Nicktoons MLB

Time for the final baseball game in my collection and it was probably the hardest one yet in terms of some of the achievements. It’s another North America exclusive title too which is the only reason I had it and was playing. I actually quite like baseball now but I hate Sponge Bob so having to play a game with his face on it made my face hurt.

There isn’t an overarching story to the game or much variation in game modes that need to be played. There is a tournament mode where you have to play through seven teams, ending with a team of Nicktoons characters, and a showdown mode where you have to play as either MLB Allstars who you pick yourself or the Nicktoons characters.

There are some mini games to play as well but these are really meh. Other than that, there’s the pick up and play function for couch co-op and against the AI which seems to be the main point of the game.

Controls wise, Pitching and Fielding is easy for the most part. Just throw the ball and if the AI hits, get it back to the bases and try to get them out. Batting though, there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to. The ball will go where it will go. Even if you strike the ball in the hot zone, you aren’t guaranteed to not get caught out and playing on easy doesn’t prevent AI fielders from performing amazing catches regardless of stats all day long.

The one exception to this is the gimmick of the game which is the turbo. You build up turbo by getting strikes and when you have a turbo available, you can either do a special catch, a special pitch or a special bat. At bat, if you strike the ball it’s an automatic home run.

Musically, it’s grating and graphically it’s dated and it’s a generally forgettable experience in these areas.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 35 Achievements

Despite having an estimated completion time of six to eight hours, this is real slog-fest. I started by just playing the game normally, targeting standard baseball things like getting home runs, getting the grand slam, winning really well and all the rest of it and I think I knocked out 19 achievements after playing 1 game of 9 innings.

There are only two game-playing achievements that gave me trouble. The first of these is the cycle, probably the most pointless thing to aim for in any sport. You need to hit a single, double, triple and home run with the same player. This is tricky for two reasons, the first being that running a triple is a pain in the ass and you normally need to sacrifice another player to stand a better chance of getting your runner to the plate. The second is the fact that need to get the batter in at least four times so it’s best playing a 9-inning game and also praying that you don’t get a bad hit and caught out.

The next one is the only one you need to not play on Rookie difficulty for and that’s for getting a double play – getting two AI opponents out at the same time. This came down more to luck than skill, especially the way I did it, but essentially, the opponent needs to have a runner on base, preferably one. You need to throw to a batter and pray he hits a shit return into the ground then quickly throw to second then first base. I got sensationally lucky by striking out the guy I was pitching to and the AI tried to steal third. I threw to third and got the double play. Definitely more luck than skill.

There is another tricky one for pitching a perfect game of 9 innings where the opposition doesn’t get any runs or to any bases. This is tricky because no matter what happens, the AI seems to hit at least one ball well. It took me three attempts before pulling this off.

The last few achievements involve having to beat all the teams and unlock all the cards in the game. If you’ve done the double play and cycle, this is now the easy grind to the full completion and involves beating all the National League and American League teams and playing a game of Distance Derby and hitting 20 targets in the mini game. That said, in order to get 20 hits in Distance Derby you have to deliberately miss some hits otherwise you will win without facing 20 balls.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Nicktoons MLB as mentioned above, is a very bland and forgettable experience with a completion made horrendous by that stupid double play achievement. It’s advertised as short and easy but don’t be fooled. This one is a waste of time and money, even to fans of baseball.

Arcade Game Series: Galaga

This game was no where the top of my next-to-play list but being bored one Friday, and a hankering for some retro arcade games made me jump in to the backlog and clear out another one.

Galaga is actually a game I had previously completed on the 360 arcade and it was a very quick and easy completion. On the Xbox One, it’s still quick at around two and a half hours but it’s much more challenging now. More on that later.

Galaga sees you take control of a spaceship with some limited abilities. It can move left and right and also fire two bullets in quick succession. Not three though as that might make the game fair. You need to shot millions, and millions, and millions of bugs as they are presumably hell bent on attacking earth. So it’s up to one spaceship to stop them.

There is one thing you can do to improve your odds and that’s deliberately getting one of ships captured by one of the big enemies (that take two shots to kill) and then shot that enemy to release the captured ship and create a double ship that can fire, wait for it, four bullets in quick succession. Two at a time. The irritating thing about this though is that it does cost you one of your lives and when you only get five to begin with, it’s kind of a big deal.

That’s all there is to the game play. You clear waves of enemies and move through levels of increasing difficulty, also including some bonus stages where you can relax as the enemies won’t shoot you.

Looks wise, it’s a typical 80s arcade game and has stayed true to its roots. Musically it’s done the same but it’s incredibly grating even after a short amount of play time.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

First things first, clearing 31 waves is the target from a progression perspective. This isn’t hard as there is a level select function which essentially gives you 5 lives for each level so even when it gets tough towards the end, it’s easy just clearing a level at a time.

There are also some miscellaneous things to do along the way like getting an accuracy score of over 70% on wave 10 or higher. This is really dumb as all you have to do is shot once, score a hit, then let the enemies kill you and you will finish the wave with 100% accuracy.

