Nightmares from the Deep 3: Davy Jones

Now this really is the last Artifex Mundi game I will play for a while as there are currently no more remaining on the marketplace. I suspect there will be another few released as soon as this is published though.

Artifex Mundi have recently come under fire from the gaming community for upping the prices of their games. They have done this retrospectively too which is unusual, but again highlights why buying when the price is right is a good idea. There were a load of comments on a forum I was reading essentially saying how people weren’t going to buy their games and how their games are not worth the price hike. To put this into perspective, the UK prices when up from £8.99 to £11.99 – an increase of £3. That is about two loaves of bread for something that you keep for ever. This has been dressed up by describing it in terms of percentages. Saying there has been an increase of 33% seems extortionate – but if you increase the price from £1 to £2 that’s a 100% increase… but still not expensive.

What I’m trying to say is, I don’t understand the ire of the public on this. If you are a gamer you are doing something you don’t need to do to survive. If you don’t like the price of a game, don’t buy it. But at least have the sense to identify that Artifex Mundi are a business and need to make money to continue making games. On the flip side, if they didn’t raise the prices, people would be crying their eyes out that Artifex Mundi went out of business and no longer make any games. Also, the amount people saying, ‘I’ll just wait for a sale’ aren’t really supporting the gaming industry. If everyone got everything for free, there wouldn’t be a gaming industry to start with – then you’d have to find something else to complain about.

Anyway, on to the actual game review now I’ve got the padding out of the way. Davy Jones puts you back in the pants of Mrs Black, Artifex Mundi’s most notorious protagonist. After trying to deliver a presentation on Davy Jones, Davy Jones takes exception to this, smashes a hole in the museum and kidnaps Mrs Black and her daughter. He is going to make Mrs Black walk the plank when the daughter, the smartest character in gaming history, asks Captain Jones not to kill her and says she will do anything to save her mother. She signs some kind of deal thing and Mrs Black gets thrown in the ocean anyway. Davy Jones didn’t kill her, he tried to let the sea do it instead. Ha. Ha… Ha. ‘I pushed you into the shark tank but it was the shark that killed you, not me.’ Such tosh logic… but it’s typical pirate logic, I suppose.

Anyway, Mrs Black doesn’t die as Davy Jones knocks a rowing boat in the water, initially to prevent you from escaping, and Mrs Black lives to solve puzzles and hidden picture scenes to save her dumbass daughter from the even dumber Davy Jones and break the curse once and for all.

The gameplay is the same as we’ve already seen from these titles so I’ll talk about the story some more. The daughter is a real dick throughout. Stupid at the beginning and moronic later on. There is a point in the story, even though she is effectively Davy Jones’ prisoner, she acts like she is bored and just wants to go home. I mean, really? I know there is no time constraints on the life or death situations but my god, at least act like your life is in peril.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

Outside of the main body of the standard Artifex Mundi style achievements, there are collectibles to be had and lots of them. You have to collect 10 pirate cards, 12 seahorses and 24 puzzle pieces. Some of these are quite hard to see so you do have to keep an eye out but unlike other games, you can revisit all the way back to where the first collectible is right up to completing the game. In addition, you also have to interact with 16 different animals on the island. This one is bit tricky as you don’t get a counter for it (you do with the others) and you can miss interactions without even knowing it as some things count and others do not. It’s quite annoying.

The last one I unlocked was for completing games of mah-jong which is the additional game in this title. However, Artifex Mundi seem to have taken their achievement lists seriously and they only require you to play three games instead of all of them. That said, what was also annoying is that you don’t have to play the hidden picture scenes in the bonus adventure for any achievements but the games of mah-jong played in the bonus adventure don’t count towards this achievement. Why?? If they had counted it wouldn’t even require a small partial second playthough – made more frustrating by the fact that there are no hidden picture scenes in the opening 20 minutes of the original adventure!

Downloadable Content – N/A

Davy Jones is an enjoyable Artifex Mundi game and achievements wise, is much improved from earlier Xbox One ports. I will continue to buy their games as long as they remain of the same quality and offer the same style of puzzles. All of the Artifex Mundi games released to date have a total Gamerscore available of 14,000 points – quite the haul for some puzzling fun.

Assassin's Creed Origins

My original plan was to have completed all my other Assassin’s Creed games before Origins was released. However, this was a total pipe dream and I still have Chronicles India and Russia to go as well as The Ezio Collection but that only sort of counts as it’s just more of our favourite Italian assassin and I’ve already done his adventures once.

Assassin’s Creed Origins takes us all the way back to ancient Egypt and puts in the sandals of Bayak of Siwa as he goes on a murderous rampage to avenge his dead son. This is basically the birth of the Assassins versus Templars thing as Bayak keeps killing dudes only to be given more dudes to kill. The story is pretty good and despite some people calling Bayak boring, he is far more engaging that Connor from Assassin’s Creed III and that Arno guy from the forgettable Assassin’s Creed Unity. You also get to play as his love interest Aya for small sections of the game.

The gameplay has caused a lot of people to call Origins a breath of fresh air in the franchise. I get it as it feels a lot more refined than before, but I can’t help but feel that it’s kind of missing the point. Assassins are supposed to be sneaky and kill people silently. While I get that they should be combat ready at all times, the default should be sneaking and the punishment for being detected much more severe. You can kill anyone in any way, shape or form. I was kind of hoping for some more planned assassinations like the first game.

Another notable difference between this and previous games is that instead of Eagle Vision, you now have an actual Eagle who can see stuff for you and identify targets, enemies and chests and allow you to see them. I am assuming at some stage, an assassin will go into some kind of scientific device with said eagle and they will combine to generate the Eagle Vision power we know and love from the franchise. It is incredible that the eagle can supposedly see treasure chests in underground caves but whatever, we’ll run with it.

