Assassin's Creed Chronicles: Russia

Once upon a time in the gaming past, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China was a Games with Gold title. Having played a lot of Assassin’s Creed games I dived right in and completed it over a few weeks.

This is how I initially thought it must have gone but then I looked up what actually happened. Chronicles China was Games with Gold in September 2016 and my completion was July 2015 – so I actually paid cash money for the game and was massively disappointed when it went Games with Gold a year later. At least I played and completed it before it was free.

Anyway, the point of the story was that I bought the Chronicles trilogy when it was cheap as I enjoyed China but then didn’t play the other two games for a further year and a half either. Chronicles India has been and gone on Games with Gold so I thought I best play Russia before the entire trilogy becomes another case of me throwing money down the toilet.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia follows the story of Nikolai Orelov and some girl called Ana. Nikolai rescues Ana and takes her back to the order as she has special assassin-like powers, somehow linking her to the girl from Chronicles China and everyone’s favourite assassin, Ezio. However, the Assassins want to kill her so he does a Shay Cormac (Assassin’s Creed: Rogue) and turns on his brothers to save her, destroys a tank and rides off into the sunset.

The gameplay is the same as Chronicles China in that it’s a 2D side-scrolling stealth game that actually makes you act like an assassin. You can survive combat but you are not scored highly for doing so and you are so cack-handed at it that stealth and assassination are, essentially, the way you are supposed to play the game.

Other elements of the gameplay give Nikolai the ability to use different gadgets to stealth your way through levels, most notably a rifle and smoke bombs. Ana is able to whistle and use Helix abilities to turn invisible.

My only real complaint is the controls. You have to be quick for certain sections and I was trying to be quick and stealthy but when you run as Nikolai and try to hide sometimes you will slide into the back legs of a guard only for him to turn around and shoot you in the face. This became pretty fucking annoying after the first three occasions and it was more down to the over reactiveness of the controls than me. It was very picky too as sometimes Nikolai wouldn’t slide at all and just get shot by guns on some of the running levels.

Achievements - 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

Achievements wise, Chronicles: Russia is very forgiving and the checkpoints can be used to make a lot of this really easy.

There are 5 achievements awarded for various milestones you complete throughout the game and another 6 for repeating various actions. You need to get 100 headshots, electrocute 25 enemies, using Helix Blade 25 times and get 30 gold rankings in the three different play styles; Assassin, Silencer and Shadow. These last three are funny as you can get a ranking of choice in chapter one, get to the end of the section and then reload the checkpoint 29 times to get the respective achievement. This isn’t really necessary for all three achievements though as you will most likely get one of them, and progress towards the other two, just by playing the game normally.

There are another 4 for doing certain things in specific chapters, all of which are fairly straight forward and not too challenging. There is another one for completing a sequence without losing your score multiplier but this will come with another achievement in this section.

That just leaves the last one which provides a little bit of challenge and has massive trial and error bits – you need to complete the game in Plus Hard mode without setting off any alerts. Plus Hard removes the enemy’s vision cones so you can’t see where they are looking unless you active eagle vision – which can’t be activated while you are running. Despite this, most of these levels are easy to get through as you can just reset the checkpoint if you accidentally sent off an alert – or maybe I just found it easy after the stupidity of Outlast’s insane mode criteria?

The only exception to this is in sequence 7 where you have to shoot guys as Nikolai covering Ana. The guys come out in pairs and if you shoot one and someone else sees his body, it sets off an alarm. You have to do two things: Fire bullets that miss on purpose to distract certain guards to separate them from their partners; then you need to become Deadshot from the Batman series and take them all out before they have the time to turn around. It’s trial and error and is borderline ridiculous. There are also three alerts that you are ‘allowed’ as they cannot be avoided but I had to look this up when I couldn’t see any possible way of avoiding the alert – which was fucking annoying.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I found Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia to be a very solid and enjoyable game for the most part and I did enjoy the Plus Hard playthrough too – the Sequence 7 bit above as the only exception. The game took me 18 and a half hours to complete but it didn’t feel like that long which is testament to its enjoyability. 

Outlast

Here’s a review that I didn’t think I would ever be able to write. I got Outlast as part of Xbox’s Games with Gold back in December 2016. I starting playing it in January 2017 and completed in April 2018. The story was I started it, played it once, didn’t get into it and then didn’t go back to it again for a year. I returned to it with zeal, hammered through 90% of the game and the DLC in a week or so and that just left the last three achievements. Which I’ll cover later.

Outlast is a true survival horror game. You come to an asylum, off the back of an email sent from an anonymous source, armed with just a video camera. You have to navigate through the asylum trying to avoid being killed by the numerous crazy inmates and the notorious man-monster Chris Walker. You obviously can’t defend yourself so you only have two choices; hide or run.

