A King's Tale: Final Fantasy XV

This game came free with Final Fantasy XV, a game I have started and will hopefully finish in the next few years – being realistic. A King’s Tale is essentially a side-scrolling beat ‘em up (with swords) so not one of the genres I want to be playing in the future. Final Fantasy XV however, does fit that bill… but King’s Tale is ultimately a short and quick to complete game so I went for it.

 

You play as Noctis’ (protagonist form the main game) dad as he tells a young Noctis a bedtime story, which recaps his former adventures. This is essentially framing for what is a very basic fighting game akin to either Streets of Rage or Golden Axe.

 

You fight through a series of chapters against a variety of different enemies, all of which have a specific set of weaknesses for you to exploit with either combo attacks or magic. Along the way, you gain the ability to summon companions in battle and if you score a combo of hits without getting hit in return, you can launch one of their special abilities. If you manage to launch all three companions’ special abilities and then launch your own special attack, you can hit enemies for MASSIVE DAMAGE (insert giant crab meme here).

 

The combat can get quite frustrating at times as some enemies are unforgiving in what they allow you to hit them with and the game is quite picky with your button presses when chaining combos. The worst example of this is the Classic Cactuar who seems to counter every move and the exploits mentioned during his tutorial simply didn’t work for me. I say this is frustrating because it’s not hard to take them out, just more time consuming.

 

That said, there are some plus points in terms of balance of game play speed and the shortness of the levels as this helps to draw you in to the battles knowing that nothing you sit down to do is going to take an age to complete. It’s really good as a pick-up-and-play title.

 

Once you complete the main storyline, you unlock Dream Battles, which are additional challenges where you fight enemies to meet certain conditions like ‘don’t use magic’ or ‘don’t use companions.’

 

Graphically it’s at home in an 80s arcade cabinet but this is the style they’ve gone for and to be honest, it works. The music is equally as grating for the era though which is totally unnecessary.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

 

If you are going for all the achievements, this will take around 6 hours depending on how quickly you become accustomed to the control scheme. One achievement will come by playing through the main story but the likelihood is you will unlock more than this as there are a lot of cumulative things to do as well, such as killing certain amounts of enemy types using your special attacks.

 

Once the story is complete, you will unlock Dream Battles, which are effectively fighting challenges, and there are further achievements attached to these. The achievements boil down to completing all of the challenges with a couple of exceptions.

 

There are only two relatively challenging achievements. The first is for completing a Dream Battle in under 1 minute however, this can be made easier by doing a specific challenge with a small amount of enemies. The real pain is the achievement for using every move in one combo. A combo means without being hit and this can only really be achieved on certain Dream Battles where the enemies are forgiving in what they do and do not block… and definitely no Cactuars!

 

The last achievement I unlocked was for completing all the Dream Battles so it’s certainly a doable list without additional game play on top of the content that’s on offer – which is the long winded way of saying ‘no grinding!’

 

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

For a game that came with a game, King’s Tale is a nice little addition on the side of a sizeable main course. I don’t think it’s worth buying by itself, though it can be obtained for free from the Xbox store if anyone wished to try it out.

The Coma: Recut

I am severely hoping this was part of some kind of game sale bundle, as I cannot see a reason this would have made it onto my wish list. Bizarre Anime-style games that centre around awkward teenage boys with crushes on their teachers with exceptionally large breasts isn’t exactly my idea of a cracking Saturday night in. But somehow, the Coma: Recut ended up in my game collection and even more bizarrely, on the next to play list.

The Coma is… well, I suppose the best genre fit is survival horror. You play as Youngho – an awkward teenage boy – not a clever naming convention for an underage prostitute – as he turns up at his school for exams to find that one of his colleagues has jumped off the roof to commit suicide. Instead of suspending the exams like any normal school, everyone just carries on and Youngwhore appears to fall asleep during his exam.

 

Upon waking, he finds himself in a twisted alternate universe of his school and it’s up to you, the player, to guide him through the mess before him and back to the real world.

 

This is made difficult to fulfil by the fact that it’s a video game and shitty physics, poor controls and bizarre design decisions will constantly work against you to prevent Youngslut from achieving his goal of escape.

 

The story is told through written text dialogue in the game and while I appreciate the game is based in Korea, some of this is really bad. There are a few hammed-in swear words which seem to be an attempt to appeal to Western audiences but this means a lot of the dialogue just feels wrong. They also through a random swear into an achievement description for some arbitrary reason – maybe thinking it’s cool?

 

So let’s move on to how it actually works. The school is a 2D environment where you need to roam the halls avoiding a load of stuff that randomly appears on the floor to hurt you and the biggest pain in the ass, a demonic form of your ‘hot’ teacher who will cut you into ribbons if you run into her.

 

Your tools of defence are running and dodge rolling. Both activities use up stamina, of which you have relatively little and to top it off, 90% of encounters you have with demon-teacher-lady are random so you can’t plan for them.

 

While this does create an element of suspense, after you’ve walked through a door, only to be immediately stabbed and killed for the fifth time in a row, the suspense is gone and replaced with rage-induced frustration. This is probably a good time to talk about the totally redundant health system. You have five hearts, which is enough to survive two stabbings. If that’s the case, what’s the point? Just give me two hearts and be done with it. The other elements that can hurt you can inflict bleeding and poison and there are items to heal these status effects, but it feels a bit weak and just tacked on, like the game couldn’t decide what it wants to do.

