Cars 2

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

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

Assault Android Cactus

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

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

The Witness

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

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

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

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

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

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

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

Livelock

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Multiplayer

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

Downloadable Content – N/A

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

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.

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.

Back to the Future: The Game - 30th Anniversary Edition

This is the second game from my Bean Dive that I’ve seen off and I’m not sure how I feel about the experience. It took a while to get through and had some ups and downs. I bought the game a long  time ago with no real intention of playing it straight away and the only reason I chose it now was because the title is so long, it was throwing my game collection on True Achievements out of whack. The game became Games with Gold on Xbox One after I had bought it on the 360 but I didn’t get it for a second playthrough and I’m glad as I don’t think I could go through it again.

Back to the Future follows the story of Marty McFly and Doc Emmett Brown after the events of the movie trilogy. Doc has gone back in time again for some reason and Marty has to find him… for another reason. They eventually meet up and make a load of fuck-tarded decisions to try and fix the timeline after Doc is killed.

It’s the same as the movies in this regard in that you have to suspend your disbelief in terms of the liberties they take with time travel. Only the liberties taken in the game are a lot bigger and more noticeable. Essentially every concept of time travel is completely ignored to drive the story.

The second thing that annoyed me was Marty. In the movies he’s a cool, easy-going guy but in this game, he’s an arrogant fucker with a stupid face. His dialogue is annoying. His face is annoying. And his environmental movement is annoying. Although this is more of a gameplay thing, the camera angles and walk directions are so fucked up that the biggest challenge you will face is getting Marty from one location to another.

Well, that’s not entirely true. Working out what to do is the tricky bit. Unlike most other TellTale games I’ve played, it’s not linear and you will have to click on most objects in the environment just to figure out what to do. I had to use a guide for most it as most actions are convoluted.

Sound wise, the voices are pretty good. They got Christopher Lloyd to reprise the role of Doc for it as well as Thomas F. Wilson as Biff and there’s even a cameo by Michael J. Fox. They couldn’t get him to do Marty’s lines though, which is a shame because it may have made Marty likeable. Outside of the voices, the music is annoying and kept on playing the crescendo bit from the movies. All the time. Sometimes for no reason.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 59 Achievements

The game is split into five episodes, each with their own save and load section which makes getting achievements easier because if you cock up, like I did twice, you won’t have to play the whole thing through again. It’s excessively long too, each episode clocking in at over 2 hours. The gameplay isn’t enthralling either and I fell asleep a few times!

Roughly half of the achievements can be obtained just by playing through the game but the others take some planning. They all involve some kind of action, or repeated action and also relate back to the films in some way. The most irritating of these was in the final episode where you have to repeatedly talk to a cactus to get all of the ‘dialogue’ that comes out of it. It’s weird and there’s nothing in the achievement description to give you sensible directions as to what to do.

There are loads like this – too many to go through individually but that’s basically it for the achievements. With a guide it’s possible to get them all in a single playthrough. Without a guide you will be replaying forever.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Back to the Future: The Game was a partially enjoyable story albeit with an annoying Marty McFly. The gameplay was more frustrating than fun and I can see how gameplay can actually ruin the story of a game from this experience. It may be why TellTale opted for more linear games with future titles.

Achievements wise, it will take over 12 hours to run through the game to get them all, but that’s only if you use a guide.

Outlast

Here’s a review that I didn’t think I would ever be able to write. I got Outlast as part of Xbox’s Games with Gold back in December 2016. I starting playing it in January 2017 and completed in April 2018. The story was I started it, played it once, didn’t get into it and then didn’t go back to it again for a year. I returned to it with zeal, hammered through 90% of the game and the DLC in a week or so and that just left the last three achievements. Which I’ll cover later.

Outlast is a true survival horror game. You come to an asylum, off the back of an email sent from an anonymous source, armed with just a video camera. You have to navigate through the asylum trying to avoid being killed by the numerous crazy inmates and the notorious man-monster Chris Walker. You obviously can’t defend yourself so you only have two choices; hide or run.

