King's Quest

King’s Quest is the last of my eight Bean Dive games that will be fully completed this side of 2018 as the other 2 involve lots of online grinding and some stuff I potentially won’t be able to do. Time will tell…

Anyway, King’s Quest follows the story of Graham… or Gram as he is referred to by most of the cast that can’t seem to say Graham, as he recalls the stories of his youthful adventures to his grandchildren. The first episode of the game, which is the pre-DLC game, focusses on how Graham becomes a knight by winning a tournament.

The game play has you move Graham around the relatively small open world town of Daventry – a town name I hated throughout my time playing as it sounds a little bit like a domestic cleaning product. The general aim of the game is to find items to use to complete your quests, and occasionally make dialogue choices.

In terms of what King’s Quest offers, its essentially 60% story, 40% puzzles. Some of the puzzles without the use of a guide would be tricky to figure out but it’s all reasonably fair in terms of allowing you the freedom to figure everything out – there is nothing that’s massively obscure.

Without ruining the game, there’s not really a lot else to talk about other than style and music. The graphics are reasonably cartoony which suits the story telling aspect and the music goes with it quite well. It’s also telling that I played the game and all DLCs for nearly 25 hours and the music didn’t get annoying in the slightest.

Achievements – 1,800 Points – 53 Achievements

Right, so while King’s Quest is probably listed as an easy completion due to its gameplay and story focus, getting all the achievements in one playthrough is a bit of a task. This is because 34 achievements are missable and not related to the story and it requires a few tactical saves to reduce unnecessary play time.

For the main game (episode 1), there is a lot of pissing about you need to do to net them all. There are 17 Achievements in the main game with 13 random things you need to do. A lot of these, and a theme for some of the missable DLC achievements, involve you having to repeat a dialogue or action over and over again to get all of Old Graham’s changeable dialogue to be played. Or dying stupidly which causes one of those, ‘oh wait, that’s not how it happened!’ moments that make the death just part of Graham’s awful memory.

Downloadable Content

There are 4 DLCs which extend the story of Graham’s adventures from the first episode. I’ve said before with these style games that I don’t consider the additional episodes to be DLC but this one carries 1,000 points from the from the first episode alone with another 200 on offer per additional episode.

The first two DLCs require partial multiple playthroughs to get every story outcome with achievements attached and the most frustrating part of the hunt was having to play through a story game for a second time. Thankfully though, the cutscenes are fully skippable and this showed how the short the game is if you skip through the fuzz.

From episode 4, things take a drastic turn from jovial to horribly dark storytelling. It becomes even weirder when the dark turn issue is resolved, and everyone just carries on as afterwards as if nothing happened. I won’t go into more than that but it’s at this point that Graham’s character stops being charming and comes across like a massive twat.

Things get even more weird in episode 5 and even more depressing when we reach the end of the story. Most of this last instalment feels a lot like playing through Graham’s onset of dementia. It’s dark but also a brave move addressing a very real, heart-breaking issue that people go through and actively capturing it in gameplay.

King’s Quest was a slog at times – especially during the second and third episodes where I had to replay a large portion of them. But overall, it’s a solid story game that asks questions of the players towards the end. I would definitely recommend it for a relaxed playthrough just for the story alone.

Assassin's Creed Origins

My original plan was to have completed all my other Assassin’s Creed games before Origins was released. However, this was a total pipe dream and I still have Chronicles India and Russia to go as well as The Ezio Collection but that only sort of counts as it’s just more of our favourite Italian assassin and I’ve already done his adventures once.

Assassin’s Creed Origins takes us all the way back to ancient Egypt and puts in the sandals of Bayak of Siwa as he goes on a murderous rampage to avenge his dead son. This is basically the birth of the Assassins versus Templars thing as Bayak keeps killing dudes only to be given more dudes to kill. The story is pretty good and despite some people calling Bayak boring, he is far more engaging that Connor from Assassin’s Creed III and that Arno guy from the forgettable Assassin’s Creed Unity. You also get to play as his love interest Aya for small sections of the game.

