Late Shift

I recently went on another purchasing spree using the True Achievements wish list function that highlights games that go on sale. Late Shift popped up on one of these so I thought I would get it and play it in ten years time. However, I then decided to ask my friends to randomly select some of my easier games so I will actually play and complete them. Late Shift was the first game to be selected in this way.

Late Shift is a bit of a strange game. I read a review before playing it which made it seem like a Tell Tale style game and to some degree it is. It plays like a TV episode of some sort where you make decisions as Matt, some student guy with an obsession with the word ‘mate,’ who is working at some hotel car park as the night watchman. A guy breaks in to the car park to steal a car and Matt ends up going along for the ride at gun point.

The review boasts seven different outcomes based on the decisions you make, and I put this to the test early on. When the robber has you at gun point you can run away or choose to drive him out of there. However, both of these choices result in the same outcome and there is no way of avoiding actually getting involved in the game’s story... even though this could quite easily have been accommodated as one of the endings.

Some of acting in this was quite funny and didn’t make a lot of sense if you change your mind about stuff half way through playthroughs. As an example, if you start by going against the robber’s scheme, Matt will be a shaky mess for most of it. However, as soon as you get stuck on having to go along with them, his comfort levels with his situation seem to skyrocket. He also becomes much more adaptable to the life or death situations he’s faced with automatically.

In essence, my biggest issue with the game is the fact that the seven different endings are basically decided by two decisions you make, and this is the same criticism I have of TellTale for the most part. At least there are different endings for Late Shift though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

I completed the game in only a few hours on the same day so it doesn’t take long to do and you can abuse the above two decision points to reach all seven endings in as little as two full playthroughs.

There isn’t much to the gameplay elements and the majority of achievements are earning via making choices as certain points in the game. Make a decision a certain way and you will get an achievement – choose differently and you won’t. You only need to know when these choices occur.

There are individual achievements for each ending and two cumulative achievements for watching all the endings.

The last achievement I unlocked was for finding all the main chapters and this is actually a really good achievement as the game requires you to see all of its content if you want to unlock them all.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Late Shift was an enjoyable experience that didn’t outstay its welcome. Despite Matt’s inability to use a different greeting other than ‘mate,’ I did find myself wanting the characters my decisions influenced to do well, to the point where my last playthough ensured the best outcome.

The only issue I really had was the occasional frame rate drops which I experienced at certain choice junctures. It’s kind of bad though as most of the game is cutscenes so these should have been flawless.

Crackdown

Okay, several years ago I went through a phase of buying games just because. Not because they were easy and not because they were quick but simply because they were games. Crackdown must be one of these games as I can’t think of any other reason as to why it’s in my collection. Anyway, one of friends who I completed Saints Row II with pointed out that he needed to complete Crackdown and there was a requirement for completing all of the main ‘missions’ in co-op mode. So we did it.

Crackdown is game I can’t make sense of. You are an agent who looks like a criminal and you go around the city killing criminals in the form of three gangs, taking out their leaders and wiping the gangs from existence. Once you have done this to all three gangs, you have completed the game and then can wonder the city doing fuck all for eternity.

The gameplay mechanics really wound me up throughout my time playing the game. A lot of it is centred around the five stats that you can increase to make your agent less shit. These involve shooting stuff with guns, collecting agility orbs, shooting stuff with rocket launchers, punching and kicking people and my personal favourite, driving.

The driving mechanic is total shit. You can get into vehicles Grand Theft Auto style and drive everything in the game but most cars handle poorly and it’s actually quicker and more convenient to run and jump everywhere. You can use agency cars but only if you take them from the agency headquarters so it makes the game’s own fast travel system redundant if you want to use cars as you can’t fast travel in a car.

While I’m talking about driving, I’ll also mention the map mechanic too as that’s garbage. It’s not an interactive map, you cannot set waypoints and you can’t see the entrances back to the agency headquarters which, when you are trying to take vehicles back to impound, is really fucking irritating. I basically had to spend a lot of time learning the map so I would know where to go and how to get there using the roads.

The agility stat also provided a minor annoyance too. You have to jump around collecting agility orbs to level up your jumping ability but the thing I don’t get is that every time your agent jumps, he flails his legs around like he is falling to his death. Not only was this irritating to watch, a lot of buildings in the map cannot be climbed. But they look like buildings that can be climbed. So I make jumps towards ledges that look grabbable only to see my agent flail around like a twat before landing on the ground perfectly fine.

That just leaves the combat mechanics and again the game falls short of basic expectations. When aiming at enemies you lock on to them but there doesn’t appear to be a way of flicking on to another enemy once you are locked on without resetting and starting again. This is made even more irritating by the fact that ‘Agent’ is just as likely to lock on to someone half a mile away than someone shooting him and also just as likely to lock on to a corpse. The hand to hand combat is garbage too. ‘Agent’ will just kick the guy and then stamp on him to finish him off. It’s really hit and miss as whether he will connect with the enemy in the first place too.

Sound-wise, the sound track is just offensive noise for the most part and when your shield goes down, which will happen a lot, the designers thought that having a really annoying beeping sound continuously going off was a good idea. It got to the point where I actually wish they had just killed me.

Crackdown has not aged well either. It looks like a game from 2005 and having spoken to some of my friends who played it when it came out, they said how revolutionary it felt as the time. The controls are archaic too which probably influenced a lot of my thoughts when playing the game.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 50 Achievements

There is a lot of bollocks here and on reflection, I’m not sure what was hard and what was time consuming. Once you have got a firefly rocket launcher and the decent assault rifle, all of the combat becomes repetitive and relatively straightforward so the main game stuff, if playing on easy, will fly by for the most part while feeling like taking forever. There’s only one thing to do. Murder tons of dudes.

Outside of all of the specific achievements for killing people in certain ways and driving like a turnip for a large amount of time, there are a few things I will remember doing for a while. The first one of these is collecting all the orbs.

There are 800 orbs to collect, carrying two achievements, one for agility orbs and one for hidden orbs. There are 500 and 300 of these respectively. There is a fairly solid guide that I used for the hidden orbs but there isn’t a guide for the agility orbs. I went looking for one and found a couple of maps but there are so many that there wasn’t really a way of using it effectively to know which orbs I had and which ones I didn’t and once I was up to 496 orbs, looking for the last four was blood-curdlingly frustrating. It highlights game progression now as most games have in-game collectible tracking or at least separate map-area recordings... but Crackdown is the entire map and there are 800 orbs. Go and find them.