At first, I thought the game was quite slow and laborious but on reflection, I think this was just me not being used to playing a game without a weapon. Once I got going, it’s quite scary at first and does all the things a survival horror is supposed to do quite well. I was constantly in fear of my life praying that that no one saw me in the dark. When they do see you, its basically a case of run for your life and pray they don’t see you hide. You can close doors behind you to slow them down and one criticism of the AI is that it’s so dumb that if you close a door normally, they need to bash it down, rather than just opening it which gives you a few extra seconds to hide from them. To be fair, this makes the game fair rather than swinging the gameplay in your favour - especially considering you can actually fight anyone.

Essentially that’s all there is to it – you make your way through the asylum, hiding and running until the end of the game. Without a guide, the biggest challenge is working out where to go. Some areas of the game are pitch black and you need to rely on your camera light to get through. This will cause the camera to run out of battery power so you need to try and find batteries to keep the camera going.

The most notable bad guy is Chris Walker who, if he catches you, will just rip your… body off of your head - you have to see this for it to make sense – and its essentially a one hit kill. It’s painful when you have to watch his grotesque face smiling at you as you die.

Musically its great as well. It has the depressing tone when you are alone which suits the game perfectly and when someone sees you and starts chasing you, it ups tempo and gets the heart racing. Every encounter is a life of death situation and the music captures the essence of this too.

Graphically… well… it looks good but there are very few interactions with the environment other than picking up collectibles and batteries and considering how much stuff there is, it almost feels like a waste. In addition to this, I encountered a few game-breaking glitches, one of which caused me to throw up in my mouth a little bit and I’ll go into that a bit later.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 17 Achievements

With only 17 achievements you could be forgiven for thinking this is an easy ride. It’s far from it. The main game has 11 achievements, 5 of which can be obtained by playing the game from start to finish. I got the first two of these before stopping and I’m embarrassed to admit that this probably equated to about half an hour’s worth of game play once the routes are known. It’s probably possible to speed run the game in less than 1 hour but realistically it’s a 1 to 2 hour completion assuming you don’t get any collectibles.

There are also four missable achievements for stuff that you need to do while playing through the game. 2 of these are for collecting all the documents and recordings and another is gained almost at the beginning of the game for pressing a button on an elevator and this is really easy to miss.

One of the bigger ones, which is also fucking stupid, is for playing through the whole game without hiding under a bed or in a locker. There are certain points of the game, even right at the beginning where you are actually told to hide in the locker and having watched the videos of this being done there are really stupid ways of getting around it and most of the time it looks like luck that people survive.

Thankfully for this one, someone figured out that you can actually just do chapter select and do the last part of the game and this counts. There is no need to hide for the last ten minutes or so or the main game which actually makes this achievement really easy.

The last two achievements are two of the hardest I’ve probably earned. Firstly you have to play through the game on insane difficulty. This entails getting through the whole game without being killed otherwise you have to start the whole thing again. Secondly, for the ENERGISER achievement, you have to do this without reloading the camera batteries. In a game that is deliberately dark. Not just dark to the point where it’s hard to see but dark as in you totally, absolutely cannot see anything at all without the camera light.

Essentially to get these two took me a few weeks of trial and error couple with some weeks of getting up the energy to actually try in the first place. With a run not using the camera, you essentially have to know the whole game from start to finish and get through the non-death parts without using the camera at all. It’s basically repetitive trial and error that stops the game from being scary and sees it become annoying. I was sick of the sight of Chris Walker by the end.

Here comes the biggest game breaking glitch. I was ploughing through an insane run and had got further than I had ever been before. I jumped off a platform in a fairly innocuous position and got stuck on the scenery and was unable to continue. This has happened to me twice before when I was crouching but the game managed to right itself. Not this time though and I had to start again through no fault of my own. My rage was so great that I got my head down and made the next run the successful one that netted me the completion.

But seriously, this kind of shit can FUCK RIGHT OFF. I don’t care what level your company is operating at, AAA or ID, sort your shit out. This is fully unacceptable and Red Barrels should be ashamed of themselves. There. I managed to hold that in for 13 days (at the time of drafting this review.)

