on the list, was for causing 500 objects to explode. I was so far off this by the time I had done everything else, that I had to travel up and done in an elevator causing exploding barrels to respawn, destroying them, rinsing and repeating. It’s the only blemish on an otherwise solid, fun list.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Captain America: Super Solider was a fun 10-hour completion although maybe my view is skewed as I went in expecting it to be bad. I actually thought it was a better game than X-Men Origins: Wolverine – it was certainly less of a drag.

Ben10 Ultimate Alien: Cosmic Destruction

This is another Bean Dive game and one I added to the list because… I didn’t really want to play it. I bought it for the kids and they played it for five minutes so rather than see it as wasted money, I began cracking through it and it went surprisingly quickly once I got going.

Ben 10 follows the story of Ben 10 in a more basic storyline that the last timeline clusterfuck I played. There is this big alien dude coming to earth to destroy us and Ben and his friends go in search of some device that will allow him to fight said alien and save the world. Again. And this is a point that Ben labours on throughout the game.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Ben 10 franchise and haven’t invested any time watching it. However, the wife had seen some of it when the kids were watching so I asked if Ben was this arrogant and annoying in the cartoon. Apparently he is and I just can’t understand how this arrogant shit bag who has no respect for anything is considered a role model to kids. I’m glad they’ve grown out of it.

Gameplay wise, its all very meh. You walk through levels killing bad guys and get to the end and fight a bigger bad guy with a health bar and win the level. Some of the mechanics and the camera controls in particular left a lot to be desired. I found it very tiresome being turned around to face an enemy I had no interest in fighting because that’s the way the controls wanted me to face.

Graphically, its not winning any ingenuity prizes and the music is the standard faire of the franchise. All very boring.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

There’s not a lot to write home about here either other than one majorly fucking annoying thing that happened to me twice. But I’ll come on to that later. There are 15 storyline achievements for playing through the game from start to finish and you will rack up some others along the way too.

Ones you have to go out of the way for include getting 50 kills as Ben, (same as the previous game), destroying all the cars in the game, destroying all the security cameras in the Amazon level and getting a 100-hit combo. This last one is a ballache as you have to get into a position with a certain boss that doesn’t take damage to pull it off. It’s basically an episode of timing but totally defeats the point if this is the only way to do it. I couldn’t keep normal enemies alive long enough to get a combo that high.

There are other collectibles for collecting three sumo slammer things in each level and this is where more of the gamplay functionality can do one. Ben can change in to 4 different aliens in any level. There are three you need to complete the levels and one you can select yourself if you like them. All the aliens have unique abilities. Two of the sumo slammers require you to have specific aliens in your foursome to be able to get them. However, if you reach a checkpoint and turn off the game and come back to it later, any alien you had selected is replaced by the default. And you can’t change it. This caused me to slightly lose my shit with the game. Thankfully it was near the end.

You also have to get to max level with all your aliens but if the game fucks you like it did me, this is fine because the extra replays of the levels will net you enough experience points to do this.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Ben 10 Ultimate Alien: Cosmic Destruction is a very below average game that offers little enjoyment and no replay value. It took me less than 10 hours to get all the achievements, so it’s middling in terms of a speed completion.

Zenith

Here’s another Bean Dive and the first one I’ve gone back to since completing games for my American friend. I sampled a review before diving in to this game and the review was scathing but potentially unfair for reasons I will discuss.

Zenith follows the bizarre story of Argus Windell as he gets caught up in an adventure to save the world from the Unexpected, the worst named evil character in the history of role-playing games. The thing to note about Zenith is that the whole thing is satirical, and the majority of the story is there to take the piss out of RPGs and other games, and even itself at certain points.

It got off to a very good start where Argus is talking to some potential attackers and tells them that he had to come this way to get away from the singing, man-size spiders. Of course, his attackers don’t believe him and it’s meant to be a play on the standard ‘lie’ that game characters tell to get out of sticky situations… but when the spiders actually show up and save Argus (more through luck than design) I actually found it hilarious.

Running into satirical versions of characters from the Final Fantasy series was also fun, especially the ones based on Tidus and Cloud. The game des well at highlighting how annoying Tidus was and shows how Cloud – or Claude, as he is referred to – as the strong silent type shouldn’t actually work in the real world. You also run into Tifa who bitches about Claude running off with a flower girl. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek but as I could relate to it, I found it funny.

Another funny bit was a conversation I had by sheer chance. I ran into someone called Gerald who is Zenith’s answer to Geralt from The Witcher series, and he talks about how he can’t remember what his epic quest was because of all the side quests he had done. It reminded me of my Skyrim review and is so true of the RPG genre.