 

The killer-lady-tits is also ridiculously annoying. There is background music when she chases you and when you successfully hide from her, it fades out meaning it’s safe to continue the story. But on several occasions when I emerged from my hiding hole, she was standing right there waiting for me and I had to start the sequence over again. This happened in one spot five times in a row and while yes, it’s realistic, the video game logic was clearly suspended here in an infuriating way that prevented me from progressing the story.

 

Another annoyance is that a large portion of the game is exploratory based where it will benefit you to be able to remember the hide spots, which doors are locked and where everything is. However, if you had put any work into this, the third act throws this out of the window by rearranging the entire school. I think this was done just to make the big finale even more harrowing, but not when it turns your potential victory into a game of guesswork, trial and error that isn’t based on skill.

 

Turning to the environment, I found the controls when interacting with objects to be sticky at times. This is made all the more noticeable when you press A to open a door to escape weird-anime-chick only to instead, do nothing and be stabbed to death. Helpful.

 

The music is used to create an eerie, survival horror feel which it does to great effect, but it’s the only decent part of the game which makes it all the more pretentious.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 24 Achievements

 

There are lot of guaranteed achievements at the beginning of the game just for progressing the story but I actually missed one of these, which was for trying to go into the girl’s bathroom before the horror portion starts – not strictly guaranteed but still pretty hard to miss. And right up there with the undercurrent theme of the game.

 

There are several issues with the achievement list and it commits that cardinal sin of having non-stackable ending achievements. Essentially, Youngslag has spent too much time on street corners and failed three of his classes and there are certain things that occur during the game, which will allow him to rectify his grades. Two of these can be completely missed – it may be possible to miss all three but I wasn’t going to suffer through another playthrough to find out.

 

There are four ways you can end the game – getting the good ending  by doing everything the way it was supposed to be done and being a really nice guy at most opportunities, and then there are another three for completing three, two or one of the grade amendments. Guess what? The bad ending is the same regardless of if you get one, two or three grades changed so there is literally no reason for the game to make you play out this scenario three sodding times to see the same shit.

 

Aside from these, there are loads of other missable stuff for looking at things when you walk around the school and taking the various multiple choice roots through the game. The worst part of the whole thing is avoiding stabby-killer-boobies though. This mechanic is arguably worse than the entire achievement list.

 

Downloadable Content –N/A

 

The Coma: Recut is a painful yet short completion which I’m glad to see the back of and wouldn’t revisit for fun, because it’s not. I’m actually contemplating what’s worse – having to play The Coma for another seven hours, or actually being stabbed for real.

Untitled Goose Game

Honk! 

I was tempted to leave it there as that one noise sums up 90% of what makes Goose Game fun and this is what this style of game should be. Having some mindless, crazy fun and that’s exactly what you do when you take on the role of Goose.

 

So there’s some kind of weird storyline where you are in your home, as a goose, and start the game by Pressing X to Honk. That’s all the X button does but it can he used to great effect throughout the game. The goal of the game is to annoy as many people as possible starting with the gardener. Such annoying things include stealing his keys and hat and taking his keys and throwing them in the lake, all the while honking, spreading your wings and being generally cool. There is something oddly charming about being an asshole goose, it’s weird.

 
Gameplay wise it’s not great, sadly. Controlling the goose is a royal pain and getting him in the right positions to pick up items can be unnecessarily difficult. He also has a nasty habit of getting caught on the scenery and that’s without any unnecessary wing extensions. I forgave this though because the game is simple fun and that’s not something that happens that often.

The overall arch of the game sees you travel from the garden, to a street with shops, some more gardens and a pub. Each area has its own list of ways for Goose to be annoying. While Goose cannot be killed, probably because he’s not a fox, he can be shooed away and this happens every time you are seen doing something you shouldn’t be. What’s incredible about this though is that the NPCs are a total glutton for punishment. One women shoos you with a broom, which you can break by grabbing, but she doesn’t do anything else to try and stop you coming back for more harassment. It get’s so far that you can even lock her in her garage, which adds to the hilarity.

The NPC’s biggest piece of resistance is… whipping out a ‘No Geese’ sign. Yep, like that’s going to stop you stealing their shit. Essentially this just works as your cue to trigger the last piece of shenanigans before moving on to the next area.

The music is sinfully annoying but you won’t notice it too much because you will be focusing on trying to manoeuvre Goose into doing the next crazy thing on the list. Graphically, it’s cartoony and that’s fitting with the subject matter.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

There are five achievements for playing through the various areas and completing the overarching storyline. After that, there is a load of miscellaneous stuff to do for the remaining achievements and the game wins some points here as each area has a reset function so if you do get stuck, you can reset and start again. Essentially, this means that none of the achievements are missable.

I complained about the controls above and unfortunately, I think game acknowledges the controls are terrible because one of the biggest challenges early on is getting a cabbage to a picnic blanket. This is hard because Goose can drag or pick up loads of stuff… but not a cabbage. This means you have to play football with the cabbage to walk it over to the picnic blanket. This was hard enough but the game takes this one step further for another achievement in another area.