There are others for forming a dual fighter and shooting down an enemy fighter. I’ve mentioned forming a dual fighter above but to get the enemy fighter, you have to let your fighter be captured and then shoot it. In addition to mucking around with getting captured, you have to shoot a boss while it’s trying to capture you so you can escape its tractor beam. This one is all about timing. You need to shoot just before the tractor beam touches you so you fire straight and the boss dies while you are being transported. It’s either that or cross your fingers and hammer the shoot button as you spin towards the boss.

The remaining achievements are the tricky ones. You need to clear the bonus stages from 11 to 31 by getting a perfect score. One of these levels has to be done with a single ship too. The easiest of these to do with a single ship is level 27. There are no tips for these other than keep practicing and working out the enemy patterns and where best to shoot them from. It takes a bit of time but is very doable.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Arcade Game Series: Galaga is a great trip down memory lane and a challenging completion to boot. It takes around 3 hours to complete if you manage to get the patterns down for the bonus levels quickly but I can see how doing these will cause many people to tear their hair out.

SEGA Superstars Tennis

After doing a bit of research and continuing my quest to complete all games I own on the previous generation, I started up SEGA Superstars Tennis without honestly having the intention of finishing it. I was looking through my collection of non-backward compatible games with online achievements and this was the one I chose to start. I cleared out the online stuff and then just carried on clipping away at the solo bits and before I knew it, the game was complete. That makes it sound a lot easier than it is.

Superstars Tennis is essentially a basic tennis game. You play as various characters from a multitude of SEGA based games including Sonic, Space Channel 5, Jet Set Radio and Golden Axe to name a few. You play on a variety of themed courts, some of which make playing tennis more difficult than it should be as the lines become hard to see.

You can play singles or doubles but doubles is a pile of garbage unless you are playing with another human player.

However, the tennis element is only a small fraction of the game. The majority of playing time will be spent in the Superstars mode which is basically a collection of mini games where you have to do a variety of stuff in keeping with the SEGA games theme. For example, Jet Set Radio games focus on hitting the ball to the other side of the net to complete graffiti tags whereas Sonic mostly focuses on collecting rings. This isn’t true for every game though. Clearly where they couldn’t think of any appropriate mini games, you just have to play tennis – which is fair enough when you consider there are 101 challenges to complete in this mode.

Graphically, it’s cartoony and the animations don’t interfere with the gameplay which is good. But the music is sinfully irritating, especially the Samba Di Amigo stage. Thankfully this arena is just a tennis match that’s over quite quickly but I still hate it which is testament to how annoying it is.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Achievement wise, completing the game is difficult and takes a massive amount of perseverance. There are a lot of fairly quick and easy achievements that will come from just playing the game, probably the trickiest of these is for hitting three perfect serves in a row. However, if going for the completion, a lot of tennis will be played so this will likely come through attrition.

Outside of Superstars mode there isn’t a lot to do. The first port of call is probably playing tournament mode but the achievement states you need to win the final stage. What it doesn’t tell you though is you need to win all of your matches without dropping a game to get to the ‘final stage’ so it’s a bit misleading. This also unlocks the ‘hidden stage’ which there is another achievement for beating. I’m pretty sure this was just a glitch though and beating the final stage is meant to unlock regardless of how you do it.

There’s a lot of other stuff to do but before that, playing through all of Superstars mode is required to ensure that everything is unlocked that you can then do in either singles or doubles matches or game modes. There’s not really a lot worth mentioning about it other than the fact it takes a while. There are various achievements that can be obtained while playing specific levels and you will unlock all the characters, play against most of them and unlock all the game modes.

One playthrough of Superstars mode and beating all the players and classic doubles pairings will likely leave you with two achievements – getting AAA ranks in all of the Superstars challenges and getting 7 chaos emeralds in the Sonic mini game.

Firstly, the sonic game… my god this is a piece of work. In order to get the 7 emeralds, you have to run around on court collecting rings while avoiding robots firing electrified balls at you. Bombs will also appear sometimes instead of rings. You get three lives. The worst part about this is several times when playing, a line of rings would spawn where I was standing and more often than not, exactly where I would be standing, a bomb would spawn costing me a life through bad luck. It became infuriating after a while, almost controller breaking.

However, once you get used to the pattern and learn how to manipulate the robots, it’s doable and very much rewarding once you get to the end.

Getting the AAA ranks in all the missions is the long road in this and it really only comes down to 2 things; the Jet Set Radio tags and beating the Alex Kidd tennis tournament.

The tournament matches are a bitch as you have to win all the matches without dropping a single point. Once you work out the patterns of play this isn’t so bad with the exception of the Alex Kidd tournament. For some reason, even if you set the difficulty to easy, these three guys play like pros and seem to hit cross court winners with ease.

Making the tags without missing a shot is just an episode of screaming. I mean there are certain depths of shot you can hit but I swear to god the game has a mind of its own sometimes. This is fine for some of the other challenges but when you’re not allowed to miss, it’s a massive ballache. This is coupled with the fact that you need to get the right colour spray cans to drop on to the court, only 4 cans drop at a time and some of the tags have six colours. Oh, and sometimes sponges will drop which if picked up, will wipe off your tags. Essentially what this means is a lot of things have to go your way for success… which brings me on to my biggest bugbear with the whole game.

When you have a selection of small challenges when you are going to need to restart a lot, the least the game could do is have responsive menu controls. After pressing pause, you need to delay for a second before it will allow you to scroll down to the reset button. This may not seem a big deal but when you are trying to retry for the tenth time after missing the first shot, it becomes incredibly old really quickly.

