Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear

As part of my ‘no new games 2019’ extravaganza, I performed a cull of my wish list. This involved removing a large amount of games that were either added for an unknown reason, because they looked easy, not because I actually wanted to play them. While going through this process, I bought two games that were no longer available on the digital store, one of which was Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear. This was one of the games on the list because it was easy. And it was.

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear is a rail shooter where you play as a guy called Will (I think) through 12 levels of rail shooting, which is essentially a shooting gallery. It doesn’t really make sense as an Xbox Game in the same way Toy Story Mania didn’t make sense, unless there is a gun accessory I don’t know about. Essentially the game play boils down to moving the cursor around and shooting bad guys before they shoot you and also aiming for their heads to score more points. A bad guy will die if you shoot him in the head, his hand or his toe so it doesn’t make too much of difference as long as you hit them.

In addition to the normal shooting, you also get to pilot three different vehicles during the campaign, the main difference being that you can fire rockets and stuff and blow things up.

In terms of music, it’s got a very typical ‘we are in the army’ feel to it and is very generic. The same can be said about it’s dated appearance as well, as the whole thing is a rather depressing yellow, grey colour.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 34 Achievements

The achievement list is a bit bland and doesn’t offer much variety, however the game does get quite difficult when you start getting in to veteran mode levels (this isn’t a separate difficulty but more of a continuation where you have to do the game again on a higher difficulty.

The easy way of doing this is to plug in some extra controllers which effectively gives you four extra lives as the enemies have four targets to shoot at instead of one. This makes the veteran levels a breeze including the last level which has an achievement attached to it for completing it without reloading checkpoints.

There’s another stupid achievement for completing a level without taking any damage. When you take control of the tank in the tenth mission, you can’t take any damage unless you get completely blown up and die – so you will always finish the level with full health.

There are 16 collectibles in the form of radios you need to shoot throughout the campaign. These were ridiculously hard to see as they blended in to the background really well and fit with the middle ground yellow/grey that’s overtaken this game world.

Outside of these, there are two pain in the ass achievements and the first of these is for using a pistol to kill 250 enemies. The pistol appears to be some kind of backup weapon for when you run out of ammo with your main gun, at least I couldn’t find a way to change to it. It was one of the last achievements I unlocked and I had to settle for firing off 300 rounds of my main gun just to use it. This turned out to be okay because of the last achievement I unlocked. For shooting 25,000 bullets.

I appreciate that this is a rail shooter but the fact I needed nearly three playthroughs and some rubber banding on the helicopter level to unlock this is ridiculous. Why have it so high? Especially when all this does is encourage you to miss a lot – loosely translated as being bad at the game. So playing the game like a 5year old would have got me this achievement faster? Thanks.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear was fun until the end of the normal playthrough. Then it started to repeat itself and become boring. And it’s ugly. However, it is an easy completion and clocks in at around six hours so it doesn’t outstay its welcome too much. Except for that dumbass grind at the end.

Devious Dungeon

Continuing to work through the backlog of games and this is one I got as a reward for giving blood. A fellow gamer who runs loads of promotions offered it to me in advance of my second giving appointment with a promise of another one if I make it to five donations. At the time of writing, I’m days away from donation number 4 and therefore, 3 months away from another free game.

Devious Dungeon is a roguelite game and it’s probably the best one I’ve played (in terms of reference, the only other one I’ve played is Crypt of the Serpent King which was shitty awful.) You take control of an armour-less knight with a sword and descend through 65 levels of dungeon, collecting coins and experience to buy new equipment and level up respectively.

In terms of combat, at first, I thought the enemies were cheap a lot of the time, especially the floating eyes with their blast attacks, but after the first boss fight (of which there are five throughout the dungeon) it clicked that everything is a case of working out the enemiy’s attack patterns and timing.

The dungeons themselves are procedurally generated so the environments and enemies are random in all levels. In order to progress from one level to the next, you need to find a key and the exit door. Sometimes, this will have you going from one end of a long dungeon to the other and back again, but enemies do not respawn so the going back isn’t really a problem. Sometimes however, the exit door, start location and key will all be within 20 seconds of each other. Surprisingly this happened to me towards the end of the game quite a lot, it was almost forgiving.

The coins you collect can be used to buy different bits of equipment to improve your three key stats; attack power, hit points and critical hit frequency, all of which serves to make your character better and therefore, the game a lot easier.

Looks wise, it’s a 2D SNES graphics style which caused my wife to question why I was playing such an old looking game when I had more modern stuff in the collection. The reason I gave was that I was given it as a gift and, of course, the…

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 23 Achievements

You can get the majority of the achievements in this game quite quickly as they are tied to buying stuff from the shop, levelling up and checking the map screen. This leads to earning 12 achievements before the first boss fight, assuming you get another two ones for picking up a tome during a level and hitting an arrow in mid-air.

There are then five achievements tied to the individual bosses. By the time I had killed the final boss, I only had two more achievements to get. One of these is a bit of a grind as it involves collecting 100 keys. Completing the game, assuming a few deaths, will still leave you around 30 short of this but it is a simple case of starting the game again with loads of equipment and playing levels until you get the remaining amount you need.

The last achievement I earned was for dying 25 times and this is a testament to how easy the game is. For me, this essentially boiled down to taking my armour off and standing in front of the dragon boss around 15 times. Easy, but when this is required 15 times in a row, it’s still boring.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Devious Dungeon was a quick completion coming in at around 5 hours. It was pretty fun but towards the end, the dungeons and gameplay became quite repetitive despite the procedural nature of the game. It retails for £8.99 so you are looking at over £1 per hour of game play which just isn’t worth it.

World II: Hunting Boss

From the image of this game on the digital store you could be forgiven for thinking this is Monster Hunter: World lite. But it’s not. Far from it.