In terms of the actual game story, it’s okay but it feels like it’s only there to play on the character tropes of ‘strong female’ and ‘reluctant hero’ but it works for the most part and produces a few genuinely funny moments.

Zenith is a funny ‘game’ though because the gameplay sucks. And I mean really sucks to the point where I felt the only reason I got to the end was luck. You get potions for health and mana and some equipment, which I’m not convinced offered any kind of real noticeable bonus. Because your character is so shit at staying alive, most of the game is incredibly difficult and it doesn’t feel like it’s by design. Unfortunately for me, this undid all the good work that went into the dialogue and story. Literally no effort has gone into it and if this was meant to be part of the humour, it falls flat.

Graphically, it doesn’t look great and I found the music to be cutting and massively repetitive.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

Achievements wise, there’s not really a lot to do and this is only a good thing considering how shitty the gameplay is. 6 achievements are earned from getting from one end of the game to the other and based on the difficulty spikes, this is the hardest part of the achievement list.

Outside of the storyline achievements, there are achievements for killing enemies and destroying barrels, but all of this should unlock before the end of the game through normal gameplay anyway. The only possible exception would be the achievement for killing 500 enemies as when the game gets difficult, you can get away with just running past a lot of them.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Zenith wins a lot of points for its humorous story but shits all over itself with the game play. It’s a real shame too because the bare bones were there to have a fun to play game. It would have worked as well if it was overly easy but the unintentional difficulty – which is solely because of the game’s poor design – made it a slog to get through. That said, it still took me less than 10 hours to get to the end.

Crash Time III: Highway Nights

The first thing that made me laugh is the way that these game titles translate on the Xbox 360 console. Crash Time 2 has a number whereas this one has roman numerals. No idea why but I’m sure it made sense to someone.

Anyway, this is the final Crash Time game of the series for me and I dived straight in after completing Crash Time 2. I even started playing it before completing Crash Time 2 due to that insufferable grind for the State of Emergency achievement.

Crash Time III puts you back in the shoes of Semir and Ben, whose American voices are now almost indistinguishable from each other, as they go on the trail of some left wing extremists who are blowing up cars in the city. It actually has a story arc where you see the end of the game in the opening cinematic and the game takes place over the seven days leading up to this opening event.

Along the way, there will be car chases – which were a little more forgiving than the previous game – and races as you go undercover to infiltrate some street racing guys… that spend all their time racing around a race track and not on the street. It’s all a bit weird but I would expect nothing less at this point in the series.

The gameplay is a lot more refined from the second game but they introduce a day and night cycle. While this adds a bit of realism, it also makes it a lot hard to see what’s going on when the sun goes down. Also, the colours used in the textual overlays were poor choices as I couldn’t see what my targets were for most missions.

While I say it’s more refined, it still suffers from the standard Crash Time bullshit of resets favouring the AI, the environment being your worst enemy and a terrible control system. It’s kind of hard to get wound up by this game as it’s so much better than Crash Time 2, despite doing most of the same things. That’s another criticism I suppose, it doesn’t really offer anything new.

Along the lines of not offering anything new, the game even makes fun of this as some point. Semir has to drive a tank and he makes a quip about the fact they pulled the same shit in the previous two games… though I can’t remember driving Crash Time’s version of a tank in the 2^nd game? Anyway, I did find this highly amusing and it endeared me to the characters a little more.

Looks wise, it hasn’t aged well either and as I’ve said, the environment interferes too much with the gameplay. Musically, it’s quality. It’s got the same soundtrack as its predecessors and it goes really well with the gameplay for the most part.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

After the horror show that was Crash Time 2, we are back to a more standard list without a horrible grind. There is still a grind but nowhere near as horrible or depressing as train-gate.

The main point of concern with the list, and probably the game itself, is that two achievements are unintentionally missable due to a glitch. Around the half way point, you will be given a car list with a load of cars that need to be collected. In order to get them, you need to go into patrol mode and will randomly appear. Once they appear you need to pull them over and steal them. There are ten cars to collect and you can supposedly do this at your leisure. However, if you don’t do it before completing the last mission of the game, you will lock yourself out of the achievements for getting 100% and for unlocking all cars. The reason for this is that there is a mission that follows collecting the cars and this mission won’t appear if you have already completed the game – a glitch that will never be fixed.

Aside from these, there are a lot of samey achievements like destroying 100 cars and 1,000 objects. Driving 1,000 kilometres makes a return too. Outside of the main game, there is some mild grinding to do but at least it offers some slight variety. The first two are quite small. There is a replayable mission in patrol where you have to drive a 13-checkpoint race which awards you with discount tickets. You need to get a million discount tickets and you get 20,000 ticket points per checkpoint. Another small one is for destroying ten opponents. I only managed three by the end of the game, so I needed to grind this out playing the early training mission over and over again.

