Far Cry New Dawn

For some dumbass reason unknown to me at this time, I asked for a load of Far Cry games for Christmas. I got them all because they are fairly cheap at the moment and New Dawn became the first one of the three that I played because it had an obligatory multiplayer achievement and someone I knew was playing it at the same time as me.

Far Cry New Dawn follows the story of the Captain in a post nuclear world that follows on from Far Cry 5, another game included in the Christmas bonanza that also means I’ve played the games out of order, which may make Far Cry 5 slightly more interesting.

 

The characterisation is where Far Cry really excels and it does so again here with the twins, our antagonists. As soon as you meet them, you will want to kill them because they are just plain dicks. They are just the most terrible people and coupled with their psychopathic behaviour, they also appear immature which makes them even more grating. Knowing that the climax will ultimately lead to their deaths kept me going throughout the game.

 

So what’s ultimately my problem with Far Cry New Dawn? Did I say I have a problem with it? No? Well I do. To sum it’s that it’s a Far Cry game. They do most things well but that’s it. It’s a very safe franchise and as a result, despite how pretty they make the world and how clean the gameplay is, it ends up being a very dry and repetitive experience and I failed to see any major differences between the story here and that of Far Cry 4.

 

That’s where it’s the same but every game has to have a slight difference and New Dawn goes down the weapon crafting route. It is an apocalypse after all. This system does however, come across as very unbalanced. You start the game unable to craft bugger all and end up with ineffective guns when you go up against anything other than a pack of wild kittens. As the game progresses and you upgrade your base to be able to craft better guns, this quickly escalates to the point where even the hardened enemies go down easily. The game breaking point is when you get the legendary bow, which one-shots everything if you have the right perks (which you will) and shot enemies in the head. This feels kind of backwards – you expect a game to get harder as you progress, not easier. The enforcers – essentially bikers as they all wear motorcycle helmets – appear at the first stronghold you capture if you get spotted at level 2. All the game does as you progress is throw more of them at you.

 

In terms of the graphics, it’s very pretty and I must confess that they’ve gone out of their way to avoid the traditional brown/grey scenery as there is colour everywhere. Musically, I found it to be quite grating as it requires a lot of play time to get through and listening to the same stuff over and over again is not fun and when the menu music is noticeable, it’s bad.

 

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

 

It’s another long list and one that doesn’t give you much for the main story – 5 whole achievements. That said, there’s a lot of points for upgrading your stronghold and getting the better guns and perks. Essentially, playing the game how it’s intended to be played will net a fair whack of score.

There are some notable ones on the list that require some effort. Late in the game you will acquire some abilities that you need to use to unlock achievements. One of these is called Wrath which boosts your combat strength. The achievement in question requires you to kill ten enemies while Wrath is activated in one go. This is stupid as getting ten enemies together to do this is an absolute ball ache. It took me many, many attempts and swear words to finally get this done and the hard part really shouldn’t have been attracting enough enemies to do it.

 

The next one is for completing all Expeditions on level three. This boils down to performing seven different missions, three times, which, after you’ve done them all once, becomes tiresome very quickly. It just feels lazy and unnecessary to have you replay the same stuff only with slightly more difficult enemies. With the gun situation mentioned above, it doesn’t make it any harder.

 

This is also where the multiplayer element kicks in – you need to complete three of these expeditions in co-op with someone else. It’s the only part of the achievement list that requires a second player so what’s the point? Arbitrarily targeting achievement hunters and trying to get them to socialise for one measly achievement? I doubt it, but still.

 

The other few that provide a challenge are the hunting ones for catching every animal and collecting the skins. This is hard because the monstrous animals can actually be quite shy and you have to walk around the map for a while just trying to get them to show.

 

There is one more worth mentioning and that’s for driving a plane without wings over 100 metres in one go. This can actually be glitched though by throwing dynamite into a lake and driving over it. Get it right and you get catapulted into the air and earn a free achievement to boot. Having to do this without the glitch is frustrating as there’s only a few places on the map where it can actually be done.

 

Downloadable Content – N/A

 

Far Cry New Dawn is a perfectly fine open world exploration game with an okay story and setting. But that’s also its biggest problem – it’s so middle of the road that it becomes a fairly boring journey, annoyingly before it reaches its conclusion. I would recommend it for the bad guys alone though, but the 100% achievement completion is a bit of a grind.