At the start of the game, you pick one of three characters and off you go on a monster killing ‘adventure.’

The gameplay is simple. You run around hitting the X button to attack the monsters and using special abilities with cooldowns to inflict more damage. You also have a pointless stamina bar which serves no other purpose than to annoy you. As mentioned, the special attacks have cooldown so having a stamina bar doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially as there appears to be no way to manage your stamina to keep attacking for longer. There is also an XP based levelling up system which serves a purpose but again, just serves as being annoying because when a mission gets hard to point of being unable to complete it, your only option is to replay the missions you’ve already completed to level up – which is boring as sin.

There isn’t a story either unless you count the weird one-liners that go at the start of every fight. The fights themselves appear to be against 1 of either 4 monsters or a team of three humans who are exactly like you.

You fight through 5 missions as just your normal character before being joined by the other two characters you could have started the game with for the remainder of the game. They are next to useless when they are at a lower level but will kill everything themselves once you’ve levelled up a bit so they are completely unbalanced.

In terms of looks, it’s massively cartoony and I encountered a couple of game-breaking glitches where the game forced me to restart. My play time was around four and a half hours so that’s pretty bad in terms of glitch/time ratio.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

In terms of the achievements, a lot of these are hand outs and some are just obnoxious. 15 are gained just for playing through the missions up until Class B Monsters/Humans. Completing 10 of these gets you the ‘hard’ achievement but this can be 10 of the same mission as long as it’s in the B Class area so you only need to be able to win the first one.

Outside of this, the really irritating ones involving having to suck at the game so badly, you actually have to play badly on purpose to get them. You need to fail 10 missions which is easy enough, just stand there and get ganked. The other one requires you to get an A rank in 5 missions. This is actually difficult as the ranks are assessed on the speed you get through the missions. There is no indicator of time so it’s pure guess work to start with and then you need to rely on your AI compatriots not slaying the monster too quickly (assuming you don’t do this in the first 5 missions before they join you).

The worst achievement though, is getting to level 20. Essentially this involves replaying the same mission over and over again to grind out the XP. It’s a small grind but unenjoyable grind in a bad game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

World II: Hunting Boss justifies its £2.50 price by being short and awful. I’m not sure why Square Enix published this but I certainly won’t be playing any more of it.

Phineas and Ferb: The Quest for Cool Stuff

I’m not even going to pretend I know anything about Phineas and Ferb. It’s another American import and probably the most American game I will play until I get to Darkest of Days. I had no real idea who any of the characters were and I’m still none the wiser and it will stay that way.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by the game for the first 10 or so minutes I played it. Soon after that though, things started to unravel.

Phineas and Ferb follows the story of… Phineas and Ferb, two strange looking children who are either super intelligent or just have super-active imaginations. They go on a quest for cool stuff using a bizarre digging thing in their back garden. They build a museum of cool in which to celebrate.

There is also one of the coolest characters I’ve seen in video games – Perry the Platypus. Whoever thought to give a platypus a fedora and pose him as a crime fighting detective deserves some serious praise. He also has his own theme tune.

The gameplay itself revolves around a simple platforming mechanic as you navigate the super cool digging machine through a variety of different levels, jumping from platform to platform and collecting stuff for the museum. As you progress, you unlock bits of the machine that allow you to explore different parts of levels, like a better drill to get through harder rocks or a headlight to see in dark places – though in reality, the headlight makes no difference so it’s just a device to force you to revisit areas you could not previously go to.

The robot digger thing has two functions, one controlled by Phineas, the other by Ferb. With Ferb, you can jump better and do a spinny attack. With Phineas you can kill enemies with a drill.

So what started to suck about the gameplay after ten minutes? To sum up in one word; jumping. The jumping mechanic is total shite. It suffers from similar issues to JuJu in that forward momentum does not equal a better jump to clear a larger gap. There were so many times I missed jumps because the game decided I hadn’t done something in a very exact way to get enough distance on my jump.

There are occasional jumping sections where you play as the individual characters outside of the digger. These are timed and the jumping issue caused me to fail a few times. It’s not game-breaking but it is annoying. Dying in levels, when you fall into bottomless pits, doesn’t carry too severe a punishment either so it doesn’t make the game harder – it just feels like poor design.

Speaking of unintentional, there are two bits where you have to collect items as both Phineas and Ferb. At the end of a Ferb bit, Phineas says ‘Great job Ferb!’ and you can see Phineas in the background watching so this makes sense. However, when you complete these bits as Phineas, he still says, ‘Great Job Ferb!’ at the end. Ferb is nowhere to be seen so this is just a cut-and-paste to the point where it doesn’t make sense.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

Despite the gameplay issues, it’s possible to get through the game in under 5 hours and you will nab 8 achievements for doing so. Most of the other achievements are earned by collecting everything in all levels which is essentially all that’s required for the 100% completion.

There are few annoying elements to this. Burford’s races force you to replay levels for no other reason than to beat his time, and upgrading the museum of cool and buying all the customisation items costs more in-game currency than you will accumulate throughout your playthrough so there is a small need to replay levels at the end. It’s so small though, that I don’t think it can be called a grind.

Collecting all of the items is really easy as the game is so linear with the exception of one level where you go into outer space. In this one level, the collectibles are in really obscure locations and out of the way and it’s the only time I had to use a guide to find anything.

As Perry the Platypus, you need to find all the gnomes instead of treasures but these are easy to find as well.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Phineas and Ferb was an okay experience that tried it’s best to shit all over itself which is a real shame. However, it has introduced me to Perry the Platypus so it will always have a special place in my heart. All in all, another quick and easy 1,000 Gamerscore. If you live in America, that is.