Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

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

King's Quest

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,800 Points – 53 Achievements

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

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

Downloadable Content

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

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

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

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

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

Your Toy

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

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

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

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

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

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

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

The Station

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

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

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

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

Captain America: Super Soldier

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

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

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

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

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

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

Ben10 Ultimate Alien: Cosmic Destruction

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

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

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

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

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

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

Zenith

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

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

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

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

Crash Time III: Highway Nights

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

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

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

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

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

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

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