As well as killing people, there will be lot of optional side quests that pop up for you to help the people of Egypt with their day to day lives. This will also include killing some more dudes at some stages as was the norm in ancient Egypt? It is quite comical how casual Bayak is about killing people for the most inane crimes.

Another good thing about the gameplay is that you can chose the difficulty level to suit your ability.

Egypt is huge. The first area itself is probably the size of one city from Assassin’s Creed II and there were only three cities in that game. There are like twenty areas here. It does suffer a bit from being far too spread out though. There are desert regions in the south where there is nothing to do. Some of the mountainous terrain in the north is a little tricky to navigate quickly through.

I suppose my point here is that if you are going to have a big map, use it a bit more? There is literally no point in having the desert regions in the game, they are just taking up memory. That said there are in excess of 400 locations to explore where you have to complete actions like open treasure chests, kill dudes (obviously), find secret tablets and gaze at the stars.

Graphically the game is stunning. Egypt is beautiful from the pyramids to the oceans and everything in between. The character designs and environments and well thought out and there were few cases of me getting stuck on the scenery. The music offers an ancient Egyptian feel with the familiar twang that’s accustomed to the Assassin’s Creed franchise. It doesn’t overpower but also goes unnoticed for the most part, which is the right balance for in-game music.

Achievements – 1,240 Points – 67 Achievements

I am hoping that Ubisoft are done with this. We are already two DLCs in and Discovery Mode with a nice even 1,500 points.

There are 12 main storyline achievements but you will get a couple more through normal play that don’t warrant going too far off the beaten track. The fact there are those empty deserts at the bottom of the maps means that it is possible to complete the game without defogging the entire map which is a bit weird but there you go.

Outside of the main stuff, it does throws in the usual Assassin’s Creed varied achievements and my word, it doesn’t half want you to do some convoluted shit. The first one of these was feeding a corpse to some animals. First you have to kill a dude (I know, right?) then drag his dead ass across the burning desert in hope of finding some animals that actually want to eat him. Once you’ve done this, you then need to throw the corpse down in a place where the animals will go without them seeing you and then hang around waiting for it to get eaten. Stupid.

Killing three enemies with one hit was a pain too but I foolishly tried to get this one at the beginning of the game when my weapons were shit. In the later game I had one weapon that killed everyone with one swing so this is actually a lot easier than I made it for myself.

Another fun one makes you tame a lion (you need to have acquired the skill from the skill tree) and then lead said lion to a crocodile and make them fight. This is made hard by the fact that you cannot fast travel with a lion so you have to wander the wastes of Egypt looking for a crocodile while your trusty lion follows you.

The one achievement I needed to grind out was for killing dudes (again) by firing fire arrows into oil and setting them on fire. You need to do this 30 times but there are not a lot of opportunity and also normally you have to fire arrows through fire into oil to do it. You can, however, get legendary bows which have automatic fire arrows which makes this easier.

There are another three achievements worth mentioning. You need to sell 100 trinkets at once. Trinkets are useless items that you find in pots and stuff as you search places. There appears to be a limited number of these so you need to save them up to get it. DLCs may help in making this easier to get in the future.

The one which annoyed me is for witnessing raining bugs in the desert. This means you have to run Bayak through the desert regions of Africa until he starts hallucinating. Once he starts, it’s totally random what he will see. Raining bugs is one of many hallucinations Bayak could see. Some people have reported not seeing this for several hours. What happened to me was that I saw it not once but twice without getting the achievement. I then restarted the game and it unlocked so this was one of the rare occasions where the game glitched on me and this could be an Xbox issue rather than a game issue.

The last one is the big one and it’s for clearing every location in the game. This is straight forward for the most part but also time consuming and there is one thing that nearly fucked me here too. When you are exploring certain locations, there are yellow crystals called silica that you need to pick up to complete the area. However, make sure you pick all of them up. The last location of these types requires 50 silica to complete it so if you rush through like I did and not pick them up, you will have to revisit these areas to get the missing silica.

I also had that annoying collectible issue where I was missing about four locations and had that, ‘is this the last one??’ moment when trying to find them. Pro tip for this – the map is too bright. Lower the in-game brightness right down and it will make finding those missing locations a damn sight easier – they show up on the map as question marks if you haven’t found them yet.

Downloadable Content

There are three DLCs. The first one of is a single player expansion called the Hidden Ones. Its not very long and compared to main game, the achievements aren’t that demanding. The most notable ones are for killing three dudes from a zipline, freeing twenty rebels from captivity and jumping off some statue thing between 10 am and 12pm. The reason this last one is tricky is because there is no in game clock. You have to time it based on the shadows in the game.

The second DLC, which is free, is Discovery Tour which allows you to play in a non-combat Egypt and learn all about ancient culture. This is great move that has been really well received by the public. It offers three achievements, all are easy to get it shouldn’t take more than an hour and a half to get them.

The more recently released Curse of the Pharaohs sees Bayak visit Thebes where long dead Pharaohs are coming back to life and killing people. Bayak goes on a quest to stop them and in doing so, stumbles into the afterlife. It’s probably closest to the Tyranny of King Washington DLC from Assassin’s Creed III in that it’s totally out there in terms of fantasy. This is especially the case when you end up fighting a load of giant scorpions.

Curse of the Pharaohs carries another six achievements which are straight forward to get. Thebes and its surrounding area is a lot bigger than the Hidden Ones DLC so it takes a while longer to get them all but when they charge £15.99 for the privilege, I would fucking hope for some extended gameplay. Artifex Mundi games are cheaper than this.