Battleship (Xbox One)

This was my last selected game prior to the Bean Dive and one that I’m unsure why I added to my collection in the first place.

Battleship is the video game adaptation of the popular board game of the same name. The premise is that you have five ships, your opponent has five ships and you take turns trying to sink each other. There are two modes. Classic – which is the standard board game, and Clash at Sea – where each of your ships have special attacks and you build up resources each turn to use these special attacks.

The main solo campaign is all Cash at Sea and this is where the game reveals itself to be a pile of garbage. All the missions involve having a battle with another fleet with only minor changes from the mission before. You also have to use different fleets with different special attacks but this proves irritating as some of the other fleets have entirely different special moves, some of which are next to useless and cost more resources.

The most painful thing about the campaign is the basic premise of Battleship. The idea of the real game is that your opponent doesn’t know where your ships are – this is made evident in the local multiplayer where the game asks the other player to look away when you are placing your ships. However, the AI has no real way of not knowing where your ships are. This can go one of two ways. For the early missions, the AI becomes fundamentally retarded when it hits your ships and does deliberately crap shots that only a two-year-old would maybe think is a hit. The second way is that they will use a specially attack that hits 12 squares at once… and find four of your ships. This was majorly annoying because if a human player did that it’s total luck but when the AI does it, it knows where your ships are. In the later missions, once the AI finds your ships, it will actually sink them, making the whole game primarily luck based. This is even more true in the notorious mission 24 where you must win receiving half the resources of the AI.

Musically, it’s repetitive and annoying. Graphically, it doesn’t do anything other than irritate you with overtly long cutscenes which play every time you sink a ship, even if you sink more than one ship at once – one cutscene per ship. The other negative thing I noticed was that the load times were excessive, especially when you consider how little there actually is to load.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 16 Achievements

Most of the game’s achievements can be earned by playing through the campaign but as per my earlier comments, this is the most ‘challenging’ part of the game.

You have to play with the different fleet types in the game a certain amount of times and sink 150 enemy ships. If you are winning missions, that’s a minimum of 30 games you have to play. There are 30 campaign missions and 8 tutorial missions so this takes care of itself too. You will need to play some local matches as the Tech Fleet to round this off though.

Outside of the main campaign, you have to play some versus games. There is an achievement for playing a game under Classic rules which doesn’t happen in the campaign so you have to start a versus match to do this. While you are at it, you may as well do a local player versus player match and score ten hits in a row on ships when you know where they are placed, and then win the match. Doing all of this will net you 4 achievements. It’s also worth playing another game with normal rules to get another achievement for revealing all your opponent’s grid squares before winning – made easy when you control both teams.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Battleship was a less than mediocre gaming experience that took me around 10 hours to complete. It would have been less if the AI didn’t luck out and hit four of my ships in one go twice in a row in the final mission. It’s a good one to get on to the completed pile and yet another reason why I shouldn’t just buy games that I see other people playing.

Assassin's Creed Origins

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Achievements – 1,240 Points – 67 Achievements

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Downloadable Content

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grow Up

Right, so word of advice that you probably don’t need – don’t go buying shit you don’t know anything about just because it cost less than £5 and has the word ‘platformer’ under the genre. That’s exactly how I came into possession of the digital license for Grow Up. Apparently Grow Up is a sequel to a game released on PS4 and Steam which is a bit perplexing considering it’s come to Xbox without the option of playing the first one?

Grow Up follows the story of BUD, a robot who’s spaceship (called MOM) crashes on a distant thing that sort of qualifies as a planet and has to find all the parts of his ship to rebuild it and escape. BUD is not alone in this quest though. POD is there to be your eyes and ears on the planet. But he can only go as high as BUD has previously gone which is just a bit weird.

The gameplay itself is awful. There is a no other word for it. BUD is a lumbering piece of robot junk who makes moving around so difficult that it makes me look back on Octodad with fond memories. You have to use the planet’s plants to traverse the landscape and considering how many shitty little islands there are, traversing around the place is a fucking ballache... until you get the balloon like thing that actually lets you go upwards, then the game becomes a tad easier.

Aside from rebuilding the ship, there are abilities to unlock, checkpoint challenges to complete, and crystals to collect which give BUD enhanced abilities. I wish I had known this at the beginning of the game as when you collect 60 of these crystals BUD gets a rocket propelled glider than makes traversing the landscape a piece of piss. He is still a cunt to control though.

