The Witness

Completing The Witness served to remind me that it had been over a year since I started the game which is quite a scary thought. However, it’s also been reassuring to see the game show up on a few ‘best games of the decade’ lists which is a far cry from most of the other games I’ve finished recently.

The Witness is an open world puzzle game with a difference. Where most games like this give you a linear path with progressively more difficult puzzles, The Witness dumps you on an island with some tutorial puzzles to teach you the basic concepts and then you’re off to explore.

The island itself has 11 lasers on it which need to be activated and directed towards a mountain to unlock the final set of puzzles. To activate the lasers, you need to master some line puzzles. These vary from simple mazes to complex puzzles where the solutions are found by manipulating the scenery to see the solution or by figuring out the complex rules involving dots on the lines and coloured squares. None of these are explained, it’s up to you to figure out and managing to do so is very rewarding.

In terms of navigation, this can be quite slow and frustrating at times, even more for me when I forgot that there was a sprint button. Even with the sprint button though, it still takes ages getting anywhere and then there is the element of not knowing where you are going that adds to this. In addition, there is also a boat which you can activate and use at various locations as a sort of fast travel. It’s also the only way to reach one of the areas so needs to done at some point.

Everything about the island is deliberate and well-crafted and I didn’t get scenery stuck or trapped at any point and the same can’t be said for many other triple A titles. In addition, the music is atmospheric and clear – and it has to be as some of the puzzles are based on the sounds in the environment so if there was overbearing background music, it would destroy this game mechanic.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

It’s a short list and simple enough for the most part. 11 of the achievements are for activating the lasers scattered around the island and all of these need to be activated to unlock the final challenge in the game – and that’s where the real challenge is.

Activating the lasers is simple enough in that if you get stuck you can use a video or picture guide to get past any overly difficult bits and to assist with the navigation of the island. I’ll admit to resorting to this when I revisited the game after a long hiatus as it helped me get my bearings and point me in the right direction.

So that just leaves the last two achievements. The next one is just for completing the game and there is small taste of what’s to come with this one. You have to solve two puzzles to open a door that combine some of the elements from the puzzles you’ve already played. The issue? These puzzles are random and they reset after a very short amount of time so there’s an element of luck, where you can get a really basic puzzle, and an element of skill, if you are quick enough to solve the puzzle that comes up regardless of difficulty. To show my ineptitude at the game at this point, I swear some of these weren’t even solvable.

Anyway, this door pales in comparison to the last achievement, simply titled Challenge. This area is in the same area as the end game but doesn’t unlock until you’ve unlocked all of the lasers. Essentially, it’s a sequence of 14 randomly generated puzzles that get progressively harder. Oh, and this time, you’re on a timer too as you have to complete it before the music stops, which is two pieces of classic music that comes in at just under 7 minutes. Oh, and you can’t pause it otherwise the challenge resets.

I’m pretty sure I got lucky as I managed to complete this on my tenth run after getting progressively better at it over time. Though I did have some help. One part of the challenge requires you to enter a maze which is actually a mirror image of one the puzzles you’ve solved before. I got my partner to take a picture and guide me through the maze. Essentially, it’s a solid challenge, one that a guide can’t help with and one that is very rewarding once completed.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Witness is one of the best puzzle games about and critically acclaimed by many sources as well. It’s well worth a play and even after completing the achievements, there are still more puzzles and secrets hidden by the island for you to find.

Destiny 2

Whey, here’s a review I never thought I would write. It’s taken me two years (just over a year since the DLC game out) but I finally managed to finish Destiny 2, and I tell you what, it’s a hollow experience from start to finish which is a real shame for the following reasons.

Firstly, I’ll start by saying that I never even planned to play this game after finishing the first one. Getting that overblown co-op experience done was enough relief to last me a lifetime. However, a friend of mine asked me to play with him and some others so liking the sound of a ready-made two thirds of a raid team, I looked at the achievement list and got into it. The problem still persists from the last game though where not everyone will stick with it for the time it takes to get to end game content and real life gets in the way and therefore not everyone can play at the same time. When it becomes a ballache organising to play a game, it stops being fun.