I got down to needing one more agility orb before moving on and trying to find all the hidden orbs and amazingly the last one was in a really obvious place that I thought I had cleared out. This always seems to be the way of collectables with no tracking.

Other than this, there were stunt markers, street races and foot races that need to be completed. The footraces were simple enough bar one which was a total fucker, but the street races were just impossibly hard without having fully maxed driving skill and access to a DLC car which made all of them really easy. The biggest one was the stunt markers though, there are 39 of them and they are all apparently really difficult to get to and as such there are lots of videos where people work as a team to co-op and throw the cars through the rings. It’s actually not as difficult as the videos made out which shows that when a game is old enough, people will find convoluted ways of doing things for the sake of it.

Downloadable Content

As mentioned above, there is DLC and there are two packs to download – the free for all pack which introduces two achievements, and the Getting Busy pack which has the car I mentioned above and also some more achievements for dicking around in cars.

The achievements for the Free for All pack are both frustrating. You have to complete all of the missions again in time trail mode on the hardest difficulty and you know how much I love doing things twice so that can suck my balls. The other one is worse as it requires you to collect and impound a certain amount of cars... but if you’ve already killed all the gangs then some of these won’t appear anymore so you need to respawn the gangs in order to get them. Also a lot of the cars look the same and you are supposed to get a message telling you whether or not the car you are in can be impounded or not but for me, this didn’t come up straight away and instead it would tell me which bullshit song was playing – information I didn’t need or ask for.

The Getting Busy Bonus Pack, aside from having a really stupid name, introduces another five achievements. One of these was a co-op one for completing a stockpile mini-game which we did as part of our co-op playthrough. There are another two for doing silly shit like pinning five people to a car with a harpoon gun and doing three flips in a vehicle.

The last two are for completing the Street Races introduced by the DLC. There are 36 of them over 6 courses and most are pretty much impossible to win normally. What you have to do, and I think they designed the game this way, is start the race, go back to the agency headquarters – without a map – get the agency Supercar which is one of only three cars you can select on the street race mode, drive it back to race and park it just passed the start line. Now if you restart the race, the supercar will be there and you should be able to actually win the races.

This is massively time consuming and in my opinion, redundant. Why would you want to do street races in Crackdown? An open world, free roam third-person shooter that’s own game mechanics makes the use of cars redundant. This isn’t real racing so what’s the point?

As I said earlier, Crackdown has not aged well and the main difficulty of the game is battling with the archaic controls. I certainly won’t be entertaining the sequels any time soon.

Eventide 2: The Sorcerer's Mirror

I swear these storylines are becoming even more ridiculous. Eventide 2 sees you doing some rock climbing with your niece Jenny, who is then kidnapped by the Russian sorcerer who then uses magic to cut a rope and send you plummeting from the rock face to your death. Just kidding. That wouldn’t be much of a game now would it? While you don’t actually die, this opening scene is ridiculous in that the sorcerer uses magic to cut a rope when a knife would have done the job a lot easier, and earlier in the scene, you use a knife to cut through a tree branch like it’s butter. Not to mention the Deus Ex that sees you survive the fall just because there wouldn’t be a game otherwise!

The remainder of the story sees you travel to the Sorcerer’s mansion making friends along the way as you try to rescue your niece. Naturally, she has been kidnapped as she looks a little bit like the sorcerer’s dead lover and needs to be sacrificed to bring her back to life.

This is where my main annoyance with the game is. I only know this part of the backstory because there are about six storyboard sections which are supposedly puzzles that don’t take any intellect to solve, but are essentially unskippable dialogue bits which are annoying on second subsequent playthoughs. But it also feels like a very lazy and stupid way of telling the story. Why do I need to complete some weird storyboard puzzle thing to open a gate to a cemetery and does that mean the gravedigger has to watch that shit every time he goes in there? It’s mental.

The game introduces two new mechanics; combining items and moral choices. The combining of items is a nice touch and it’s a wonder this hasn’t been in previous games as it did add a level of enjoyment to the series.

On the flip side, the moral choice mechanic can do one. It boils down to you, the player, being able to make five dialogue decisions throughout the game that will slightly alter the course of events you encounter. It’s ridiculous on many levels and here is an example.

The first moral choice you make is about whether or not you lie to the innkeeper about buying a drink for the gravedigger. If you tell him the truth - you are buying it for the gravedigger - then the gravedigger will have the key to the cemetery. However, if you lie and say it’s for you, the innkeeper will have the key and you have to do the same events in a different order. It’s totally redundant as a choice and how the fuck does this alter who has the key?!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

It feels a lot like I laboured through this list and the reason for that has a lot to do with the moral choice mechanic in the game. You do all the standard stuff like complete the game on expert, do all puzzles without skipping and complete all picture scenes without using hints and this will net pretty much all of the achievements.

Outside of this, there are not standard collectibles to get which include talking to all imps in the game (pretty hard to miss), collecting all glimmering mirrors and imp cards (slightly harder to find but not impossible). The biggest issue with the collectibles though, it how segmented the game is. Once you get through five or six scenes you cannot go back and explore. Not a problem for me but I can see how this would be irritating if you missed a mirror or card in the middle of the game.

Back to the moral choices issue, there is an achievement for playing the game again and making different choices. However, what this should say is the following: Play the games once making all choices on the left side of the screen which results in pink flowers on the book and then play it again making choices on the right side of the screen which gives orange flowers on the book. Oh, and do both of these playthroughs back to back otherwise you won’t get the achievement.

So this resulted in me playing through the game three times as lying to the innkeeper about who the drink is for is a bad choice. So one playthrough for everything and then two back to back playthroughs for this one achievement. As I said earlier, the moral choices in this game can do one.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Aside from the moral choices the game felt a bit shit. This is a combination of the story boards which felt lazy, and the moral choices which also felt lazy. That said, it’s still a quick completion as the story is somewhat shorter that the others.

Mega Coin Squad

After completing this one, I tried to find out why I actually bought the damn thing. Was it Games with Gold? No. Was it Easy? No. Was it Cheap? I’ll be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to look back through my payment history to find this out but I’m guessing it’s the only reason I would have paid cash money for it.

Mega Coin Squad sees you take control of... the Mega Coin Squad as they travel to a strange new world to... collect coins. There are five playable characters at the start of the game, each with their own reasons for joining the Mega Coin Squad but this wasn’t obvious from the intros you get and I didn’t really engage with any of them. That said, I don’t think the back story is the main selling point of the game.