I had a lot of fun with Assassin’s Creed Origins and it’s definitely given me the impetus to complete the franchise. With the DLCs included though it takes up nearly 20% of the hard drive so you don’t want it sitting around forever once installed. In fact, that’s been the most annoying part of the game – having it sit there, waiting for the DLCs to come out.

Achievement wise, it’s very doable and leaves everything in the hands of the single player gamer and offers variety. In this regard, it is a great list to go through.

Arcade Game Series: Dig Dug

After Hue, this is next game picked by friends and I’m not really sure what happened. The number selection process was meant to enable me to get some quick and easy completions off of the list of which there were about twelve. Dig Dug was nowhere near the easy end of the spectrum but more on that later. It did, however, meet the quick completion criteria coming in at under 6 hours.

I got this game with the two other, slightly easier Arcade Game Series games at a discount as part of  package and I will try and get the others completed soon.

Dig Dug is an arcade classic as semi-dictated by the title of the game. The idea is that you are a man and you have to dig through some underground areas to kill some enemies using a pump and inflating them until they explode. Once you’ve killed all but one of the enemies, the last one will try to run away. Either kill or let him escape and you move on to the next level and repeat the process.

Simple right? Well, yes it is if one of the enemy types couldn’t breath fire at you which sometimes goes through walls and sometimes doesn’t. The enemies themselves can also turn into ‘ghosts’ and float through the walls to kill you. In the later levels they will all gank you at once making it nearly impossible to survive for more than a couple of seconds at a time unless you get lucky. I found that once you got to a certain point, the gameplay verged on unfair.

Musically, it’s fucking annoying, there’s no other word for it. Imagine you’re in an arcade surrounded by loads of other machines and kids all screaming at each other – the music will make very little difference. However, take that game out of the arcade and stick it in your living room and play the same music and it becomes almost unbearable to listen to. If you are going to adapt an arcade game for the home console, at least dial down the annoying high-pitched, beepy, non-stop music please.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

I played the game for about five minutes and four levels before I was killed and then took a look at the achievement list. I was immediately scared that I wouldn’t complete the game at all due to two achievements, one for killing one hundred enemies in a single playthrough and one for digging out 1,000 squares in one game (although the achievement description doesn’t say that.)

However, the good thing about the achievements is that you can unlock them after putting the settings on ‘easy’ which is giving yourself five lives and setting the life rewards to the lowest setting which is one extra life after 20,000 points.

Anyway, on to the achievements and there are two gimmes for completing level 1 and 2. I did this on my first session which locked me in straight away.

In each level are four rocks which can be used to kill enemies and most of the achievements are associated with these rocks. 9 achievements can be earned by dropping two rocks in certain levels to get fruits to appear. Collect the fruits for achievements.

There are another three achievements for the rocks. You need to kill two enemies with one rock and four enemies with one rock. Two is relatively straight forward but four takes a bit of planning. You need to get four enemies to chase you, have a vertical tunnel up to a rock and then move out of the way and cross your fingers that none of them escape. The last one is for killing all enemies in a level with rocks. This is easier in the first level as there are four enemies and four rocks.

There are two easy miscellaneous ones – for killing all enemies without digging – in the first level just wait for them all to come to you – and another for killing an enemy on the surface. When the last enemy escapes, they always go to the surface to do it so you can just wait there for them to pop up and kill them.

The last three are the fuckers and the first one set me up for the last two. The first one involves having to dig out the entirety of the dirt in a level. This is hard for several reasons, the first being that you have to have two enemies alive that you need to avoid as if you kill all bar one, the last one will run away. It’s made harder still by the fact that the enemies get faster the longer you stay alive so they will always get you eventually. And harder still by the fact that digging out columns vertically or horizontally next to each other leaves a small wall of dirt on the map which also needs to be removed. Essentially it boils down to having to move horizontally and vertically through every square on the map.

The good thing about this is that it gave me a chance to develop my survival skills for the last two achievements which I’ve already mentioned at the start. Essentially, it boils down to practice. I will make another note on the controls here though; the analogue stick is overly sensitive and I found myself dying a lot because my dude would turn away from the enemy I was trying to kill. The D Pad removes this issue completely. Another tip which is essential once you start getting to enemies in the same starting locations is that you can approach a wall of dirt, partially dig through it and use your weapon to kill both enemies in the area without presenting yourself as a target. You will have to approach the fire breathing dudes from above or below so they don’t get with the fire though.

Centurion requires you to get to level 15 and clearing it without getting a game over on the assumption that no enemies escape. Good luck. Rambler, for digging through 1,000 spaces of dirt, I’m not sure about because Xbox was having achievement issues when I unlocked it so I don’t know when it popped. However, I got to level 9 when I unlocked it and got an extra life on level 6 for some ideas as to whether you are on track for this. I also nearly entirely cleared the first three levels of dirt on my successful run.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Dig Dug is a tough yet rewarding completion and I got a great deal of satisfaction from unlocking the harder achievements. The controls and cheapness of the game did fuck me off at times but despite this, I managed to get all of it done in less than six hours. Considering it retails at £3.19, that’s not bad value.

Goosebumps: The Game

True Achievements turned 10 years old this month and as part of this event, they threw out a community challenge to spell out HAPPY BIRTHDAY TRUEACHIEVEMENTS using the first letter of the names of achievements. I tried from the outset to do this with my current games in progress – which gave me new hope for completing FIFA 08 or what’s left of it – but I got stuck on the second Y with only a handful of ridiculous or time consuming achievements left in my outstanding list. Enter Goosebumps: The Game with an easy achievement list, and a couple of achievements beginning with the letter Y to boot.

Goosebumps: The Game is a point and click adventure game where you get involved in having to stop all of R.L. Stine’s monsters who have escaped from their book-prisons. There are several really annoying things about playing the game and most of them are to do with navigation.

