Fearful Symmetry and the Cursed Prince

This is one of my newer purchases of the year as it came up in a sale and I was clearing down my wish list so what better way to cross a game off? The sale price was ludicrously low so I took full advantage and was pleasantly surprise by the game for the most part.

Fearful Symmetry is a puzzle game. You control two characters at the same time and they effectively mirror each other’s movements. At first, this is quite easy to get to grips with but as the levels become more complicated, it becomes rather taxing and for someone like me who isn’t superiorly clever, most levels resorted to trial and error. And then guides.

Obviously the big challenge with these is that you need to watch two screens at once for danger and sometimes this becomes incredibly hard to do. At this point, I don’t see how the puzzles can be solved without trial and error.

There is a story to it too. There are these things called Symmetry Scrolls which your hero is tasked to retrieve. The whole thing becomes a circular journey where you recover the scrolls to save your soul (or something) but in turn, end up cursing someone else. You can play through the story up to three times as three different characters but the second and third characters have special abilities that make the playthroughs different.

In terms of graphics and music, it’s got a classic design using a top-down format so there’s little room for graphical glitches or errors. Musically it paints a great picture of the game world and doesn’t interfere with the gameplay.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 46 Achievements

Achievements wise, there are 25 given out just by playing through the story. In some of the levels there are relics which need to be collected for another set of achievements. Most of these are in plain sight but some are hidden by objects that need to be destroyed. This was very rare though.

As you play through the game, you unlock two additional characters who need to play through the same levels except they have special abilities to help navigate the levels. One of these characters burns things with a fire power and this is where the biggest pain in the ass part of the game comes into play. In one level you have to burn something while standing on a square that kills you if you stay on it for too long. The fire power performs itself so slowly that you have to time this to perfection in order to complete the level. It feels a lot like trial and error as to whether the game lets you do it too.

Once you’ve completed all the normal levels, bonus levels and collected all the relics, you are done. As mentioned above though, some of the latter levels are so tricky that without a walkthrough, would take a regular person a very long time to get right.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Fearful Symmetry was a fun game up until the levels became stupidly complex. It’s still an easy completion though and is fairly cheap at £8.39.

Brave: A Warrior's Tale

The next game that came up to play was one that caused me to stop before diving in to. I don’t normally do this but as I was at a point where I couldn’t immediately play it, so I took stock of some of the reviews people had written for the game. To sum up, they weren’t very nice, to the point where it put me off playing the game as they gave the impression it was a broken unplayable mess.

This sort of set me up for something of a straight forward completion as the game was a lot better than expected – not good by any means, but also not a broken unplayable mess as advertised.

The story follows Brave, a Shaman/Warrior, who is recalling the tale of his battle with the Wendigo, a being of immense power that looks like some kind of hell demon. The Wendigo has destroyed Brave’s village and performed some kind of mind control over the other villagers and it’s up to Brave to retrieve Spirit Dancer’s amulet and save the day.

In terms of gameplay, it really does suck. It’s a basic platformer with a terrible jump mechanic. Jumping comprises the majority of the game so I can see why people gave it a lot of stick. There are lots of instant-death floating platform sections but while the jumping is a bit shit, the checkpoints are really forgiving so it’s not the end of the world.

The combat sucks too. As you progress through the game, you are given a tomahawk and a bow. The tomahawk is fine as you just run at enemies and hit them but using the bow is just an episode in sheer frustration. There is an aiming mechanic but I couldn’t work out if there was a way to switch targets and Brave seems only to be able to aim in one direction so if your target strafes you, Brave will not be pointing his bow at any enemy that is likely to attack you.

There are also vehicle/animal sections where you take control of animals and have to run through checkpoints. This seems to be in the game because it was released at the height of obligatory vehicle sections no matter what kind of game it was. I’m just grateful that there wasn’t an underwater level.

In terms of general errors, I did fall through the game floor once which was terribly annoying, however the same thing happened to me when playing Agents of Mayhem so it shows that games appear to have made little progress in this regard.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 14 Achievements

It’s a small list and can be broken down into three categories. The first are the main story ones and for getting to end, you will get 8 out of 14 achievements.

The next ones are for completing some of the vehicle sections without getting damaged or missing checkpoints. The first of these is for piloting a canoe down a river without taking damage. This is actually quite easy as there is no time limit and you can just go slow and avoid all the obstacles. The second is for flying an eagle through all checkpoints without missing any. This is a bit harder as there is a timer attached to it but I didn’t have any issues.

The last lot are the most frustrating and they are for picking up all the hidden collectibles of which there are 48. I followed a guide for these but they are still problematic and here’s why. The levels are so nondescript that finding directional landmarks to use is really difficult. There is no compass function either so ‘go north’ is useless and unhelpful too.

In order to get the collectibles, you have to do one of two things; either call a bird to drop one or follow a trail of footprints. Some of the birds are impossible to see and there is no way anyone would just stumble upon them, even if you were looking. The footprints thing is also a royal pain in the ass as you have to find one, then find another but it can be in any direction. This doesn’t make logical sense because the footprints point in certain directions (because they are footprints) and it’s a game so why make it so convoluted?