The game itself is comprised of a series of three coin-collecting missions followed by a level where you must fight enemies and collect a Mega Coin. This process is repeated four times for one playthrough of the game. The levels themselves are Mario style platforming set pieces where obstacles, enemies and coins phase in and out of existence. You have to collect a set amount of coins and put them in a giant pink piggy bank to complete the level.

Each of the coin collecting levels has three challenges; one for completing it under a set amount of time; another for banking your coin target in one go and another for completing the level without taking any damage. The first two are fine but this last one can suck my dick. The game feels ridiculously unfair at times regarding when enemies hit you and when you can defend yourself and the controls are very sensitive so it’s quite easy to fly into a pit of fire by mistake. My personal favourite example of how unfair the game is occurred when I was standing on a platform above some spikes and the whole thing faded out of existence... but apparently the platform I was standing on faded first so I landed on the now invisible spikes and took damage. As I said. Suck my dick.

Graphically it’s pretty similar to Super Nintendo Mario and this is fine for its purpose but fuck me, the music is annoying. It’s like it’s been designed to be both penetrating and grating at the same time and whatever you do, do not leave the game at the menu and do something else. It’s the kind of shit that horrible neighbours leave on loud and go out for the day. Fast paced, high-pitched and repetitive.

There are some reports of frame rate drops from some of the gaming community but I didn’t experience a lot of this. There were a few times were the game became slightly jittery but not often and I only noticed after I had been playing for a while.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

Of the 22 achievements, you get 10 from completing the main game with the 6 different characters available. You start with 5 but unlock a bonus character after your first run through. In addition to this there are 3 grind ones where you have to bank a total of 100,000 coins. The hardest level requires you to bank 999 coins which gives you a picture of how much grinding is required. You can go in excess of the banking amount though so the easiest way to do this is to replay level 1-3 over and over again maximising your banking each time.

There are 3 achievements associated with completing all the challenges in the game. You have to do this in one level, one world and then in all levels. Getting the challenges for not getting hit is where the majority of my OTT shouting was done – especially if this happens at the end of one of the harder levels.

There are also two timed achievements for completing a level in less than 60 and 30 seconds and this goes hand in hand with the challenges. You get power ups from completing the challenges and these can greatly speed up your level clearances. The double jump is pretty much essential to get early on too. Once you’ve got a few, replay level 1 until you get it down to less than 30 seconds.

The last two achievements are the hard ones and ones that I thought would risk the completion for me. The first of these is for completing the whole game in less than thirty minutes but there is a work around for this. You can quit to dashboard if you die or are too slow so all you really need is patience and persistence for this. I actually did it with one of the slower characters on my second genuine attempt at this.

The last one, I am pretty proud of myself for doing and more so because of the way I did it. You have to complete the entire game in one sitting without dying. I didn’t really try this, I just sat down, turned it on and took it a level at a time. Te key really is patience and if some coins look too hard to get and you only have one life, don’t risk it, just wait for a better opportunity. I was massively surprised to nail this first time, especially because I so rarely do things first time. But I’m not going to sit here and say it was easy. That would ignore all my screams of frustration as I got used to playing the game to a reasonable standard.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Mega Coin Squad is not something I will look back fondly on. The music was grating, the game play was inconsistent and there’s not much variety. I’m still pleased to have completed it though so it does carry a weird sort of satisfaction with me.

The Turing Test

True Achievements puts on a playlist every month where they have a featured game that everyone plays. I haven’t taken part in one of these before but I did in November as The Turing Test was the nominated game and it was being given away for free as part of Games with Gold. Instead of accumulating further unplayed games, I thought I would try and get another one off of the list.

The Turing Test follows the story of Ava Turing as she wakes up in a research facility on Europa (A moon of Jupiter I believe?). She is going in search of her crew with AI, TOM accompanying her. The story line follows Ava’s interactions with TOM as they discuss AI and the value of the life from the perspective of a human versus a machine. There are no hilarious consequences here, but I did find the dialogue exchanges interesting for the most part.

The gameplay itself sees you using an equivalent of the portal gun to move energy around to try and get through a series of rooms. There are seven chapters each with ten levels of gently increasing difficulty that you must traverse in order to try and get to the rest of your crew. You are introduced to different mechanics as you travel through the levels so the game evolves as you progress. It is also very Portal­-esque in this approach.

I was also very proud of myself for completing this one as I only had to use a video guide for the very last puzzle of the story. Such is my mind that I think the puzzles must have been easier than what I’m used to, or I’ve become more puzzle-gaming clever in my old age? Who knows. At certain points I thought that maybe I wasn’t solving them in the way the game intended them to be solved... but that’s just more points for me for ingenuity.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

In terms of achievements, there isn’t much else to add. 8 of them are obtained from completing the game. There are seven secret areas, one per chapter, that need t be solved for the 100%. These are in the same place in all chapters though so you don’t need to do much searching for them.

Again with the optional puzzles, I was able to solve most of them without the assistance of video guides with the exception of two but one of these was really stupid. The first one was in chapter 2 where you have to walk slowly across a light bridge. There wasn’t really any clues I could see that pointed towards this being the way to do it and compared to some of the other puzzles, this one was a little outside the box.

The other one was in chapter six and this annoyed me a little bit. You have to solve various light orb puzzles to unlock gates to get to the end of a long corridor. At the end of this corridor is another gate that appeared to be locked and I couldn’t see a puzzle I needed to solve to open it. I watched a video where the guy doing the puzzle just walked through the door without doing anything! He also thought it was locked and when I tried again it let me though. No idea why this was the case, but this was the hardest room to solve to get 100%.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Turing Test took me around 7 hours to complete without the use of guides. With a walkthrough it can probably be done in less than three so it’s a completionist’s dream as well as a pretty solid puzzle game with decent story element to boot.

The Walking Dead: Michonne

Okay so I had actively put off playing any of the new Walking Dead Tell Tale games for a while, mainly because the storylines and music were depressing and the main characters were just really bad at surviving. As nice as Clementine is, she’s not going to go around beheading zombies left right and centre is she. Michonne goes some way towards rectifying this. The reason I decided to get on this now was because it was on sale for Halloween, along with about ten others I won’t play for three years.

I don’t profess to know anything about the comics so I did a little research before writing this review. She is a character from both the comics and the TV series but I’ve not kept up with the TV series at all. The game is supposed to explore a period of time in the series where she is absent from the main cast. The story in the game sees her meet up with a guy named Pete who takes her on a ship to sea and she makes some other friends.