The last ones are all racing related. You must do a race on all the race tracks and in every vehicle in the game as well as winning a total of 50 races. In addition to this you must race two of the circuits for 30 laps. I am pretty sure these two need to be done in one go too.

It’s a very repetitive process and the various tracks of different lengths make the 50 wins a bit of a grind but at least the courses are varied. The 30 laps on the two circuits were the biggest pain but there is a trick – you don’t have to win the race, you can start the race up, leave it and cross the line after the AI has completed the laps and you will get the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Crash Time III is probably the best game in the series but I’m not sure that’s saying much. It does offer some non-serious, light hearted amusement but not enough to warrant the monetary or time investment. It took me around 15 hours to complete the story and grinding races and I’m glad to finally be done with the series.

Crash Time 2: Autobahn Polizei

Okay, so the last two games on my sales request list are the last two games in the Crash Time series. A series I stopped playing as it got repetitive but in hindsight, I should have cracked on as the last two games were easier on paper and I also wouldn’t have had to refamiliarize myself with everything that pissed me off the first three times I played these games.

Anyway, Crash Time 2 puts us in the shoes of Semir and Ben and no one explained what happened to Chris from the first game. It’s like they just changed Chris’ name to Ben and hoped we wouldn’t notice. Story wise, I’m not even sure there is one. You just chase guys down, pull them over or smash them to bits. The aim is to complete a series of cases, which are in no way connected to each other, and once you do the last case, that’s it – game complete. At least in the ‘game’ sense.

The main issues I have with the game don’t concern the non-committal journey from A to B, but the way you get there. The first thing was working out what I had to do. You are given briefings on what your goal but when chasing after opponents, this became a bit of guess work until I managed to crack their code. You will either be required ‘stop opponent’ or ‘force opponent to stop.’ The latter means ‘use driving skill to pull them over’ but the former means ‘smash the fuck out of them until their car explodes.’ This was in no way clear from the outset, but the handy loading screen hints told me what they meant about seven hours after I had figured it out. Thanks.

Also, I think I mentioned this in previous reviews, but the reset function is total bullshit. If you reset yourself after getting stuck on some arbitrary scenery or something, you are not going to catch the guy you are chasing unless you get lucky. This is even more bullshit as it works the other way when you are tasked with destroying an opponent. Several times, I had my opponent pinned where they can’t possibly get away… but they just reset and drive off. So you lose if you reset and lose if they reset. Fuck off.

Another issue I had, which I think is ever present in these games, is the lack of functionality in switching to and from reverse gear. In most games, you just hold down the brake until the car goes backwards. In this, you have to press the brake button again after the car stops. I have no idea why they made this decision but it’s fucking annoying, especially when you need to pull off a fast change of direction. Which is all the time.

Sound wise, I have to say on a rare plus, the music is great. It’s borderline heavy metal and some of the riffs are easy listening that don’t get too repetitive over the game’s lifecycle. The dialogue is rubbish but that’s expected from the series and I also had a sound glitch for the first 25% of the game where it would just cut out. I’m not sure if this is my copy though or the game in general.

Graphically, it looks its age and it’s not going to win any prizes. In addition, I found the interactions with the environment to be clunky where some items would get stuck on you and stop you moving.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 35 Achievements

I would say that putting up with the shit I’ve mentioned above is the biggest challenge for 90% of this list. You will get 6 achievements for completing the main story and there are no missable or difficulty specific achievements to speak off.

Outside of this, there is the standard Crash Time faire which are all really easy to do and can also be done fairly quickly. None of these are secret either so it’s also straightforward to work out where you need to go. Some of the more notable ones for this game are to drive for 50 km in manual transmission and to drive for 30 minutes on patrol without being interrupted. This second one is essentially asking you to not play the game for thirty minutes.

An exception to this is the MadCop mission where you explore the city to find car parts. These are in some ridiculous locations, but can all be found using a video guide.

Another grindy one is for winning 50 single races, but you can grind this out relatively quickly by playing the same short circuit over and over again.

Now for the annoying ones. There are two of these. One is for causing 10,000,000 damage in one race and the only way to realistically do this is to start a race on the freeway course, turn off the damage and smash into cars until you get to 10,000,000. You can double up and get the achievement for destroying 100 cars as well. It will feel like a lifetime to get this far as Crash Time manages to make crashes boring.