The sound effects are just shit. It sounds like the game is designed for 3 year-olds and if 3 year-olds are expected to be able to complete this game, I may as well quit gaming now as I don’t have a hope in hell. Graphically it’s pants too. It’s glitchy, temperamental and not very pretty.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

I’m not going to lie, I struggled to get motivated to finish this one off. It didn’t help that I also started playing the latest Goat Simulator DLC at the same time so all the Xbox One games I was playing were shit – but after Skyrim everything was going to seem shit.

Anyway, there is no real direction to the game so the order in which things unlock is completely random as is some of the shit that they want you to do.

Visiting all biomes is basically exploring the whole word and one that everyone has managed to get. The first one I did though was for stacking 10 mushroom plant things on top of each other – I must have been keen to get the game logged on my Gamertag.

There are three achievements for grabbing the various animals on the planet and doing things with them (no jokes) – like taking them to the moon, completing a challenge while holding one and flinging one over 100 metres.

Another one that gave me trouble was for using two sporchids to shoot 400 metres in the air. BUD’s clumsy controls made grabbing two of the things at the same time beyond difficult and then there was an element of luck in that they didn’t both launch together. I must have spent a good half hour dicking around with the plants before successfully getting this to pop.

There are five achievements associated with collecting all of the shit around the planet. This involves completing all the challenges, unlocking all of the teleporter things, flowering all Starplants, unlocking all the seeds and last but not least, finding all 150 crystals scattered throughout the world. This last one was the real fucker because there are so many of them and no in-game way of tracking which ones you’ve got. I let out an audible noise when the last one appeared on my radar and I knew I was going to be done with this shitty game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Grow Up was not one of my finest gaming choices and I simply can’t recommend it to anyone ever. I didn’t find any joy in the gimmicky nature of the gameplay and there was nothing precious about the childlike nature of its construction. It’s completable but not enjoyable.

Assassin's Creed Syndicate

So this is probably the newest game I’ve played in a very long time and the first of my Christmas 2015 collection to hit the completed list (this shows how far behind I am with reviews.)

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate shows that sometimes developers do actually listen to people that buy their games. There is no multiplayer that, in my opinion, has blighted the franchise since Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. Blighted might be harsh but it’s certainly an unnecessary addition to the franchise.

Syndicate follows the story of Jacob and Evie Frye, two already established assassins who travel to London to thwart the plans of Crawford Starrick, a Templar Grand Master who is after the Shroud, another piece of Eden. There is also some modern world framing but you are required to a lot less during these sections that you were in Rogue and Black Flag, let alone the stuff you had to do with Desmond Miles. They are basically just cut scenes now. I’m not sure if this is a good thing. I kind of enjoyed having an interaction with the modern world but I guess not everyone else felt the same.

It’s graphically and musically excellent, I have to say. The only real criticism here is that the generic guards repeat their lines a lot and they are all overly aggressive for no real reason. While this isn’t so much of an issue for the first few hours, as with all Assassin’s Creeds if you are playing it to completion, you will be playing until it’s insufferable.

The gameplay is also strong. Another piece of feedback on franchise seems to be that having to climb buildings all the time was boring after you’ve done it 100 times. Quite early on in the game you are given a grappling hook which makes getting across the city and up the tallest buildings a piece of cake. It real terms, this cuts at least 10 hours off of a full completion, if not more.

However, it does do the standard Assassin’s Creed thing of introducing three or four new items to kill people with, which is all very blah. The most notable thing about the game, and the franchise in general, is that we have almost moved completely away from the stealth element of being an Assassin. If you are spotted by guards, in most circumstances you can kill your way out of trouble and once there is a big pile of corpses, no one seems to care. And can you blame them? Who in their right mind would take on either of these two when they can singlehandedly massacre a small army and walk away like nothing happened?!

Achievements – 1,300 Points – 56 Achievements

I managed to get this done, including DLC, in just over 60 hours. There’s a lot of random crap that you have to do that mostly goes towards your 100% completion so I won’t go into too much detail about collectibles and story missions as the collectibles get marked on the map and if you bought the game, why would you not do the story missions as a minimum?