Downloadable Content

I actually put off the LUNATIC and ENERGISER achievements until after I had played through the Whistleblower DLC as I didn’t fancy manning up to the challenge at the time. Whistleblower sees you take control of the guy who sends the email to the other guy at the beginning of the main game and you essentially have to escape from the asylum. In terms of storyline, continuity and framing, Whistleblower is probably one of the best game additions I’ve ever played. In terms of gameplay, it’s more of the same of the original game with different enemies and a different protagonist who gets crippling injuries you have to cope with. Same video camera though.

There are three achievements for making it through the DLC unscathed and this is also a lot easier than the main game. In addition, you get another two achievements for getting all the collectibles.

That just leaves the Insane run through for the completion and if you’ve done the main game (again, which I did after this) it’s a cakewalk in comparison. It’s still difficult though and I got caught right at the end of the playthrough only to be thrown back to the start. That was hard to take but I got through it in the end.

Outlast is probably one of my proudest completions. Getting through it has given me a second wind to carry on to more challenging things and push through my backlog of games more quickly. I did actually find myself thinking about playing another insane run after I’d finished. Then I remembered I don’t hate myself and uninstalled it forever.

Project CARS

I original got Project CARS free from Games with Gold with Xbox and it went straight into the backlog despite having some online achievements. I started playing Project CARS after a friend of mine posted about the community events being stopped – of which there is a related achievement which is now discontinued. If you are starting Project CARS now, you will not be able to get all the achievements. You have been warned.

This has taken the best part of six months for me to finish for the simple reason that there is soooooo much racing that needs to be done.

Project CARS is a racing game with the tag line, ‘a racing game by racers for racers’ or something like that. When I started playing I was immediately afraid that I wouldn’t be able complete the game at all. Getting a car around the track in one go proved impossible. That said, I started on the Pro setting. After epically failing, I dumbed it right down to amateur and found that I could then get a car round the track and my hope for completion was restored but only after I managed to win the first go karting race.

As mentioned above, there is a lot of racing that needs to be done. There is a career mode which sees you go from racing the above mentioned go karts all the way up to LMP 1 – which are the cars that do the Le Mans 24-hour race. There is an online mode where you race against other people with a long list of customisable settings; the community events in which you use a specific car to on a specific course to set the fastest time... And then there’s free play… but that’s it. The main feature of the game that I didn’t use was for customising and tuning the cars. I used default settings but this is a big part of the game for racing enthusiasts and something that sets it apart from other racing games.

The one shit thing about career mode is that you get invitational events that you enter year on year. There are a limited amount of these that come up but there doesn’t appear to be anything that shows which ones you won and which ones you haven’t raced so I found myself manually checking each time an even came round until I got it sorted in my head which ones I had done. It doesn’t help that a lot of them have similar names too.

The career mode is purely driven on your performance in various classes and there is no money with which to buy new cars. The sheer amount of races that come up here though, is quite daunting but more on that later.

Graphically, it’s very pretty and lots of detail has been put in to the courses and cars. Musically, it does that thing where it tries to be operatically epic but this is almost cliché at this stage.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Despite being a racing game, it doesn’t half make you do a lot of shit. And it will take a long time. Outside of the multiplayer and community events I’ve mentioned above, the career mode alone will be a time sync. You basically have to win 16 of the main championships which equates to 16 full seasons of racing. Thankfully you can reduce the season length to minimise the race lengths but several championships will have you completing races that are five laps minimum with a mandatory pitstop. Oh, and you also have to defend a championship 3 times, which means you have to complete the same seasonal championship 4 times in a row.

Outside of career mode, there is a lot of random stuff to do but most of it can be done in free play mode using specific cars on specific tracks. A few are worth mentioning though. One achievement requires you to finish 3 consecutive laps within 0.1 seconds of each other. I actually think this is impossible without letting an AI driver do it for you. There is another one that can be done without doing anything and that’s completing the California highway in under 9 minutes in an American Car. If you simulate it from the start, the AI will complete this is around seven and a half minutes.