Interestingly she is quite a cold character so staying silent through the whole three episodes of the game feels like a valid option. In addition to this as I mentioned above, she is quite handy with a machete too and the game has a lot of quick time events where you slice up zombies real nice. These are also more forgiving in terms of the time you have to avoid death - probably due to the fact there are so many more of them than normal. It makes sense in terms of the character you are controlling though.

The decision making, supposedly the major plus point of the series, is again suspect here and I did a little bit more research to avoid additional playthroughs after a decision I made resulted in an outcome I didn’t like. Essentially, none of your choices mean anything to end outcome. If you make a decision not to do something, the same outcome will happen later in a different way. It defeats the point of having choices in these games if those choices don’t actually mean anything. I realised this at the beginning of episode three so stopped caring about my decisions from this point onwards.

The other thing about the decisions is that they often boil down to which character you want to like you more. There are outcomes that are often a split path and there doesn’t appear to be a way to get everyone to agree or like your choices. On the flip side, if you want to be a total asshole, it’s probably only possible to get a handful of characters to hate you. It’s not real life so at least allowing the player the ability to ‘win’ once in a while would be nice.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 21 Achievements

With most TellTale games, there’s not a lot to say here. Complete the game will get you all of them across the three episodes. I still don’t consider the extra episodes to be DLC. They are part of the main game and the cost of the game should be considered the price of all three episodes. So...

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Walking Dead: Michonne is one of the better TellTale Walking Dead games but the lack of real choice is still a massive bug bear of mine. Also when are we going to be able to play as Rick Grimes? That would be a major seller for me and most others, I’m sure.

Lost Grimoires: Stolen Kingdom

This one was a pile of shit that nearly caused me to lose my rag and also caused me to email Artifex Mundi with my issues.

Lost Grimoires follows the story of some twat who comes to a town to be an apprentice to some other twat who is so obviously the bad guy that it hurts. The biggest criticism of the story is that so much it only happens because of stupid decisions made by our character that we are not in control of.

The game also introduces ‘dialogue choices’ in quotation marks because they are not choices at all but merely boxes you need to click on. What’s made worse is the fact that your character is voiced in parts so why the fuck these bits couldn’t just be conversations, I don’t know.

The game is a lot shorter than the others. There is no bonus adventure after you complete the game either, which isn’t too much of a loss as these are normally unnecessary tag-ons anyway. They do introduce a new game mechanic though where the items you find in the environment are used as parts of recipes to make other items. This was quite good and it’s nice to see a new game mechanic.

The music is incredibly frustrating and irritating too. Actually I’m going to labour on this point. The music and sound effects are imbalanced in a lot of these games but it became really apparent here. The music was so irritating during certain sections that I turned it down. But it’s connected to the in game dialogue which means turning the sound down turns the dialogue down. It means that subtitles are a must which makes having dialogue redundant.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

It’s another standard set of Artifex Mundi achievements here, but they are slightly reduced from some of the other titles. You only get one achievement for completing the game – two if you played on expert. I think this is also the easiest game in terms of an expert playthrough without any hints. The puzzles were not as advanced as some of the other ones I’ve played and the structure was a lot more forgiving this time round.

In addition to the main game and typical achievements, you need to collect Kestrel symbols which are hidden in the standard one per scene, however there is a difference this time which caused me to miss a collectible for the first time in a long time.

In previous Artifex Mundi titles, there are sections where you have to use codes to find routes through forests, mazes and the like and Lost Grimoires is no different in that you need to navigate through a dark sewer. In previous titles, these areas did not contain anything for you to collect that was missable and this is where Lost Grimoires differs. There is a Kestrel symbol in this section and due to my past experience with the game, I didn’t even think to look for it. This meant a partial second playthrough was required in a game where you don’t need to do one. That was annoying.

But not nearly as annoying as what happened to me when completing the game. So after completion, there were three achievements left to unlock. The Kestrel one I knew about and apparently I wasn’t quick enough to complete a hidden picture scene in less than a minute either. But the third one, for completing six hidden picture scenes in a row without using hints, had not unlocked despite the fact that I had done the whole game without using hints.

After replaying the opening to get the kestrel, the six scenes without hints unlocked and just seemed to be delayed. However, the one for doing a scene in under a minute refused to unlock even then. In the end I had to uninstall the game, delete my save data and start again. This worked for me but there are reports of other achievements not working and doing this didn’t address it either. It’s hard to say whether it’s the developer or Microsoft at fault here though.

Downloadable Content – N/A

 Lost Grimoires is the weakest title of the series thus far. It’s not a bad game, it just feels a bit rushed in how it was put together. Unfortunately, I am most likely to remember the game for the glitched achievements and I did write to Artifex Mundi about this. They pointed me in the direction of the True Achievements website and told me that loads of people had unlocked it... nothing like shifting focus away from you!

Destiny

I started playing Destiny when it was hot off the press in 2014. It’s not really been a game I’ve put down and stopped playing like others and it’s definitely one of the most frustrating completions I’ve endured. That said, the game itself is not bad and I will have some fond memories of my time playing it.

Destiny has a story mode where you are one of the many, many guardians in the solar system who is blessed with the light of the Traveller – a celestial entity that has settled on earth. You are accompanied by a ghost which is a small robot-like thing that is basically brought to life by the Traveller to work as a Deus Ex to explain why it’s okay if you continuously die. The ghost will revive you. Unless he can’t. But more on that later.

Completing the story mode basically serves as the tutorial for the game. Along the way you will shot loads of bad guys in the shapes of the Fallen, the Hive, the Vex and the Cabal. The storyline for the main game focuses on the Vex who are murderous robots that are essentially the root of all evil. You must travel to the black guardian to destroy the source of their power.

Once you’ve done that, you can then start loot grinding your way up the power tree until you are badass enough to take part in raids which are six man player versus the computer in some of the most elaborate shit I’ve seen in video games. Destiny does not allow matchmaking for raids and when you do one, you will understand why. If you want to do one of these, you will need to build the team yourself and it will need to consist of capable players who have both skill and the ability to follow instructions.

When you are not risking your neck trying to keep humanity alive, you can also take part in the Crucible which is essentially a player versus player smash fest. In terms of the story it supposedly makes sense that guardians are training but other than that, it’s fairly difficult to explain why guardians will take part in deathmatches when there are four alien races hell bent on mankind’s destruction.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 60 Achievements

So why did it take me three years to complete Destiny? Two words. Other people. It’s impossible to do a lot of the game by yourself and having the energy to put together a team of six people for the harder stuff without any solid grounding to know if said team will be good to complete the task at hand, is something I really struggled with.