There are also the side missions and the standard, ‘get full sync in the main missions,’ but Syndicate does what Unity did and doesn’t actually require you to get the full 100% sync for the game. Syndicate goes one further than Unity though as it doesn’t require you to get all of the chests spread across the landscape of London.

For the random achievements though, there are a few things you have to do which make you go well off the beaten track. The two most notable are for shooting 50 enemies before they shoot at you and destroy 5,000 destructible objects in a carriage.

There is supposedly a counter shoot function that can be used to make shooting the 50 enemies easier but this hardly worked for me and I ended up doing a lot of them manually. The carriage one is an absolute fuck ass though. I’m guessing that the only reason it’s an achievement is because they introduced the carriage driving as the main game play gimmick and they will make you use it and use it a lot! I was actively trying for this for most of the game and only unlocked it at the end.

Downloadable Content

There is one DLC which is actually quite cool. It takes place several years after the events of the main game and sees Evie try and hunt down Jack the Ripper who is portrayed as a misguided assassin. There are seven achievements to go with it which see you use new skill sets to instil fear into your enemies, and complete a new set of missions.

The bizarre thing is there is an achievement for getting 100% sync in the DLC, not the game as before. I’m not really sure why but it was quite fun so I was happy to do everything anyway.

Assassin’s Creed Syndicate is a very safe game that doesn’t push any major boundaries of the franchise and goes a little bit further by appearing to deliver on feedback given by the fans of the series. Getting rid of the multiplayer made this a very enjoyable completion. Ubisoft have announced this will be the last main stream Assassin’s Creed for a while and it’s a good memory to leave behind.

Valiant Hearts: The Great War (Xbox ONE)

Games with Gold on Xbox has caused my game collection to swell at an uncontrollable level now that they are offering four games a month across both platforms. It’s got to the stage where I’m actually glad to see a game I already have come up just so I know I won’t be adding to my collection. Who turns down free games?

Valiant Hearts: the Great War is a good one to come up though as it is a relatively quick and painless completion – gaming wise anyway.

Valiant Hearts is a fictional recreation of the lives of several different people during World War I. World War I wasn’t the most happy time period to live through and Valiant Hearts accurately captures this in a very emotive story driven game. I did have to spread it out over a few days though because it was far too depressing to plough through in one sitting. Not only the story has this effect but also, the music fully supports the theme as well. I’m not saying it’s bad. In fact, it is very good that the game is so emotive.

Gameplay wise, it’s another 2D sidescroller (which I seem to playing a lot of at the moment – really get the most of the power in my Xbox One!) mixed with puzzle solving. It’s generally non-combat which is great considering it’s a war time game, a real change from the norm. You do occasionally have to bonk people on the head though.

In terms of controls it is very nearly flawless. There was only part I got stuck on when I had to line up this gun thing with an explosive to destroy a door. For some reason I simply could not get the gun to line up with what I needed to destroy. It was the only time the controls were an issue for me though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

Playing through the main story will get you nine achievements. There are another four for collecting the surprisingly tricky to find collectibles scattered throughout the game world. That leaves seven achievements for doing a load of random stuff which is also secret for the most part.

There is one for petting the dog who will no doubt win the ‘gaming animal of the year’ award and this is probably one of the easiest achievements in gaming history. The dog is seriously the best part of the game. I developed a more emotive attachment to the dog than any of the main characters so it was nice to see an achievement surrounding him.

There are certain sections of the game where you have to escape from the Germans in a car. For these sections the game switches from side scrolling to downward scrolling as you race away from your enemies. There is an achievement for completing any one of these sections without taking any damage. I managed this on a single playthrough but if you don’t, there is no need to panic as the game offers loadable checkpoints at the beginning of each chapter.

Of the other five only one was problematic. One of the characters is a nurse and you have to complete quick-time events to bandage up people who have been hurt during the fighting. In my opinion, the hardest achievement in the game is for completing the hardest Quicktime event at the end of the game. It took me several attempts to get this right.

The last achievement I unlocked was for collecting all the historical items and as I said at the beginning, some of these were really well hidden. Thankfully the game offers chapter select to pick up the ones you missed.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I enjoyed Valiant Hearts despite its depressing nature. It was nice to play a war game where I wasn’t required to blow off the heads of enemies for ten hours. Hopefully Ubisoft will work on more games like this in the future. 

