Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden

This is another Artifex Mundi title and the last one I am likely to play for a while. At the time of completion there were no more games available on the marketplace and this one felt a bit stale after the time invested in the rest of the titles.

Abyss follows the story of a girl who goes deep sea diving looking for her lover Robert after he goes missing. She stumbles across Eden, an underwater city, similar to Rapture from Bioshock except instead of Big Daddys there are these Wraith things that suck the life out of you. They are apparently trying to resurrect some kind of ‘evil one’ and Robert is the vessel and you need to save him. The storyline is tried and tested and is only really there to give you a reason to go from one puzzle to the next.

The puzzles and hidden picture scenes are essentially the same as before but Abyss does require you to go back and forth a lot and some of the hidden picture scenes reopen despite you thinking you were done with the area some time ago. It’s very similar to the first Enigmatis in this regard.

Instead of doing the hidden picture scenes, you can play a game of dominos which has been in previous games so I’m guessing there won’t be a lot of variety going forward if they are repeating themselves here. Personally, I don’t see why they need to have these additional things and I would rather they just did away with them.

There is also a bonus episode which acts as a prequel to the main games which provides a little more story and some more hidden scenes. Other than this it doesn’t pull any extra punches.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

This is average sized haul for an Artifex Mundi game now and eight of them are related to various parts of the story. There are another eight achievements related to doing all the puzzles and hidden picture scenes without skipping or hints as well as finding three items in three seconds, not making many mistakes and completing both a puzzle and hidden picture scene in less than a minute. Standard Artifex Mundi fare.

Where I struggled was the expert playthrough as it required a lot of faffing around and searching and it could have brought my playtime down dramatically if I had just played on normal first but there you go.

I also struggled to get the motivation up to complete a second playthrough and nab the three achievements related to playing all the dominos games. This sums up how much the game felt like a slog.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden is another solid game from Artifex Mundi that offers the same thing as before. As I said though I’ve had my fill of these games so this review probably comes across as negative. It’s still a good addition to the collection and offers new scenery as a lot of the others are turning in to series’.

Bioshock

Bioshock is one of the most celebrated games released for the Xbox 360. It a recent poll, in certain circles, it was even voted Game of the Generation – quite a title to live up to. I started playing the game around its release in August 2007 before I had internet access as none of my achievements have time stamps. There was one DLC achievement which I didn’t bother with until recently, hence the review.

The basic story of Bioshock follows ‘Jack,’ a guy whose plane crashes next to a lighthouse in the middle of the ocean. He survives the crash and goes into the lighthouse where he finds an underwater submarine which takes him to the underwater metropolis of Rapture. He meets a friendly Irish guy over a radio and proceeds to explore the city, assumingly to look for a way out alive. However, his very first action contradicts his want of survival. The first time he comes across a syringe filled with blue glowing liquid, he injects himself with it, no questions asked.

This kind of behaviour is bizarre. Mind you, Jack will also instantly consume any food item, alcohol item and cigarettes that you click on, even if you are searching a dead enemy so he clearly has no willpower either.

Once Jack gets settled in to the Rapture experience, the game essentially boils down to walking around an underwater city touching little girls. There is a moral choice system built in and you can either touch them in a good way or bad way with varying rewards for both. Giving a girl a bad touch results in a higher immediate reward but you will get the bad ending, however touching them real nice will cause them to like you and bring you cuddly toys filled with weapons and other stuff to help prevent your death. Essentially, it pays to touch little girls in a good way.

Gameplay wise, after returning to this game from the likes of Destiny, I found it very strange to switch to a first-person shooter without a manual aim function. This was especially problematic for me because the left trigger, my usual go-to aim button, is actually the plasmid-use button. This meant that every time I wanted to take aim at an enemy I would simply raise my glowing left hand – not good when trying to survive.

That said, the gameplay is where Bioshock scores all of its points. It is clean and well thought out. I did not experience any crashes. I did not get stuck on any scenery and the gameplay always flowed. The action isn’t going one-hundred miles an hour but it also didn’t suffer from Dead Space’s severe lack of pace. All in all, it is solid, balanced and well-rounded.

Achievements – 1,100 Points – 51 Achievements

Generally speaking, Bioshock’s achievements are relatively straight forward. As mentioned above, it has a moral choice built in to the story and a missable achievement relating to the touching of little girls (Little Sister Saviour). You have to touch all the little girls in a good way to get the missable achievement but by doing this, you won’t be able to collect the maximum amount of upgrade points needed to fully upgrade your stuff. This can cause problems if you are playing on hard mode and are not very good at shooters, like me.

However, two playthoughs isn’t a problem for a game like Bioshock. It is good enough to have replay value and while I had to run through the entire game again to get the last achievement, it was enjoyable. The game is not unnecessarily long or slow (Dead Space).

Aside from the Little Sister Saviour Achievement there are 11 other missables, including some of my favourite types – secret missables! You have to take picture of Sander Cohen’s corpse after you kill him and also find his secret room. The second one isn’t a real problem as you should get that through exploring anyway but the first one is a load of cack. I don’t see how this would be apparent unless it was advertised and it isn’t covering any storyline issues so why the hell is it a secret?

There are also collectible achievements and as you cannot revisit previous areas of the game, these are missable by default so it makes sense to do two playthroughs anyway.

Downloadable Content

This is probably the most infuriating DLC in history. It was released in December 2007, not actually that long after Bioshock, but I had already got the 1,000 Points by the point. My lack of internet didn’t help either. Also despite being described in certain places as a title update, I can assure you it is not. A title update is one that is automatically applied or triggered when playing the game with an internet connection. You have to actually go into the Xbox Market Place and download the Ryan Industries Plasmids and Gene Tonics expansion pack in order to be able to disable the Vita-Chambers and Unlock the Brass Balls achievement – this certainly does not qualify as a ‘title update.’

Getting the achievement itself it fairly straight forward. You don’t have to play on hard mode unless you really want to. Instead you can play the game through on ‘easy’ and change the difficulty to ‘hard’ at the end of the final battle and the achievement will unlock.

Bioshock remains one of the best shooting games on Xbox today. I doubt there will be a more original idea released again especially with the ever-soaring popularity of shooting games like Call of Duty and Battlefield. Developers will more than likely clone these two instead of coming up with anything new.