Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India

Completing all I could of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey encouraged me to go back and finish the only unfinished game in the series Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India.

The game follows the story of Abaaz, an Indian assassin as he goes on another 10 missions of side scrolling, assassination fun. Now, the thing about the Chronicles series is that they are actually proper assassin games where the main objective is to get through the level without being seen and without killing anyone that isn’t a target. Essentially, it’s what Assassin’s Creed should be rather than the ‘get seen, kill everyone’ that the main series has become (and has been since Assassin’s Creed II).

There are two types of level in Chronicles: India. You have your normal ‘progress through the level past the guards to the end goal,’ missions. These missions will usually have a secondary objective which you don’t need to complete but if you do, it will net you points. The more points in a level you get will determine what extra abilities you unlock for Abaaz including carrying more items, more health and more damage. The health and damage upgrades are totally pointless if you play the game as it’s meant to be played as you get the higher scores for completing levels without being seen – so no combat.

In addition to the sword you will never use, you have the ability to whistle to distract guards, chakrams which can be used to cut ropes at certain points of the game and kill guards if you hit them right, noise bombs which are whistles that don’t originate from you, and the auto-win smoke bombs that once you can carry enough of, none of the other items matter. Except for the chakrams which need to be used to progress past certain points.

This accounts for half of the game and the other half are speed run levels of which there are 4 – more than any other Chronicles game. I was happy for this though, as I’m generally better at these types of levels. Anyway, you score points here based on the speed of completion.

Looks wise and music wise, I personally think it’s very good. My only criticism and I think I mentioned this in the Russia review, is that when you are trying to go quickly, which is most of the time, the way the buttons are configured caused to slide into the back of guard’s legs a lot, totally ruining my stealth approach. This is because the stealth button is the same as the slide button when you are running so if don’t stop running quickly enough, you will knock into a guard and then be hacked to pieces.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 18 Achievements

The achievements are mostly straight forward and can be broken down into groups. You only get two of the achievements for playing through the main game.

The next set is for getting golds in the three styles, shadow silencer and assassin, 30 times across all playthroughs. You can rinse and repeat checkpoints to get these, though I don’t see the point between silencer and assassin as choking someone out and not killing them is pretty much the same as slicing them up real nice in terms of the result.

The next batch are obtained by performing certain actions in certain sequences and there are 4 of these. 3 involve speed running certain levels and the fourth is for clearing a section in sequence 8 without taking any damage. All of these can be done with a little practice.

Penultimately we have the biggest batch of the lot with 6 achievements for doing the same shit over and over again. The most painful of these, and the last achievement I unlocked was for multi-killing 200 enemies, so essentially 100 multi-kills. There is a good place to grind this out in the last sequence of the game but it’s overly grindy in comparison to the rest of the list as multi-kill opportunities are few and far between when you play through normally.

The last two achievements are for completing the game in certain ways, namely without killing anyone and without being seen while playing on Plus Hard mode. Plus Hard Mode doesn’t show you the enemy’s vision areas essentially making it harder to not be seen. And it only unlocks after completing the game once, so you have to do two full playthroughs no matter what.

These two are a lot easier than they sound though as the game tracks which sequences you’ve met the criteria in, meaning that you only need to complete each sequence meeting the condition and not the whole game in a row. The only issue is that the game doesn’t tell you which sequences you’ve done so if you don’t remember then this could become more complicated. Although, as a pointer, during sequences 9 and 10, you can kill everyone and it doesn’t invalidate the achievement so if you are missing one for the not killing anyone achievement, it’s not these sequences.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I have mixed feelings about my time with Chronicles: India. I really struggled to get up the enthusiasm to play it but now I’ve done it, I do look back on it fondly. I think it offered the right level of challenge, where it’s not overly difficult but not straightforward. I would certainly recommend the series if only to experience what a true Assassin’s Creed game should be like.

Skylanders Giants

I’ve been given a new task of getting rid of all games that involve peripherals, mainly because the wife is fed up of having 24 Skylander toys dominate the shelves (I didn’t buy them all!). I set to work on this task thinking that completing Skylanders Giants would be the end of it… but it turns out they are backwards compatible for Skylanders Superchargers, so they’ll be hanging around for a little while yet.

Anyway, Skylanders Giants sees you use the toys and portal of power to revisit Skylands to save it from Kaos again. He is the worst villain ever, even by kid’s standards – full of bad guy cliché and has absolutely no reason for wanting to take over Skylands other than to create a plot to the game. And it doesn’t really need him in this regard.