There is another pain in the ass that can’t be AI done and that’s for completing the Monaco Grand Prix circuit in reverse. Such a pain in the ass as the bends are tight and you can’t crash. However that’s not the worst one. The game also wants you to race continuously for 24 hours. This is utter madness but at least it can be simulated from a race perspective. However, don’t do what I did and leave the penalties on. I thought it would be fine and my AI driver would race by the rules. Apparently not, as I came home from work to find him parked up in the garage after being disqualified.

Multiplayer

I didn’t have much of an interaction with the online community and after my experience on Forza Horizon, I had no interest in doing so from the beginning. One of my friends was kind enough to lend me some of his time to grind out the online achievements in private match ups.

Essentially this boiled down to winning 51 races or at least finish in the podium positions. This is a little quirk of the game’s achievements. The description states ‘more than 50 races’… so 51 races then. Thanks.

In addition to this there is a scary but funny one. You have a win a race using manual gears with no driving aids using cockpit view. This may seem daunting at first but I started up a race with one other random. Another quirk of Project CARS is that the start of a race is totally manual if you set it up without driving aids. But no one reads the sets up apparently as the guy I was racing went storming off the line before the green light and was immediately disqualified. All I had to do was get around the track in one piece. What I didn’t know though is that Monza short course has a chicane at the end that cuts off half the road. I smashed into the barrier and nearly fucked my car beyond working… but it could still go in first gear so I hobbled across the line and unlocked the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Project CARS was a very rewarding, time consuming completion that did offer some racing fun but long outstayed its welcome in terms of going for the 100%. I’ve had my fill of racing games now though and won’t be buying any new ones. Hopefully reviews of Forza 5, Forza 3 and Forza Horizon 2 will follow.

The Turing Test

True Achievements puts on a playlist every month where they have a featured game that everyone plays. I haven’t taken part in one of these before but I did in November as The Turing Test was the nominated game and it was being given away for free as part of Games with Gold. Instead of accumulating further unplayed games, I thought I would try and get another one off of the list.

The Turing Test follows the story of Ava Turing as she wakes up in a research facility on Europa (A moon of Jupiter I believe?). She is going in search of her crew with AI, TOM accompanying her. The story line follows Ava’s interactions with TOM as they discuss AI and the value of the life from the perspective of a human versus a machine. There are no hilarious consequences here, but I did find the dialogue exchanges interesting for the most part.

The gameplay itself sees you using an equivalent of the portal gun to move energy around to try and get through a series of rooms. There are seven chapters each with ten levels of gently increasing difficulty that you must traverse in order to try and get to the rest of your crew. You are introduced to different mechanics as you travel through the levels so the game evolves as you progress. It is also very Portal­-esque in this approach.

I was also very proud of myself for completing this one as I only had to use a video guide for the very last puzzle of the story. Such is my mind that I think the puzzles must have been easier than what I’m used to, or I’ve become more puzzle-gaming clever in my old age? Who knows. At certain points I thought that maybe I wasn’t solving them in the way the game intended them to be solved... but that’s just more points for me for ingenuity.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

In terms of achievements, there isn’t much else to add. 8 of them are obtained from completing the game. There are seven secret areas, one per chapter, that need t be solved for the 100%. These are in the same place in all chapters though so you don’t need to do much searching for them.

Again with the optional puzzles, I was able to solve most of them without the assistance of video guides with the exception of two but one of these was really stupid. The first one was in chapter 2 where you have to walk slowly across a light bridge. There wasn’t really any clues I could see that pointed towards this being the way to do it and compared to some of the other puzzles, this one was a little outside the box.

The other one was in chapter six and this annoyed me a little bit. You have to solve various light orb puzzles to unlock gates to get to the end of a long corridor. At the end of this corridor is another gate that appeared to be locked and I couldn’t see a puzzle I needed to solve to open it. I watched a video where the guy doing the puzzle just walked through the door without doing anything! He also thought it was locked and when I tried again it let me though. No idea why this was the case, but this was the hardest room to solve to get 100%.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Turing Test took me around 7 hours to complete without the use of guides. With a walkthrough it can probably be done in less than three so it’s a completionist’s dream as well as a pretty solid puzzle game with decent story element to boot.