You unlock the first achievement for completing the first story mission so that locks in the first time you play and it starts off really easy too. By the end of completing the main story missions you will have about 6 or 7 achievements unlocked. A lot of the other stuff isn’t too hard either but it does get very time consuming early on. Especially when I played as updates for the game have made a lot of stuff easier. It’s only really when you get to the raid stuff that it becomes difficult but first a note on clans.

In Destiny you can set up clans by not actually logging into the game but by going to the Destiny website and setting this up. Luckily when I started, I had a couple of friends I was playing with. There are two achievements associated with being in a clan – one for completing strike with just your clan members and another for completing a raid with just your clan members. The first one is easy as the strikes are basically hard versions of missions from the campaign and you don’t need to do anything special to finish them. The raid, however we were very creative with as we actually managed to do the second raid from the first DLC as a three man team - not an easy task when we did it.

There were some achievements I have problems with though and some that involved some major luck. Triple Play is the first one which is for killing a Warlock, Hunter and Titan without dying in PvP. However, what this doesn’t tell you, is that you need to do all three within about 4 seconds of each other. Not to mention the fact that it’s total luck as to whether or not the three characters in the same place at the same time are the classes that you need to kill.

The second one for completing a raid on hard mode was where the luck came in. You don’t need to do the whole raid, only the last boss and by chance one of my friends invited me in to the raid to finish it off. I think I was under-levelled at the time and was essentially carried to victory but this pales in comparison to the next one

You also need to complete a raid without anyone in your fire team dying. This is insanely hard as all six of you have to survive from start to finish with no deaths. I mentioned before that the raid mechanics are a bitch but getting a group with 5 decent people for this is impossible. Getting raid experience is hard enough as most group want you to have either a set of specific weapons or have completed the raid before and know what you are doing. That’s for people just completing raids without trying this.

Anyway, I lucked out again. The first DLC raid can actually be completed solo with a little bit of ingenuity and I know what you’re thinking. After weeks and weeks of practice I finally managed to nail this one? That’s not true and I won’t even pretend to be capable of such a thing. A guy was actually advertising runs at this achievement where he solos the whole thing and you sit back and watch. The only thing you have to do is jump to the top of a tower after the first section of the raid and then stay out of the way. Cheap, I know but this is how I completed the main game. But then...

Downloadable Content

There are two of these – The Taken King and The Rise of Iron both of which caused me to nearly quit the game. Most of my friends were quick on the uptake and had these completed almost as soon as possible when they came out which meant I was left behind. I’m not even sure why I picked up the controller for these again, especially to address the new raids, but I’m fairly pleased I did.

The Taken King sees you face off against Oryx, a Hive God, after you kill his son Crota. The DLC introduces s three new sub classes for your characters, each of which you need to master for an achievement a piece. You also get an achievement for completing the new set of story missions.

The Taken King introduces quests which are a series of tasks you need to complete and keep coming up after the story missions. They add a new dynamic to the game play which is good for keeping things fresh.

You have to complete certain quests for some other achievements and the one that takes the biscuit is the Hunger Pangs quest. For this one, you have to collect 45 calcified fragments which are collectibles spread throughout the universe. There are 50 in total but some of the shit you have to do to get them all is ridiculous. This is where I stopped playing as you need to complete the raid and I couldn’t get a team together for the life of me. Eventually I managed to do the raid and get the fragments but then stopped again when I needed some other people to do some of the other stuff.

I picked it up again in September 2017, with renewed vigour and jumped straight in to trying to get the Hunger Pangs achievement. I actually managed to do this fairly easily after a week or two of playing and this tied in nicely with a session for completing the new raid on Heroic. Gone are the requests for people to have certain shit or completed the raid 500 times. We battled through to Oryx and this is where I got lucky again. I died at after the first phase of the fight but the other five guys managed to finish him off and get me the achievement.

The Rise of Iron I was not so lucky with. There are three basic quests which need completing and these are easy. After that though it gets a bit weird. You have to do some Crucible grinding on the new game type Supremacy. This wasn’t hard, just time consuming. You have to ring bells in a certain order in the new social area. This last one actually requires a team of people such is the layout of the bells and I chanced this with a group of guys, got lucky again as I forgot about it and tagged in last minute to get it.

That left me with four achievements. Completing an encounter in Archon’s forge was easy enough but finding the fucking start point for this was a nightmare. Most interact points come up with the X button prompt on the screen but it’s really fussy when it comes to the prompt to start this.

Then came the one where the effort was required. The new raid. I had never done the raid before or even attempted it and it took me two attempts to get this done. The first ended in failure when we managed to skip to the last fight of the raid but after hours of trying it just wasn’t happening. The next attempt was one of the most ridiculous things I’ve ever done for achievements.

We started the raid at 2000 in the evening on Sunday night. After the four hour session was up, we were only on the third encounter out of five. We did not stop. We kept going until 0600 in the morning with us poised on the last boss and only a day left before Destiny’s reset on Tuesday. We picked it up again at midnight with one replacement from the original team (one of my friends who graciously gave up his time to help.) The achievement time stamp reads 0526 in the morning for both normal and hard mode achievements. A total of nearly sixteen hours of concentration and team work. Not to mention I worked on both Monday and Tuesday for 8 hours. Needless to say I slept well on Tuesday night.

The very last achievement is for collecting Iron Artefacts which are essentially rewards for a quest that resets every week. There are eight of them so this will take eight weeks if you have one character, which is where I was at this point - only having one character strong enough to do the quests. What was really annoying was that I only needed one more artefact after the raid... but the specific item wasn’t a reward after the reset so I had to wait another week before I could finally add Destiny to the completed games pile after 3 years.

Completing the Wrath of the Machine raid is the highlight of my time with Destiny and I would have said it was enough to discourage me from playing these games... but I’ve already dived in to Warframe... and Destiny 2 so clearly I haven’t had enough punishment yet!

Eventide: Slavic Fable

This is another Artifex Mundi title here and another quick completion with a few more quirks to boot. Eventide sees you take control of a botanist who travels to some forest to save some flowers. However, she is attacked by Mothra and needs to go on a quest to stop the evil goat man from killing her grandma and becoming all powerful.

In the Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride, the protagonist had the uncanny ability to do pretty much anything. In Eventide, however it’s a different story. The character has had their brain melted to the point that they can’t do the simplest of things. Like using a stick to reach a high up object. Or using a knife to cut some string because it’s not the knife the game wants to use. Honestly, the specific item requirements seem to get more ridiculous the more of these games I play.