The main component of the game is obviously the ‘toys to life’ concept of placing the Skylander toys on the Portal of Power and playing with them in the virtual game. It’s a pretty solid concept, the only problem with this being that if you want to go everywhere in the game, you won’t be able to unless you buy additional Skylanders outside of the starter pack. Essentially, it’s a game that costs money in addition to the game for the full experience. In terms of achievements though, it has been developed to be completed without the need to buy additional Skylanders.

I found the gameplay to be laborious and slow. The game is spread over 16 levels and while some Skylanders do have the ability to move slightly faster than others, generally speaking its snail’s pace for most of it.

Graphically, it’s fairly standard cartoon graphics with environments that prevent you from dying by having invisible walls surrounding you at every turn. This sort of goes hand in hand with a lack of jumping and preventing any kind of inventive exploring along with protecting you from insta-death a lot of the time. However, a lot of the environments aren’t very well thought through and there are lots of points where you can get completely stuck on your surroundings, forcing a reload or mucking around with which Skylander you have on the portal.

Musically, it’s so un-diverse and hollow that I think it’s another one that could cause young children to develop unconscious depression. This, along with the fact that the levels themselves are unnecessarily drawn out, is not a good combination.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

In terms of an achievement list, I would say it’s 50% designed for children and 50% for adults and masochists. The game will award you 14 achievements for playing the game’s 16 levels without going out of your way, however there are 16 other achievements for doing something specific in each level. Most of these are linear and will be done just by playing the game in no particularly targeted way.

However, some of the these are fairly tricky and annoying, the most notable of which is Chapter 6 where you have to shoot down some specific flying enemies during robot ‘vehicle’ sections. Some of these enemies give you seconds to shoot them and this is combined with a terrible shooting mechanic where the bullets only sort of go where you are aiming. This leads to a lot of checkpoint reloads, retries and repeated dialogue.

There are tons of collectibles throughout the levels however, the achievements for getting them are limited to requiring 10 ship upgrades, 10 story scrolls and getting all of the collectibles in just one level, not all of them. You also need to beat the time trial on the same level for an achievement. This is potentially to do with the fact the achievement list is designed specifically to be completed by just the 3 starter Skylanders that come with the game.

Throughout the game, you will come across three battles that take place in arenas against waves of enemies. This then unlocks an arena battle mode on your hub ship. You are then required to play through a large and repetitive amount of arena battles for another achievement.

There are another three achievements I would consider a pain in the ass. The first one of these is for playing a minigame on the ship where you shoot projectiles out of the sky. There are three different mini games and they are random so first you need to get the right one which just so happens to be the hardest of the three. Once you’ve got the mini game, you need to do a perfect run. This can be frustrating but thankfully, once you’ve got the right mini-game, you can just die every time you get hit to restart. The painful part is if you try to do this before completing the main game, the mini game will lock itself out until you complete the next mission.

There is a massive grind of an achievement for amassing 65,000 gold with one Skylander. This is totally pointless as it means stacking so much gold you won’t use. Thankfully this carries over across games and some of mine had a lot already on them.

The last one is for completing the game on Nightmare mode and this is obtuse because Nightmare mode doesn’t  unlock until you complete the game once. So you have to play through the whole thing twice if you want 100% and this is just as likely to kill you from boredom that anything else. On top of that, the enemies do silly amounts of damage to you and they are very spammy with their attacks, especially towards the end of the game, filling the screen up with near unavoidable lasers that kill you with one hit. I had the luxury of having a lot of Skylanders but if you just have the base game ones, not only is this a chore but it’s a hard one to boot.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Skylanders Giants is a very middle of the road game with an expensive gimmick that doesn’t really excel. It’s not an advert for getting the rest of the series and I won’t be doing so. I do already have Skylanders Superchargers but that will be the last game I play in the series.

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

The next game in the neverending run of Assassin’s Creed games is Odyssey. In terms of my progress, I am only missing the one game in the series for the complete set and that’s Assassin’s Creed Chronicles India which I will get to one day and hopefully soon.

I kind of broke from my pattern of clearing up some of the older games to play this one as I was really keen to get into it. However, I quickly found out that it’s not a game you can just pick up and play as I soon found myself 5 hours in and feeling like I hadn’t gone anywhere.

AC: Odyssey follows the story of Alexios… or Kassandra as you go on a journey of revenge to destroy the Cult of Kosmos, a group of people who I can only imagine are the ancient Greece version of the Templars. Along the way, you can help loads of people and make a name for yourself as the Eagle Bearer. There are dialogue decisions for the first time in Assassin’s Creed history so you can play any way you want. You can even decide to be straight, gay or somewhere in between.