Multiplayer

There is also a small amount of online achievements for playing the game and getting wins in both doubles and singles matches and the only real way to do it now is with friends but there is one really annoying one where you have to get on the in-game Superstars Channel and no one really knows how this is decided. What I did was keep playing a massive tie break and it eventually unlocked during the game. Again, this felt more like luck than skill.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While there are a lot of frustrations with playing SEGA Superstars Tennis, especially if going for the completion, it is a very rewarding feeling if you get to the end. It’s also one of the more fun tennis games that doesn’t take the tennis too seriously.

Slayaway Camp: Butcher's Cut

This is another recent sale acquisition where I bought the game for easy challenge points initially but it then came up as my randomly selected ‘next to play’ game.

Slayaway Camp is a puzzle game with a funny twist. You are a killer, generally based on movies such as Jason and Halloween, and you have to navigate through maps, killing people and then finding the exit. Most puzzles have a set amount of moves you can use to kill the victims and escape so while, it’s a slasher in appearance, it’s a pure puzzle game at heart.

You essentially play through a series of these slasher puzzles to unlock the next set of puzzles. Once you complete these, you open the next one for a total of eight sets of puzzles. It’s quite forgiving here as to unlock the next set, you only have to complete the last puzzle in the set. Some of the puzzles are ridiculously difficult and take a lot of trial and error to resolve. Then they throw cats into the equation which makes it harder as you have to kill the targets but not the cats – because everyone loves cats.

In addition to the puzzles, there are a few mini games that unlock too. I only played one of these as only one had achievements tied to it but more on that later.

Looks wise, it’s gone for a Minecraft style appearance with block characters in appearance and animation. There’s nothing wrong with this but if they wanted to have made a higher certificate game, they could have made it more realistic and therefore more gruesome.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Back up to the traditional 50 achievements for this one. As I mentioned above, some of the puzzles are really complicated and can result in getting into a position where you can’t actually finish them. There are several guides online to get through the tougher ones, including video and text which greatly help if you get stuck.

Achievements wise you don’t actually need to complete a whole lot of puzzles to get all of them. Simply completing the last puzzle in each set will get you an achievement for each. There are also achievements earned along the way for killing victims in certain ways. None of these are secret so its case of working out which level you get your specific death scenes in and killing away.

Outside of what you can do in the main game are grindy achievements, of which there are three. Throughout the levels, there are cops who you don’t need to kill but you can. There’s an achievement for killing 30 of them and this can be done in one of the deleted scenes where two cops appear. This is small grind compared to the victims who you need to kill 666 of for two achievements – there’s another one for 100 victims. This will obviously take some time but there is another deleted scene where you can kill four victims in a few seconds so it’s not as grindy as some other games.

The hardest achievement to get is for playing one of the mini games called Faces of Killed 3. This game involves pressing A when a fast-moving cursor moves into a kill zone and you have to do this 25 times in a row. At the beginning it’s easy as the kill zone is large but it gets progressively smaller until at the end, it’s a matter of pressing A when you think the cursor will be in the kill zone as by the time you see it enter, it’ll be too late. I always took this approach and continuously fell short of the target so maybe it’s just me. It took me about an hour and a half of playing to get this achievement – almost as long as it took me to grind out the victim kills.

While you’ve been doing all of the above, you will have been amassing coins to spend in the in-game shop. Incidentally, the fact it took me such a long time to clear Faces of Killed 3, meant that I had a lot of coins. There are several things in the shop to buy that will unlock achievements and there are two ways to go about this. The first is to play the game a lot and gather loads of coins. The second is to abuse cloud saves to unlock achievements, delete the console save, relaunch the game and buy another item. I got bored of playing Faces of Killed 3 when I was 6,000 coins short of the target so I abused the save system to get these last three items. Having to have done that for all of them would have been more soul destroying than playing the game though.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Slayaway Camp: Butcher’s Cut is a fun little puzzle game for a single playthrough. The puzzles don’t have much replay value and it suffers from the same trial and error-based approach that most puzzle games suffer from. The killer style was a unique twist which was both funny and enjoyable.

I would recommend it to fans of the puzzle genre but it’s overpriced at £13.59 so it’s most definitely sale material.

Darkest of Days

This is a North America only game and also a pretty clever game title that works on so many levels. When I initially got Darkest of Days, I thought it would be based during either World War I or World War II and be a traditional war shooter. The only reason I got it was to make use of the American Xbox I own as it’s not a genre I would usually play.

Now, the reason that I think the title is clever. As soon as I started playing the game, I realised that the gameplay, game design and construction is so bad that it’s a circular reference to gaming in general and that playing the game is most likely the darkest day you will experience in the medium. Bad joke aside, here’s why.

You play as a guy called Morris who is fighting during Custer’s Last Stand. You may be led into thinking that this is therefore a game set during the American Civil War. You will immediately hope not though as soon as you are asked to wield a shitty pistol at some Indians. The aiming mechanics are bad, and the graphics and gameplay generally don’t lead a lot to you being in for a good ride.