Outside of the game play there are two new sets of collectibles and not a lot else that different from previous titles. It’s not disappointing though and still provides the same level of fun as the others. None of the puzzles were ridiculous while still providing a challenge.

The one big annoyance though was the music. The sound was really high-pitched and jarring to the point where we had to turn it down.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 27 Achievements

As these games have come out, they seem to be swinging more towards story related achievements. 10 of the 27 are awarded for story completion, and another for playing through on expert. In addition to these lot, you’ve got the usual ones for completing the game without using any hints or skipping any puzzles. You also have to find three items in a hidden picture scene within 3 seconds which also should come naturally.

The unique achievements to this game involve having to collect ethereal flowers, which are bright purple and pretty difficult to miss. The only thing to be aware of is that they show up in both mini scenes and the main scenes so you have to look everywhere. There are three achievements associated with these.

There are another three achievements associated with collecting various bestiary cards which show the animals you encounter on your travels. These are a little harder to find but, unlike the flowers, can be tracked in the collectibles menu and they are recorded in the order they are found within the game. This makes it easier to know which ones you’ve missed and where you may be able to find them.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite character retardation, Eventide is still enjoyable albeit a little frustrating. There are not many games left in the series for me to play now and they are starting to grate on me a little. Hopefully the next title will be a little refreshing.

The Little Acre

I’m not sure how I came across this one. It’s possible I was trawling through some list of some sort and saw that it the game cost less than £5 and wasn’t too long or difficult to complete. I took a chance on it and it turned out to be something of a minor let down. It’s hard to be too let down by a game that costs less than £5 though.

The Little Acre follows the story of Aiden and Lily, father and daughter, as they point and click their way into another world using Lily’s grandfather’s strange generator that can tear holes in space time. It’s a fairly solid game with lots of narrative drive and unlike Gone Home, the characters are more likeable and relatable.

The game play itself was massively frustrating due to control issues and my biggest bugbear by a long way was the item menu. You have to press Y to open the item menu and you can carry various items at once. Having more than one is a massive pain in the ass as scrolling through these items seems to be very disjointed as it’s nearly impossible to control the cursor. The amount of times I selected the wrong item because the cursor moved at an uncontrollable speed was ridiculous.

In addition to this, every time you pick up a new item, it automatically opens the item menu and leaves it open. This is annoying because nine times out of ten, you won’t need to use that item straight away.

Controlling the characters in the environment also feels very faffy and disjointed. It also flicks between a point and click cursor and roaming around the environment using button prompts to select things.

Another big criticism is that all of the dialogue and cut scenes are unskippable even on multiple playthroughs of the game so you don’t have a lot of control over what content you watch even if you have seen it before.

The music is also really annoying. It’s a very high-pitched attempt at positive happy sounding noise which is just irritating. I’m assuming that having to listen to jingle-jangle tunes constantly being repeated on adverts has none prevented me from having any kind of normal response to this kind of thing. But I do find this a lot with video games in particular that the music just makes me feel depressed. I may have to play future games on mute, especially as I’ve just downloaded the last two Walking Dead games which suffer from the same issues.

Achievement s – 1,000 Points – 27 Achievements

I have to confess to using a guide for this one. I gave it a go up until I got stuck and then powered through it as quickly as possible. 15 Achievements are story related and cannot be missed but the other twelve are missable, event related achievements that require you to do something well first time or just do something you don’t have to do.

I got most of these using the guide but there are a few that get special mention as they are made especially difficult due to the controls I’ve mentioned above.

One requires you to move an orb from one slot to another but the item goes into your inventory when you pick it up. This means you have to pick up using the x button, press the y button to open the item menu, struggle to select the orb and once you have selected the orb, you have to move the now unbearably slow cursor down to the slot where the orb goes. To get the achievement, you have to do this first time and you are on about a three second timer. I had to do a second playthrough to get this one and I even knew it was coming the first time. The difficultly is purely down to the faffy controls. There are a couple of these, ‘do it on your first try’ achievements but the others are easy compared to this one.

The other one combines everything I’ve said above. There is a speed run achievement that requires you to complete the game in under an hour. With all of the crap controls and unskippable dialogue, you can understand why this was frustrating.

Downloadable Content – N/A

In respect of the genre The Little Acre is okay. It doesn’t make a lot of narrative sense, nothing is really explained and characters don’t seem to make a big deal over the fact that they’ve been to a strange new world (there may be some underlying backstory here that I’m not aware of), but at least the characters are likeable and it’s a bearable gaming experience.

Gone Home: Console Edition

In an effort to avoid a build up of games going forward I recently decided to buy about ten new ones in a sale. Stupid I know. I’m just throwing this out there though. Gone Home: Console Edition was a Games with Gold title from mid-September to mid-October so I have sort of prevented build up by getting this one off the list as soon as it was on it. At the time of completion anyway...

I have to say I didn’t think there was much to write home about with this one. I found the story both pretentious and depressing for the most part and the way your character moves about the house is slow and laborious.

I am sure there is more to the story but I really couldn’t be bothered to find and read all the crap around the house to try to understand what was going on. And I didn’t really feel I had a reason to. The game didn’t give me anything that made me want to invest in the characters. It just dumps you at the front of house and wants to find out stuff so I think I can be forgiven for looking to a quick way to the end.

The house design and layout is questionable too. It’s a big house with lots of rooms but not a lot of it is easy to get to. For example, most houses would have easy to access kitchens and bathrooms but they are not central to the house. If you want a sandwich and you are in the study, get your hiking boots on.

Musically again, it’s just depressing and this appears to be a growing theme of this genre of games. They make you want to kill yourself. I don’t know whether some developers have a mission to cure the world of gaming but Gone Home is definitely evidence of this.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

The headline here is that it’s probably possible to complete in less than an hour but some of these things are just stupid. And I got lucky.

The entire list, with the exception of completing the game, is missable. There are two timed runs which are the biggest challenge. The one I got lucky on was for completing the game in under 10 minutes finding all 24 journal entries. I did this twice, collecting 23 entries both times and being annoyed at myself for missing one on my second attempt... but the achievement unlocked anyway. I guess I managed to trick the game into thinking I had them all because I missed a different one on both playthroughs. Who knows.

The second timed run is for completing the game in less than a minute. I know, right? You have to get the key to front door, run to the secret room, and then run to the attic. It took me a few attempts to get right but you can imagine my frustration at this achievement coupled with the protagonist’s ability, or lack thereof, to actually move.