The gameplay has caused a lot of people to call Origins a breath of fresh air in the franchise. I get it as it feels a lot more refined than before, but I can’t help but feel that it’s kind of missing the point. Assassins are supposed to be sneaky and kill people silently. While I get that they should be combat ready at all times, the default should be sneaking and the punishment for being detected much more severe. You can kill anyone in any way, shape or form. I was kind of hoping for some more planned assassinations like the first game.

Another notable difference between this and previous games is that instead of Eagle Vision, you now have an actual Eagle who can see stuff for you and identify targets, enemies and chests and allow you to see them. I am assuming at some stage, an assassin will go into some kind of scientific device with said eagle and they will combine to generate the Eagle Vision power we know and love from the franchise. It is incredible that the eagle can supposedly see treasure chests in underground caves but whatever, we’ll run with it.

As well as killing people, there will be lot of optional side quests that pop up for you to help the people of Egypt with their day to day lives. This will also include killing some more dudes at some stages as was the norm in ancient Egypt? It is quite comical how casual Bayak is about killing people for the most inane crimes.

Another good thing about the gameplay is that you can chose the difficulty level to suit your ability.

Egypt is huge. The first area itself is probably the size of one city from Assassin’s Creed II and there were only three cities in that game. There are like twenty areas here. It does suffer a bit from being far too spread out though. There are desert regions in the south where there is nothing to do. Some of the mountainous terrain in the north is a little tricky to navigate quickly through.

I suppose my point here is that if you are going to have a big map, use it a bit more? There is literally no point in having the desert regions in the game, they are just taking up memory. That said there are in excess of 400 locations to explore where you have to complete actions like open treasure chests, kill dudes (obviously), find secret tablets and gaze at the stars.

Graphically the game is stunning. Egypt is beautiful from the pyramids to the oceans and everything in between. The character designs and environments and well thought out and there were few cases of me getting stuck on the scenery. The music offers an ancient Egyptian feel with the familiar twang that’s accustomed to the Assassin’s Creed franchise. It doesn’t overpower but also goes unnoticed for the most part, which is the right balance for in-game music.

Achievements – 1,240 Points – 67 Achievements

I am hoping that Ubisoft are done with this. We are already two DLCs in and Discovery Mode with a nice even 1,500 points.

There are 12 main storyline achievements but you will get a couple more through normal play that don’t warrant going too far off the beaten track. The fact there are those empty deserts at the bottom of the maps means that it is possible to complete the game without defogging the entire map which is a bit weird but there you go.

Outside of the main stuff, it does throws in the usual Assassin’s Creed varied achievements and my word, it doesn’t half want you to do some convoluted shit. The first one of these was feeding a corpse to some animals. First you have to kill a dude (I know, right?) then drag his dead ass across the burning desert in hope of finding some animals that actually want to eat him. Once you’ve done this, you then need to throw the corpse down in a place where the animals will go without them seeing you and then hang around waiting for it to get eaten. Stupid.

Killing three enemies with one hit was a pain too but I foolishly tried to get this one at the beginning of the game when my weapons were shit. In the later game I had one weapon that killed everyone with one swing so this is actually a lot easier than I made it for myself.

Another fun one makes you tame a lion (you need to have acquired the skill from the skill tree) and then lead said lion to a crocodile and make them fight. This is made hard by the fact that you cannot fast travel with a lion so you have to wander the wastes of Egypt looking for a crocodile while your trusty lion follows you.

The one achievement I needed to grind out was for killing dudes (again) by firing fire arrows into oil and setting them on fire. You need to do this 30 times but there are not a lot of opportunity and also normally you have to fire arrows through fire into oil to do it. You can, however, get legendary bows which have automatic fire arrows which makes this easier.