Downloadable Content – N/A

I didn’t have lot of fun with Brave: A Warrior’s Tale but it was nowhere near as bad as some of the reviews made out, which probably made the experience a lot more bearable. It takes around 8 to 10 hours to complete with the collectibles so it’s relatively short but I can’t recommend playing it.

Agents of Mayhem

After buying Agents of Mayhem in a sale, I let it gather digital dust for a few years before I was ‘forced’ to start playing it by the UHH contest. Initially I thought it was okay – I wasn’t required to play more than half an hour of the game for the contest and while that can be enough time for a game to shit all over itself, Agents of Mayhem delayed this for a good four hours or so.

I recently created a list of my games that require some kind of online involvement and aimed to prioritise these achievements over others for fear of server shutdowns causing yet more unobtainable achievements to appear. Rather annoyingly, Agents of Mayhem has one achievement with such an online requirement and it took so long to get that I thought I would finish the game off in its entirety while the control scheme was fresh in my head.

Agents of Mayhem is almost a spiritual successor to the Saints Row game series given that it’s similar in style and developed by the same company, Volition. The basic elements of gameplay are that you have a group of Agents that you select three of to undertake missions to stop the dreaded Dr Babylon from taking over Seoul – and by extension, the entire world. You run around Seoul with your three agents, shooting a bunch of ‘bad guys’ called Legion in order to stop Dr Babylon from taking control.

Now, I started asking the question of the game – exactly who are the bad guys here? Legion soldiers tend to show up when you hurt innocent people in Seoul so it’s almost like they are the police force. When this happens, you build up a wanted level and when you max it, a giant robot shows up to kill you. In this element, it’s just like Gat out of Hell but instead of being set in hell, it’s set on planet earth… so the Agents of Mayhem are the equivalent of Team America for all intents and purposes.

Before getting on to the achievements, the game had so many glitches that I stopped counting them. During my time playing the game, there were countless graphical fuck ups that affected gameplay but the worst of these included, not driving over a ramp and treating it like a wall, falling through the floor of the game forever (there’s no benefit to this like in Mafia II) and proper game crashes which happened to me on two occasions. Essentially it feels very broken and almost rushed into release and considering its age, it seems that it won’t be improved.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 49 Achievements

I would say for the most part, it’s an easy list with the exception of 5 or 6 achievements. Completing all of the missions in the game will net 11 of the 49 on offer and you will get a load by wandering the environment and completing small side objectives.

Outside of the main missions, each agent gets a personal mission that you can complete. Doing this with all of the agents gives you additional missions with three specific agents who have been put into arbitrary groups. You then get a special mission for the three agents in question and there are four special missions encompassing the 12 non-DLC agents for a further four achievements.

The driving in the game sucks balls but there are a few achievements for driving around, namely for jumping over 50 meters, doing a 360 and finding 10 jumps in the city.

There is also a weird kind of mini game called global offensive where you can send your agents off to other areas of the globe to do… something. All you have to do is sit back and wait for them to complete their objective. Once you’ve cleared the whole map of ‘missions’ it will unlock a Legion Lair which needs to be completed at difficulty level 10. This is probably the hardest thing to do in the game difficulty level wise, but once you have levelled your agents enough, it’s still fairly easy, you just need to not run in to loads of guys guns blazing. The VR simulations which are required for another achievement only go up to difficulty level 9 so are slightly easier than this.

While talking about difficulty specific stuff, one of the more taxing ones requires you to complete all normal missions at difficulty seven or higher. Once again, with the right level agents, its pretty easy and the difficulty goes all the way up to 15 so there’s a lot of leeway here. The difficulty lies with the game’s general shitiness as loads of people have reported this one not unlocking when meeting the requirements for it.

The online one is probably the most taxing but only because of how poorly designed it is. The idea is that you work with 5 other people to complete contracts and you get three of these contracts offered every day. The achievement is awarded for completing 15 of these contracts. However, what people do is set them up then do fuck all towards their completion. While I was doing this, I think I only had one person help in any noticeable way on one contract. And you can imagine how fucking irritating it is doing the job of six people by yourself. Thankfully some of the goals are more achievable than others and some of the online community highlighted some decent grinding spots but it still took an hour or two a day to get one of the three completed. Needless to say, it took me a lot longer than 5 days to get 15 done.

The last achievement I unlocked was for getting all agents to level 20 and completing their personal missions and this is only because outside of three or four agents, the others are redundant so you won’t use them. Grinding out the last lot of experience points didn’t take too long after completing all the other objectives, but was still a noticeable, unwanted grind.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Agents of Mayhem was a terrible game to play due to the issues mentioned above. It doesn’t have many redeemable qualities as it feels shallow when it’s trying to be funny and the gameplay is mega repetitive. It’s a real shame after the strength of the Saint’s Row Series too, and I think that Saints Row The Third is probably the best game put out by Volition.