Anyway, Morris gets injured and is about to be killed when outta nowhere, a portal appears and some dude drags you into the future. I know what you’re thinking – what a twist! It gets better too as your mission becomes travelling back through time to World War I, World War II and The American Civil War to rescue some people of significance to the future timeline while you try and find the father of time dude who invented the concept of time travel.

The premise is fairly good, original and inventive however it’s completely derailed by the shocking graphics and gameplay that would have been more at home on the original Playstation. It got worse the more I played as they tried to create that war time effect of having loads of guys fighting each other at the same but all this did was murder the frame rates and make the game unplayable at points.

The difficulty is another thing that puzzled me. There are three difficulties to play on and I spent most of my time playing on easy but this doesn’t seem to mean anything at all difficulties seem to have the same ridiculous difficulty spikes. My favourite thing in all games is not knowing how or why I died and the enemies range from not being able to hit a barndoor with a banjo to being able to snipe you from 750 metres with a World War II rifle. Get fucked.

Musically, its grating and the characters swear more than necessary and I couldn’t listen to a lot of the contrived dialogue.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

Another limited list and despite the frustrations, its probably possible to get through it in around 8 hours. It felt a lot longer for me due to the constant death and shitty frame rates causing me to vomit in my mouth repeatedly.

Anyway, from playing the game without worrying about anything else, 4 achievements will be earned. Technically 5 for playing the ridiculously shit hidden mission at the end of the game where the game developers thank you for playing and tell you how much effort they put in to making this pile of smokeweed.

There are five miscellaneous achievements available and these are best done on easy at the beginning on the game. The first one alludes to the game having a sense of humour. It’s called Horse Puncher and it’s awarded for punching a horse to death. This is easily done in the first mission when Indian arrows from point blank range do nearly no damage to you. You can run into a crowd of horses wailing on the melee button and this will unlock easily.

The next two are for killing yourself, either with a grenade or via drowning, both of which are easy to do in the first World War I mission.

The next two are strange as it’s a gun-based game but you get awarded for completing a level without killing anyone and also for punching 25 dudes to death. The second one is made even more bizarre as generally speaking, you have to run through their bullets to apply the killing blow – another cause of constant death.

After each mission you will be awarded upgrade points to apply to either your skill with pistols or rifles. There is a limited about of points available and there are two achievements for upgrading both the pistol and rifle to the maximum level. The easiest way to net both is to save all the upgrade points until you have the 40 required to upgrade a weapon fully, upgrade one, then reload a previous save and upgrade the other.

The last achievement is for completing the game on the hardest difficulty level but thankfully there is a Bioshock-style work around where you can play the game on easy right up until the end and then change the difficulty to the highest one and then finish the game. This is the only blessing in an otherwise dyer experience.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Darkest of Days will definitely be remembered as a dark point in my gaming history. The basic gameplay mixed with grey/brown environments was bad enough but throw in the terrible gameplay functionality and it really is just a pile of smoking garbage. I wouldn’t even say it was easy due to the variable AI ability an it’s certainly not worth anyone’s time investment.

Nevermind

With a new social challenge of True Achievements came a new excuse to buy games on the wish list when they go on sale. That’s how I came across Nevermind, a quick to complete adventure game ideal for this year’s iteration of the Great True Achievements Score Challenge. I don’t have the time to compete with the elite of the field for this as the competition runs for 48 weeks. Thankfully, the challenge only requires getting to week 10 and the score available from Nevermind was enough by itself to get through one of the earlier weeks.

Nevermind places you in the body of a doctor working for some company that specialises in analysing and repairing (I think?) the memories of its clients after they’ve suppressed horrible memories that they can’t face. In terms of games, it’s quite similar to Layers of Fear in the way that it plays. There are also echoes of The Park during some of the gameplay elements as well as you explore some frankly disturbing images the game conjures. It’s more emotionally jarring that visually scary with some of the iconography and representation focussing on some real issues that people face.

Criticisms of the game are also similar to The Park in that it takes an age for your character to get anywhere as they have the walking pace of a snail. If a snail had legs.  The looking mechanism also feels severely handicapped even if you adjust the sensitivity to max. So essentially in a game where the walking and looking are the two main gameplay elements, they are both the worst aspects of the game.

Where the game does strive though, is the atmosphere it creates and this is done by the scenes you explore, which are all intricately designed and thought out, and the accompanying music and eerie sound effects add to the immersion. This also makes it feel like the gameplay is part and parcel of the atmosphere the game aims to create.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

It’s another short list and takes around 6 hours to get through. There are four individual memories and a tutorial, which is essentially Hansel and Gretel, to play through and just doing this will net you 6 achievements.

Unfortunately, the game makes an error next with its achievement list and requires you to play through all of the memories again for a second time to collect an additional set of memories. The memories don’t change so it’s effectively an entire second playthrough that feels redundant and unnecessary as there is no reason why these couldn’t have been incorporated into the first playthrough.

This is made even worse during the last memory where you have to play through a third time as there is an alternate solution to one of the puzzles that contains one of the memories. You also have to finish the memory for the collectible to register so that’s three full playthroughs of this bit for the completion and as it’s the last mission in the game it’s one of the more convoluted ones to complete.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Nevermind is a good atmospheric story game that falls down on a combination of slow gameplay and replay requirements. It’s painful once you’ve been through the whole story to not be able to speed things along during a second playthrough. This isn’t helped by the fact that the second playthrough feels entirely unnecessary when the memories could have been put into the first playthrough.

