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.