Every action you take is subject to narrative that appears at the bottom of the screen and prevents you from doing anything until you have clicked through the narrative. It comes up every time, even if you have already read said narrative several times when you need to revisit scenes, or get lost. I get that the game is based on a series of books but I don’t go back and read a previous page when I’m trying to get through the story.

Coupled with this, the navigation is clunky. You can get to new areas by either clicking on the correct corresponding, unmarked part of the screen – which is hard – or you can use the D-Pad. I know right? Something I forgot even exists in this analogue world we live in!

It reminds me a little bit of Discworld in terms of the inventory. You can pick up almost anything you want but that doesn’t mean it is of any use to you. At the end, I had nine pages of inventory which is just ridiculous. Some items have multiple uses too which is a tad different from most point and click adventure games of this type. I’m looking at you Artifex Mundi – why bin off my perfectly useful screwdriver after one use?!

Musically and graphically it’s not enjoyable and uninspiring. You don’t really notice it either because you are too busy reading and rereading all the narrative that comes with making your way around the game world.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 40 Achievements

The easy achievements are only easy if you use a guide, otherwise some of them are fucking stupid which I will go into later. In order to get them all quickly you will need to strategically save and reload. The game is frustrating in this regard too as you only get the one save file, so if you get half way and want to make a checkpoint but start from your earlier save, you can’t.

For the main story you will get 14 achievements. The other 26 are missable and some of them are missable because they cross over with other achievements. Several examples of these are the mobile phone achievements. You have to call R.L. Stine from the payphone and using your phone after finding his number. You also have to download a song on to your phone or use a cassette player to play it. There are also achievements related to not using your phone at all throughout the playthrough and another for completing the game with a dead phone battery – but if you do this, somehow your in-game mother can still call you during the end game sequence.

There are a few other notable ones from my playthrough but probably the two biggest ones are for getting all the items in your inventory – of which there are 118 of the buggers – and, associated to this, for getting five items from the laundry chute. This is just fucking stupid. To get an item from the laundry chute, you have to drop an item down there, go from the chute to the laundry room, check the basket for the item and if its not the one you want, go back and do it again. You don’t get the five items you need in a row so you have to keep repeating this inane process, complete with narrative interference, over and over again until you get lucky. Dumb as fuck.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Goosebumps: The Game wasn’t fun, it felt a bit of a slog and it’s a clunky game. It did offer some light nostalgia but not enough to stop me having a negative opinion of the experience. I’m often asked why I persevere with unenjoyable games. I’ve seen a lot of people play games for five minutes to an hour and then not play them again but I don’t think you can form a subjective opinion over something in such a short time period. For me, a lot of gaming is trying new things and you have to see them through in order to learn if you enjoy them.

Hue

Hue is another randomly selected backlog game that I must have added to my game collection during a sale of some kind using my wish list. My lasting impression is that it was a really good game that offered a lot of enjoyment over the short play time.

Hue follows the story of... Hue. He is a boy that appears to go looking for his mother or something and gains the ability to use colours to make stuff disappear and reappear. I will confess to not paying much attention to the story and while I think it is a good game, fuck me some of the dialogue is horrendously pretentious. I’m not sure if it’s one of those moralistic pieces about the fabric of society or one of those pieces that is designed to make us question our existence but when a mother writes the line, ‘perhaps everyone in this world only sees shades of grey’ they certainly aren’t trying to be to the point. There are more pretentious lines than this one but I would have to go through all of the game on play back to find them.

The game wins all its points for the solvable and not ridiculous puzzles that, upon completion, offer a sense of reward to the gamer. As you go through various areas of the game you gain more colours. You can switch the background colours in order to make objects that are blocking your path disappear. As you get more colours, the puzzles become more complex. I managed to get right to the end before having to look at a guide and that was only for one of the puzzles. For other gamers, this may indicate that the puzzles are easy but for me, they were the right level of challenging.

Musically and graphically is does what it has to do for a puzzle game. Not irritate and be clear and easy to see what’s going on. It ticks both these boxes too so it’s just the story that can do one. It adds nothing to the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

It’s a really straightforward list where 10 of the 13 achievements can be gained by getting to the end. That only leaves another three.

There is another for watching the credits which role automatically when you get to the end and another for making 5,000 objects disappear via colour changes. I got this one so early on that you will most likely get this through normal game play anyway.

The last one and the one that is the most frustrating is for finding all of the secret beakers that are hidden in the various areas you visit. Each area has a counter which shows how many beakers you need to find and you can revisit any area at any point. The biggest pain about getting these though is that you can’t do in one run through as you need to advance through the game to get certain colours and then backtrack. It’s annoying because you have to go through the same puzzle rooms again to get to where the beaker is located. It’s the only frustrating thing about the achievement list.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Hue is a solid puzzle game that offers a few solid hours of enjoyment. It took me less than 5 hours to complete and it retails at £11.99 when full price so I would recommend getting in a sale.

Lost Grimoires 2: The Shard of Mystery

I think I mentioned at the end of my last Artifex Mundi review that they had released another two games right when I thought I was done. Lost Grimoires 2 is the first one we have gotten around to playing. And we smashed it in one evening.

Lost Grimoires 2: The Shards of Mystery follows the story of… someone as they go on a mission to save the kingdom of somewhere from an evil person trapped in a mirror. Minor spoilers – this one doesn’t do the Artifex Mundi story trick here where you get to the end of the game only for the person you thought was evil to suddenly be revealed as not evil. This bitch in the mirror is evil throughout the entire thing.

You start by helping your nephew who becomes king at a young age and then when he goes a wondering one night you run into his bit of stuff who just happens to be the daughter of the evil bitch. The evil bitch is trying to escape the mirror and it’s up to you to a solve a load of puzzles save the kingdom and do away with evil bitch once and for all. It’s a pretty mystical and farfetched storyline and if I’m honest, I didn’t pay that much attention to it while it was happening.