The others are all for doing miscellaneous things around the house with the exception of the last one I unlocked which was for going around the house with modifiers on to collect all director commentary nodes. Now, I’m not being funny but this did feel a lot like a celebration of the game but as I didn’t like the game to begin with, this just added to the pretence for me. Especially when you get to the one about the ‘Easter Egg.’ For a start, one of the miscellaneous achievements is related to the Easter Egg. It’s not an Easter Egg if you point it out to people as an objective. Secondly, having one of the voiceover actors repeatedly meow into a microphone in a monotone is not my idea of Easter Egg content either.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Gone Home: Console Edition was not a title for me but I can see where others may find enjoyment in such things. It’s all about media for me. This would have been much more suited to a novella of written text. That way I may have been able to find some engagement with the characters. That said, I’ve also read some really shitty books in my time.

Battleship (Xbox 360)

I’ve stopped labelling the console I’m playing the game on for past posts but this one is actually relevant as the Battleship game on the One is based on the traditional board game whereas the 360 version is based on the 2012 movie. Now, I know I’ve previously voiced my negative opinion on movie tie-ins but Battleship really takes it to the next level in terms of shitiness.

Firstly, the game is ridiculously short. There are seven missions but actually it’s more like four missions as the enemies remain the same throughout the game and the level layouts start repeating themselves when you get to the middle missions. It’s just lazy crafting from this point of view.

The gameplay is also repetitive and seems to encourage cover based shooting but you can’t use cover very well which means the whole saga turns into a protracted game of peek-a-boo. And on hard mode, you will be shredded. I cannot tell you how many times I got shoot while ‘in cover’ by enemies hiding behind walls. It was ridiculous.

The thing that makes the game unique is the fact that you have to control a fleet of up to three ships at a time using the LB button to move into ‘tactical mode.’ There are so many things wrong with this. For a start, one guy who’s job is to run objectives on land would not have control over three ships in the open ocean and tell them where to go. It basically puts admiral control in the hands of a grunt which is just stupid but fine, I suppose, if I suspend my disbelief for game purposes.

However, the thing I can’t get behind is the stupidity of how ‘tactical mode’ works. I could be in the middle of a fire fight but if I press the LB button, the equivalent real time events must happen.

My character: ‘Guys, I need to arrange the ships in the fleet. Can you stop shooting at me for a sec.’

Aliens: ‘Okay sure, that’s fair.’

My character: *whips out tablet and tells ships where to go, possibly enters ship-to-ship combat mode to sink all the alien ships. Puts tablet away when done.* ‘Okay guys I’m done. On three we’ll go again. 1. 2. 3!’

*fire-fight resumes*

It’s just stupid. There’s no other way to describe it. Also, the load times between entering and exiting the ship game are excessive, especially when you can quite easily press the button by accident.

Tactical mode is also total shit and glitchy as fuck. The last battle is hard enough given that you don’t have any real control over the ships but this was made worse on several occasions when the ships would not move into the locations I wanted them to for no reason. It was like they were deciding certain waters were too shallow or their path was blocked when it clearly wasn’t. Surviving at the end of the game is hard enough without throwing this unnecessary, stupid bullshit into the mix.

Oh and graphically, it looks like ass as well.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 33 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to getting all the achievements other than surviving hard mode and trying not to get too bored when playing the game. As I mentioned earlier though, it’s really short and this does become a blessing once you are truly hacked off with the gameplay.

There are 10 achievements for playing through the game, 12 if you play on hard as there are two difficulty related achievements which are stackable. As I mentioned earlier the hard playthough is sinfully irritating but only really in two places. Mission 4 has a bit where you have to survive while your ships kill off enemies. This is completely out of your hands as no amount of tactical fiddling will make this easier. You can pick up ship-to-ship combat tokens which help but it’s totally random as to whether these drop. The last bit is the last mission for the reasons I’ve already mentioned.

There are also achievements relating to the in-game weapons where you have to get a certain amount of kills with some of them. I did all of these on the first playthrough with the exception of grenades. Putting the difficulty down to easy makes grenades destroy up to five enemies at a time like they are made of wafers.

You also have to get a certain amount of kills with each of the ships you control. This comes with playing the game mostly but it does help to use ship-to-ship combat tokens from some of the weaker vessels.

When I completed the game, I only had four achievements left. I already mentioned grenade kills but there are two achievements associated with using the ships in support positions to kill on-land enemies. You have to do this 200 times which is excessive. There is also a sort of glitched achievement involving the submarine support weapon which is supposed to stun enemies. I could not see this working at all and it unlocked at the same time as the 200 kills so I think I got lucky here.

The last one I unlocked was for doing something on a specific mission and it’s totally stupid. Once you have completed all your objectives, instead of finishing the mission, you have to move all your ships into specific positions on the mini-map before running to the end. It makes no sense as an achievement which is why I completely missed it on my first playthrough.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Battlieship is a really shitty gaming experience and not worth the box it comes in. I would say avoid at all costs as despite being a quick completion, it doesn’t offer any fun unless you enjoy yelling at your TV for things outside of your control.

Grim Legends 2: Song of the Dark Swan

As far as the Artifex Mundi games go, this is probably one of the more simple ones to complete but only from an achievements perspective.

The story is in no way connected to the previous Grim Legends which is a majorly different approach from the Enigmatis series. This story follows a healer who has come to a castle to look into a sickness being suffered by the baby prince... however, like all things Mundi, shit goes wrong and the baby gets kidnapped and there is some kind of dark magic going on. As you explore the world, you discover that the there is a swan kingdom that was destroyed by evil magic and the swans turn into humans when they wear nettle shirts... but only for an hour??

It’s all really weird to be honest but as you can expect, you eventually save the day and the really obvious looking bad guy gets killed at the last minute and you save the day.

Game play wise, Song of the Dark Swan is slightly different in that you get three different companions throughout your adventure that all leave you for ridiculous reasons. The otter stops helping you because he finds a waterfall where he enjoys himself; the bird decides it can’t go too far away from his nest and the... forest sprite (who cannot speak English and just makes annoying noise every time he... talks?) can’t travel through magic portals. Which is actually fair enough.

Some of the puzzles in this one were an episode in monumental frustration. Not the puzzles themselves for the most part but getting from one scene to another and finding the items needed to progress was insane at some points, especially on expert. There were two reasons for this. The first being that some items were in specific scenes but, despite feeling very certain that I had clicked on every inch of the scene I had somehow missed what I needed to find... only to look up what needed to be done to find the thing I was looking for was where I had already looked. I’s very picky about where you click.