Assassin's Creed: Rogue

The latest game in the Assassin’s Creed series was released on Xbox 360 while Assassin’s Creed Unity was doing the rounds on the One. Incidentally, Assassin’s Creed Rogue is the better game by far with less bugs, less France and a bigger boat. Well, okay, it has a boat whereas Unity does not.

The story follows the Assassin Shay Cormack, until he realises that Assassins are evil and decides to run away and eventually becomes a Templar. The most tragic thing about Shay though, is not his moral code but the fact that he is supposed to be Irish but, depending on what he is saying, this really does come and go. I’ve never met an Irish Assassin with a worse Irish accent.

Shay is on a quest to stop the assassins from killing innocent people whilst annoying everyone with his accent.  To do this, he essentially travels around the North Atlantic being a pirate. It’s all quite fun and combines the gameplay of Black Flag with... the looks of Black Flag and... okay, basically it’s an extension of Black Flag but Black Flag was pretty good.

The framing story, as will all Assassin’s Creed games involves you having to once again dick around in the offices of Abstergo trying to fix a server crash caused by the Assassins.

It doesn’t look at pretty as Black Flag was for me, probably because I played Black Flag on the One, and the game makes the graphical superiority of the next generation evident when put onto a screen. The sea shanties are back with some new ones and the classics which makes all the aimless sailing more enjoyable.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 46 Achievements

The thing I like most about the achievement list for this game is that they are all offline which technically means you can still finish the game ten years from now if you have a television that a 360 will work on.

Outside of the main game, there isn’t that much else you need go out of your way to do, however the game is big and will take you a long time to cover everything. There are a couple of things I had to grind out though.

You come across enemies known as stalkers at some point during the game. They are basically assassins trying to assassinate your Templar ass. They will attempt to air assassinate you but you can counter this (the first Templar in history to do so) and by doing so 15 times you will get an achievement. There is another one for counter killing 30 stalkers which goes into the same grinding category.

The most grind-tastic achievement is What’s Yours is Mine for looting 20 ship convoys. This is actually quite difficult. You can find the convoys by visiting taverns and getting intel, however the taverns will stop giving out locations after a while which leaves you alone to try and find them yourself. However, they don’t show up on the map very often. A few people figured out you can trigger spawns by fast travelling through a series of locations but I didn’t realise this until after I’d finished the game which meant that this was the last achievement I got and I had to work hard for it.

There are also four achievements for actually using cheats which was new. They aren’t too challenging or time consuming and all they do is have you repeat the same action a certain amount of times, some without dying. Not too tricky if you have a fully upgraded ship and character.

The last one I’ll mention is the one you get for completing all the legendary ship battles. I managed to do three of them but, try as I might, I couldn’t do the last one quickly. Instead of bashing my head against a brick wall for a week, I found out that you can win the battle using the invincibility cheat and unlock the achievement. You don’t get the rewards for completing them by doing it this way though – cheap yes, but effective nonetheless.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It took me around 35 hours to rack up all the achievements but on the whole, it was an enjoyable time. Assassin’s Creed Rogue still offers a similar experience to the first game. There is no reason to change the mechanics, just the location, and Rogue is a welcome addition to the franchise.

Trivial Pursuit LIVE! (Xbox ONE)

Trivial Pursuit LIVE! is a simply trivia game brought to you by American developers, Ubisoft San Francisco. The most notable aspect of the game, that is annoying from the outset, is the location selection. It always raises my suspicions when a game has an option to select English (UK) and English (USA) from as the first thing you do and in this instance, I was completely right. I always select UK because that’s where I am from so I do not understand why I had an Arts and Literature question come up regarding Archie and Jughead and nothing at all about the Beano or Dandy.

What is the point of having a specific English option if you are not going to have relevant questions? It sure as hell wasn’t for a language choice as I had to listen to the most irritating American* ‘quiz show host’ voice. If I have to hear the words, ‘Needa wedge, wanna wedge, gotta get a wedge,’ ever again I will most likely need mental help (if I don’t already.)

*A quick note that I do not find the American accent generally annoying. I’m sure if it had been a British voice, I would have been irritated by that stupid phrase regardless.