In the second area, there is a football being kicked around by a little kid. Again, without being able to pick it up, you have to guide the football through the second area, passed two NPCs in the third area, who both overzealously shoo you away, through three garden fences before pushing it between some goal posts. The hardest part of this is the last garden with the goal because some genius put the goal at the top of the garden, which happens to be at the top of a massive slope. So you can get the ball all the way to the end and then lose it, and it rolls to the bottom of the garden. It’s a struggle to then get behind it to push it up the hill and an even bigger struggle in getting it in to the goal.

Another notable one is for collecting five flowers from around the map and placing them in basket in a back alley. This is tricky as you have to know what flowers count as there are several non-achievement related flowers throughout the game. Also, there is a bit of a problem with the list in general as the majority of these things are secret achievements. I’m not sure how you’re supposed to work out which random things are achievement related but I’ve moaned about this before.

And that lastly leaves the meta game of doing runs through each area against the clock. I was a bit concerned about these as there is a lot of randomness that happens throughout the game, however it became quickly apparent that the 7 minute time limit is actually more than enough time to complete each area. The third area can do one though. One of the objectives is for getting one of the NPCs to put a bow on you by pretending to be a goose statue. It seems completely random whether or not the NPC either mistakes you for the statue or shoos you away for being a real goose and this is fine in the normal game, but when you’re up against the clock, it’s unfair.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Secret Achievement issues aside, Untitled Goose Game is a game that serves to remind people that games can actually be fun by tasking you with doing a load of random things. The only issue is one of price. Doing everything on the achievement list, which is effectively doing everything the game has to offer twice, can take between six to eight hours if taken at a leisurely pace. The game is currently retailing at £16.74 so it’s not great value for money.

Cars 2

I’m not sure why I went back to Cars 2 but it was a good feeling to clear off another one of the games I started in 2018. Apparently, I’m still trying to clear all the movie tie-in games despite the fact I hate them. Or maybe I‘m searching in vain to find the only good one? Which I won’t because apparently that is Spiderman 2 for the Playstaton 2.

 

Cars 2 isn’t a true movie tie in. It just uses the framing of the Cars franchise to create a loose Mario Kart rip-off. There is a career mode of sorts where you play through an assortment of different game modes that revolve around either using weapons against AI or racing against AI… or racing against the clock while using weapons against the AI.

 

The problem with using Cars as a framing device is that all of the characters are incredibly irritating. I suppose it’s worth considering that I’m not the target audience for Cars however, this is where game difficulty doesn’t make a lot of sense. I think I’ve mentioned this before but when the subject material is targeted at children, the gameplay should match it and while Cars isn’t Dark Souls on the scale of difficulty, it’s certainly not easy to the level of its target audience.  Typically, as soon as children are stuck on a level, they will stop playing and I imagine this would happen at some point soon after the tutorial. So why would you make a game this long if it’s not going to be played the whole way through?

 

Focussing on the annoyance of the interludes between gameplay, the attempts at framing the story around Cars 2 (the whole secret agent thing), is totally pointless here and makes no sense when you factor in the fact that you can select any character to do any race. It’s as flawed as it is unnecessary.

 

Turning to the gameplay itself, there are a limited selection of weapons and it suffers from the AI’s ability to continuously avoid obstacles and hit you with everything they pick up. Racing is equally as frustrating because when there are no weapon items, it’s basically a case of maximising the drift capabilities of your car to gain speed boosts and picking up speed power ups. However, if you aren’t in first, you won’t get any of these because the AI hoovers them up even on easy difficulty. I think what I’m trying to say is that the gameplay is unbalanced in favour of the AI, however it counter balances this by having them not get too far ahead of you by deliberately holding back. This isn’t levelling the playing field, it’s poor and lazy game design.

 

The arena battles are another area of frustration and the Hunter Mode is a perfect example of crappy gameplay. Having to steer and line up weapon shots in a fully explorable environment rather than a circuit race just highlights more poor game design and horrible balancing. Again, the AI has laser aim and will hit you with everything, more often than not a split second before you fire off your own weapon.

 

Sound wise, along with the terrible annoying voice overs, the music is equally as galling where it takes the cartoony approach of being continuously upbeat when it the end, all this does is make the entire experience depressing.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 

While the achievement list boasts 50 achievements, in reality it’s 49 as it’s carrying a ‘get all the other achievements’ achievement, which I can only imagine is because they ported the list from the PS4’s trophy system.

 

Anyway, the vast majority of them involve doing races and events and completing the main campaign, from which the main the goal is to finish at least 3^rd in every event. Doing so is required for one of the main achievements and this is frankly a relief because the AI gets some shitty advantages in the latter part of the game. In races, they get speed boosts out of nowhere and if you are in 4^th or 5^th going into the final lap, you may as well quit because even if you get close to 3^rd, the AI will get a normal missile pick up that will hit you with laser guided precision. I’m all for having a competitive game but let the entire field be competitive. If you’re in third on the last lap, you don’t fire a missile backwards to consolidate your position if the guy in 2^nd is right in front of you. It’s frankly ridiculous.

 

Aside from finishing the events, there’s quite a bit of miscellaneous stuff the game wants you to do. One of the more notable ones involves getting 40 quick starts. These can only be done in regular and battle races and they are very picky about awarding them to you. Essentially, you have to rev the engine by hammering the right trigger but you have to start at the earliest opportunity and keeping going until the green light. Doing this in one sitting by repeatedly restarting an event will result in wanker’s cramp.