Gone Home: Console Edition

In an effort to avoid a build up of games going forward I recently decided to buy about ten new ones in a sale. Stupid I know. I’m just throwing this out there though. Gone Home: Console Edition was a Games with Gold title from mid-September to mid-October so I have sort of prevented build up by getting this one off the list as soon as it was on it. At the time of completion anyway...

I have to say I didn’t think there was much to write home about with this one. I found the story both pretentious and depressing for the most part and the way your character moves about the house is slow and laborious.

I am sure there is more to the story but I really couldn’t be bothered to find and read all the crap around the house to try to understand what was going on. And I didn’t really feel I had a reason to. The game didn’t give me anything that made me want to invest in the characters. It just dumps you at the front of house and wants to find out stuff so I think I can be forgiven for looking to a quick way to the end.

The house design and layout is questionable too. It’s a big house with lots of rooms but not a lot of it is easy to get to. For example, most houses would have easy to access kitchens and bathrooms but they are not central to the house. If you want a sandwich and you are in the study, get your hiking boots on.

Musically again, it’s just depressing and this appears to be a growing theme of this genre of games. They make you want to kill yourself. I don’t know whether some developers have a mission to cure the world of gaming but Gone Home is definitely evidence of this.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

The headline here is that it’s probably possible to complete in less than an hour but some of these things are just stupid. And I got lucky.

The entire list, with the exception of completing the game, is missable. There are two timed runs which are the biggest challenge. The one I got lucky on was for completing the game in under 10 minutes finding all 24 journal entries. I did this twice, collecting 23 entries both times and being annoyed at myself for missing one on my second attempt... but the achievement unlocked anyway. I guess I managed to trick the game into thinking I had them all because I missed a different one on both playthroughs. Who knows.

The second timed run is for completing the game in less than a minute. I know, right? You have to get the key to front door, run to the secret room, and then run to the attic. It took me a few attempts to get right but you can imagine my frustration at this achievement coupled with the protagonist’s ability, or lack thereof, to actually move.

The others are all for doing miscellaneous things around the house with the exception of the last one I unlocked which was for going around the house with modifiers on to collect all director commentary nodes. Now, I’m not being funny but this did feel a lot like a celebration of the game but as I didn’t like the game to begin with, this just added to the pretence for me. Especially when you get to the one about the ‘Easter Egg.’ For a start, one of the miscellaneous achievements is related to the Easter Egg. It’s not an Easter Egg if you point it out to people as an objective. Secondly, having one of the voiceover actors repeatedly meow into a microphone in a monotone is not my idea of Easter Egg content either.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Gone Home: Console Edition was not a title for me but I can see where others may find enjoyment in such things. It’s all about media for me. This would have been much more suited to a novella of written text. That way I may have been able to find some engagement with the characters. That said, I’ve also read some really shitty books in my time.

D4: Dark Dreams Don't Die

Okay this one is a total mind fuck. Remember my Deadly Premonition review? Well this one is from the same guys and they haven’t got any more sane between games. I got D4 while it was on Xbox One’s Games with Gold list. I can’t remember when this was now but I was so keen to play it, it survived several hard drive culls when I’ve been making room for bigger titles.

D4 follows the story of David Young as he goes on a quest to find the person responsible for the death of his wife Peggy. But he isn’t just an ordinary investigator, oh no. He can use certain objects (known as mementos) to travel back in time to see events as they unfold. And also get involved in them which I’m sure should have irrevocable time paradox consequences later.

Remember Forrest Kaysen from Deadly Premonition? He turns up as David’s partner here and is supposedly a good guy. He certainly isn’t some kind of mutant being from another planet or something else bizarre which does make this slightly more believable. David also has a cat (Or a roommate?) called Amanda. Amanda is essentially a woman who thinks she’s a cat. But David has a cat in the flashbacks? And I think the cat was called Amanda? Anyway, to cut a long story short, David has a cat-person called Amanda who sells him all kinds of stuff and lives with him.

