Death God University

With all the various lists I have going on, it’s becoming fairly easy for me to fall back in to the ‘easy game’ list of which Death God University got randomly picked to be played. There are two things I wish I hadn’t done though. The first is pay real money for this piece of shit and the second is not researching this piece of shit before I subjected myself to it.

Death God University is a fairly stupid game where you play as some kind of blockheaded devil wannabe at a school where you learn how to kill people. It may as well be a stealth game though as the concept appears to be to kill these people without being seen.

The only good thing about this game is the cutscenes at the start of each of the levels and in reality, these became old after the first three levels.

So, what’s so bad about the game? Well I’ll start with the most obvious thing that will become apparent the moment you start playing. The loading times. I have a strong feeling that I spent more in-game time starring at a loading screen than actually playing the game. On top of this, the game has you visit 4 or 5 different locations during each mission and there is loading period of the same length every time you go to a new place. As soon as discovered this was going to be case, I binned off trying to figure stuff out for myself and used a guide to reduce the amount of times I had to revisit places.

If the loading screens weren’t bad enough, the gameplay itself is garbage for all the wrong reasons. The idea is not being seen but people will see you all the time for no clear reason. After a few missions, this became irritating but the last mission requires you not to be seen at all. What fucked me off massively with this though, is that there is a bit towards the end of the game where people are walking around with torches and a clear vision cone in front of them. I wasn’t in one of these cones and the character still saw me. This has to be a glitch or just the game screwing over its players deliberately.

Speaking of glitching out, I lost count of the amount of times I got stuck on scenery. One time I got stuck just walking up a ramp with no other bits protruding out that I could get stuck on. It’s absolute wank. Also getting stuck means having to restart the game and you know what that means? More loading screens.

There were more glitches throughout the game and lots of getting partially stuck on invisible walls. So to top off the loading issues, it’s badly coded which means the developers thought they could get away with releasing a game that would get by with popular culture references alone. It’s a disgrace.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

All you have to do is complete the 13 missions given to you at the school but with all of the above crap you have to go through to do this, it’s a lot harder than it sounds.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s impossible to recommend Death God University to anyone. It’s probably the biggest garbage fire I’ve ever played and I couldn’t uninstall it fast enough.

Jurassic Park: The Game

The next game on the hit list is another American only game and one of the early TellTale games and I have to say, they’ve made vast improvements since this outing.

It’s a story-based game where you follow Gerry, Jess, Nima and some dickhead marines around Jurassic Park in the aftermath of the first film. The marine come to rescue the likes of Jess and Gerry but this soon turns in to a quest for survival and trying to make money out of dino embryos.

In terms of the characters, Tell Tale haven’t changed much in terms of their design. All of the characters move between being endearing and irritating at a whim and their moral compasses appear to be attached to ridiculously strong magnets. In addition to this, the dialogue options don’t seem to tie up with what they actually say. A lot of the time, it appears to be inconsequential what option you pick because they will say whatever they want.

In terms of the gameplay, it’s basically an 8 hour long quick time event. These are the only real interactions you have other than clicking on objects in the environment to generate further bits of meaningless dialogue. There are also a few puzzle bits but not a lot, so I would it’s limited in terms of gameplay.

The quick time events are ridiculously unforgiving too. You have to know what’s coming before it comes to get through most of them. The button prompts change speed and flick all over the place. Thankfully though there are loads of checkpoints throughout these segments.

In terms of looks, it’s now very dated and the frame rates are poor when loading into a scene for the first time. It feels a little bit like it’s been glued together and quite badly. Sound wise, it’s typically good as it’s stuck to the original soundtrack for the movie and therefore, sounds epic.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Playing through the game without worrying about the achievements will net half of them. The other half mainly require completing all of the quick time events in one go without making any mistakes. As mentioned earlier there are checkpoints during the scenes but this also becomes a problem later on.

There are a few scenes where the checkpoints occur directly after a point that’s easy to fail. This happened to me during one of the last scenes in the final chapter of the game. The problem with this was that once you activate the checkpoint, you then need to replay the scene without any checkpoints at all or start the episode again from the beginning. However, this particular section was even more problematic.

There is an achievement for using three flares to look down some corridors after this scene. You get the flares by picking them up during the QTR action sequence, however the action I missed was for picking up one of the flares. Even replaying and completing the scene didn’t work as when I came to use the flares in the next section, I only had two of them as replaying the scene does not overwrite your last save. This meant restarting the episode again and making sure that I didn’t miss the flares during the cut scene.

Aside from this, another one that often goes missing is for completing the first episode without dying. I didn’t take any chances with this and made sure I immediately reloaded whenever I made a mistake on the first playthrough to ensure I got it.

At the end of the game, there is a multiple-choice achievement where the story line splits. This appears to be Tell Tale’s first foray into multiple endings, and this is the only decision that impacts the storyline as far as I’m aware. It’s not very far after a reloadable checkpoint though so it’s not too painful to replay.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Jurassic Park: The Game was an interesting journey into the earlier TellTale franchise, if not a bit messy and rough in places. It’s a solid and enjoyable story experience but the over-the-top quick time events get old fast. It takes anywhere between 8 to 10 hours to complete so is fairly decent value for money.

Your Toy

Your Toy is a game on the American market that showed up on an easy achievement list thingy and as it was pretty much free in the grand scheme of things, I thought why not give it a go?