Bungie have gone to a lot of effort to create a world with lore and backstory and a lot of this feels wasted as the single player campaign is short lived and the missions are often repetitive. It just feels like there is something missing throughout a lot of it.

In terms of gameplay, it’s a good, reliable and fair shooter but again it’s really bland. On top of this when the game came out, getting to higher levels was a daily repetitive grind and guess what, that’s not fun either.

The other thing that’s galled me through the whole thing was the constant claims of completely changing the game and to make this worse, the public seemed to lap it up as well.  A news article would come out stating the game had been overhauled and felt fresher and this was coupled with people saying things like, ‘you should start playing again, it’s a whole new game.’ Guess what, it’s not. It’s still not now, two years and two large DLCs after release. I just don’t get it. It’s either blind fandom or people just appreciate minute changes to gun balancing a hell of a lot more than they should.

I’m never going to play Fortnite but I can mention this here. What on earth is the concept of seasons?? When I finished the game, it was coming towards the end of season 8… what does this even mean? Why is it relevant? It shouldn’t be, it makes no sense it terms of non-competitive computer games.

Achievements – 1,240 Points – 23 Achievements

Considering the length of time and bullshit it takes to get through it, it’s a very short list. With some of the game changes that have happened since its release, some of these have been made easier. For example, there are 3 achievements for unlocking sub classes with the three different character types. After I spent actual time unlocking these achievements, the latest update made them unlock instantly by starting new characters. This was annoying but not as annoying as one of the other ones.

There was an achievement for playing Trials of the Nine, a competitive game type that’s only available for a few days a week over the weekend. After trying this for ages with loads of different people, I eventually won it when the opponents disconnected but what’s really galling is that they discontinued the game type and never replaced it. Instead they made the achievement unlockable by just talking to some character that shows up at the weekends.

The rest of the non-DLC is just standard faire for playing the game with the exception of doing a Nightfall strike which you need to build a team for because apparently, they are too hard for standard matchmaking – which is total BS.

Then there are the achievements for doing the raid, first on normal then on Prestige. The second one is more bullshit because you used to be able to unlock the Prestige by doing a Prestige nightfall however, they blocked this behind the DLC when it came out and then changed the criteria so it was just the raid, meaning I had to find a team to do the same raid twice. Again, it’s the same rubbish as the last game, an overly complex series of stuff that you have to get 5 other competent people to do with you. And everyone is an ass who won’t play with you unless you have x or y weapon and ‘must be good.’ Honestly, the player base is the worst thing about this game.

Downloadable Content

Then came the Forsaken DLC and with it another 10 achievements. 4 of these are easy and come with just playing the game. A fifth requires you to complete a collection of equipment which is also easy but grindy as it requires repeating a load of the same stuff.

There’s another raid which is harder and more complex with more obnoxious dickheads with stupid criteria for playing with them. There’s another one for doing a new Nightfall and for collecting exotic weapons and armour pieces – 10 of them to be precise.

The main work of this one though, is to get the Triumph Seal and there are many ways to get this one. All of them take time and some of them involve a lot of luck such as Destinations, Gambit and Crucible.

After initially deciding to try for the Destinations Seal, I got fed up with having to rely on others to do the same shit over and over again. After a bit of research, it transpired that the easiest one to get solo is the Lore Seal. Most of this involved walking around the world collecting stuff but there are a few that required groups. There are some collectibles in 3-man dungeons and in the raid so I had to do the new raid twice… again.

The biggest time sync though was having to play the Blind Well over and over again every week for 11 specific weeks to complete another Lore group. This was supposed to be the end of it but I couldn’t bring myself to play the obscene amounts of gambit required to the final piece of lore and unlock the final achievement. 330 hours later.

Destiny 2 was a long completion but in all honesty, I would say 50% of it was fun. It’s just finding people to play with who aren’t obnoxious dickheads that’s the biggest problem with it and all of the scheduling required to actually have fun, which defeats the point of fun in the first place.