 

There’s a lot of rewards for using specific weapons and doing certain things in certain events but thankfully a lot of this can be done by using two controllers. In fact, there are six achievements tied to playing the multiplayer game modes, Disruptor and Arena mode and both are mini grinds.

 

Again, there are loads of other repeatable action achievements but none are worth mentioning as they are fairly easy and just take a bit of time. There is, however a totally nonsensical achievement for collecting shit in a racing game. I hate it when they do this, it’s contrary to the point of the game and the only way to get some of the hidden collectibles is to not compete in the actual race event taking place. One of them was so obscure that I was there for about 20 minutes trying to get the stupid jumps right while watching my opponents complete their 7^th or 8^th victory lap.

 

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

Cars 2 is a boring completion but at least it was a free Games with Gold title. It’s not overly long and can be grinded through in less than 10 hours but to honest, it will feel like longer and there are better uses of your time. Such as drinking bleach. With razor blades in it.

Shrek: The Third

Considering my previous experiences with movie tie-in games, I have no idea why I bought this but I remember the process. I added it to my Amazon basket. It went out of stock with the seller so I found another seller and added it again. I must have repeated this process three of four times before eventually buying the game, probably out of fear that I would never be able to buy it if I didn’t take the latest chance. So I bought something I didn’t want for a reason I can’t remember. Unless it was to write a review of another shitty movie tie-in game. Because that’s what it is. Shitty.

Shrek: The Third may follow the story of Shrek: The Third­. I don’t actually know because I’ve never watched the movie and I don’t like Shrek. Why did I buy this game?! Anyway, Shrek is tasked with going through a load of linear levels to get Arthur to beat up Prince Charming and become the new king. There are also some levels that you play as Donkey, Fiona and Sleeping Beauty, the latter who appears to have only been added to the game to show off how shit the controls are, especially the combat.

They are all bad at fighting and the AI has an irritating habit of getting the first strike in then chaining hits preventing you from doing anything. There is some kind of bizarre fairy dust mechanic where you collect the dust to use special abilities. This becomes stupid in later levels as some of the characters need to use their special abilities to get through certain sections so you could end up in a position where you are stuck without fairy dust. That said, the game does hold your hand a bit and provides fairy dust all the time if it’s going to be needed so you would have to be a child to get this wrong. Wait, what’s the game’s audience again??

What else is wrong with the game play? Ah, yes the platforming elements. The game has a terrible depth perception so it’s hard to tell where you are in the 3D plan. This is bad generally, but worse for platforming when there are insta-death holes everywhere, especially as you can inadvertently jump to your death at any given moment. However this isn’t the worst part of it. The worst part comes when you go to make a jump and get snagged on an invisible wall and fall to your death. No thanks Shrek, that’s not what anybody wants.

There are two absolute bullshit levels where you use a catapult to knockdown a castle. The catapult is dire and you are on a time limit that on the hardest difficulty level means you have to be sniper-accurate with a weapon that is built specifically for you to fail. Great.

The graphical rendering is obviously balls, as the characters can’t interact properly with the environment. The environments all look dated too, which is no major surprise. The music and sound effects can also do one. If I didn’t need some of the non-player-characters to tell me what to do, I would have muted the damn thing. I’m not a fan of Shrek music to begin and what you get in the game is the discount version, complete with sound glitches and everything.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

It’s not a complicated list but due to the gameplay issues I’ve mentioned above, it’s a pain in the ass. The best place to start would be the difficulty related achievements. There are two related to completing the game on different difficulties but Shrek goes one step further down the annoying route by having both of these as purchasable extras using in-game currency. So you need to do a partial playthrough before you can unlock the hardest difficulty mode and pretty much complete the game to unlock super-easy mode. There is also an achievement for completing each level without dying on normal or harder so you are looking at three playthroughs to take the slightly longer path of least resistance. Oh, but the difficulty won’t help you when one of the characters snags that invisible wall and dies anyway.

Once you’re done fannying around with the difficulty, there’s a load of collectibles and challenge quests to complete in each level. Of these, the most frustrating ones are for using Shrek’s ogre power 3 times in a level. Even with the full benefit provided by more in-game purchases that boost fairy dust accumulation, it still takes a long time to charge up and I had to replay a few levels after not being successful the first time.

There are some cumulative achievements for performing certain actions with the characters, like using fairy dust or performing finishing moves. Some of these were also temperamental, but none compare to having to launch 50 enemies in the air and catch them when playing as Shrek. This was just absurd. Firstly, you need to punch them in the air – this is difficult if fighting two or more enemies at a time, which you are for most of the game. Then when they are in the air, a marker will appear and you need to stand in the marker to catch the enemy. Sounds simple enough but the marker moves and Shrek is basically an oil tanker after performing the punch attack so it turns in to a race. The enemies in the air don’t get stuck on the invisible walls like you do so you won’t be able to catch some of them when they go out of bounds. Oh, and if you do end up in the right place at the right time, sometimes Shrek just won’t catch them anyway. It’s like he heard that I hate him and his game and he is deliberately punishing me for being stupid enough to buy it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Why I bought this game, I will never know. It did everything in its power to try and make me stop playing it but I didn’t give up with Assault Android Cactus, no way was this green twat going to stop me. This game deserves to join ET in a landfill. Good riddance.