The gameplay is standard faire by now. Solve puzzles, complete hidden picture scenes, etc. There were some slightly different hidden picture scenes where you have to find the items based on the pictures but it’s stuff being recycled from the previous games. The puzzles were good and still offer that rewarding feeling you get when you complete without a guide so it’s an all good more of the same.

I complained quite heavily about the music and ridiculous non-puzzle bits in the first Lost Grimoires and they have significantly cut down on these here which is good. The music wasn’t really noticeable at any point either and that’s only a good thing but that may have been down to the shortness of the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

It’s a short achievement list with only the single playthrough required to get all the achievements as there is no additional game to play here. All of the achievements bar two are missable. Playing the game through on expert will get you the two unmissable achievements for completing the game.

The remaining 11 are what you would expect from an Artifex Mundi game with the exception of finding hidden roses throughout the scenes. There are 31 roses to find, one in each scene you encounter and they are all fairly easy to spot. Of these 11, there are three achievements connected to the roses.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Lost Grimoires 2 is one of the quicker and easier Artifex Mundi games to complete. The storyline is just there as background for the puzzles which are the main selling point of the series. All in all, it’s a solid game with an easy achievement list.

Project CARS

I original got Project CARS free from Games with Gold with Xbox and it went straight into the backlog despite having some online achievements. I started playing Project CARS after a friend of mine posted about the community events being stopped – of which there is a related achievement which is now discontinued. If you are starting Project CARS now, you will not be able to get all the achievements. You have been warned.

This has taken the best part of six months for me to finish for the simple reason that there is soooooo much racing that needs to be done.

Project CARS is a racing game with the tag line, ‘a racing game by racers for racers’ or something like that. When I started playing I was immediately afraid that I wouldn’t be able complete the game at all. Getting a car around the track in one go proved impossible. That said, I started on the Pro setting. After epically failing, I dumbed it right down to amateur and found that I could then get a car round the track and my hope for completion was restored but only after I managed to win the first go karting race.

As mentioned above, there is a lot of racing that needs to be done. There is a career mode which sees you go from racing the above mentioned go karts all the way up to LMP 1 – which are the cars that do the Le Mans 24-hour race. There is an online mode where you race against other people with a long list of customisable settings; the community events in which you use a specific car to on a specific course to set the fastest time... And then there’s free play… but that’s it. The main feature of the game that I didn’t use was for customising and tuning the cars. I used default settings but this is a big part of the game for racing enthusiasts and something that sets it apart from other racing games.

The one shit thing about career mode is that you get invitational events that you enter year on year. There are a limited amount of these that come up but there doesn’t appear to be anything that shows which ones you won and which ones you haven’t raced so I found myself manually checking each time an even came round until I got it sorted in my head which ones I had done. It doesn’t help that a lot of them have similar names too.

The career mode is purely driven on your performance in various classes and there is no money with which to buy new cars. The sheer amount of races that come up here though, is quite daunting but more on that later.

Graphically, it’s very pretty and lots of detail has been put in to the courses and cars. Musically, it does that thing where it tries to be operatically epic but this is almost cliché at this stage.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Despite being a racing game, it doesn’t half make you do a lot of shit. And it will take a long time. Outside of the multiplayer and community events I’ve mentioned above, the career mode alone will be a time sync. You basically have to win 16 of the main championships which equates to 16 full seasons of racing. Thankfully you can reduce the season length to minimise the race lengths but several championships will have you completing races that are five laps minimum with a mandatory pitstop. Oh, and you also have to defend a championship 3 times, which means you have to complete the same seasonal championship 4 times in a row.

Outside of career mode, there is a lot of random stuff to do but most of it can be done in free play mode using specific cars on specific tracks. A few are worth mentioning though. One achievement requires you to finish 3 consecutive laps within 0.1 seconds of each other. I actually think this is impossible without letting an AI driver do it for you. There is another one that can be done without doing anything and that’s completing the California highway in under 9 minutes in an American Car. If you simulate it from the start, the AI will complete this is around seven and a half minutes.

There is another pain in the ass that can’t be AI done and that’s for completing the Monaco Grand Prix circuit in reverse. Such a pain in the ass as the bends are tight and you can’t crash. However that’s not the worst one. The game also wants you to race continuously for 24 hours. This is utter madness but at least it can be simulated from a race perspective. However, don’t do what I did and leave the penalties on. I thought it would be fine and my AI driver would race by the rules. Apparently not, as I came home from work to find him parked up in the garage after being disqualified.

Multiplayer

I didn’t have much of an interaction with the online community and after my experience on Forza Horizon, I had no interest in doing so from the beginning. One of my friends was kind enough to lend me some of his time to grind out the online achievements in private match ups.

Essentially this boiled down to winning 51 races or at least finish in the podium positions. This is a little quirk of the game’s achievements. The description states ‘more than 50 races’… so 51 races then. Thanks.

In addition to this there is a scary but funny one. You have a win a race using manual gears with no driving aids using cockpit view. This may seem daunting at first but I started up a race with one other random. Another quirk of Project CARS is that the start of a race is totally manual if you set it up without driving aids. But no one reads the sets up apparently as the guy I was racing went storming off the line before the green light and was immediately disqualified. All I had to do was get around the track in one piece. What I didn’t know though is that Monza short course has a chicane at the end that cuts off half the road. I smashed into the barrier and nearly fucked my car beyond working… but it could still go in first gear so I hobbled across the line and unlocked the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Project CARS was a very rewarding, time consuming completion that did offer some racing fun but long outstayed its welcome in terms of going for the 100%. I’ve had my fill of racing games now though and won’t be buying any new ones. Hopefully reviews of Forza 5, Forza 3 and Forza Horizon 2 will follow.