Thomas Was Alone

This has to be one of the dumbest, unnecessary examples of framing I’ve ever seen in a video game. It’s utter shit and pretentious to boot. Thomas Was Alone is a puzzle platforming game where you play as Thomas who is nothing more than a small red rectangle. He’s also not alone either as there are several other oblongs along for the ride. Oh, and a few squares too.

So anyway, on to the framing. There is some kind of bizarre narrative that takes place between the levels where each of the shapes have a backstory, character, likes and dislikes and lots of other things to make them more human. Did you know Clare is a superhero? Why, you ask? Because she can float on water. As a concept, It was seriously depressing, and I did my best to blank it out.

Gameplay wise, it’s actually quite fun and rewarding to navigate through the various levels. I didn’t use any guides for my playthrough so from my perspective, it was the right amount of challenge. The one criticism I have is that it suffers from the aged platforming issues of the ‘I PRESSED JUMP YOU FUCKING BLOCK!’ while you fall down to either death or the level below, having to reclimb – essentially the game failing to register a button press or just has a terribly fussy window of correct timing.

Looks wise, it’s a black and white 2D plane that you have to navigate across but this is all part of the design, which is basic but effective for the game’s genre and gameplay. Musically, it’s meh and follows the same pretentious pattern as the narrative.

And that’s what I don’t get. There seems to be an increase in the amount of games that have either an annoying or pretentious narrator, so it must be me that has the problem because there’s clearly a market for this shit.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

It’s a short list but only two are rewarded for playing through the main game and one of these is for jumping 1,600 times which is necessary to get to the end. I suppose a challenge would be to play the game and get to the end without jumping that much… but there’s no achievement for that so who cares.

The majority of the others are awarded for picking up the small amount of collectibles in each of the sets of levels. There are only two collectibles per set so it’s not onerous and they are pretty obvious once you know what you are looking for.

Outside of this, there are two other achievements, one for jumping on the block called Laura 100 times (I think this is supposed to be some kind of weird joke that doesn’t come off) and another for dying 100 times and while the game isn’t overly difficult, this one won’t take much grinding.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I want to say that Thomas Was Alone is worth playing for the gameplay if you can get past the fact the title is a lie and the game is filled with utter bollocks in terms of dialogue. It’s a little on the pricey side for its length though.

Death God University

With all the various lists I have going on, it’s becoming fairly easy for me to fall back in to the ‘easy game’ list of which Death God University got randomly picked to be played. There are two things I wish I hadn’t done though. The first is pay real money for this piece of shit and the second is not researching this piece of shit before I subjected myself to it.

Death God University is a fairly stupid game where you play as some kind of blockheaded devil wannabe at a school where you learn how to kill people. It may as well be a stealth game though as the concept appears to be to kill these people without being seen.

The only good thing about this game is the cutscenes at the start of each of the levels and in reality, these became old after the first three levels.

So, what’s so bad about the game? Well I’ll start with the most obvious thing that will become apparent the moment you start playing. The loading times. I have a strong feeling that I spent more in-game time starring at a loading screen than actually playing the game. On top of this, the game has you visit 4 or 5 different locations during each mission and there is loading period of the same length every time you go to a new place. As soon as discovered this was going to be case, I binned off trying to figure stuff out for myself and used a guide to reduce the amount of times I had to revisit places.

If the loading screens weren’t bad enough, the gameplay itself is garbage for all the wrong reasons. The idea is not being seen but people will see you all the time for no clear reason. After a few missions, this became irritating but the last mission requires you not to be seen at all. What fucked me off massively with this though, is that there is a bit towards the end of the game where people are walking around with torches and a clear vision cone in front of them. I wasn’t in one of these cones and the character still saw me. This has to be a glitch or just the game screwing over its players deliberately.

Speaking of glitching out, I lost count of the amount of times I got stuck on scenery. One time I got stuck just walking up a ramp with no other bits protruding out that I could get stuck on. It’s absolute wank. Also getting stuck means having to restart the game and you know what that means? More loading screens.