So that’s the background for this wacky game, now on to the actual game element. David has a problem in the same way that the cars had problems in Deadly Premonition. The cars would run out fuel driving from one end of town to the other. David will pass out from lack of energy if he opens too many cupboards. A large element of the game involves keeping David fed and watered and doped up on Tequila so he can carry out the various things required to solve his investigation. It works like a point and click adventure game in that you have to direct David by clicking on certain points in the environment to navigate him to objects of interest. Like cupboards. And plants.

I don’t want to ruin too much of the game for those that haven’t played it as the story is the main focal point but pretty much every character is weird, some outwardly and others creepily. There is a really tall doctor who, for some unexplained reason, is always carrying a knife and fork; a weird guy who is so into fashion that he carries a mannequin around with him and appears to think she is a real person; and Forrest who I’ve already mentioned has a bizarre appetite where he eats more food than his body weight – and he’s not a small guy. Some missions invite David to eat with Forrest and in stark contrast, David doesn’t eat anything other than the stuff you make him eat.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 78 Achievements

For a standard 1,000 points, D4 has a sizeable achievement list but they do offer a lot for not doing very much. A prime example is the first one you will get which is for ‘Started playing Season One’ – so start playing the game. Don’t be fooled by this though, the entire game relates to Season One as Season One is the entire game.

The game consists of a Prologue, Episode One and Episode Two and you will get 9 whole achievements for playing from A to B. The game allows you to replay episodes and none of the episodes are particularly long and as such, none of the achievements are missable and require you to replay the whole thing. This even applies to completing the game without retrying. If you don’t feed David, he will pass out and you will fail but you only have to do each episode separately for this.

Aside from completing the main game, there are achievements for doing extra cases for the other characters you meet. You will get 2 achievements for each character; one for doing one of their cases and one for doing all of them.

There are also four quick time events in the game and each one carries three achievements – one for actually doing it (story related), another for doing without any poor or misses (and if you get enough of these you will ‘die’) and another for getting 75% or higher score which, due to the nature of the quick time events themselves, is actually quite difficult. The game is designed to utilise the Kinnect and these bits don’t really showcase its ability to accurately read what you’re doing.

Pretty much everything about the achievement list is notable. You have to find over 75% of everything you can either collect, push and observe as well as gathering witness accounts. You have to find all of the collectibles which includes letters from Little Peggy, Scrap Book articles and Golden Credits. On top of this, the biggest pain in the ass is for eating all of the items on the food list. There are a lot and you can only find some of them in the game environment. By the end of the game, you will need to buy lots of the items from the store – something that you won’t have enough money for without grinding out some serious credits.

That leaves some of the more frustrating achievements. They aren’t necessarily difficult but they do take some effort to get. You need to play this minigame where clovers fall from the top of the screen and you have to move a big hand to catch them all. If one clover hits the floor it’s game over. You have to amass 1,200 points during one game to net some more achievements. Once you have played the game during the story and completed the game, you can replay it from David’s flat at any time.

The last lot of achievements I got related to getting 100,000 credits, activating vision 100 times and ingesting 500 fluid ounces of alcohol. You can use the clover game above to get credits relatively quickly by exploiting a glitch. What you have to do is play the game and get a high score. Once you lose, go to play the game but instead of actually playing you can quit out straight away and it will reward you with the same amount of credits it gave it you during your last play. What I did was play this out then use to money to buy alcohol. You need alcohol to use vision so I used vision until I didn’t have any more, then drank some more alcohol then used vision. Rinse and repeat until they all unlocked.

There was one more that was probably the biggest pain and it involves reading all of the fortune cookies in David’s flat. This was a pain because you can only read three at a time, there are more three different fortunes per episode and David gets ridiculously worn out from cracking open a cookie. There is also no tracking involved so you will have no idea which episode you need to replay to get the remaining fortunes. Basically it’s trial and error and it was only because I fucked up the quick time events so much that I got this earlier than the last one.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The fact that there is no DLC is disappointing. The story sucks you in and actually makes you want to know exactly what is going on in this bizarre universe. Then the game ends with the promise of Season Two. It’s been more than two years since Season One now so I doubt I will ever be able to finish the story and that for me this is the biggest disappointment about D4. It’s a real shame that it appears to be a funding reason that we won’t see an end to it so I guess not a lot of people engaged with the game like I did.