There are another three achievements worth mentioning. You need to sell 100 trinkets at once. Trinkets are useless items that you find in pots and stuff as you search places. There appears to be a limited number of these so you need to save them up to get it. DLCs may help in making this easier to get in the future.

The one which annoyed me is for witnessing raining bugs in the desert. This means you have to run Bayak through the desert regions of Africa until he starts hallucinating. Once he starts, it’s totally random what he will see. Raining bugs is one of many hallucinations Bayak could see. Some people have reported not seeing this for several hours. What happened to me was that I saw it not once but twice without getting the achievement. I then restarted the game and it unlocked so this was one of the rare occasions where the game glitched on me and this could be an Xbox issue rather than a game issue.

The last one is the big one and it’s for clearing every location in the game. This is straight forward for the most part but also time consuming and there is one thing that nearly fucked me here too. When you are exploring certain locations, there are yellow crystals called silica that you need to pick up to complete the area. However, make sure you pick all of them up. The last location of these types requires 50 silica to complete it so if you rush through like I did and not pick them up, you will have to revisit these areas to get the missing silica.

I also had that annoying collectible issue where I was missing about four locations and had that, ‘is this the last one??’ moment when trying to find them. Pro tip for this – the map is too bright. Lower the in-game brightness right down and it will make finding those missing locations a damn sight easier – they show up on the map as question marks if you haven’t found them yet.

Downloadable Content

There are three DLCs. The first one of is a single player expansion called the Hidden Ones. Its not very long and compared to main game, the achievements aren’t that demanding. The most notable ones are for killing three dudes from a zipline, freeing twenty rebels from captivity and jumping off some statue thing between 10 am and 12pm. The reason this last one is tricky is because there is no in game clock. You have to time it based on the shadows in the game.

The second DLC, which is free, is Discovery Tour which allows you to play in a non-combat Egypt and learn all about ancient culture. This is great move that has been really well received by the public. It offers three achievements, all are easy to get it shouldn’t take more than an hour and a half to get them.

The more recently released Curse of the Pharaohs sees Bayak visit Thebes where long dead Pharaohs are coming back to life and killing people. Bayak goes on a quest to stop them and in doing so, stumbles into the afterlife. It’s probably closest to the Tyranny of King Washington DLC from Assassin’s Creed III in that it’s totally out there in terms of fantasy. This is especially the case when you end up fighting a load of giant scorpions.

Curse of the Pharaohs carries another six achievements which are straight forward to get. Thebes and its surrounding area is a lot bigger than the Hidden Ones DLC so it takes a while longer to get them all but when they charge £15.99 for the privilege, I would fucking hope for some extended gameplay. Artifex Mundi games are cheaper than this.

I had a lot of fun with Assassin’s Creed Origins and it’s definitely given me the impetus to complete the franchise. With the DLCs included though it takes up nearly 20% of the hard drive so you don’t want it sitting around forever once installed. In fact, that’s been the most annoying part of the game – having it sit there, waiting for the DLCs to come out.

Achievement wise, it’s very doable and leaves everything in the hands of the single player gamer and offers variety. In this regard, it is a great list to go through.

Mafia II

Bit of story to this one. It was a Games with Gold title a ways back and I downloaded it on to the Xbox 360 with every intention of playing it. I was then told by certain gaming friends that the game’s downloadable content was to be removed from the marketplace and that the only way to 100% the game was to get the Xbox Classics version which has the DLC included. I’ve now completed the game but for all intents and purposes the DLC is still there on the marketplace so I didn’t need to buy a copy of the game that I already had for free. For fuck’s sake.

Anyway Mafia II has us following the story of Vito Scaletta, a guy that seems set on a having a life of crime, but then gets arrested, gets conscripted, gets injured, gets illegally discharged, decides to have a non-crime related life, lifts one box in a warehouse, thinks ‘fuck this, crime is better!’ and thus starts the adventure of Mafia II.