There were more glitches throughout the game and lots of getting partially stuck on invisible walls. So to top off the loading issues, it’s badly coded which means the developers thought they could get away with releasing a game that would get by with popular culture references alone. It’s a disgrace.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

All you have to do is complete the 13 missions given to you at the school but with all of the above crap you have to go through to do this, it’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s impossible to recommend Death God University to anyone. It’s probably the biggest garbage fire I’ve ever played and I couldn’t uninstall it fast enough.

Livelock

I’ve recently decided to stop downloading games just because they are free if I realistically have no intention of playing them and only focussing on games that I think I will enjoy. Livelock was one of the last Games with Gold titles I downloaded before making this decision and I’ve also striped out all the previous rubbish from my collection. Livelock did make the cut to be played as some people were talking about it like it was good at the time it came out.

One of my friends was looking for a co-op partner to do the online stuff with and this prompted me to start the game a while back. With the online out of the way, it sat there gathering virtual dust for a while before I picked it up again.

Livelock is a top down shooter where you can play as three different robots and make your way through a variety of desolate landscapes destroying other robots. As you play, your robots level up and unlock new abilities to aid in the destruction of these other robots. You can also find credits which can be spent to upgrade your weapons to make killing other robots easier.

The way the game works is essentially score driven where all dying does is reduce your score. This means that there is no difficulty even on the higher difficulty levels, you will just die more.

There is some kind of story where these robots are supposedly trying to save humanity but I didn’t’ see a single human during my playthrough and, to be honest, the story and dialogue didn’t really engage me. What I did pick up on though, is that there are three different enemy factions you fight against, the last one appearing to be a take on communist Russia which is so cliché, even in a post-apocalyptic version of Rock Em’, Sock Em’ Robots.

Musically it’s very down beat and dour which I suppose is in keeping with the theme but I am starting to struggle with games always taking this route. I mean, it wouldn’t kill them to have a little bit of energy about it every now and then.

Graphically, again it’s another colourless expanse of greys, browns and yellows which becomes old very fast. There is a little difference between the Acts and the third act is snow, but it still doesn’t really inspire.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

The game itself is relatively short but it didn’t feel like it at the beginning. The game is structured over 3 Acts and there is an achievement for completing each one but the first act has three times as many chapters as the other two so it took me ages to get the energy up to finish it after completing the first Act. And that in itself says it all.

A single playthrough will net most of the game’s achievements. 6 relate to the story but loads of others will unlock along the way. It’s worth playing on hard the whole time due to the no death criteria as three of these achievements relate to completing the game on the game’s three difficulties and they are stackable.

Outside of completing the game, the rest of the achievements outside of the multiplayer are simple grinding ones. You have to level up all three robots to level 30 and this is easily done by replaying the same short mission over and over again a lot of times.

There are audio log collectibles spread out across the levels. Some of these can be picked up by any robot but each robot has 6 of its own audio logs that only appear for them. This is especially annoying as one level has two different robot-specific audio logs in it. This one wasn’t too bad of a grind though.

There is one achievement for getting a 100-destruction streak which takes a bit of setting up. In one level, if you follow a set of actions, loads of small robots will spawn which can be easily destroyed for this achievement. During normal game play, I only got up to around 60 or 70 so this appears to be the only way to do it.

And that just leaves the data cards. Every time you kill a unique enemy for the first time, you unlock its data card. To unlock the master data cards, you have to destroy a set amount of each enemy. This is frustrating as it requires multiple plays of the same levels but also because you need to know what levels have what enemies in them to find them. This isn’t recorded in the in-game log but it does at least tell you how many of each enemy you need to kill.

And once all of that is done, if you played like me, you still won’t have killed 10,000 robots for the last achievement in the game so yet more grinding is required.

Multiplayer

There aren’t a lot of multiplayer requirements and the hardest thing about them is finding people to play with. There is match making but it doesn’t help with all of these. There are two that require completing a mission with three of the same robot and another for using all three different robots. You also need to just complete a mission as a three and complete a mission on Hard without dying. These last two are easy in matchmaking if you play the right level.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I may have been a bit harsh in the above as Livelock isn’t a bad game. It’s just an average one that’s fairly easy and a little mindless so quite good for a ‘pick up and play’ game. The only tricky part about completing it is finding people to play with online. Other than that, it’s a grindy list that will only cost you some time.