Saints Row IV

Saint’s Row and Saints Row: The Third have now been completed while I’m slowly working through the arduous progress of getting all of the multiplayer done in Saint’s Row II and now they have released Saint’s Row IV on Games with Gold. I couldn’t help but pick it up and start playing it straight away... despite the fact I had already got it on the One as part of a compilation – which means that Saint’s Row IV will be the second game after The Wolf Among Us to have two completions on my gamer profile.

In Saint’s Row IV, you pick up where you left off in the last instalment although it’s fantastically more ridiculous as the leader of the Saints is about to become President of the United States. Fast forward to you actually being the president, and then the world is then invaded by aliens. The aliens conveniently abduct the leader of the Saints and the entire crew before destroying planet earth and flying off. This is a massive far cry from the Grand Theft Auto clone that was the first one of the series – it just continually refuses to take itself seriously.

The main body of the game sees you fighting against the alien forces within a simulated Steelport created by the aliens. The alien abduction is basically a framing device to make the gameplay as weird as fuck. You have ‘superpowers’ and crazy weapons in the simulation as you fight back against the aliens by trying to crash the simulation. However, it all feels a little pointless as the aliens have already destroyed earth so you have nowhere to go even if you do win.

As with any Saints Row, the gameplay is very clean. My only real criticism is that sometimes the rag doll physics can be a little too crazy at times and the difficulty curve is non-existent. It suffers from the same upgrade philosophy of the third game where you basically become indestructible with unlimited ammo, only this time it seems to happen even quicker. It’s also a bizarre change of pace that when you unlock super sprint, you no longer have to use cars as it’s faster to run. Mental.

Interestingly, for me, this made the game’s licenced soundtrack redundant but you did have the option to play music while running around – it was a simulation after all. I found this too immersion-breaking though, which I accept doesn’t make a lot of sense when you are fighting an alien race through their artificially created world.

Achievements – 1,200 Points – 70 Achievements

Where to start with this one... Missables? There are only two, thank God. One of them is for giving up on fighting the aliens and simply submitting during the middle of the game. You can be quite easily forgiven for not doing this. Why would you voluntarily kill yourself in a game for an achievement? Oh, and it’s a secret too.

The other one is basically for completing all the side missions for your homies before completing the game, however you get a ‘point of no return’ warning and you also need to do them all for the other achievements if you are going for the 100% anyway.

Another notable one, or at least it was for me, was the achievement for creating and sharing a character online as Volition worked hard to fix this, as per Saints Row: The Third. This is only achievement that requires an online connection.

The rest of the game is pretty much as per my Saints Row: The Third review, with the exception of one achievement which allows me to rant. Saints Row: The Third had an achievement that required you to play the game for 30 hours. I remember saying that I was quite happy with this as it allowed you to complete the entire game and DLC in roughly 30 hours. Saints Row IV wants you to play for 40 hours with less DLC content and a noticeably shorter main game – a tad annoying. The timing of my achievement unlocks shows this as well. I completed all the other achievements, inclusive of DLC and had to leave the game running over night two nights in a row to get the required time to complete it. Ridiculous.

Downloadable Content

There are two separate DLCs for this one. They are both ridiculous but, How the Saints Saved Christmas is possibly one of the worst DLC expansions I’ve ever played, even going as far as making that stupid space thing from the third one look good by comparison.

Again, I won’t say much more than that. The DLC achievements don’t have any notoriety and they aren’t massively different from Saints Row: The Third.

If you liked Saints Row: The Third, Saints Row IV acts as possibly the biggest DLC pack you’ll find offering more of the same at an increased level of craziness. It did get a little bit boring towards the end but not enough to put me off finishing the series. With just Saints Row II and Gat of Hell to go, the end is at least in sight.