The Quick Completion Compendium - Volume 1

Following a switch in focus, I took the time to clear out my game collection of any games that took less than an hour to complete. All of these I bought during sales for days when I didn’t have a lot of time to play but after sampling some of this bile, I’ve decided that it’s not a great use of time to keeping doing this.

The problem with the industry at the moment is that it’s saturated with rubbish like this, however in amongst the majority drivel there are some genuinely good games. The problem is heighted by the fact that everyone seems to review short games like they have descended from heaven to offer up some enlightenment to us pathetic masses but this is just more contrived bullshit. This has been true for previous games I’ve reviewed like Gone Home and Dear Esther and I’m not sure why these have been received in such good light when they are both developed by twats and offer little to no game play.

Anyway, this selection serves to act as a demonstration as to why it’s best to avoid these games altogether unless the critical world decides to write some balanced reviews on actual games.

Anyway, that’s enough of my personal drivel. Let’s kick off where I started and that’s with a game called Scalextric 

Scalextric

I’m sure many others were sucked in to this for the reason I was and that’s nostalgia. This could have been a great concept for a game with lots of options to expand on an established formula, however in reality, what we have is a piece of shit that gets everything wrong from the menu onwards. Getting into a race is difficult, racing around the track is luck based because the trigger sensitivities are well off and the AI varies from completely retarded to borderline cheating.

Oh, and every time I completed a race, the game would get stuck and I was have to exit to the console home page and relaunch it. It takes less than an hour but most of that time was spent reloading the game.

Summary Review: Piece of Shit.

Rememoried

Rememoried has a level skip function which allows you to breeze through the achievements in a matter of minutes. However, I do have some integrity so I thought no, I’m going to play it the way it’s meant to be played. That lasted for three ‘levels’ which comprised of horseshit gameplay and narrative so pretentious and contrived that if my ears could commit suicide, they would have. It seems the developers agree with this assessment as otherwise, they wouldn’t have put in the level skip feature.

Summary: Pretentious Contrived Garage.

 

Storm Boy

This is 50:50 one because as a narrative device, it is effective and pelicans have now become my third favourite game-animal behind cats and foxes. There is a genuine attempt at generating an emotive reaction from the player and it is effective. However, a game should be a game first and Storm Boy could achieve all have achieved all of its goals by being a children’s book. The gameplay elements are just drivel and kill the pacing the story.

Summary: Emotive but not a real game

 

 

METAGAL

Why the title feels the need to be in capital letters, I don’t know. This one is a game where you shoot stuff as a girl android in 2D retro environments. The gameplay is actually quite difficult but the achievement list doesn’t require you to get very far. This is a blessing because when I say it’s difficult, it’s mainly down to terrible jump controls and having to avoid a million bottomless pits. It’s another cheap cash grab and perhaps the easy achievement list is intended to get people to buy it. If that is correct, it’s a poor business plan as only 1% of the gaming community care about Gamerscore.

Summary: Lazy Cash Grab

Hexologic

This is the exception that proves the rule. Hexologic is a game where you have to solve number problems by placing up to three dots in a hexagon to get a line of Hexagons to add up to a given total. I’ve made that sound more complicated that it is but essentially; Maths plus Logic equals good puzzle game.

As you progress, more rules come into play and the puzzles get more complicated. The interface is easy to use (though quickly flicking through the 90-plus levels can cause motion sickness) and the puzzles are very rewarding. It is the diamond in the rough as far as this post is concerned and, it’s actually a proper puzzle game with rewarding payoff.

Summary: Solid Puzzle Game

NORTH

Almost saving the best to last, I would say NORTH summarises everything wrong with quick completions. I’m not even sure what the concept is. You play as… someone who goes to a poorly rendered environment for some bizarre reason. There is a story told through letters to your sister and it’s effectively a walking simulator which one arbitrary speed racing gameplay section thrown in. How anyone would publish such utter drivel is beyond me.

Unlike the above games though, NORTH was critically panned by most people and no one I know that’s played it has a nice word to say about it. Honestly, I played it to see what the fuss was about which probably makes me part of the problem where even bad press is good press. However, this will help me massively in the future, because now I know who to listen to when it comes to selecting games to buy.

Summary: What the Fuck

Achievements – 6,000 Points – 65 Achievements

So 6,000 points in around five hours… but it’s really not worth it. If you’re keen on points and don’t care about having fun then go for it but it you want to be choosey and like puzzles, then Hexologic is the only one worth playing here. Storm Boy does offer an emotive story but it’s not the main purpose of a game.

Rayman Origins

I started Rayman Origins at the back end of 2018 and stopped playing it for an age due to other gaming projects. I also wasn’t planning on returning to it but after I finished Baja I started Football Manager 2007 and that’s another long completion. I couldn’t face trying to understand the system set up and I couldn’t be bothered to change discs so I just started chipping away at Rayman Origins during the odd hour here and there and before I knew it, the game was completed.

Rayman Origins is a classic 2D platformer that does not try to do anything special and just focuses on its core gameplay element – platforming. This is ideal as it means that you get a solid gaming experience that, if you like platformers, offers you more of the same gameplay at increasing difficulties. That’s not to say it is without its flaws though.