At first, I thought the game was quite slow and laborious but on reflection, I think this was just me not being used to playing a game without a weapon. Once I got going, it’s quite scary at first and does all the things a survival horror is supposed to do quite well. I was constantly in fear of my life praying that that no one saw me in the dark. When they do see you, its basically a case of run for your life and pray they don’t see you hide. You can close doors behind you to slow them down and one criticism of the AI is that it’s so dumb that if you close a door normally, they need to bash it down, rather than just opening it which gives you a few extra seconds to hide from them. To be fair, this makes the game fair rather than swinging the gameplay in your favour - especially considering you can actually fight anyone.

Essentially that’s all there is to it – you make your way through the asylum, hiding and running until the end of the game. Without a guide, the biggest challenge is working out where to go. Some areas of the game are pitch black and you need to rely on your camera light to get through. This will cause the camera to run out of battery power so you need to try and find batteries to keep the camera going.

The most notable bad guy is Chris Walker who, if he catches you, will just rip your… body off of your head - you have to see this for it to make sense – and its essentially a one hit kill. It’s painful when you have to watch his grotesque face smiling at you as you die.

Musically its great as well. It has the depressing tone when you are alone which suits the game perfectly and when someone sees you and starts chasing you, it ups tempo and gets the heart racing. Every encounter is a life of death situation and the music captures the essence of this too.

Graphically… well… it looks good but there are very few interactions with the environment other than picking up collectibles and batteries and considering how much stuff there is, it almost feels like a waste. In addition to this, I encountered a few game-breaking glitches, one of which caused me to throw up in my mouth a little bit and I’ll go into that a bit later.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 17 Achievements

With only 17 achievements you could be forgiven for thinking this is an easy ride. It’s far from it. The main game has 11 achievements, 5 of which can be obtained by playing the game from start to finish. I got the first two of these before stopping and I’m embarrassed to admit that this probably equated to about half an hour’s worth of game play once the routes are known. It’s probably possible to speed run the game in less than 1 hour but realistically it’s a 1 to 2 hour completion assuming you don’t get any collectibles.

There are also four missable achievements for stuff that you need to do while playing through the game. 2 of these are for collecting all the documents and recordings and another is gained almost at the beginning of the game for pressing a button on an elevator and this is really easy to miss.

One of the bigger ones, which is also fucking stupid, is for playing through the whole game without hiding under a bed or in a locker. There are certain points of the game, even right at the beginning where you are actually told to hide in the locker and having watched the videos of this being done there are really stupid ways of getting around it and most of the time it looks like luck that people survive.

Thankfully for this one, someone figured out that you can actually just do chapter select and do the last part of the game and this counts. There is no need to hide for the last ten minutes or so or the main game which actually makes this achievement really easy.

The last two achievements are two of the hardest I’ve probably earned. Firstly you have to play through the game on insane difficulty. This entails getting through the whole game without being killed otherwise you have to start the whole thing again. Secondly, for the ENERGISER achievement, you have to do this without reloading the camera batteries. In a game that is deliberately dark. Not just dark to the point where it’s hard to see but dark as in you totally, absolutely cannot see anything at all without the camera light.

Essentially to get these two took me a few weeks of trial and error couple with some weeks of getting up the energy to actually try in the first place. With a run not using the camera, you essentially have to know the whole game from start to finish and get through the non-death parts without using the camera at all. It’s basically repetitive trial and error that stops the game from being scary and sees it become annoying. I was sick of the sight of Chris Walker by the end.

Here comes the biggest game breaking glitch. I was ploughing through an insane run and had got further than I had ever been before. I jumped off a platform in a fairly innocuous position and got stuck on the scenery and was unable to continue. This has happened to me twice before when I was crouching but the game managed to right itself. Not this time though and I had to start again through no fault of my own. My rage was so great that I got my head down and made the next run the successful one that netted me the completion.

But seriously, this kind of shit can FUCK RIGHT OFF. I don’t care what level your company is operating at, AAA or ID, sort your shit out. This is fully unacceptable and Red Barrels should be ashamed of themselves. There. I managed to hold that in for 13 days (at the time of drafting this review.)

Downloadable Content

I actually put off the LUNATIC and ENERGISER achievements until after I had played through the Whistleblower DLC as I didn’t fancy manning up to the challenge at the time. Whistleblower sees you take control of the guy who sends the email to the other guy at the beginning of the main game and you essentially have to escape from the asylum. In terms of storyline, continuity and framing, Whistleblower is probably one of the best game additions I’ve ever played. In terms of gameplay, it’s more of the same of the original game with different enemies and a different protagonist who gets crippling injuries you have to cope with. Same video camera though.