Along for the ride is Joe Barbaro, the guy your mother warned you about who basically goes around starting trouble and gets Vito involved. What I do admire about Vito though, is his no nonsense attitude to getting stuff done. Hey Vito, go here and steal that car.  ‘Ok’. Hey Vito, here’s a gun in case you need to kill some dudes when you do. ‘Ok – and I’ll make sure I kill at least twenty dudes while I do it.’ He’s the ideal Mafia henchman which plays directly into your hands as the player.

Gameplay wise it’s fairly solid although my major criticism is the structure of the game. You have to play through chapters which take place at certain points in time but the world is a sandbox with no side missions. You basically just go from point A to point B and carry out whatever mission you are tasked with. The sandbox element to the game is almost totally redundant.

Another thing that was negative was the music as well. While I appreciate that it’s the fifties, there really is no need to have the same five songs playing over and over again on the radio. Although Dean Martin’s Ain’t That a Kick in the Head is pretty darn good. The rest of it can suck my dick.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 67 Achievements

Despite the linearity of the main game, the achievement list is quite varied. There are 22 achievements for the main story and some really annoying ones that aren’t triggered by anything from the main story but will need to be done in certain missions to get them. The first one of these is in chapter 2 where two people are having an argument over a broken down car at the side of the road. You have to wait for the two people to stop arguing and when the guy storms off, help the woman fix her car. The first time, I walked past this, thinking it was no more than an interesting piece of environment activity, seeing as the last time I tried to talk to someone, they basically told me to fuck off and mind my own business.

Another one which was fuckery was for helping a certain character at a certain part of the story escape from his house without getting caught. It’s another one of those ‘you need to know what to do before you can do it’ ones and considering the game continues on whether you fail or not, replaying this is a pain in the ass.

There are loads of bits that you have to do which require you to go out of your way during gameplay. There is one for getting 5 headshots in quick succession and the easiest way to get it is to replay a bit with a machine gun from a window. There are no scoped rifles in the game to up accuracy so this really felt like pot luck. Robbing 5 stores in 5 minutes is another thing that you have to do just for the achievement and no real gain.

There are others but these are my picks for annoyingness. The harder one is for surviving ten minutes at the maximum wanted level but there is an exploitable glitch where you can park in the car crusher and the police can’t get you.

Now for the big ones. You have to drive in 30 different vehicles but the game doesn’t track which ones, only how many different vehicles you have been in. This would have been easier if I had downloadable the DLC first as it gives you eight cars in your garage but I managed to do it without this after climbing through several cars that all look the same.

The last two achievements see you getting collectibles and this is where the chapter layout of the story can go fuck itself. There are playboy magazines and wanted posters that you need to collect spread throughout the sandbox world. The wanted posters are fine but the playboy magazines are specific to in-game chapters. This means that if even if you did what I did and do a hard playthrough from the off, you will still need a partial second playthrough to get the magazines (unless you used a guide for the first playthrough) rather than just roaming roads at your leisure to pick them up. I still don’t get the reason for this.

Downloadable Content

There are two DLCs that carry achievements for this game; Jimmy’s Revenge and Joe’s Adventures. Jimmy’s revenge is the fucker here as it requires you to kill 1,000 enemies and drive for 1,000 miles in the DLC. This is basically horrendous grinding as you will only get around 300 odd kills playing through the missions and you will only drive around a paltry 100 miles.

Thankfully, there is another exploitable glitch where you can drive through a shop window and fall through the floor of the game. This will get you another achievement for amassing 1,000,000 points in the arcade style game but also it accumulates miles very slowly. I had to leave my Xbox on overnight for several nights grinding this out.

Joe’s Adventures, which I played second, is much more forgiving in comparison. Half of the achievements are story related and out of the other five, only one of these is a pain in that you have to get 10 different score actions in the same mission. It takes a bit of planning but it’s nothing compared to driving 1,000 miles for NOTHING.