Now for the bitch. Once you have completed the game and done the above achievement, you will likely have caused around 40,000,000 worth of damage. To get the last achievement, you will need to cause 1,000,000,000 worth of damage. I haven’t mistyped that. The best is, the fastest way to do this is to take the most expensive car in the game and drive it onto train tracks to get hit by a train. If the train destroys your car, you will get 1,000,000 worth of damage. That’s 0.1% of the total required, meaning you will have to repeat this tedious process close to 1,000 times to get the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

If the last achievement wasn’t there and I didn’t get that sound glitch, I think Crash Time 2 would be my favourite game in the series. As it stands, it’s poorly made, feels rough round the edges and outstays its welcome as far as completionists will be concerned. With the last achievement, it takes around 20 hours to complete the game, which is about 6 hours more than it should be.

Family Game Night 4

This is the last title I needed to buy to for my American friend and I’m not sure if I saved the best or worst to last.

Let’s start with what I liked. Playing through the first game show. That’s it.

Family Game Night 4 is a game that consists of playing five games; Connect 4 Basketball, Yahtzee Bowling, Sorry Sliders, Bop It and Boggle. You can either compete against an AI opponent or a human player and you have to play all 5 games in a best of three scenario, with the exception of Boggle, to complete a game show.

You can also play the individual games under another menu. The individual games offer a slightly different variant to the one that’s part of the gameshow and these do have slightly more variety. But essentially that’s all there is to the game.

The controls are a bit awful though. For Sorry Sliders and the Bowling, the power meter is very fiddly. You have to slide it very carefully to avoid overshooting and it takes a lot of practice just to not get a full power shot. This is meaningless in the bowling which is a 100% game of luck but in the Sliders it becomes really frustrating when you have slide one slider for the win and overshoot and lose.

My biggest annoyance though is the voice over guy. He sounds majorly sarcastic when you win and overly condescending when you lose. And he can’t be interrupted at certain points, especially the end of the game show which is unskippable bullshit every single time you complete a game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 31 Achievements

I’ll start with the ones that aren’t part of the game show. You have to play all games outside of the game show and this will net a couple of achievements. There are also achievements for playing the special variants of the games available outside of the gameshow too.

In addition to above, the Bop It ones provide a little challenge in that the AI is so fucking stupid that you won’t be able to get the achievements for getting 30 commands in a row without some human help. Or using two controllers – which is what I did.

The rest are all obtained, one way or another, by going for the big one – playing fifty game shows. Playing this many gameshows allows all of the annoyances I’ve mentioned above to really sink in. There are many ways to make it quicker but going for this achievement further highlights problems with the interface.

Sorry Sliders has the unskippable intro which makes the game the longest part of a run. Yahtzee bowling is just pure luck so you may as well sack it off. As mentioned above, the AI is pretty stupid in most games but will sometimes pull a quick move out of nowhere in Boggle or Basketball to steal wins. This all adds to the game’s ending where the cash cards are turned into money but it’s totally random. Once, I won all the games, only for the AI to get the biggest card handed to them at the start. This meant all the cards had to be drawn which adds minutes to each game show.

Getting to the 50 games will get all bar one achievement and that’s for getting 1,500 Points in Boggle. This is a bit weird because if you get a win, it’s 25 points to win and you can get a maximum of 29 points for a win. So even if you get maximum points on every game – which is so unlikely to the point that it won’t happen – you will still need up to ten games to finish it. For me if was 8.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Family Game Night 4 is so weak and devoid of content, I can’t understand how it’s a standalone title. It hasn’t endeared me to the other games in the series and this will likely be my last venture in the genre – not including games already bought and started of course.

Talking in real terms, a game show will take you around 15 minutes to complete meaning an estimate for completion of around 12 to 14 hours. They will be some very boring and repetitive hours though.

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL

This was the next requested game of the three I didn’t own and while I think it was better than Looney Toons it’s not great by any means.

The story mainly revolves around Dexter as he travels through universes assembling a team of Cartoon Network characters to fight the ultimate evil and save all worlds. The ultimate evil is a remote control. Which I suppose can commit the ultimate evil of changing the channel away from Cartoon Network.

I must admit, there was some nostalgia here. When I was little, I used to watch Johnny Bravo, Captain Planet and Dexter’s Lab (sometimes the Powerpuff Girls) but some of these other ones I had never even heard of. Who the fuck is Chowder and why does he have to continually belch? I don’t get it. But I also didn’t get Cow and Chicken either and they didn’t make the cut, thank God.