Teslagrad

I got Teslagrad during a sale due to a recommendation and the fact that it was a puzzle platformer – this is one of my favourite genres. Actually I’m not sure if favourite is the right word when I end up screaming at the TV in blood-curdling frustration, but they do provide a challenge that comes in small doses. Also, they only tend to have the one difficulty level and require single playthroughs for achievements. Teslagrad fits this bill perfectly.

Teslagrad sees you take a little boy into a castle after running away from evil looking Russian dudes. You have to use electrical/magnetic powers to navigate through various puzzle rooms until you find your ancestry and travel… somewhere to fight some king or something. It’s all a bit weird from a story perspective.

When you aren’t using powers to navigate through the castle, you will also come across unique and challenging boss fights. These were a change of pace from the rest of the game and usually had one solution for victory and follows the nostalgic pattern of score 3 hits and win. The boss battle pattern changes and gets harder after every hit too.

There isn’t really much more to say about the game other than I found the layout and map of the castle ridiculously confusing. You can backtrack everywhere but there is no option to move the map around (apparently there is but this wasn’t apparent or didn’t work in my game) to see all of it from where you are which makes planning any routes an episode in frustration and luck. Essentially, you need a bloody good memory and I can’t imagine playing this game, taking a long break, and then coming back to it without having to start again due to the fact I would have no idea what to do after I stopped playing.

The game is set as a 2D format where you have to climb up, drop down and move forward through the various rooms of the environment. Musically, it doesn’t do anything to detract from the game – not often I have no complaints in this area. In fact, that’s two reviews in a row.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 40 Achievements

It is almost possible to make it through the entire game without getting any of the achievements bar one. The only one you cannot avoid is for beating the King. This achievement, and part of the game, is one of the most frustrating fights I’ve done for a long time.

He has many cheap attacks and sometimes you can do what feels like the same thing, only to be killed one time but not the other. Once you get used to his attacks though, it’s quite easy to get to the end of the fight but then it feels like blind luck whether you get an opportunity to inflict that third hit or not.

The other 39 achievements are collectible related. There are 36 scrolls which need to be found to unlock the true ending. There is another secret achievement for finding a picture of a cat too. In order to get all of these, I used a handy video guide. This also helped in solving some of the harder puzzles in the game – some of which felt ridiculously luck based.

The hardest one of the scrolls to get involved having to go up a magnet lift thing while avoiding electrical fences that will kill you on one touch. You have to get up there in one go and really fast as you are racing against the scroll which you will be able to see on the left side of the screen. Even if you do get to the top in time, you will need to time a dash jump to perfection to get the scroll. This took me two attempts so you can imagine my frustration after navigating the death maze to miss the scroll and have to start again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Teslagrad was a fun 6 hours of gameplay. The story didn’t grab me but the gameplay was exactly what I was looking for. Achievements wise, it’s very doable but slightly frustrating and challenging in places. It’s certainly doable though. There won’t be much replay value after you have gone everywhere and done everything though.

Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey Remastered

This is another game I bought a while ago but have no recollection of why or on what basis. It’s not quick and it’s not really easy either so I can only assume that I saw someone else playing it and applied a rationale of, ‘it looks easy and all the achievements are offline so I’ll get it.’

Letter Quest follows the story of Grimm as he tries to get pizza. He leaves his house and has to go through various forests and cemeteries battling monsters in a unique way in order to get to the pizza place. It seems like they weren’t offering delivery on this particular night.

The battles consist of having to spell words from a grid of 15 letters that deal damage based on the score of the word. The letters scores are based loosely on Scrabble so unless you are really good at Scrabble you will be working with mostly five and six letter words to kill most of the enemies.

Some of the battles you fight have unique modifiers that allow to deal extra damage by using tiles in a certain way; double letters, tiles from the bottom row, words of x number of letters. However, some of these are sinfully annoying. My personal favourites are ones that mean the enemies cannot be damaged by words of more than 4 or 5 letters. This means that you have to spell lots of words in order to kill the smallest of enemies.

There are two game modes to play – story mode and endless mode. Story mode sees you go on your quest for pizza and you can play each level up to four times for stars. Endless modes requires you to continuously killing monsters until you die.

In story mode, you can earn coins and upgrade your equipment to make life easier, whereas endless mode you just go for it and can buy power-ups and health periodically from some random dude who turns up to sell you shit.

Outside of the gameplay, in terms of graphics it’s a 2D side-scrolling cartoon and musically, some of the best music I’ve heard in a game for a while. It’s original piano scores for the most part that were enjoyable to listen to right up to the end of the game. It began to wear itself out towards the end though but that’s only because it takes an age to get all of the…

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 60 Achievements

At first, these will come relatively quickly, especially if you have employed a word unscrambler to turn your 15 letters into something that makes sense. A lot of the achievements are for doing certain things like killing monsters, spelling x amount of words with 6, 7 or 8 letters, using specific tiles to spell words and dealing set amounts of damage. Seriously there are loads and to many to list.

The only ones that gave me any real trouble were the ones for getting an entire grid to be filled with plague tiles and duplicator tiles. These boil down to luck as you have to be fighting specific monsters and they have to not attack you in a certain way otherwise it will interfere with the board being filled. Both of these were frustrating standalone achievements.

The end game achievements were just time consuming in the end. You have to complete every level in story mode 4 times to get all of the stars. This takes an age but bizarrely was still not long enough for me to score 100 critical hits. You have a ridiculously low critical hit chance even when you equip stuff that maximises your chances of getting one.