The game consists of either a three or five round game show depending on how much time you have on your hands. There are several different types of round. Quickstarter – a round where there are five questions and each subsequent question is worth double the points of the previous question. All of my friends complained about this. Grab Bag – A round where you have a grid of sixteen answers and only eight of them are correct and it’s completely stupid because as soon as you select a wrong answer you cannot continue even if there are correct answers remaining. Close Call – a round where you have five correct answers and the best answer gets the most points, which is really stupid because the person who is last always goes first. There are also blitz versions of the last two rounds where you all go at the same time rather than taking it in turns. Switchagories – a round where a players gets to select one of two categories and they get double points for getting the answer right. This is a horrible round for many reasons. If I had a choice between History and Arts and Leisure it’s like asking me to chose between wanking with sandpaper and sawing my foot off. What is the point of giving me an advantage for answering a question in two of my worst categories? Oh right, there isn’t one.

The final round gives you two options and a statement and you have to select which of the options the statement applies to. Do this correctly five times (once if you are playing multiplayer with a single controller) and you get a wedge. The winner is the person who gets six wedges. Wedges are awarded for achieving various score landmarks throughout the game up to a maximum of four. You then get a wedge for each final round question session you get right.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

The achievements are not too hard for this game. The invention of Google makes general knowledge a piece of piss, especially when you can pause the game to look stuff up. However, several people complained about the answers to some of the questions but I’m at an age now where if they are using the internet to look stuff up, the chances are that they looked up the wrong stuff, assumed it was right and just pissed their pants about their own inability to utilise a search function to find the correct information.

There are six different categories for trivial pursuit and an achievement for answering 50 questions correctly in each category. There is one for answering every question correctly throughout the game, which can obviously be a problem if you get Close Call. The easiest way to do this one is to play a four player human multiplayer game as that eliminates the luck element from all rounds and leaves you free to answer away. You can also cover off Greedy Grabber by doing this if you get Grab Bag. Simply answer incorrectly with the three non-you-players leaving you free to try and select all eight correct answers in the grid.

All of the rest can be achieved on your way to winning 25 Gameshows which takes a lot longer that I thought it would, even by just playing three round games. The reason for this is that there is a lot of unskippable bullshit between rounds with stat attacks and updates on who is 1^st, 2^nd 3^rd or 4^th. After. Every. Single. Round. This is never amusing but becomes insufferable after game the 2^nd game you play.

You get this along the way but I thought I would mention some glitches with the Sense of Entitlement achievement. You basically unlock titles as you go along. There is a title for most things like answering all questions in a round correctly, answering 50 science and nature questions correctly, etc. However I managed to unlock the title for 50 questions for Geography but not 30 questions?? It’s clearly glitched and stopped counting correct answers for whatever reason. It didn’t stop me unlock the achievement though thank god.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Trivial Pursuit LIVE! is fun to play with friends but not by yourself. The achievements are a slog more than anything and I won’t be revisiting alone again.

Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag (Xbox ONE)

My very first Xbox One Review. How exciting! I followed on from the completion of Assassin’s Creed III and cracked straight on with this for a few weeks, however the sheer vastness of the game caused me to make it an ongoing project which spread out over the next six months.

The in-game world is huge and beautiful. A lot of effort has gone into the development of the game, especially the first area, which makes sense as it is the first place that people see. However the whole world is fantastic. Characters, locations, sailing, everything.

Anyway, enough praise and on with thereview – in a dramatic Assassin’s Creed U-Turn, we actually go back in time and play as Edward Kenway, Connor’s grandfather. Against the grain for linear progression but okay, we’ll go with it. Now, let’s not forget that the whole Assassin’s Creed world is just a simulation. In the ‘real world,’ Desmond Miles is dead and his body has been shipped to Abstergo Industries where you, a new Abstergo employee, are reliving his memories to create a new computer game based on the life of Edward Kenway. How crazy is that? The framing is that we are working in a computer game developing job to create a game where you play as pirate in the West Indies. Ubisoft just love their framing.

Onto the story within the story, playing as Edward you are a master Assassin with absolutely no assassin training whatsoever. It is actually quite funny. Your ship crashes onto a desert island and it is just you and the actual Assassin, Duncan Walpole, who survive. In typical pirate fashion, Edward kills Duncan, takes his stuff including the hidden blade, years of assassins training and all, and goes to Havana and pretends to be him in a meeting with the Templar.

Unlike all of his predecessors, Edward does not possess a moral compass. He is out only for himself and his pursuit of The Observatory is totally self motivated. I don’t know why he thinks the Observatory will give him untold wealth, but at some point he is told it is valuable so he goes after it with no expenses spared.