Still, it’s another quick and easy completion to add to the pile.

Tacoma

Despite telling myself I wasn’t going to jump on sales this year, I have failed on several occasions to restrain myself. Especially when games on my wish list keep cropping up for less than £5. In response to this, I severely whittled down my wish list removing any trash that I didn’t have a reason to keep on there, limiting myself to wanted titles, platformers and open world games. Tacoma doesn’t fit into any of these categories but I think someone recommended it so into the collection it went.

Tacoma follows the story of Amy, who is tasked with going aboard the abandoned space station, Tacoma, to retrieve an AI program at the request of some corporation. The game centres around exploring the various areas of the station and recovering the memories of those that were aboard. Amy uncovers that the crew were in trouble after something collides with the station and the memories describe their attempts to escape certain death.

Game play elements are fairly limited and while it’s labelled an adventure game, it’s closer to a visual novel. You cannot die and the objective is to look at the memories left behind by the crew to work out what happened while the main goal is retrieving data and the gathering of memories appears to be something to do while you wait for data retrieval to happen.

Some of the load times were a bit long and Amy doesn’t walk very fast. I was able to get through the game is just over 3 hours despite this so there’s no a lot to do and what’s there is drawn out. Looks wise and sound wise it doesn’t put a foot wrong and it all contributes to the isolated atmosphere of the station and the crew’s perils.

Regarding the other characters, there’s a real mix of lore surrounding them and they are all interesting in their own right. They do appear to have gone full on in pursuit of the diversity card as there is a heady mix of races and clear gay and lesbian characters. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this but it does feel a little forced at times, especially with Andrew’s secret gay relationship.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

A short game with a short list but a rather weird one too. The list is 90% collectible based and really tests your ability to explore… or prepare.

There are five achievements for performing various actions on the station, such as playing basketball, rebuilding a science skeleton, going to the gym and rebuilding a broken sign. Sickeningly, some of these ridiculously obscure actions are hidden behind secret achievement blockers making unlocking them naturally nearly impossible unless you have bizarre natural tendencies to do weird shit for no reason.

There is another achievement for finding 7 cat memories and some of these are in really obtuse locations where I can only imagine you need to know where to look in order to find them. Again, there is another one for finding a wedding ring towards the end of the game and as you can imagine, something so small is incredibly hard to find… unless you already know where it is.

While there are achievements that unlock during the course of play, there are a set that only unlock when you finish the game. The problem with this is obvious – you only find out at the end of the game whether you’ve missed something and while I was able to unlock all bar one of the achievements, the one I missed – for finding all the AR Records – was because I didn’t click on one square during my playthrough. Thankfully, it’s not a long game and nothing becomes permanently missable. Even with my need to revisit locations, it still took less than 3 hours to complete.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Tacoma is a relaxing and interesting game to play though it does verge a little close to a walking simulator at times. Achievement wise, it’s easy with a guide but makes it slightly harder to enjoy the underlying story if following words to ensure you don’t miss stuff.

Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sloggers

Another one of my American backlog games, Sandlot Sluggers is a baseball sports game in a cartoon fashion. In terms of similarity, style wise it’s the same as Rookie Rush but far less obnoxious in terms of achievements.

There are several modes to play in Sandlot Sluggers but for the achievements you only need to play story mode and play now to get them all so I won’t be mentioning the other modes.

The game was a real pain in the ass to learn how to play and even now, I’m not sure I know how to play the game. When you play Story Mode, you create your own character and then have to play with some really shit characters against teams that are better than you. When you beat them, you get a new team mate until you’ve formed your All Stars team and can take on the Bullies. It’s fairly contrived but serves to provide a story for a game that didn’t really need one.

The game play itself consists of pitching and batting. Pitching is simple enough. You have to throw the ball at the square on the screen by selecting a pitch type and using a power meter. The AI then rolls the dice regardless of what you’ve done and they will either hit the ball or not. Strike out three of their players with good fortune and then you can bat.

Batting is the same as pitching in that it feels like complete luck as to whether you hit a home run, hit the ball straight up in the air, get a strike out or just hit the ball into the field. There are various objects in some of the playing fields which will grant automatic doubles or triples but most of my wins felt like luck in the early game.

Aside from just batting and pitching, there are also power ups you can use. As a pitcher, they make the ball do weird things but again as you’re playing against AI in story mode, it’s up to the game whether this makes a difference or not. When in bat, you will get some abilities that mean the ball cannot be caught which is useful when the game decides you are going to sky the ball.

That’s essentially it for the gameplay. As mentioned above, looks wise it’s cartoony and sound-wise, the commentators are annoying but no where near the level achieved by the other games in the Backyard series.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

9 of the achievements are awarded by default by playing through and winning in story mode. Loads of others will be unlocked along the way and the ones that aren’t – for completing specific actions during a game – can be easily set up with two controllers in Play Now mode.

There are some exceptions though, the most notable one being for winning every game via the mercy rule. This means that you have to set the game up so that the mercy rule is on, then you have to get a 10-run lead after the bottom of the inning to auto win without playing the whole game. Doing this for every game is a ballache, especially early on when your team is utter shit.

