The Quick Completion Compendium - Volume 1

Following a switch in focus, I took the time to clear out my game collection of any games that took less than an hour to complete. All of these I bought during sales for days when I didn’t have a lot of time to play but after sampling some of this bile, I’ve decided that it’s not a great use of time to keeping doing this.

The problem with the industry at the moment is that it’s saturated with rubbish like this, however in amongst the majority drivel there are some genuinely good games. The problem is heighted by the fact that everyone seems to review short games like they have descended from heaven to offer up some enlightenment to us pathetic masses but this is just more contrived bullshit. This has been true for previous games I’ve reviewed like Gone Home and Dear Esther and I’m not sure why these have been received in such good light when they are both developed by twats and offer little to no game play.

Anyway, this selection serves to act as a demonstration as to why it’s best to avoid these games altogether unless the critical world decides to write some balanced reviews on actual games.

Anyway, that’s enough of my personal drivel. Let’s kick off where I started and that’s with a game called Scalextric 

Scalextric

I’m sure many others were sucked in to this for the reason I was and that’s nostalgia. This could have been a great concept for a game with lots of options to expand on an established formula, however in reality, what we have is a piece of shit that gets everything wrong from the menu onwards. Getting into a race is difficult, racing around the track is luck based because the trigger sensitivities are well off and the AI varies from completely retarded to borderline cheating.

Oh, and every time I completed a race, the game would get stuck and I was have to exit to the console home page and relaunch it. It takes less than an hour but most of that time was spent reloading the game.

Summary Review: Piece of Shit.

Rememoried

Rememoried has a level skip function which allows you to breeze through the achievements in a matter of minutes. However, I do have some integrity so I thought no, I’m going to play it the way it’s meant to be played. That lasted for three ‘levels’ which comprised of horseshit gameplay and narrative so pretentious and contrived that if my ears could commit suicide, they would have. It seems the developers agree with this assessment as otherwise, they wouldn’t have put in the level skip feature.

Summary: Pretentious Contrived Garage.

 

Storm Boy

This is 50:50 one because as a narrative device, it is effective and pelicans have now become my third favourite game-animal behind cats and foxes. There is a genuine attempt at generating an emotive reaction from the player and it is effective. However, a game should be a game first and Storm Boy could achieve all have achieved all of its goals by being a children’s book. The gameplay elements are just drivel and kill the pacing the story.

Summary: Emotive but not a real game

 

 

METAGAL

Why the title feels the need to be in capital letters, I don’t know. This one is a game where you shoot stuff as a girl android in 2D retro environments. The gameplay is actually quite difficult but the achievement list doesn’t require you to get very far. This is a blessing because when I say it’s difficult, it’s mainly down to terrible jump controls and having to avoid a million bottomless pits. It’s another cheap cash grab and perhaps the easy achievement list is intended to get people to buy it. If that is correct, it’s a poor business plan as only 1% of the gaming community care about Gamerscore.

Summary: Lazy Cash Grab

Hexologic

This is the exception that proves the rule. Hexologic is a game where you have to solve number problems by placing up to three dots in a hexagon to get a line of Hexagons to add up to a given total. I’ve made that sound more complicated that it is but essentially; Maths plus Logic equals good puzzle game.

As you progress, more rules come into play and the puzzles get more complicated. The interface is easy to use (though quickly flicking through the 90-plus levels can cause motion sickness) and the puzzles are very rewarding. It is the diamond in the rough as far as this post is concerned and, it’s actually a proper puzzle game with rewarding payoff.

Summary: Solid Puzzle Game

NORTH

Almost saving the best to last, I would say NORTH summarises everything wrong with quick completions. I’m not even sure what the concept is. You play as… someone who goes to a poorly rendered environment for some bizarre reason. There is a story told through letters to your sister and it’s effectively a walking simulator which one arbitrary speed racing gameplay section thrown in. How anyone would publish such utter drivel is beyond me.

Unlike the above games though, NORTH was critically panned by most people and no one I know that’s played it has a nice word to say about it. Honestly, I played it to see what the fuss was about which probably makes me part of the problem where even bad press is good press. However, this will help me massively in the future, because now I know who to listen to when it comes to selecting games to buy.

Summary: What the Fuck

Achievements – 6,000 Points – 65 Achievements

So 6,000 points in around five hours… but it’s really not worth it. If you’re keen on points and don’t care about having fun then go for it but it you want to be choosey and like puzzles, then Hexologic is the only one worth playing here. Storm Boy does offer an emotive story but it’s not the main purpose of a game.

Jump, Step, Step

Unfortunately, I’m not very good at doing what I say I’m going to do. Jump, Step, Step was added to my wishlist a while back and it came up in a sale so I bought it. However, in a desperate attempt to not get a further build up of sale games I played this one straight away.

Jump, Step, Step is a puzzle game where you have to enter commands to get the game’s protagonist, Bob, from somewhere to somewhere else in order to build a spaceship to escape the block world you have landed on.

The gameplay consists of entering commands into the game which tell Bob to move forward, jump, turn left or right and later on, do all sorts of complex shit that a standard human brain would not be able to compute just by looking at Bob’s position. You have to get him from the start position to the end position in one go just by looking at his start and end locations.

It’s a great idea in principle but it suffers for two things and one of them really pissed me off. The first is the camera angle the game is set from. Everything is slanted at a 45 degree angle which makes working out left and right more challenging than it should be. The second is a killer. There is one part of the game where there are moving problems you have to get across to carry on. Now, the game is run from a user command prompt so you can enter the right commands but if you don’t press ‘execute’ at the right time, Bob will die. This is absurdly stupid as it’s down to total luck whether you get across or not.

Graphically and musically, it’s cartoony graphics with god awful music that can only have been designed to irritate.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

It’s the minimum possible haul for this one and six of them are earned from completing the game but this is easier said than done if you don’t have a guide with the images of the button commands you need to enter.

The amount of trial and error required to get through some of the puzzles must be insane, especially when you have to enter commands depending on which one of four random directions Bob could end up facing. There are more ridiculous commands after this, especially the ones needed to fight Alice at the end, and I won’t even try to explain them.

There are four missable achievements and three of them are sort of related. The first one though, it is at odds with the last one. You are required to die on a spike. Incidentally this was the second achievement I earned and fits with the trial and error philosophy as you have to know what a spike does in order to get passed it.

In between the start and the finish of the game there are two puzzles, including defeating Alice, that have to be done in a certain amount of moves or less – easy with a guide.

The last one is for completing the whole game in a perfect go without making any mistakes. Flashes of Outlast came back to me for this one, especially with the sliding platforms mentioned earlier that have a tendency to randomly kill you. In addition to that, the button configurations get really complicated and one wrong move will void the achievement. Okay, so its not the same intensity or difficulty as Outlast but it’s still frustrating to fuck it up after 45 minutes of gameplay.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s technically possible to get all of the achievements in Jump, Step, Step in less than an hour but this was not the case for me. While the premise was good, I didn’t think it was very well executed and the sliding platforms was a deal breaker, especially in such a short game.