The gameplay is like Super Smash Brothers in that you have two attacks and boss battles turn into a clusterfuck where it’s impossible to know what’s happening half the time. When you are not in a boss battle, it’s a side scrolling beat ‘em up although it’s generous to call it a beat ‘em up when there are only two moves you can do. The health system doesn’t make a lot of sense either. When I was playing on hard it looked like my player character could take up to 300% of damage? What’s the point in this? Why not just have a health bar like normal beat ‘em up games? It just adds to the obscurity of not knowing what’s going on.

The controls caused me a bit of an issue too. Apparently, the jump button, which is required for the side scrolling and is very important for staying alive during boss fights, defaults to the Y button. This game doesn’t pre-date standardised controls so why the fuck isn’t it the A button like every other game?

It’s based on Cartoon Network cartoon characters so it’s predictable as to what I’m going to say about the music and graphics. The music is repetitive and irritating. I think I may actually play Skyrim again just so I’ve got something nice to say about music. The graphics are as you would expect from a cartoon-based environment although some of the likenesses were good – Captain Planet aside.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

The first thing I did before tackling this game was check for missables and difficulty specific achievements. There are no missables but there is an achievement for playing the game through on hard. This is one of the worse parts of the achievement hunt, not because it’s hard but the game is so boring, I struggled to play it for more than an hour at a time. If you do play the story through on hard, you will net 11 achievements. In reality it’s 13 achievements as you should get the score related ones from doing this.

The next thing I did was clear up all the things you need to do in story mode. There are a few speed run achievements but none of these are particularly troubling, with the exception of SECTOR V which requires you to complete one of the longer levels in under 5 minutes. Basically, this is trial and error so you have to do several runs to work out when you need to race through and when you need to be careful on the platforms.

There are also achievements for doing certain fights without dying. One of these fights is against a character called Aku and it was a total pain as it seemed like luck as to whether one of his attacks blew you off the map or not. This took me several attempts before I lucked out and finished it.

After this, its case of using battle mode to get all the other achievements by using two or three controllers and getting PTE finishes and assists with specific characters. The one exception to this is getting three knockouts at the same time with Captain Planet’s special attack but this is easily done in one of the end levels.

You also need to spend your points to unlock the stages, characters and alternate costumes, some of which you will need for the achievements in battle mode. This is a small grind but less painful that playing through story mode.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL is an easy completion but it seriously lacks in the fun department. I wouldn’t recommend playing this one either. There are much better games out there. Even Gamerscore wise, I don’t think it’s worth it.

Looney Toons: ACME Arsenal

This game wasn’t on my radar in the slightest. Then a friend of mine from America contacted me. He is more into achievement hunting than I am – to the point where I have supplied him with a European Xbox 360 to play region-specific games. To be fair, in exchange he gave me a load of region specific games from America, but I still need the specific Xbox to play them.

Anyway, he recently contacted me to ask me to hook him up with some more Euro-zone games. He had a list of 9 games of which I already owned 6. Of the three I didn’t own, Looney Toons was the first one I played as I clearly have to finish all of these games before I send them on to him… right?

I’m not really sure what the ACME Arsenal storyline is despite playing through it in its entirety. You play as Bugs and Daffy and the Martian chap... Foghorn Leghorn and Taz… and Gossamer though I can’t remember what he’s from? And you have to stop some evil thing from doing something with robots.

The gameplay is very basic with a jump button and three different attack buttons that do different things, but the controls are shoddy if I’m being polite about it. The first thing you will notice is that the camera is a fucking pig. For some reason their default camera movement control is left to go right and right to go left. This makes no sense. Not even in-flight simulation games would be that way around. The camera also appears to be a separate entity that gets stuck on walls or behind scenery.

The jump controls are complete shit as the speed and distance of your character jumps are bizarre. This is especially noticeable when playing as Gossamer who is one of the faster characters. You can be running at full speed, and as soon as you press jump, you practically stop like you’ve got hydraulic brakes equipped and don’t jump very high either.

Looks wise, it shows its age for a game released in 2007 and the music is painful to listen to. It’s not traditional Looney Toons music and sounds like a cheap knock off. Even the voice of Bugs is off to point where it’s not charming – it’s just horrible to listen to.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

I powered my way through this list, keen as I am to get it off my backlog and off to America.

For playing through the story, you will get 10 achievements. A couple more if you do it in local multiplayer however, I got caught out by this. I was doing it with two controllers and signed in with two profiles however, when I unlocked the last local co-op level related achievement and went to continue in single player, I loaded up my game and found that the last three levels hadn’t saved. It turned out I had saved progress on the second profile as that profile was the lead when I unlocked the achievements.