There are three achievements for making it through the DLC unscathed and this is also a lot easier than the main game. In addition, you get another two achievements for getting all the collectibles.

That just leaves the Insane run through for the completion and if you’ve done the main game (again, which I did after this) it’s a cakewalk in comparison. It’s still difficult though and I got caught right at the end of the playthrough only to be thrown back to the start. That was hard to take but I got through it in the end.

Outlast is probably one of my proudest completions. Getting through it has given me a second wind to carry on to more challenging things and push through my backlog of games more quickly. I did actually find myself thinking about playing another insane run after I’d finished. Then I remembered I don’t hate myself and uninstalled it forever.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

I started this one in December last year when I was looking for something new to play that was quick to complete. It was certainly new to me but wasn’t quick and this was partly do to with Xbox One commitments but mainly due to the fact that I just couldn’t get in to it. More on that later.

So X-Men Origins: Wolverine is a movie tie in but it’s different to most in that it’s actually good. Or better than the movie as most people perceived it. You play as Wolverine – or Logan – Or James Howlett as he is known in the game as you run through the jungle murdering tons of dudes… and then run through facilities and buildings murdering tons of dudes. And some robots.

When I first played the game, I could see why it got a lot of praise. Imagine the first two X-Men Movies were R rated and it’s basically that. Wolverine gets chopped to shit all the time and just gets back up dripping blood everywhere and carrying on. But the main part of the game comes with the blasé nature with which Wolverine dismembers everybody, the most out-there part being where he sticks someone’s head in helicopter blades for a decapitation.

While a lot of people have raved about the game, I was left bored and disappointed. At its heart, it’s an uncomplicated hack and slash where 90% of the enemies provide you with a minor annoyance rather than any kind of challenge and while I’m not averse to an unchallenging game, I am averse to a boring one.

The game was released in 2009 and it definitely looks its age. On top of that I found the level design to be less intuitive than Clive Barker’s Clive Barker’s Jericho. I will borrow from Yahtzee of the Escapist’s line here and ask which X-Men Origins Wolverine level did you enjoy most? Brown Jungle, Grey Complex, White Complex, or revenge of the Brown Jungle?

Musically its forgettable but repetitive so offers even less in this area that the graphics, but at least it doesn’t interfere and overstep.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Despite me failing to get into the game and taking nearly 5 months to complete it, a lot of the achievements are easy to get and some of the larger ones are easily grindable by replaying checkpoints. You get 8 for playing through the main story but it will probably be closer to 30 after completing one playthrough.

Some of the more grindy ones involve using Wolverine’s rage attacks. Using Claw Spin to kill 200 enemies was a ball ache because Claw Spin is shit and doesn’t do much damage to enemies late on. The only one of these special moves you will want to use is the Berserk mode which has another kill achievement. The rest are pretty much redundant.

Speaking of redundant, Wolverine also has to kill a load of dudes while in feral sense which is wolverine’s equivalent of Eagle Vision from Assassin’s Creed or Detective Vision from the Batman Arkham series. There is no cost to using it but for some reason, it times out after a while and you need to reactivate it again. Totally pointless.

Looking at the more in-depth grinding ones, there are only two worth mentioning. The first is for collecting all the dog tags but this actually didn’t prove too difficult. There was also quite clearly a point where I got so fed up with the game that I tried to reduce my play time by collecting all of them and looking everywhere. I only missed 3 tags from the end of chapter 3 onwards to avoid me having to replay the later part of the game.

The other one is for getting all your combat reflexes up to the max level and this was totally fucking stupid. You have to replay two checkpoints over and over again to do it so you are never going to get the maximum benefit from doing so because the game is unchallenging. It just adds an unnecessary grind to an already boring game.

The last one I earned is one of my personal favourites. You have to play it through on hard. It’s almost no different from normal and certainly didn’t add any extra challenge. On top of that, the game wants you to complete it on normal first before it lets you play on hard. This aspect of games can fuck off.

The last fight on this mode was a total cunt though. As it’s not difficult, it makes up for it by being cheap. Deadpool can shoot out the ground you walk on and then shoot you in the air when you jump over the gaps. The only way I found to avoid this was to let him shoot me a few times, then jump. Totally benign and not well thought out gameplay.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite the hype before I played it, I found it a resoundingly average game. It’s not bad but I am wondering if the hype comes from it not being total garbage while also being a movie spin off? Anyway, the long and short of it is that it’s a very unmemorable 12 to 15 hour completion in terms of achievements. And you will most likely be bored at the end.