Another story mode one that’s a bit of a pain is for completing all the mini games and unlocking the boosts. The minigames themselves are really easy but if you fail one and skip, you will need to play all of them again for the achievement.

Some of the more notable Play Now achievements were painful too as they involved going through the entire roster to get the same player to score a single, double, triple and home run. I kept losing track of who had done what so every time a play finished, I was crossing my fingers that it was the right one.

A few others have you playing full five-inning games and performing specific actions at the end and it was here that the game started to drag. Getting the achievements in the easiest way involved striking out teams all the way to the final inning and then performing an action. Luckily this didn’t happen to me, but I could easily see going through the pain of getting to the fifth inning only to mess up the action and having to play through again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers hasn’t made me want to play more baseball games and on review of my collection there are still two more to play. I will be glad to see the back of them to be honest and certainly won’t be buying anymore.

That said, Sandlot Sluggers was a two-day completion clocking in at under 6 hours of play time so it’s not that bad for completionists.

Inside

Inside is a game that’s had a lot of critical acclaim after its release in 2016. I subsequently bought it a few years later and didn’t play it… then it became free with Xbox Gold so what better time to play it. It’s just another kick up the ass to get through my historic games, something I’ve made a lot of in roads with this year.

Inside is a side-scrolling adventure, puzzle game where you play as a boy who must have some kind of super powers as he is being hunted by some dudes who keep trying to shoot him with tranquiliser guns. There are a few puzzles along the way and lots of exploring to do in a multi-directional 2D plane.

In terms of the praise the game got, and this may be controversial but I’m not sure it’s warranted. In places, the game is clever and some of the puzzles are unique in terms of how they are solved but I didn’t really feel like the game was massively breaking new ground and the silent protagonist and lack of any real information towards what’s going on didn’t give the story anything extra either.

That’s without mentioning the ending of the game which made absolutely no sense and raises questions as to why the protagonist even went on this little escapade in the first place. So it’s not fantastic, but it is very competent which I shouldn’t find surprising in the modern gaming world as most new releases set the bar so low that it’s really easy to achieve mediocrity.

Looks wise and sound wise, again it’s competent in that there could have been no background music at all and it wouldn’t have made a difference such is the focus on the game play, and I didn’t get stuck on any unintentional environmental bits all the while the independent artwork looks the part.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 14 Achievements

My playthrough for 100% took just under 4 hours but the game itself is slightly longer. It’s another list that actually finishes before the main story so achievement wise, there’s nothing to drive you to the end of the game. I finished it anyway but I kind of wish I hadn’t after experiencing the bizarreness of the game’s conclusion.

All 14 of the game’s achievements are tied to finding secret collectibles hidden throughout the game. Some of these are obvious while others take a bit of effort and for these you will need, either a bizarre ability to figure out obscure things… or a guide.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Inside is a well made, competent game with exploration and puzzle, platforming elements. With a completion time of just over 4 hours, it doesn’t outstay its welcome and it’s a quick 1,000 Gamerscore for the achievement hunters.

The Godfather II

For a while I was looking forward to playing The Godfather II. I skipped the first one in the series as it had some DLC that was no longer available and based on my experience here, that was a great plan as The Godfather II, to be polite about it, is a flat uninspiring gaming experience.

The story and premise are fairly simple – you play as some faceless goon, Dominic as he climbs the mafia tower in service of Michael Corleone. You have to wipe out other crime families and take over the city by controlling all businesses. There are other missions and an underlying story but none of the voice actors seem to care about this and I, in turn, didn’t either.

My first impressions of The Godfather II weren’t all bad. The driving mechanics and controls were really good considering it’s a 2009 release and it great to be using the triggers to drive rather than the A and B buttons. However, that’s where it ends. Once the takeover mission mechanics were explained, I lost interest and didn’t play it again for over a month.

Also, the shooting is god-awful (no pun intended) with horrible auto-aim that seems just as likely to kill you than save you. If you are in a gunfight with more than one person, Dominic will lock on to some dude hiding behind a chest-high wall 500 feet away, rather than the guy standing in front of you with a shotgun.

What else sucked? The whole structure of the game, if I’m honest. If you have taken over businesses, the rival families can take them back by attacking them. It happens a lot and at the beginning the game, where everything is loosely explained in a very dull way, it wasn’t clear how to prevent this.

Essentially what it boiled down to was taking out all of the made men from a family so they couldn’t attack you while taking over their businesses and sending any of your other family members to defend your locations if they are attacked. Except taking out all of the made men will take a long time and is hugely repetitive. Just like all of the other activities I’ve described.

So it’s basically an over simplified, boring version of Grand Theft Auto with terrible voice acting to boot.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 41 Achievements

When I eventually started getting into the game, the achievements came quite quickly. Most of them can be earned through playing the main story and overtaking all crime rings and businesses. Along the way you will likely rack up the 750 kills too.

There are some notable ones and this is again where I got slightly hung up on progressing the game. The first of these is simple enough. You have to eliminate 5 made men. The first one is a given in a ‘this is how you do it’ kind of way but the next four, you have to pick up favours (more repetitive work) to gain kill conditions and then kill them in a specified way. A concept that makes no sense – strangling someone means perma-death but headshots? Just flesh wounds, no worries. It’s a missable achievement as you will run out of made men if you wipe out all families but they will annoy you so much by attacking your businesses that you will want to take them out anyway.