The story follows Rayman and his friends as they go about trying to save some pink things from an evil thing or something like that. The storyline is frankly bizarre and occasionally crude in its delivery. You free princesses as you go and each of them grants you an extension to your abilities such as being able to punch things and run up walls. However, there is no reason at all for all of these ladies to have ample cleavage on display at all times they are present… yet they do, apparently trying to appeal to a teenage boy fantasy crossed with anime.

Gameplay wise, while the control scheme is sensible, there are many mechanics that are either designed to deliberately irritate the player, or they are just poorly designed. Firstly, there’s Rayman’s speed of movement which is… changeable if I’m being polite about it. Using the run and jump buttons at the same time leads to Rayman slowing down and jumping high some of the time, but doing a longer shorter jump some of time. When this appears to be changeable at the drop of the hat, it becomes frustrating, especially when you are doing timed runs where you can’t die.

The jumping function by itself is frustrating to say the least for the exact same reason as the running. The press of the button will result in a massive change in speed if it’s not timed to perfection and again this becomes severely problematic when doing timed runs, especially when going after the skull teeth.

All that said though, the only reason I noticed and had a problem with these things was due to my striving to 100% the game – playing it casually, most players wouldn’t likely notice.

Moving on to the graphics, it doesn’t do a lot wrong and keeps a constant whimsical theme throughout, if not a little obnoxious at times (princesses with massive tits). The music is severely divisive though. Rayman is a game where you have to be invested in the game play to do well, which means full concentration on what’s going on. Even though that’s the case I could still notice that the music would not be appealing to many as there are lots of repetitive, annoying and babyish noises throughout.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 36 Achievements

Only five achievements are earned naturally through playing the game but there will be a few others that will naturally unlock through playing and if they don’t, they are easy to target. Outside of this the achievements can be categorised into two distinctive areas – miscellaneous crap and collecting everything.

Firstly, the miscellaneaous crap. Certain levels have achievements tied to them where you have to perform certain actions like killing all of a specific type of enemy. The most frustrating one of these, for me anyway, was for jumping into piranha-infested water and jumping out again before being eaten. This became ridiculous quite quickly as I constantly died. It’s also one of those ones where watching a video won’t help in the slightest as it will show you what to do but trying to recreate it feels luck based. And coupled with the jumping control issues mentioned above, this just adds to the frustration.

As for collecting everything, thankfully you don’t actually need to do everything. You do need to find all the hidden cages and collect the lum targets to complete each medallion but you don’t need the lum medals and this is massive let off as this would have made it a difficult completion. Getting a lum medal essentially means clearing the level gathering everything and lums appear from many sources and disappear if you don’t collect them fast enough.

You also need to get all the skull teeth, which is a requirement to beat the end game levels, and complete the speed trophies in each level. This last one offered a bit of challenge in some levels – again, due to the running and jumping issues mentioned above, however these are nowhere near as tough as the ones in Legends.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite some of my negative comments, I actually had fun playing Rayman Origins and it felt very satisfying to complete it.  Depending on your platforming skill, it takes around 15 hours to get all the achievements and that’s 15 hours well spent.

Assault Android Cactus

I never thought I would complete this one. I started it for the Ultimate Head to Head Contest in 2018 and I dipped in and out of it over the next year. It’s a great game to just pick up and play for ten minutes here and there but only if you have a great disposition as the game does its utmost best to make you want to destroy your controller in a fit of rage.

Assault Android Cactus does have some kind of story that follows an Android called Cactus and her friends as they try to free themselves from the evil Medulla… or something. The whole story thing is just framing and an excuse to shoot loads of guns at loads of robots. It’s likely the closest I’ve come to experiencing this Bullet-Hell genre I’ve heard about.

The gameplay is simple and clean for the most part. You pick an android and use their guns to destroy all the robots in a level and then move on to the next one. You unlock different androids as you progress. In terms of the gameplay through, only three of them are any real use and they are Cactus, Holly and Starch as they have the best weapons in the game by some distance.

In terms of layout, there are 25 levels across 5 environments. There is a boss at the end of every section and you have to adopt specific strategies to beat them. Outside of the Campaign, there is Infinity Drive which is essentially an endless mode. This verges on being hazardous to your health as if you go on a deep run, it really takes its toll on your thumbs. There is also a Boss Rush Mode, which is unlocked after completing the campaign and gives you the opportunity to face all the bosses back to back.

Graphically, it plays into the cartoony nature of the game and there were no issues with environmental snags so that’s all good. Sound wise, if you end up replaying the same level over and over again, the background noise can get a little repetitive but the fact is there are so many robots that need killing, you won’t notice it 90% of the time. The menu music and game over music is quite cool and I didn’t get tired of it despite my extended play time with the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

Smashing through the campaign will earn you 5 achievements, one for each boss. There’s also a gimme for getting a chain of 100 kills which comes quite easily unless you deliberately try to not shoot things. There are also some special circumstantial achievements for the boss fights, which can be quite challenging, and also achievements tied to performing specific actions with specific androids so despite only three being good, you need to play with some of the others if you want all achievements.

Most of it is straightforward and will come with practice but there are a few things that don’t. Firstly getting a chain of 1,000 can only be done on a specific level with an special option enabled, There’s another level you need to play with three AIs to ensure you pick up the all the batteries in one level.