Mafia II was pretty great up until the point of finishing the main game. The DLC didn’t really add anything other than pissing off achievement hunting gamers and to be honest, didn’t really add a lot of extra story. Still, it felt like a rewarding completion add a welcome addition to the 100% club.

Dragon Age: Origins

This one goes back a long long way. I think it was back in my first year of university that I stuck Dragon Age in to my Xbox for the first time. I earned six achievements in about five hours of play, came across one monster I couldn’t kill first time, then stopped playing. I didn’t find the game play too engaging if I’m honest which may have contributed to my apathy. Anyway, after about five months of dipping in and out of the game I finally completed the last few DLCs and nailed the achievement list.

Dragon Age is/was a new action adventure RPG with an original story and characters. You play as the Grey Warden who can be from one of about six different backgrounds and also male or female. Your goal is to unite the land of Ferelden against the all consuming evil known as the darkspawn. The darkspawn and led by the archdemon, a giant ugly dragon type thing and your ultimate goal is to kill the archdemon and save the world from death and destruction. Simple enough, right?

The different character you chose makes a difference to the opening 2 hours of the game and the decisions you make will result in different outcomes that affect your personality and how other characters perceive you. The way the game is constructed is actually quite good if your mind hasn’t been destroyed by all the bang, bang shooty fun going on at the moment. All of the other party members you can recruit on your adventures have an opinion of you which can be influenced positively or negatively depending on your actions. Some of them will actually attack you if you make a decision they don’t agree with, which can result in some hilarious consequences.

One example of this is that you can actually ‘romance’ four of the in game characters. By ‘romance’ the game actually means ‘have sex with’ but you have to get some of them to fall in love with you before they will consider taking their clothes off. You can get Leliana to fall in love with you and doink her, then take her on one of the main quest missions. The decision you make at the end may force her to attack you and you will kill her – a strange turn of events considering she was rolling around semi-naked with you just the previous morning.

When I say bang, bang shooty fun destroying minds, Dragon Age is not the fastest game in the world. The combat is more about strategy than speed and dexterity and the dialogue takes forever to get through. That said, I did invest in the characters a lot and as Leliana was so hard to romance, I actually did buy in to her background in the end. I must have not been the only one either because she has her own DLC.

The gameplay element is the bit which resulted in me becoming bored. Now, there are difficulty levels and I must confess I played on the lowest one but only because the game doesn’t appear to have any kind of difficulty curve. There are some super hard bits early on and really easy bits later in the game. The attacking and defensive structure seemed too complicated for me to do well – you basically have an attack wheel and you can learn various attacks and defensive skills from levelling up. You can’t max out the skill trees so you have to pick your stuff carefully. I could never do this well so I didn’t invest too much time in it. Despite not doing this, it still took me in excess of 100 hours to complete the game.

Achievements – 1,750 Points – 76 Achievements

God, where to start with this one. Nearly half of the achievements relate the numerous DLCs so starting at the beginning feels like a reasonable idea.

There are six different types of character you can play as. Each has their own origin story and there is an achievement for completing each one. I did a couple of these at the end of the game after completing my various playthoughs but don’t panic, you do not have to complete the game six times.

In fact on to that, the maximum amount of full playthroughs you need is actually only one if you use tactical saving. You will, however, need to play for a while as a character of the opposite sex as you need to romance heterosexual male and female characters. That’s not to say Dragon Age doesn’t encompass homosexuality as there are two characters who swing both ways allowing you to engage in both gay and non-gay sex scenes.

There are four total romances and five achievements attached to them. The hardest one to do is Leliana because, to be frank, she is a fussy bitch. The others you can bed simply by engaging in casual conversation but Leliana, you’ve got to talk to her, complete her personal quest and bring her flowers before she will even consider getting down and dirty. Then to top it off, you have to have some very specific conversations with her giving the exact responses required. I managed to achieve this about half way through my first playthrough and after I did, I felt like the rest of the achievements would be easy – and I was right.