I have to say from the moment I started playing, I thought that Your Toy was a horrible game. The basic premise is that you have thrown away a toy bear, perhaps by ripping it in half or something, and the entire game appears that this wonton destruction has created this nightmare you now face. You spend the majority of your time running from a bear monster thing that chases you, and the rest of the time solving puzzles that are so obscure that only the diehard trial-and-error enthusiasts will see out without the use of a guide.

In terms of gameplay, the most frustrating part of it is the ridiculously slow and laborious movement speed of the game’s protagonist – or teddy bear killer with no soul, whatever you want to call him. Getting from room to room, and even getting around the same room, is sheer frustration. There’s also a zoom function where you can look at stuff, and sometimes this is the only way to interact with things. That’s pretty much it for the controls, the whole thing is a just a bizarre adventure game, if you can call it that.

Another note on the puzzles, as well as being convoluted they also change from one game to the next and several people have reported that their puzzles have become incompletable. When this sort of thing happens, it makes the convoluted nature of the puzzles look more like bad game design.

Looks wise, it’s not easy on the eyes. It’s very gun-metal grey and shitty brown for the most part despite being about an angry decapitated bear in what appears to be a nightmare situation. It wouldn’t have killed them to introduce some colour here and there.

Music wise, it goes out of its way to be creepy in keeping with the nature of the game, but due to the poor gameplay and unengaging ‘story’ the background music becomes more of an annoyance that atmospheric.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

The achievement list for this one is a mixed bag between story related achievements, stuff that’s totally missable and some real luck-based bollocks that all games could live without.

You can get nine achievements from playing through the game without worrying about what you do and another 11 are missable. My favourite of these missable ones is the luck-based one for finding a key in the cave on your first try. The achievement is even called Good Luck just to really rub it in. To get the achievement, you must break a light with a hammer and the key is randomly in one of these lights. However, you can restart the checkpoint when you don’t find it and go through some of the longest stupid menu loading and loading screens I’ve ever had to sit through. At least it felt that way.

The last missable achievement is the big one for picking up all the items in the game. Obviously with this being missable it means that there are several items in the game that do not have a use. And looking everywhere in this game is slightly less fun that ripping out your own teeth.

I also experienced some achievement unlocking issues throughout but considering the shocking state of the Xbox One achievement system at present, I don’t think I can blame this on the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Essentially, unless you have OCD and a tendency for self-harm, use a guide when going for the 100% here. Better still, don’t play it at all. I can’t consider a game to be truly easy if it’s only easy with a guide as well. It’s difficult to find a recommendation here so I will just stick this one in the ‘avoid’ pile for all time.

Fibbage

Fibbage is a party game only available as a standalone title in the US. I got it using some of my American credit a while ago and only got around to playing it last month. It seemed like fun so I actually got some real-life friends to come around and play it to completion.

Fibbage was a unique gaming experience for me. It requires you to use a smart phone, tablet, laptop or computer and go to a website while the Xbox One is running the game. You, and up to seven friends, need to log in to a room and then you play the game on your devices.

The principle of Fibbage is simple. The game will ask you some outrageous questions and you have to enter a deliberately wrong answer that’s as close to be being right as possible in order to trick the other players into going for your answer. If you find the right answer, you get points, and you get points for tricking people with your lies. At the end of the game, the person who has the most points wins. Simple. You play two rounds of multiple questions followed by a final Fibbage with increasing points as you go through the rounds.

After you’ve played a few times, the narrator gets annoying as he explains the rules every single time which is frustrating but understandable as first-time players will need the info.

Also, on our last play, we found that the same questions were coming up frequently so there’s not a lot of variety after about six hours of playing. However this is a double edged sword type of problem when you consider…

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

With the right set up, 9 of the 10 achievements can be earned in 20 minutes. The trickiest to carry out alone, although I shouldn’t have worried in the end, was for completing a game with 8 players. I actually did this using multiple browsers on a laptop with Firefox and it was easier than a lot of the guidance made out.

A lot of the other achievements are luck based if not playing alone though. The most notable ones are for tricking everyone with a lie in a three plus player game and you also have to enter the same lie as someone else. You have to know the answer to at least one of the questions as there is an achievement for entering the truth for a lie. The game won’t let you enter the actual truth so after you discover the truth through guessing (like I did), you have to enter a lie.

The one that I didn’t get until a few games in was for winning the Thumbs Cup. You can like other people’s lies once you’ve answered the question but I didn’t see this for some reason. You need to get the most likes in a game and then you get the Thumbs Cup. This is also like a post-game thing you can do where instead of playing for points you can play for likes.

As mentioned above, there are surprisingly few questions in the game and the last achievement I unlocked was the pathological liar achievement which is for answering all the questions in the game. The main problem with this is that there are a set amount of subjects and you have to pick from a selection so unless you track all the subjects you’ve picked, this will take a while and even then it’s up to the computer to give you the ones you are missing – which is annoying.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Fibbage was a fun few hours with friends. It’s a shame that the fun was short-lived though. What it could do with is a ‘make your own’ function where you can ask your own questions. That would definitely add to the life of the game. Achievement wise, aside from Pathological Liar, it’s a quick and easy completion and well worth doing if you have some friends who like these sorts of games.