In terms of gameplay, there is another massive open world map to explore and this is where a lot of play time will be spent. It took me ages just to fully explore the starting island, then you hit the open sea to get a real feel for how big the map is. Thankfully the ship travel is relatively quick but there is still a lot of ground to cover. The most frustrating thing about this is the bizarre positioning of some of the fast travel points. In some of the larger locations, they are few and far between, but then on some islands that are tiny, there are four of five within a stone’s throw of each other.

In terms of combat, I found that it suffered the same issues as Origins in that it is possible, and satisfying, to get through a location without being seen and killing everyone, but there is always that one guard that sees you and if he does, all of his mates come to cut you down. I could imagine this becoming very frustrating having to either be killed or run away to come back once they had seen you but playing on easy, it’s possible to leave a pile of corpses and just carry on in most scenarios.

When going from place to place and potentially needing to get around in a hurry, I was often faced with the same thing preventing me from doing so. The environment. For the most part, it’s very polished but for some reason, Alexios has no issues scaling a bronze statue with no discernible handholds, but gets stopped in his tracks by small mounds of earth. Seriously, some of the bits that aren’t climbable are just laughable. Also, I played the game for over 120 hours but still couldn’t find a way to make my horse go faster than a trot when within 100 metres of semi-built up areas. If he did, I reckon my play time would be closer to 80 hours.

Achievements – 1,850 Points - 93 Achievements

The main game offers up a normal 50 achievements but the expansive DLC ups it to 93. I think it’s done now though which is odd as it would have made sense to take the score up to 2,000.

Out of the main 50, there is just the one missable achievement but it’s only missable if you play like an amoeba as it’s for spending the night with another character. Loosely translated – get laid. When I say this is missable, it’s really difficult to play this way as from chapter 5 onwards, pretty much every sub-quest dialogue will give you a romance option. Some of them are just funny too. The first one I had was Odessa (potentially the first romance available in the game) and you literally just throw lines at her until she cracks and takes you to bed. She doesn’t take much cracking either and neither does anyone else for that matter.

Concerning the rest of the list, there’s no great shakes. Following the main story and eliminating all targets will most likely leave you with very little left to do. Don’t take this as it’s a quick game though, because doing all of this, and the character specific side quest achievements (which are all secret) will take a while simply because of the size of the map.

Some of the more notable achievements are for getting your ship up to legendary status, which involves grinding for materials to upgrade it, defogging the entire map (there are some areas you don’t need to go to during the main game) and everyone’s personal favourite, clearing all underwater locations.

This last one has had some issues with locations not completing and the achievement not unlocking but I was fortunate enough to be playing after this was patched. There are only 42 underwater locations, each of which are a pain in the ass because nothing underwater in games is good.

Some of the other achievements involve having to recruit legendary lieutenants to the ship and using overpower attacks with each weapon. Another two I had to go out of my way to get was for getting a maximum bounty, which just involved slaughtering all civilians and the reloading the game when done, and for killing a leader while an area has low resources but again, this was easy once you know it’s a thing.

Downloadable Content

The DLC can be broken down into three sections:

The Lost Tales of Greece and Mythical Creatures

These are nice little missions that have been periodically add to the game. They each carry one achievement for completing the quest or killing the monster. It’s a shame that there aren’t more monster quests as these are the most fun.

The most recent Lost Tales of Greece expansion didn’t carry an achievement which has led the community to believe that there won’t be any more added to the game.

The Legacy of the First Blade

This is a 3-part DLC containing 15 achievements in total. These are a continuation from the main story and adds more to the legacy of Alexios/Kassandra. There are 3 achievements for completing each part’s missions and on top of this, you need to kill another set of dudes who want to kill you and learn new abilities and use them. On top of this, each part contains a miscellaneous thing to do just to mix it up.

The Fate of Atlantis

Again, it’s another 3-part expansion but this one focusses more on the outside universe of Assassin’s Creed and is more attuned to the craziness from the Tyranny of King Washington in Assassin’s Creed III.

Fate of Atlantis sees Alexios travel to Elysium, the Underworld and eventually Atlantis to free some people from oppression and find some answers with regard to his wider role in the franchise. Of the achievements here, there is more killing and exploring to do, as well as completing the questlines.

Overall, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is an excellent game. The characters are relatable and well developed, the game world is stunning and despite some of the travel issues, it’s very well balanced. On top of that, the season pass keeps on giving and no one is really sure when the DLC train will end. In this regard, it’s also certainly value for money and also includes remastered versions of Assassin’s Creed III and Liberation. If you are a fan of the franchise, you can’t go wrong.