Timeshift

Coming up with mini completion projects is becoming a problem for me now as I seem to have far too many on the go. This one should be the most pressing though as it revolves around completing all the Xbox 360 games that haven’t been made backward compatible and also have an online requirement. Timeshift is one such title and after playing it, I can understand why it’s not been considered for saving for the future.

Timeshift is a very dated first-person shooter with a weak storyline. The storyline is so weak, I don’t even know what it was about come the end. Something to do with travelling through time to do some stuff. I dunno. The cutscenes were rubbish and the textures were very 2009 so other than struggling through the levels, I didn’t feel engaged enough to pay attention.

Gameplay wise, it has some original concepts with the time bending abilities. You can use time powers to either slow, pause or reverse time. Reversing time is good for storyline things and in-game puzzle solving. It is also handy for reversing the throw of grenades from enemies which was especially good at preventing death, which is needed on the hard difficulty.

The other two are simply frustrating. Time-pause runs down your ability bar really quickly but restores your health. Time-slow doesn’t drain as fast but only slows time rather than stopping it. On hard, getting shot a few times means you die and time-slow allows you to kill more enemies and hide than time-pause. This is where I started getting really annoyed with the game. There is an in-built ‘tactical awareness’ thing that auto-selects a time power depending on the situation. In combat, it auto selects time-pause. I was playing on hard and this was bad for so many reasons. The first reason is, I couldn’t figure out how to turn it off if this option even existed. Secondly, on hard with the number of enemies you face, time-pause doesn’t give you enough time to do anything meaningful. Thirdly, it’s a game and you are taking a gameplay option away from me? Fuck off. You can manually select the right power but given that it’s a combat situation, pre-setting the power I want to use would be infinitely more helpful. It’s total bullshit and ruins an already average game experience.

Speaking of average, I’ve mentioned textures already but the levels are all a combination of gun-metal grey and shitty brown that adds absolutely nothing in terms of entertainment, or any other value for that matter. The final point of bullshit is the menus. They are so unresponsive that selecting anything is an episode in frustration. It all takes ages to load which doesn’t help when the game is a chore to play in the first place.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 57 Achievements

With an unimaginative game comes an unimaginative list. There are six chapters in the game and three difficulty modes. Each level has three completion achievements, one for each difficulty mode so that’s 18 of the 27 achievements that don’t involve multiplayer. There are another three for completing a level without dying on each difficulty level. This can be tricky due to the game’s ridiculous imbalance on the harder difficulties however, some of the levels at the beginning of the game are short so give you some leeway.

That only leaves six others and they are all for repeating actions with time powers or sticking grenades to enemies. No great shakes and no going out of your way. If you hate collectibles, this list is for you.

Multiplayer

As with any non-current COD or Battlefield game, the multiplayer is simply not played by anyone anymore, the reasons most likely are provided above. Thankfully, the way the multiplayer achievements are put together, only two people are required to get them all. There’s also nothing in here that is complicated to get, however a lot of it is time consuming. The biggest one is for winning 100 matches and this is where the time comes in. That said, it’s not the longest multiplayer grind by any means.

There is another bizarre one which requires you to host an online server for 48 hours. This essentially means creating a lobby for other people to play the game in and then just leaving your console on until 48 cumulative hours have passed. Pointless and ridiculous.

Downloadable Content

Because the multiplayer was so good, they decided to expand it with two additional DLC packs with extra maps. Because everyone loves extra maps!

They are just more of the same rubbish but thankfully the achievements don’t add too much extra time to the completion but do give an extra 250 points.

Timeshift was a boring completion where the main campaign was a slog and an even more boring experience than grinding out the multiplayer and it’s a sad state of affairs when it’s that way around. I can’t recommend it to anyone, even hardcore fans of the first-person shooter genre.