The next is for completing all execution styles and to be honest this is the hardest work the game offers because the requirements are so irritating it’s not even funny. To get an execution, you have to injure a mobster enough to get an execute prompt and press the right stick with a certain weapon equipped to get either a standing or kneeling execution. The kneeling ones are stupid because getting an execution with the magnum or sniper rifle means you have to shoot them in the leg with a different gun, change guns then run up to them to execute them. Run up to them. With a sniper rifle. Super dumb.

There are also some environmental executions and thrown weapon executions, the most painful for me was throwing a bottle at someone to get the killing blow and I still feel I was lucky with this. I had to throw the bottle after damaging an enemy enough but before my allies killed them. You also have to pick up a bottle in the environmental so it’s conditional on whether there’s a bottle around to begin with.

Outside of this and clearing all the crime rings and businesses, there are safes in every location and favours you can earn from public officials. All of these collectibles are location-marked so finding them isn’t a problem, however the same can’t be said for the fire arms. None of these are too far out of the way but you do need to look for them and using a guide is probably the best way.

The last achievement I unlocked was for completing the game so there is no post game grinding, thought there could be depending on the order you choose to do things. The executions are one you’ll want to do prior to the end game as there will only be two guys left you can do executions on once all the families are wiped out. This sounded stupid so I did it as soon as I could.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Godfather II was a boring and forgettable gaming experience where both gameplay and story fail to deliver. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you want to be bored for 12 or more hours doing the same repetitive tasks.

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.

Death Squared

Another Ultimate Head to Head game was next on the list for completion and it was annoying me for a while. Death Squared is a puzzle game and that’s fun to play and has basic controls so it didn’t take a lot of re-learning to go back to, yet for some reason I kept putting it off. Until one weekend I decided to sort it out and finish the damn thing. Well, that’s a half truth. I did party mode one weekend and then the main game on another weekend. But I still took a few months of break in between.

Death Squared has a sort of story mode where David is testing robot AIs with an AI companion. They share witty banter where David is a useless employee and is constantly being put through his paces as the AI winds him up. Most of this is just background irritation for the most part but there are some genuinely funny bits interspersed with the annoyance. My favourite bit involves David having to install a software update throughout most of the game and he keeps refusing the update. When he finally caves and allows the AI to update it, another software update is required immediately after. His outrage is comical.

The gameplay is simple but, I have to say, it can be incredibly fussy and infuriating. In the main game, you control two square robot AIs and are tasked with navigating them to the exit platforms. You have to get both bots onto both platforms to complete the levels. There are 80 levels, each getting progressively more complicated. It takes a while to get through it all too. Most of the levels consist of hidden traps and lasers which take a lot of trial and error to get past.

I mentioned that it was frustrating and here’s why. The analogue sticks move the bots and the right stick moves the blue one and the left stick moves the red one. I think. I have no idea if that’s correct and therein lies the problem – I got this wrong so many times which caused bot-death on several occasions. Incredibly frustrating, especially when you’ve navigated past the hard shit to just fall off a single platform when you are about to complete the level.

Also, the bots hate you. There will try their hardest to die at every opportunity and if you misjudge a movement by a millimetre, the bot will fall to its doom. Sometimes they will even ‘get stuck’ and blow up, again in a very unforgiving manner.

Now, picture these frustrations and imagine having to deal with four bots instead of two. Enter Party Mode. It’s more puzzle levels with the addition of two extra bots and you can switch between who you are controlling by using the bumper buttons. It’s essentially the same but with more complications. The last level here in particular takes an age to get through so imagine the blood curdling screams getting to the very end of this level to then lose green-bot because it got slightly to close to an edge.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

Completing both story mode and party mode will earn 10 of the achievements. Aside from this, there are a few miscellaneous things to do such dying 50 times in one level, making all 4 bots dance at the same and making them all die at the same time. All three of these are best done in party mode and the last two can only be done in party mode as you need 4 bots. There are also achievements for skipping the intro and watching the credits, this last one can only be done after completing the game for some bizarre reason, despite it having a credits bit in the options.

After these, there are three other things that need to be done. The first is completing 9 levels in a row without dying. Thankfully these can be any 9 levels so the first and easiest levels can be replayed until the bots decide not to commit suicide in consecutive arenas. To be fair, it’s tough to die once you know the level layouts and this isn’t too tricky.

The next thing is collecting secret items. There are ten secrets in ten different story levels and you have to do some strange shit with the bots to get them. Some of the later ones are quite complicated too but there are loads of video guides out there to help.

The last one involves dying a lot. 999 times to be exact. I got to less than half of this by the time I was done with everything above so it’s mini grind but thankfully one that can be done with an elastic band on one of the party levels repeatedly killing all four bots at once.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Death Squared is a fun but occasionally frustrating puzzle gaming experience. It took me around twelve hours to complete doing probably about 80% of the game without the use of video guides. However, the last levels do become a sequence of repeatedly horrible trial and error without guides.

Candleman

The next game on the easy list was Candleman, a platformer where you play as a candle that can jump. I can’t remember why I had this one but looking at the reviews of the game, they seem to give the indication that it was quite good.