While I’m on co-op, there are five achievements associated with specific local co-op play. Three are for completing specific levels in co-op but two are a bit different. You must complete a co-op level with two characters wearing superhero outfits. To do this, you must complete the game and also pick up the super suits while playing the story, then replay a level with both characters wearing said suits. This is annoying as you can’t wear costumes until after completing the game. The next one is last achievement I earned and it’s a fucker and mainly down to, shockingly, the game’s controls. You must score an atomic combo of 9. I think this means killing nine enemies at once using a combined attack from both players. However, I say ‘I think’ because it seems to be totally hit and miss as to what counts. I swear I did this five or six times in a room with 13 enemies all of which died only to get a combo of six. It’s like the game doesn’t know its own system. Along with this one, there are three achievements associated with a getting a 6, 9 and 12 combo in single player. I’m pretty sure I lucked out on the last one.

In addition to this, there are a few collectible achievements and three speed runs to do. Two of the speed runs are straight forward but the game doesn’t tell you what the time to beat is. At least I think it doesn’t. The time wasn’t obvious if it was there. Anyway, once you complete the game, Gossamer makes two of these easy. The third is for doing a speed run of a level on a scooter. Another control issue, these levels are essentially vehicle sections but for some bizarre reason, the left trigger is accelerate and the right trigger is shoot… like no other racing game before or after. This speed run requires a very precise route to be taken as any deviation from the route will result in you missing the time by one second. It was incredibly frustrating.

Multiplayer

There are three achievements associated with online play and I only really started this game now because True Achievements were doing a viral week and one of the achievements is for playing with someone who has Bugs’ bug. I still have no idea what Bugs’ bug is or how to get it despite internet searches but the viral session meant that I didn’t have worry about it. I got this one and another for completing a game over Xbox Live. I was also fortunate to meet another gamer who wanted to get the other online achievement… for getting an online atomic combo of 9. That’s right, you have to do the stupid combo thing a total of three times. This was the first of the three combo achievements I did and it took us four hours before the game finally let us have it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Looney Toons: ACME Arsenal feels like a cheap, rushed attempt at cashing in on the Looney Toons franchise. It’s got a poor story, poor gameplay, poor controls and a glitchy game structure which turns what should be a mildly amusing experience into an episode of frustration. I think it took around 10 hours to get all the achievements based on the fact it took me four working days to get them all. I can’t recommend playing it so I hope my friend knows what he is getting in to.

Battleship (Xbox One)

This was my last selected game prior to the Bean Dive and one that I’m unsure why I added to my collection in the first place.

Battleship is the video game adaptation of the popular board game of the same name. The premise is that you have five ships, your opponent has five ships and you take turns trying to sink each other. There are two modes. Classic – which is the standard board game, and Clash at Sea – where each of your ships have special attacks and you build up resources each turn to use these special attacks.

The main solo campaign is all Cash at Sea and this is where the game reveals itself to be a pile of garbage. All the missions involve having a battle with another fleet with only minor changes from the mission before. You also have to use different fleets with different special attacks but this proves irritating as some of the other fleets have entirely different special moves, some of which are next to useless and cost more resources.

The most painful thing about the campaign is the basic premise of Battleship. The idea of the real game is that your opponent doesn’t know where your ships are – this is made evident in the local multiplayer where the game asks the other player to look away when you are placing your ships. However, the AI has no real way of not knowing where your ships are. This can go one of two ways. For the early missions, the AI becomes fundamentally retarded when it hits your ships and does deliberately crap shots that only a two-year-old would maybe think is a hit. The second way is that they will use a specially attack that hits 12 squares at once… and find four of your ships. This was majorly annoying because if a human player did that it’s total luck but when the AI does it, it knows where your ships are. In the later missions, once the AI finds your ships, it will actually sink them, making the whole game primarily luck based. This is even more true in the notorious mission 24 where you must win receiving half the resources of the AI.

Musically, it’s repetitive and annoying. Graphically, it doesn’t do anything other than irritate you with overtly long cutscenes which play every time you sink a ship, even if you sink more than one ship at once – one cutscene per ship. The other negative thing I noticed was that the load times were excessive, especially when you consider how little there actually is to load.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 16 Achievements

Most of the game’s achievements can be earned by playing through the campaign but as per my earlier comments, this is the most ‘challenging’ part of the game.

You have to play with the different fleet types in the game a certain amount of times and sink 150 enemy ships. If you are winning missions, that’s a minimum of 30 games you have to play. There are 30 campaign missions and 8 tutorial missions so this takes care of itself too. You will need to play some local matches as the Tech Fleet to round this off though.