He makes lots of friends along the way, gets them killed and also makes more enemies... generally speaking Edward is a horrible person and while this was funny for the first thirty or so hours, it did start to wear thin towards the end.

The sounds effects are good for the most part and again I enjoyed the sea shanties that you can collect and are then sung by your crew when sailing the high seas. This is very good as you will spend a lot of time travelling around in your ship looking for various collectible items.

The gameplay has the standard Assassin’s Creed issues in that the free running isn’t as seamless or easy as I would expect it to be. My Edward continually gets caught on various objects, doesn’t grab hold of ledges when I wanted him to and generally acts like a brain damaged moron from time to time. The worst instances of these were his survival instincts or lack thereof. When I jumped from a tall building in an attempt to land in a haystack, several times I died landing right next to the haystack. There was a similar issue in Assassin’s Creed III and to be fair, it has noticeably improved but it’s still something I would be happy to live without.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 60 Achievements

As with all Assassin’s Creed games, the achievements are plentiful and varied with loads of stuff to collect and, of course, multiplayer.

There are 19 achievements obtainable for playing through the game but you will also nab a few others including swimming a certain distance, plundering ships and recruiting crew members. I made a habit of collecting everything every time I visited a new location so I had a lot less to do once I had completed the main game.

Two challenging achievements include destroying all the forts and taking care of the Legendary Ships but once you have fully upgraded your ship it shouldn’t be too problematic once you identify the patterns required to take them out.

There are also the generic achievements for killing certain enemies in certain ways and getting chain kills, etcetera, but nothing too painful. The whole single player element is very time consuming though and despite fast travel, sailing around the map is a bitch.

Multiplayer

I really did think we were on to a winner after the sparse achievements on Assassin’s Creed III however, I was very wrong. There are nine multiplayer achievements (including DLC) to get, the most painful of which is getting to level 55. The easiest way to do this is to play one wolfpack multiplayer map every day to take advantage of experience boosts.

Outside of getting to level 55 there are a few small pain-in-the-ass achievements. Playing a match on every game mode was a struggle as everyone has already decided they didn’t want to play the shittier game play modes by the time I got around to playing it.

There are two achievements I used a boosting session for; killing someone using a booby trapped lift which I may have got through luck, and being the highest scoring player in a game of Domination as The Jaguar. In order to do the second one you have to get the opportunity to select the Jaguar which requires you to have the multiplayer DLC. There is a one-in-two chance of doing this if you have four players and you are the leader for one team. Next, you have to be the highest scoring player which means you need to actually be good at this game mode. Both of these scenarios were unlikely for me to pursue. So I didn’t.

Downloadable Content

The extra 250 points consists of two downloadable packs. The first is the MP Characters Pack #1 Blackbeard’s Wrath which has four achievements, the two I mentioned above and another two which can both be obtained in Wolfpack mode once you reach the correct level to use the abilities.

The other is Freedom Cry where you can play as Edward’s one time friend, Adewale as he liberates slaves from plantations. It is essentially the same gameplay style as the main game, only you get to play as someone whose moral compass is pointing in the right direction. And he is badass. He carries a machete as a default weapon and can use a blunderbuss to kill multiple dudes at the same time.

I had a lot of fun with Black Flag even if Edward’s self destructive personality threatened to ruin everything. There is the option of replaying the game on the 360 but I can’t bring myself to play the whole game again. At least not yet, anyway.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Following the two previous catch up reviews, I can now focus on a game I recently finished. I know it seems like OCD gone mad after my earlier review of Assassin’s Creed III but I felt that Ass Creed III was so far removed from this lot that I could weirdly justify reviewing it first.

So anyway, there is one reason and one reason only that Assassin’s Creed III was published before these reviews; I had absolutely no intention of ever completing Brotherhood because of the multiplayer. I don’t understand why a game series I really enjoyed decided to add a multiplayer mode when the single player along was perfectly fine, and I understand even less why people like it so much. More on the multiplayer later though.

I almost didn’t continue with the series such is my disdain for multiplayer and also the way the game was advertised led me to believe that the only function of the game was a multiplayer one and that it had no bearing on the Assassin’s Creed storyline. I can’t remember how I found out this wasn’t true but I sucked it up, purchased the game and actually quite enjoyed the single player experience.