There are achievements tied to buying everything from the shop, which will take many level replays to get enough credits to get everything. This won’t be a problem if you are going for all the achievements and that’s due to the end-game challenges, of which there are three.

The first, and easiest challenge, is for completing Boss Rush Mode and it’s the easiest for two reasons. Firstly, it’s the shortest and secondly you can use powered up weapons without voiding the achievement.

The second is for getting to level 25 in Infinity Drive Mode. This is hard because it takes ages to get to level 25 and you have to fight the bosses on the way, which means quickly adjusting to different play styles. You need to beat the third boss to get to level 25 and it’s a total change of pace to take him out. I had to pause the game before fighting the third boss to give myself a mental break and calm down before going for the finish. This is where the thumb pain really starts to sink in and getting beyond level 20 and failing means that it should be your only attempt of the day unless you want to give yourself some major hand problems.

The last achievement is for getting S+ ranks in every mission in the game. An S+ rank is awarded for completing a level without dying and killing all robots in a continuous combo. This is obviously the ultimate challenge as it takes a lot of time and patience to get good enough at each level to get the S+ rank. In some levels, dying is the problem. In others, it’s keeping the combo going. This is where the game becomes incredibly frustrating and you’ll start questioning what killed you and more importantly, why that one enemy behind the pillar on the other side of the map isn’t trying to kill you when your combo breaks. And that’s without talking about the last boss which I must have tried about 50 times before I was afforded the perfect run to get the win. The problem with this fight becomes apparent as there are a few points where you are dependent on a specific power up dropping and when it doesn’t, you run the risk of losing the combo.

That said, getting to the end of this road was one of the most rewarding achievements I’ve earned in recent memory.

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

I got Assault Android Cactus through Games with Gold and I’m glad it was on there because I wouldn’t have played it otherwise. Despite the frustrating moments, the game is a lot of fun and a great game to just play if you have a spare 15 minutes here and there.

BAJA: Edge of Control

One of my many lists is a list of games that have an online requirement in them. This is the list that Baja appeared on because it has the one solitary online achievement that doesn’t even require a second player, just access to an online lobby – so an internet connection. That’s the reason I decided to play it and what I found was somewhere close to hell embodied in a racing game.

Baja is an arcade racing game that centres around Baja racing, that is racing across wild rocky terrains and sandy desserts in Beach Buggies and trucks. It’s a standard racing game in that it has a career mode, custom races, online and a highly unnecessary free roam event.

The environments are really bland. The game was released in 2008 and once again, it shows its age with the brown, light brown and super brown colours. I get that this accurately represents the real-life environments that they actually race in but considering the racing itself is more arcade, they could have been a bit more creative here.

Now when I started Baja, I didn’t think I would be able to finish it because at the start, the racing is really hard. Just going off the bat on easy, it took me a while to figure out just how to win or even get close to winning. It turns out the trick is to use the clutch to gain traction and speed boosts and for those that naturally drive in manual transmission, I imagine this would have been easy but for me it was a massive adjustment. Against all my natural instructs, you have to not use the brakes unless you want to continually lose. The only way to corner is to feather the accelerator or, for the tighter corners, use the handbrake clutch coming out of it.

One thing about Baja though, is that it appears to know how difficult it is and there is some definite AI balancing in place. If you cock up massively and overdo a corner or roll, the AI appears to wait for you. This happens in every race except for the open class ones where you race against slow cars and they get head starts. Then the game wants you to lose and lose badly.

One of the quirks of some of the races that really annoyed me was that apparently, they don’t close any of the roads. When doing rallies you also have to compete with traffic. This is utterly ridiculous but I suppose it goes hand in hand with the fact you can nearly fully control your car in the air and that the AI doesn’t want you to lose 90% of the time.

Vehicle damage is another aspect of the game that doesn’t make sense. As you pick up damage, it affects the performance of your car and you can repair the car at certain pit locations during the races but the oil never seems to fix itself and the warning light comes back on almost immediately after you leave the pit. I gave up trying to work out the logic for this in the end.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Not a lot of people have completed this game and there are two reasons for this. The first is that online racing puts off a lot of people, however that’s not too much of an issue for Baja because you don’t need other people to actually complete the online achievement. You just have to be in an active race, solo, for 5 hours.

The second stage of going for the completion involves completing the career mode and this actually gets progressively easier the more it goes on. I don’t know if this is to do with me progressively getting better at the game or the fact that the faster vehicles are easier to use. But what’s really annoying is the fact that upgrading your vehicles doesn’t give you any advantage whatsoever and actually makes it harder to win the races.

I later found out that only applying certain upgrades provides some help but this isn’t needed once you get the hang of the game. Along the way through career mode, you’ll net achievements for unlocking each class. You will also need to win 5 invitational events and these are hard to see come up as you need to be in the outer menu to enter them. It’s also a pain because there’s no tracking for the individual events so you don’t know which ones you’ve done and which ones you haven’t.

It’s also necessary to get golds in all the career races and this is another error with the game in that the achievement descriptions are sometimes off. This one stated you needed to get gold in all the invitationals, which is simply ridiculous. But thankfully you don’t have to do them and it’s just the career races.

While we’re on misleading achievements, there are two achievements for driving 1,000 and 2,000 miles respectively. However, what’s not stated is that all of these miles have to be completed in career mode and despite the volume of races, it’s still not enough to get to 2,000 miles so grinding is required. It was the last achievement I unlocked.