The story appears to be that as a candle, you want to be able to light up the world so you need to travel to the lighthouse to learn its secrets. The narrative that accompanies the story feels very pretentious where it appears to be one of those ‘guess the underlying message’ things, that’s always done with a child storytelling voice but using language that a child wouldn’t understand so makes no sense in its own context. I get that the game needs framing though, otherwise it’s a just a candle jumping about from place to place.

The gameplay itself is fairly solid. It’s almost 100% platforming in nature with various collectibles scattered throughout the levels. Most of the levels are linear though so there’s no real exploration to it, it’s just a case of getting from A to B. There are some puzzle elements but very basic in terms of pressing buttons in a certain order and working out how to climb up stuff in the later levels.

What makes it unique is that as you are a candle, you are slowly burning down so there is a hidden timer to your actions. You can also burn faster by pressing a button to light up the place a bit more. This is necessary for some darker sections of the game but despite this, and with the numerous checkpoints, it doesn’t add much challenge to finishing the game.

Graphically, it’s pretty, atmospheric and pretty glitch free in terms of the environment, I didn’t encounter any issues where I got stuck and couldn’t continue. Musically, it builds on the atmosphere, but honestly, with the gameplay, you won’t notice the music as much when you’re actively doing something that involves your attention.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 15 Achievements

In terms of the main game achievements, there are two goals; complete the levels and find all the candles. The one thing I found surprising is that it takes quite a long time to get through some of the levels and this can be mildly frustrating when you miss the one candle that’s off the beaten path. I also found out that if you do miss a candle, it’s easier to restart immediately than carry on and come back to it as the candles stay lit when you replay.

Outside of this there are another two achievements for dying once by running out of wax (I got this by dying in level with fire when I failed to avoid it) and for also failing five times then completing a level (and I did this is the same level. That fire is a bitch.)

Downloadable Content

Another three chapters were released as a free update to the game. It essentially offers more of the same gameplay with an additional 500 Gamerscore so in terms of what it offers, if you enjoyed the game it’s perfect.

Candleman is a perfectly adequate, but a little slow, platforming game. It’s a quick completion without any issues with the gameplay. It’s enjoyable for the gameplay, despite the overly unnecessary high brow narrative.

Backyard Sports: Rookie Rush

I had put off playing this one for about a month simply because I couldn’t face the fact it wasn’t really doable in one sitting. I don’t even know why. I also couldn’t face relearning how to play American Football, but thankfully the game wasn’t too difficult to get through and now I don’t have another American Football game in my backlog. And it’s going to stay that way.

Rookie Rush is a much-improved version of Backyard Football 10 with multiple modes with which to have lots of fun in. The general gameplay is improved too but it still suffers from borderline childish commentary, though that has also made a significant improvement since the last game. That’s not saying much though as the commentary from the last game was more at home in kindergarten.

In terms of gameplay, the premise is the same. You select your attacking and defensive plays, cross your fingers and hope for the best. I had several instances where my quarterback decided to just throw the ball out of play rather than towards my running back who had made a decent run into the middle of the pitch. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this, just every now and then, the RNG roll decides it’s time for a bad quarterback through.

This was also the same on defence. You can time your tackles as much as you like, sometimes you will make the tackle, other times you won’t. To be fair, I did benefit from this almost as much as I lost out so it does go both ways.

In terms of story, bizarrely there is a story mode where you go around beating teams and signing their best players on to your team. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but at the end you win the cup game at the fun fair so everyone is happy.

Musically, it was so annoying that I still couldn’t get the terrible music out of my head after I’d finished the game. At least the commentary was more forgettable, though the main, repetitive annoying bit that happened a lot was when the commentator says, ‘Hey, I was watching that’ when you skip the replays. And there are lots of replays and you’ll want to skip them all.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

The big put off for me was the five to six hours it takes to get through the game (coming from the guy that put 50 hours into FIFA 12…). However, once I got past it, it wasn’t so bad as the games were not total episodes of frustration.

There are two main categories of achievement here – ones earned from specific actions in matches and ones earned for winning matches. Despite my ineptitude and lack of understanding of American Football, I was able to get all bar one of the in-match achievements, the last one of these was for scoring a Safety, which seems like an impossibility without a second controller. This involves making a tackle in your opponent’s end zone. Other luck-based ones include collecting a fumble and making an interception but thankfully these came quite easily.

That just leaves completing the modes. There is Story Mode, Season Mode and Tournament. Story mode holds the most achievements as you get one for each player you recruit into your team and then another for finishing it. Season mode requires you to win 5 games in a row, make the playoffs and win. Tournament mode is technically the most time consuming. There are six tournaments you need to win and you also need to play in a custom tournament.

Winning the tournaments can be sped up by simulating the matches but this is a massive ballache because you will lose matches that, on paper, you should win. It’s highly recommended that this is done after completing story mode and unlocking some of the better teams in the game. Simulating is still miles quicker than actually playing the tournaments so it’s just a case of crossing your fingers and keeping at it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While Rookie Rush was a relatively quick and easy completion, and the most enjoyable American Football game I’ve played, I’m happy to be done with the genre. It was a bit of a drag towards the end and even setting the time to one minute quarters, games just seemed to drag on and on.