The other thing that was fucking infuriating was how fussy the game was in the hidden picture scenes. At points I had to click on an item up to four times in four different ways to get it to register – not great when there is a requirement to be accurate once in a while.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 26 Achievements

There’s no additional game to play instead of hidden picture scenes here so it’s just the single playthrough required. 13 achievements can be gained from playing through the story and another for completing it on expert. Another 9 are for doing the usual stuff of completing puzzles without skipping and not using hints for hidden picture scenes which just leaves three for the in-game collectibles.

There is basically one collectible per scene which makes it easy to track how far through the game you are and also relatively simple to know if you’ve missed one or not.

Downloadable Content – N/A

This is the first Mundi game where I’ve got the feeling that the series may start shitting all over itself. It is nice that some of the more recent ones only require the one playthrough though. Hopefully this follows on from the remaining titles in the series.

Grim Legends: The Forsaken Bride

Another Artifex Mundi title for 100% and this one gave me more issues than the other 5 combined – I’m not really sure why as it’s not like it’s the first one they made.

Grim Legends follows the story of a girl called ‘Lily’s sister’ who has come to watch Lily get married. However, it all goes horribly wrong when Lily is kidnapped by a giant bear that can open doors and work secret passageways, and it’s up to Lily’s sister and fiancé to go and save her. In true Mundi style however, it all turns out to be the other way around and the fiancé is actually the evil one and the bear is actually trying to save her. This is really stupid because if you wanted to make it look like you were saving someone, running in on a party, trashing the place and injuring a bunch of people isn’t the best way to go about it.

The gameplay is a bit different too in that it moves quite quickly at the beginning and flashes through the first scenes as you chase down the bear. There is very little backtracking required and only one or two puzzles per scene. The game is then broken into mini segments. You will have two of three scenes which are all connected with no reason to backtrack further than this for any given section.

There is a new mini game included which sees you playing Dominoes instead of hidden object scenes and this was actually one of the better ones I’ve played. It’s still mostly down to luck though. You can’t make the moves if you don’t have the tiles.

The final observation was one of the main protagonist and that she seems to have an unlimited amount of abilities when it comes to getting things done, whether that be repairing gloves, heavy lifting, rope making and blacksmithing. There’s no end to her skills!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 23 Achievements

With the addition of the dominoes game, there’s unfortunately another double run through of the story required to get 100%. Now there were lots of twists getting the full achievement set and I’m not sure if it’s bad coding or what, but one of them certainly didn’t unlock when it was supposed to.

Anyway, the standard completing all the mini games and hidden picture scenes without skipping are here but this time, they apply to the story and the bonus chapter as well. You can be forgiven for omitting rage and screaming at a broken game after completing five others where these unlock at the end of the main game but knowing is half the battle here.

That said, after I completed the game on expert, the achievement for doing so did not unlock for me – not even after completion of the bonus chapter. As you can imagine, I was annoyed as I could not see a reason why it hadn’t unlocked. I had accidently clicked the hint button twice through the playthrough but this hadn’t had an impact on any of the other achievements. It’s the only thing I did differently as well so I can only assume that there is some hidden requirement to not press the hint button at any point.

Other than this, there’s nothing different from the other games in the series.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite the achievement fuck-up Grim Legends is a good addition to the series. I didn’t really feel like it did anything differently other than tell a different story in a different environment. The stories and the hidden picture scenes are the main selling points of the series so there’s no need to fix what isn’t broken. Except the achievements. Which are broken.

Enigmatis 2: The Mists of Ravenwood

The second story in the Enigmatis series sees you take back control of the detective on the hunt for the priest who inexplicably escapes from you at the end of Ghosts of Maple Creek. The trek leads her to an abandoned camper van at the side of the road and some more... you guessed it – missing people that need to be found.

After a little bit of puzzle solving, you find a little girl and you need to find her parents who have mysteriously disappeared. This leads you on a quest to explore Ravenwood and find her parents who have been captured, not by the priest but by his evil counterpart – the Raven – who wants to drain their lifeforce to make him more powerful. There. That’s more of an explanation than the first game.

The best part about the game is that at a certain point, you encounter someone in a prison cell who starts helping you by giving you some items to assist you on your quest. It’s a similar mechanic to Nightmares from the Deep in that you have to collect coins to open his cell and set him free. The funny part is that, it is so fucking obvious that the guy in the cell is the priest – it looks and sounds like him so this is no spoiler – but even when the cell in opened, it’s still treated by the detective as a massive surprise.

Game play wise, in addition to hidden picture scenes, there is now a pair matching game, as well as the puzzles from Clockwork Tales where you need to find and build items from a scene instead of using words. You play the pairs game instead of doing hidden pictures so it’s up to you how you play.

The theme seems to stick with the similarly named titles in that the music is consistent with the first game – I actually found the music to be quite good in these titles which is saying something for me. However, there was one major annoyance with it in this game. The music drained out all of the dialogue from the cut scenes which meant I had to read it rather than listen to it. There didn’t seem to be a way to change this in the settings as the dialogue was connected to the music, so it looks like a development cock-up.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 36 Achievements

As these games seem to progress, they seem to build on what they’ve done previously in terms of both gameplay elements and achievements. The other titles in the series had between 11 and 20 achievements but this one boasts 36.

What they have done, though, is introduce a lot more story based achievements which are obtained by playing through the game. There are 17 story related achievements versus the 2 of 3 from the previous titles I’ve played. If you play the game on expert, you can 18 on one playthrough without going off the beaten track.

Next, you get the obligatory hidden scene achievements for completing a hidden scene in less than a minute, with less than 4 mistakes and finding three objects in three seconds as well as playing all of them without hints. There are the same achievements for not skipping any of the puzzles and also for finishing a puzzle in less than a minute.

We are now back to requiring two playthroughs as the pairs mini game needs to be played for all scenes as well but this time, they have realised that expecting their shitty slow automated games to be completed in less than a minute is ridiculous so now you have to do it in less than three minutes.

Now for the fun bits. There are more collectibles. You need to find 30 white butterflies and 30 illusive objects throughout the game world. The butterflies are fine but the illusive objects are irritating as they fade in and out of existence. You need to be able to see and click on them quickly which was fine for the most part but we missed one right at the beginning of the game. Convenient really, as it wasn’t time consuming to pick it up but as the game needs two playthroughs anyway, there’s no real pressure to get these without a guide on the first run through.

Downloadable Content – N/A

All in all, Enigmatis 2 was another enjoyable game despite the sound issues. I still think the second playthroughs are redundant and the additional games don’t offer anything exciting but it takes around 8 hours to run through twice and that includes playing exert mode without a guide.