Outside of career mode, there is a requirement to win all races with 5 laps against 5 AI opponents. What’s frustrating about this is there are loads of races that don’t meet this criteria in career mode so they need to be done again in solo play.

There is also a massively redundant free roam mode and an achievement tied to it for finding 5 strange locations in each of the maps. It takes an inordinate amount of time to complete as all the maps are so ball-numbingly generic and there is no map so navigating these is nigh on impossible.

Once all this is done, there are a few miscellaneous pieces to do, all bar one of which might be completed through normal gameplay. The one that won’t is for winning a race in manual transmission so unless you are a gear changing savant, the way to do is to select one of the shorter tracks, stick it in second gear and leave it there. With a trophy truck, it’s actually quite easy to win.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Baja: Edge of Control, for me, is another step towards completing all racing games I own. It’s a bit backwards in that it’s difficult to learn and easy to master, but this makes it a rewarding completion. That’s if you can stomach the dated and unimaginative graphics and the grindathon races.

Far Cry New Dawn

For some dumbass reason unknown to me at this time, I asked for a load of Far Cry games for Christmas. I got them all because they are fairly cheap at the moment and New Dawn became the first one of the three that I played because it had an obligatory multiplayer achievement and someone I knew was playing it at the same time as me.

Far Cry New Dawn follows the story of the Captain in a post nuclear world that follows on from Far Cry 5, another game included in the Christmas bonanza that also means I’ve played the games out of order, which may make Far Cry 5 slightly more interesting.

 

The characterisation is where Far Cry really excels and it does so again here with the twins, our antagonists. As soon as you meet them, you will want to kill them because they are just plain dicks. They are just the most terrible people and coupled with their psychopathic behaviour, they also appear immature which makes them even more grating. Knowing that the climax will ultimately lead to their deaths kept me going throughout the game.

 

So what’s ultimately my problem with Far Cry New Dawn? Did I say I have a problem with it? No? Well I do. To sum it’s that it’s a Far Cry game. They do most things well but that’s it. It’s a very safe franchise and as a result, despite how pretty they make the world and how clean the gameplay is, it ends up being a very dry and repetitive experience and I failed to see any major differences between the story here and that of Far Cry 4.

 

That’s where it’s the same but every game has to have a slight difference and New Dawn goes down the weapon crafting route. It is an apocalypse after all. This system does however, come across as very unbalanced. You start the game unable to craft bugger all and end up with ineffective guns when you go up against anything other than a pack of wild kittens. As the game progresses and you upgrade your base to be able to craft better guns, this quickly escalates to the point where even the hardened enemies go down easily. The game breaking point is when you get the legendary bow, which one-shots everything if you have the right perks (which you will) and shot enemies in the head. This feels kind of backwards – you expect a game to get harder as you progress, not easier. The enforcers – essentially bikers as they all wear motorcycle helmets – appear at the first stronghold you capture if you get spotted at level 2. All the game does as you progress is throw more of them at you.

 

In terms of the graphics, it’s very pretty and I must confess that they’ve gone out of their way to avoid the traditional brown/grey scenery as there is colour everywhere. Musically, I found it to be quite grating as it requires a lot of play time to get through and listening to the same stuff over and over again is not fun and when the menu music is noticeable, it’s bad.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 

It’s another long list and one that doesn’t give you much for the main story – 5 whole achievements. That said, there’s a lot of points for upgrading your stronghold and getting the better guns and perks. Essentially, playing the game how it’s intended to be played will net a fair whack of score.

There are some notable ones on the list that require some effort. Late in the game you will acquire some abilities that you need to use to unlock achievements. One of these is called Wrath which boosts your combat strength. The achievement in question requires you to kill ten enemies while Wrath is activated in one go. This is stupid as getting ten enemies together to do this is an absolute ball ache. It took me many, many attempts and swear words to finally get this done and the hard part really shouldn’t have been attracting enough enemies to do it.

 

The next one is for completing all Expeditions on level three. This boils down to performing seven different missions, three times, which, after you’ve done them all once, becomes tiresome very quickly. It just feels lazy and unnecessary to have you replay the same stuff only with slightly more difficult enemies. With the gun situation mentioned above, it doesn’t make it any harder.

 

This is also where the multiplayer element kicks in – you need to complete three of these expeditions in co-op with someone else. It’s the only part of the achievement list that requires a second player so what’s the point? Arbitrarily targeting achievement hunters and trying to get them to socialise for one measly achievement? I doubt it, but still.

 

The other few that provide a challenge are the hunting ones for catching every animal and collecting the skins. This is hard because the monstrous animals can actually be quite shy and you have to walk around the map for a while just trying to get them to show.

 

There is one more worth mentioning and that’s for driving a plane without wings over 100 metres in one go. This can actually be glitched though by throwing dynamite into a lake and driving over it. Get it right and you get catapulted into the air and earn a free achievement to boot. Having to do this without the glitch is frustrating as there’s only a few places on the map where it can actually be done.

 

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

Far Cry New Dawn is a perfectly fine open world exploration game with an okay story and setting. But that’s also its biggest problem – it’s so middle of the road that it becomes a fairly boring journey, annoyingly before it reaches its conclusion. I would recommend it for the bad guys alone though, but the 100% achievement completion is a bit of a grind.