Throughout the course of the game, you are presented with 5 moral choice decisions in the main plot lines which are obviously designed to spawn a second playthrough, however a few well placed tactical saves can get around this which results in 10 achievements for the price of 5.

In addition to the moral choices, there are four different endings you can get which are in no way related to any choices you make outside of the last hour of the game. Again, another few tactical saves at the business end of the game can result in the least amount of work for the maximum reward.

There is another requirement for a partial third playthrough if you are not planning on doing the DLC. You need to get the three different classes to level 20. Thankfully, there is a glitch that can be exploited at the beginning on the game to get to level 20. Having done it twice, I have to say it’s not quick when you have to rinse and repeat the same conversation over and over again but it’s a lot quicker than playing through the entire game three times.

Outside of this, there are a few other things you need to do such as intimidate and persuade a certain amount of people,  kill a certain dragon, inflict 250 damage with one hit (use a mage’s mana cleanse ability) keep your troops alive in the final battle(most easily done by not using them) and kill 1,000 darkspawn. This last one is the most arduous. You have to personally kill the darkspawn but the game only tracks the party kills, not your individual ones. Also, there isn’t an infinite number o darkspawn in the game once you get to a certain point. Thankfully, it counts kills up to a death or reload which means you can rinse and repeat the final battle over and over to grind this one out.

Downloadable Content

There are a grand total of eight DLCs available for Dragon Age. Three of them form part of the main game so playing it when I did was actually an advantage for these. The 3 DLCs in the main game aren’t really noteworthy but two achievements are missable. During The Stone Prisoner missions, you can miss one of the two achievements available if you don’t do the correct actions at a certain point in time. In Warden’s Keep, you will come across a potion which you have to drink but the game asks you if you want to destroy it.

The other five are standalone DLCs which can be played at any point. Leliana’s Song and Darkspawn Chronicles are not connected to the storyline from the main game whereas the other three are. Leliana’s Song has another two missable achievements where you need to either collect some stuff or perform certain actions at the beginning of the DLC.

Darkspawn Chronicles sees you take control of the darkspawn for the final battle and you have to kill the grey wardens. This is only DLC that is wildly different from the main game and it’s a massive faff for the achievements. You basically have to get all the different types of darkspawn to like you to the maximum level. If they die as your companion, the like meter resets and you have to start again. You also have to save an ogre at the beginning and keep him with you for the entire DLC. It’s quick but not straight forward.

The next one on the list is Awakening which serves to extend the story from the main game. You don’t keep your companions from the main game though and I found it difficult to invest in these new characters. By this point I was bored of the game play too. There are three missables in this DLC, two of them are related to a choice you have to make so another tactical save is needed. The other one is for upgrading your hold fully which you need to complete side quests for. This DLC is massive and takes up to ten hours to complete. It felt like twenty after the boredom set in.

The last two DLCs see you complete smaller missions and thankfully neither of them have any missables – the only DLCs to not have them. Nothing really worth mentioning other than the fact that the game difficulty comes in to play here. After not having to do anything on any specific difficulty, the two DLCs both have bosses that need to be beaten on hard. Witch Hunt isn’t particularly difficult if you have maxed your level but Golems of Amgarrak offers a ridiculous boss fight that it nearly impossible if you don’t prepare with over 300 health potions or exploit a glitch where you can’t be hurt. As you can probably guess, I took the glitch option and smashed him on the first attempt – very rarely do I get to say that even with glitch exploitation.

The main game of Dragon Age was enough for me. The extra DLCs gave people more of what they wanted but playing it when all of them were released, it became more of a chore than anything else. There are a total of 35 missable achievements across all of the DLCs and game so getting all the achievements in the quickest time takes a little bit of planning and lots of patience.

Dragon Age was a rewarding completion despite the onset of boredom towards the end and I haven’t written off Dragon Age 2 or Inquisition just yet. Maybe their reviews will appear here in 2025.