Outside of the main campaign, you have to play some versus games. There is an achievement for playing a game under Classic rules which doesn’t happen in the campaign so you have to start a versus match to do this. While you are at it, you may as well do a local player versus player match and score ten hits in a row on ships when you know where they are placed, and then win the match. Doing all of this will net you 4 achievements. It’s also worth playing another game with normal rules to get another achievement for revealing all your opponent’s grid squares before winning – made easy when you control both teams.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Battleship was a less than mediocre gaming experience that took me around 10 hours to complete. It would have been less if the AI didn’t luck out and hit four of my ships in one go twice in a row in the final mission. It’s a good one to get on to the completed pile and yet another reason why I shouldn’t just buy games that I see other people playing.

Coffin Dodgers

For some reason I found myself looking at the amount of games I’ve played which, before starting Coffin Dodgers, was sitting at 392. I decided to do a thing called a Bean Dive which is where you earn one achievement in as many different games as you want to reduce your completion percentage. I started 8 games to get myself up to 400 games played. This reduced my completion percentage by 2.5% and added 300 achievements to my to do list. Coffin Dodgers was the quickest and easiest of the games selected so I dived right in to correcting my completion position.

Coffin Dodgers is essentially an arcade racer and a poor man’s Mario Kart. You play as a selection of old guys in a race for your lives against the Grim Reaper. The races take place in a tournament fashion where the person who finishes last dies. And then comes back as a zombie otherwise there wouldn’t be any competitors and two-man races are boring.

I think there was some kind of over-arching story which involves the Grim Reaper wanting to tear down the retirement home for some evil guy to build something in it’s place but it’s an arcade racer – there isn’t much point to a story line.

Now, the gameplay is a bit shit if I’m honest. As I said, it’s like Mario Kart in that you drive around a circuit collecting boxes with power-ups in and you have to use them on your opponents to hurt them or speed yourself up. There is also a car upgrade function and this was a bit stupid because if you don’t make the right upgrades you will find yourself at a massive disadvantage. You also can’t replay previous races to earn additional credits so if you do make an error, you will have to start again. You do keep your upgrades though and it’s a short game so it’s not the end of the world but still it’s mildly frustrating.

There is also a function that allows you to melee your opponents with your walking stick but this is something that turns out to be really easy for the AI and really difficult for the player so it gives the computer a massively unfair advantage.

Looks wise, it’s not winning any awards but it does what it’s supposed to do for the most part. There were a few times I got stuck on scenery though which is almost unforgivable in such a short game with minimal content. Musically it can do one – it’s terribly annoying.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

Achievements wise, it’s a relatively quick one that can be done in less than 4 hours despite only one achievement being guaranteed on a single playthrough of the game. Upon completing the game, you unlock the Grim Reaper as a playable character and there is another achievement for completing his storyline.

You also need to win every race in the game. You have to win the last one to complete the game but the others, you just need to not die so you can finish in any position as long as you’re not in a death position at the end of the mini-tournament. You get 5 achievements for getting golds in all races in the individual tournaments and another for just winning a race.

There are also achievements associated with the power-ups where you have to successfully use them a certain amount of times. The only one of these that posed an issue was the uzi but in all honesty, most of the weapons are shit and won’t help you at all. Most of these achievements can be grinded in a two player race without AI if they don’t come through normal progress in story mode.

There is also a strange achievement for picking up one item in Crazy Granddad mode which seems to be a multiplayer, pick up as many items as you can, mode. I didn’t play this properly though, just got the item and left the game.

The final achievement I unlocked was for fully upgrading the kart and there are three achievements associated with the upgrading aspect. You can’t do this within the two playthroughs required for the rest of the achievements though so some replaying the story mode (from the beginning) is required to get this one.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Coffin Dodgers is not the best game but it does have some charm and doesn’t hang around long enough to outstay its welcome. That said for the content, it’s not worth the current £9.59 price tag and if you are going to play it, I would recommend waiting for a sale.

Back to the Future: The Game - 30th Anniversary Edition

This is the second game from my Bean Dive that I’ve seen off and I’m not sure how I feel about the experience. It took a while to get through and had some ups and downs. I bought the game a long  time ago with no real intention of playing it straight away and the only reason I chose it now was because the title is so long, it was throwing my game collection on True Achievements out of whack. The game became Games with Gold on Xbox One after I had bought it on the 360 but I didn’t get it for a second playthrough and I’m glad as I don’t think I could go through it again.

Back to the Future follows the story of Marty McFly and Doc Emmett Brown after the events of the movie trilogy. Doc has gone back in time again for some reason and Marty has to find him… for another reason. They eventually meet up and make a load of fuck-tarded decisions to try and fix the timeline after Doc is killed.

It’s the same as the movies in this regard in that you have to suspend your disbelief in terms of the liberties they take with time travel. Only the liberties taken in the game are a lot bigger and more noticeable. Essentially every concept of time travel is completely ignored to drive the story.