Once these lot are done, you will be at the end of story mode with just the endless mode achievements and spelling loads of words left. By the time I started endless mode, I still had around 1,000 words left before I hit the 2,500 target. Thankfully this didn’t unlock too long after I got to the end of endless mode… achievements wise anyway.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Letter Quest was quite fun and charming at first but if you are going to go for all the achievements, it quite quickly turns into a slog. I had to stop playing at several points as boredom set in and I needed a break. It’s good to have played one of these word games, but I won’t be doing it again.

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland

In a new bid to get some games off the shelf, I’ve employed a new method of picking games – letting my friends do it for me based on a number selection that applies to all the games currently taking up space on the shelves. Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland was one such chosen game that, on paper, looked the easiest and quickest to complete.

Back when I was young, I actually got quite good at the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. On reflection, this was probably my very first venture into a gaming genre that didn’t hold much interest in relation to my gaming patterns at the time and it also required me to go from not being able to land a kickflip at the start to being able to pull off massive combos and get the highest score achievements in the game with relative ease. So essentially it was the first game to teach me, if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying until your eyes bleed.

Anyway, journey forward in time some seventeen years and it turns out I’ve come full circle – not being able to land a kickflip without eating some pavement.

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland has two game modes, Classic and Story. Classic mode is essentially another version of the original pro skater with different maps and similar challenges so this was quite nostalgic for me. There are six levels in which you have to do specific tricks in specific locations, get a certain amount of score and collect some shit.

Story Mode is very similar. Essentially you an unknown skater who is trying to make a name for himself on the skating scene. The main driving force behind the story is that you are trying to build a skate park after your actions get the layabout idiot who doesn’t work for a living arrested. You then need to build the skate park yourself and get other professional skaters and BMXers to offer support.

The ways of doing this involve completing certain challenges in specific locations to get parts of the skate park. This is relatively straightforward if you have some skill with skating games and you haven’t lost all of your acquired skill by playing RPGs – like me.

Considering the game was originally released on PS2 in 2005, it hasn’t aged well at all and looks 13 years old in both character and level design. There were times where I felt like the scenery was interfering with the game and I got caught on invisible walls a lot during my playthrough.

Musically, its actually alright but I think this is a generation thing. I liked the punk rock scene in the mid-2000s, so it was right up my street.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Most of the game is pretty straightforward in terms of the achievements and the game itself can be made easier by enabling cheats as these don’t disable said achievements.

First things first, playing through the whole of story mode will get you 8 achievements and unlock all of the levels to play in free play mode.

Completing everything in Classic Mode will get another six achievements. I needed the cheats for this due to my inept ability to play the game and the fact that some of the things you need to do seem practically impossible without them.

After completing both story mode and classic mode, all of the levels in the game will be available in free play and to play on Xbox Live. The next thirty achievements are really easy. All you have to do is play free play and set a high score on each of the fifteen levels and play an Xbox Live game on each level too. The Xbox Live ones don’t require you to play with anyone, you only need to launch the game. It’s a bit weird from an achievements perspective but whatever, we’ll run with it.

The last one is the biggy. In typical Tony Hawk fashion there are special jumps throughout the levels. To get the 100% completion, you have to find all of these special jumps. You will get some of these while playing the game but some of them are so utterly ridiculous, you wouldn’t think to even look for them. Some of them are also really hard to do. I spent ages working on individual ones on some levels but managed to get through some whole levels relatively quickly. No matter which way you slice it, getting this achievement alone is easily a six-hour time investment and offers the biggest challenge in the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland was, for me, a flashback to the past that offered some enjoyable and frustrating game play in equal measure. It hasn’t aged well and hasn’t encouraged me to buy other skating games. In terms of achievements, it would be an easy completion if not for the hidden gaps, but if you’re not fussed about the 100%, it’s a very easy and straightforward 90%.

Refunct

This is a bit of a weird one in that it doesn’t really feel like a game, more like one of those things they put it to entertain you during excessive loading times. I bought Refunct on sale for less than £2 so it didn’t cost anything in the grand scheme of things and that’s a good thing as I’ll come on to in the achievements.

The idea of Refunct is that you have to jump and half-parkour around a strange map with blocks that come out of water. You have to make your way to switches that prompt more blocks to come out of the water and then you have to find your way to another switch. It’s essentially a bare-bones puzzle platformer.

When you jump to different platforms, they change colour. Every time you start a new game, the colour scheme of the level changes. There are also some power cube thingies that don’t do anything other than fulfil a collectable function. And that’s about all there is to it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

Despite the small amount of content within the game, there are a couple of achievements that can be quite challenging. I’ll come on to that later.

As I mentioned above there is a set of collectible cubes and collecting all of them in one game will get you five achievements. There is achievement for completing the game as well.

That just leavers four things to do. There are two related to how much of the ground you colour in. The first of these is relatively easy. You need to make sure the entire world is coloured in so as long as you track what you are doing and get everything you need to before pushing the next button, this becomes straightforward.

The flip side of this is one of the harder ones. You have to complete the game only colouring 33% or less of the world. This means that you have to plan your jumps carefully ahead of time and take specific routes from one button to the next.

The last two are speed runs – for completing the game in less than 8 and 4 minutes respectively. The first of these is relatively easy but the second is quite challenging and took me many attempts to get right. It’s essentially a case of practice makes perfect as you have to memorise the jumps you and where you need to go. There is one major issue I had with this though. At one point you have to jump on to a ledge from a crouched position and the game is quite funny about how you do this to get it right. Luckily on my run where I got this, it let me make the jump on the first attempt which saved me valuable seconds.

This is where my comment about the price comes in. Considering you have a speed run achievement that means it’s possible to complete the entire game in less than 4 minutes, a price of £2 is appropriate for the content on offer.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While not long, Refunct offers a little bit of fun and challenge in the puzzle platforming genre. There’s not a lot of replay value though as it only offers the one map for you to explore. For the price though, you get what you pay for.

Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden

This is another Artifex Mundi title and the last one I am likely to play for a while. At the time of completion there were no more games available on the marketplace and this one felt a bit stale after the time invested in the rest of the titles.

Abyss follows the story of a girl who goes deep sea diving looking for her lover Robert after he goes missing. She stumbles across Eden, an underwater city, similar to Rapture from Bioshock except instead of Big Daddys there are these Wraith things that suck the life out of you. They are apparently trying to resurrect some kind of ‘evil one’ and Robert is the vessel and you need to save him. The storyline is tried and tested and is only really there to give you a reason to go from one puzzle to the next.

The puzzles and hidden picture scenes are essentially the same as before but Abyss does require you to go back and forth a lot and some of the hidden picture scenes reopen despite you thinking you were done with the area some time ago. It’s very similar to the first Enigmatis in this regard.

Instead of doing the hidden picture scenes, you can play a game of dominos which has been in previous games so I’m guessing there won’t be a lot of variety going forward if they are repeating themselves here. Personally, I don’t see why they need to have these additional things and I would rather they just did away with them.

There is also a bonus episode which acts as a prequel to the main games which provides a little more story and some more hidden scenes. Other than this it doesn’t pull any extra punches.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

This is average sized haul for an Artifex Mundi game now and eight of them are related to various parts of the story. There are another eight achievements related to doing all the puzzles and hidden picture scenes without skipping or hints as well as finding three items in three seconds, not making many mistakes and completing both a puzzle and hidden picture scene in less than a minute. Standard Artifex Mundi fare.

Where I struggled was the expert playthrough as it required a lot of faffing around and searching and it could have brought my playtime down dramatically if I had just played on normal first but there you go.

I also struggled to get the motivation up to complete a second playthrough and nab the three achievements related to playing all the dominos games. This sums up how much the game felt like a slog.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden is another solid game from Artifex Mundi that offers the same thing as before. As I said though I’ve had my fill of these games so this review probably comes across as negative. It’s still a good addition to the collection and offers new scenery as a lot of the others are turning in to series’.

The Bunker

The Bunker came up as a recommended title a few years back but I didn’t buy it as it seemed quite expensive for what it was. However, it came up in a sale recently so I got it and played it as part of the True Achievements 12 days of Christmas Challenge – which again shows how far behind I am on these reviews. It’s another one I’ve bought and played quickly which makes a change to my usual gaming habits of buying and then letting them collect cyber dust for years.

A quick note on that, I’m not sure if it is being used as a device to get money out of people or what, but the digital marketplace is a treacherous beast. I’ve compiled a list of games I want to buy but I have this devil on my shoulder that keeps on whispering in my ear… what happens if they delist this content from the marketplace? It’s a valid concern. This can happen at any point so the principle of waiting for an item to go on sale or come down in price is now a risk. Game developers could also go bust which leads to delistings and content not being available forever. At least with a hard copy game, you stance the chance of being able to buy an old copy of a delisted marketplace game. But that doesn’t mean I am going to spent in excess of £100 on Kickass 2. Anyway rant over, on to the game review.

The Bunker follows the bizarre story of John, a guy who is born in a bunker after nuclear war breaks out. For some reason, it’s just him and his mum, who immediately dies leaving him alone. Let alone, he sticks to the routine his mother taught him until things start going wrong and he is forced to face demons from the past while everything goes to shit.

The game does well in a lot of areas – story and atmosphere being the two highlights, however there were a few things I didn’t like. The first thing is very personal but I didn’t like having to see John on the toilet while eating his daily helping of food. It was just really unnecessary and didn’t make a lot of sense. Why would you keep your entire food supply right next to the toilet? Mother obviously didn’t teach John any basic hygiene lessons.

The other think, which isn’t as personal, is that I found the navigation controls really clunky. The game is essentially a point and click adventure game, with a really slow moving mouse, as you move through live interactive scenes in the same way as Late Shift.

The highlight is definitely Adam Brown’s portrayal of John, shitting aside. The acting throughout is great in what I can only imagine was a difficult task – playing a character that has had no other human interaction other his mother for 30 years.

The music really adds to the creepy atmosphere and helps emphasise that feeling of emptiness that comes with isolation. However, sometimes it gets obscenely loud for no reason which didn’t make a lot of sense.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 28 Achievements

Considering it’s such a short game (it can take less than 3 hours to run through) it’s got a lot of achievements. 13 can be obtained by navigating John through the various chapters of the main story. There is another achievement available for choosing a different ending but this can be obtained simply by replying the last chapter.

Outside of this there are collectibles throughout the bunker which amount to John collecting his childhood toys. There are nine of these each carrying an achievement and then another one for collecting them all. There are also documents and cassettes throughout the bunker and you need to read and listen to all of these for another two achievements.

Now, the last two I had to get on another playthrough as I missed them on the first run. The first one of these is really dumb. You have to read to your mother, once when she is alive and twice when she is dead, and there are three books you can read. You get the achievement for reading the three different books. However, one of these books, Treasure Island, is automatically picked for you on the third reading so if you chose to read this book on the first two goes, you screw yourself out of the achievement without knowing it.

The last one I got also doesn’t make any sense. There is a puzzle on the wall in your mother’s room and it’s missing a piece. The achievement is awarded for finding the missing piece which shows up at the end of the game… but it only appears if you look at the picture at the beginning?? Why would looking at a puzzle cause the missing piece to appear? It doesn’t make any logical sense.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Bunker is a solid story game but it’s not very long and expensive for the content you get – it’s retailing at £15.99 currently on the Xbox marketplace. Also, once you know what happens, running a second playthrough goes from decent to depressing very quickly so there is little replay value after the first 3 hours.