The second thing that annoyed me was Marty. In the movies he’s a cool, easy-going guy but in this game, he’s an arrogant fucker with a stupid face. His dialogue is annoying. His face is annoying. And his environmental movement is annoying. Although this is more of a gameplay thing, the camera angles and walk directions are so fucked up that the biggest challenge you will face is getting Marty from one location to another.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Working out what to do is the tricky bit. Unlike most other TellTale games I’ve played, it’s not linear and you will have to click on most objects in the environment just to figure out what to do. I had to use a guide for most it as most actions are convoluted.

Sound wise, the voices are pretty good. They got Christopher Lloyd to reprise the role of Doc for it as well as Thomas F. Wilson as Biff and there’s even a cameo by Michael J. Fox. They couldn’t get him to do Marty’s lines though, which is a shame because it may have made Marty likeable. Outside of the voices, the music is annoying and kept on playing the crescendo bit from the movies. All the time. Sometimes for no reason.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 59 Achievements

The game is split into five episodes, each with their own save and load section which makes getting achievements easier because if you cock up, like I did twice, you won’t have to play the whole thing through again. It’s excessively long too, each episode clocking in at over 2 hours. The gameplay isn’t enthralling either and I fell asleep a few times!

Roughly half of the achievements can be obtained just by playing through the game but the others take some planning. They all involve some kind of action, or repeated action and also relate back to the films in some way. The most irritating of these was in the final episode where you have to repeatedly talk to a cactus to get all of the ‘dialogue’ that comes out of it. It’s weird and there’s nothing in the achievement description to give you sensible directions as to what to do.

There are loads like this – too many to go through individually but that’s basically it for the achievements. With a guide it’s possible to get them all in a single playthrough. Without a guide you will be replaying forever.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Back to the Future: The Game was a partially enjoyable story albeit with an annoying Marty McFly. The gameplay was more frustrating than fun and I can see how gameplay can actually ruin the story of a game from this experience. It may be why TellTale opted for more linear games with future titles.

Achievements wise, it will take over 12 hours to run through the game to get them all, but that’s only if you use a guide.

Engimatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala

Back to Artifex Mundi now as they round off another series in Engimatis. We are in the shoes of the detective for the last time as she goes on the trail of the preacher who is trying to bring back his master, Asmodai.

The story starts in Maple Creek from the first Engimatis game which is a bit of a change of pace from other Mundi series games and it was a nice touch to revisit some cross-game locations. The story itself is a decent conclusion to the trilogy but suffers from the same small issues as all Artifex games – either bad translation or ridiculous, out of place, character skills.

Gameplay wise, it’s mostly the same as before; hidden picture scenes or a pair matching game; logic puzzles; and the deduction board which is unique to the Engimatis series but doesn’t make a lot of sense. Other than trial and error, I could not work out a lot of deductions and some of them were very loose. It feels more like a story driving exercise than a gameplay mechanic.

Looks wise, it’s the same as other Mundi games and does what it’s supposed to. The music is a bit blah, but there was also another nice bit at the start where you can use the car radio to listen to music from the previous games.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 35 Achievements

This is quite the haul for a Mundi game but they have upped the level of story based unmissables to 13 out of 35.

In addition to these, there’s the usual faire of completing the hidden picture scenes without making mistakes or using hints and the same stuff for the puzzles. One thing I did note though is that the hidden picture scenes are a lot harder than they have been before. Some of items took ages to spot and it has been reported that they are a lot fussier now. In the past, you could get away with clicking on the edge of an item and you would get it. Now, you have to get the item in the middle of the circle and any slight variation will cause an error. Not only did this cause me to think I had the wrong item (some of the word descriptions are shoddy at best) but it also makes getting the achievement for accuracy, and for finding 3 items in 3 seconds, a lot harder. Still, relatively easy though.

In addition to the hidden puzzles and stuff, there are three sets of collectibles to find and each set carries 3 achievements. You have to find widow’s sorrows, feathers and morphing objects, all of which are a lot harder to see than previous collectibles but you can sort of track your progress as there appears to be at least one collectible in every scene.

If you play on expert from the outset, it’s possible to get all of the achievements in one playthrough. They even fixed the issue I pointed out in the Davy Jones review. You have to complete at least one pair matching game in less than three minutes but this time, it can be done in the bonus episode avoiding a small replay of the opening of the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Enigmatis 3: The Shadow of Karkhala is another solid offering and even better now that there is no requirement for a full double playthrough. It should take around 4 hours to complete for a full Gamerscore haul. The only real turn off is the price but you should know what you are paying for by now.