It is essentially a continuation of Assassin’s Creed II only slightly better due t fact it was released a year later. The gameplay elements are the same as its predecessor with two notable differences. The first is that you have a new function to recruit young assassins into your mini club in Rome and send them out across continental Europe to complete missions that are completely unrelated to your main goals. You don’t actually do anything either, other than click on a location and get given a chance of success. If you fail, your recruit dies and you have to hire a new one and start again. It is fairly dull but a good source of money which brings me on to the next change.

Instead of having your own private villa to improve, you now move in to Rome and that apparently means that, as an aside to assassinating people, Ezio has also started work as a building renovator and big businessman in the area. Your goals are to buy up all of the shops in the city and rebuild many derelict buildings including the aqueduct. I haven’t read my history on this but I’m pretty sure that Rome didn’t get renovated by some bizarre rich guy with a white cape and I have to question why on Earth they’ve put this in the game.

In Assassin’s Creed II, city renovation was new and you could say it was fair enough as you were renovating a place you actually lived in. In Rome, you are just rebuilding the city for no real reason. It doesn’t make sense in its own context which is a bizarre area to fall down on.

Also, by this point we are moving away from the stupid ‘stealth’ requirements of the assassin from the previous games such as walking slowly to avoid detection. It seems that Ubisoft have accepted the fact that sometimes people run or ride horses quickly and this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are up to no good. Of course, Ezio still walks around with his giant ‘I’m an assassin’ sign, but he has been in Rome for so long now that the guards probably think he’s an eccentric. Especially when you factor in the fact that he fixed the aqueduct for no other reason that it was a broken. And at great personal expense too.

Achievements – 60 Achievements – 1,250 Points

First off, there are the single player achievements which again are mostly straight forward. There are two missable ones for doing stuff as future Desmond but if you do happen to miss these, it’s not too much trouble to reply until the point where you can get them again.

There are some quite interesting ones involving finding certain items and locations and they actually make the most of the various side stories they have set up, namely that of Subject 16 – but no spoilers here. 

I found the single player mode to be quite entertaining, however completing the game was made a major slog and dragged out for several years due to...

Multiplayer

Earning these achievements was a huge pain in the ass. Firstly, I completed every other aspect of the game years before completing these bits and there are two achievements which were insanely difficult to obtain.  The pick of the bunch for insanity is the Abstergo Employee of the Month achievement. This one requires you to get all of the multiplayer bonuses available, one of which is called extreme variety which you only get if you manage to perform fifteen different bonuses in one match, something that doing in a random match is reserved for those people who, at the time of online popularity, had enough time to play the multiplayer over and over again until they were insanely good at it. And even then, there is a still a massive element of luck to it.

This is Assassin’s Creed’s first venture into multiplayer and you can tell from the Assassin’s Creed III achievements that Ubisoft eventually learned that people don’t like having to complete challenges based on the randomness of other players.

Downloadable Content

There is one downloadable content set with achievements which lets you access an additional sequence where you get to play with all of Leonardo’s inventions. Part of this, involves having to get 100% synchronisation across the DLC, which is actually the most challenging aspect of the game. This is what you want from DLC, something that adds something a little different and an extra challenge – thank God there were no additional multiplayer achievements!

Despite many labelling this as an unnecessary addition to the series, I thought that there was enough content here to justify a full title. I still question the necessity of multiplayer but even if people like it, which apparently they do, there is no reason to have achievements for it. Surely leaderboards and bragging rights is enough for those that enjoy online multiplayer?

Assassin's Creed

Back in my university days, Assassin’s Creed was released and I immediately thought, ‘yes that is exactly my bag baby,’ and went out and bought myself a copy. It was okay, I had learned to survive without food by this point and could spare the forty quid to buy a new release.

Of course this was years ago and I’m writing a retrospective review mainly to get up to date with the recently completed Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

The very first Assassin’s Creed revisits the Crusades where you take on the role of Altair, an assassin who goes about killing Templars because that’s what he is; an assassin that kills Templars. Although, in actual fact you are Desmond Miles, some dude in the future who has been captured by an evil corporation and forced to relive ancestral memories so that the bad guys can find the Apple of Eden, a powerful device that is owned by Altair’s mentor in the twelfth century. Or something like that.

Basically the whole Desmond thing is just there for framing and the main game is jumping about ancient civilisations as Altair.

The first time I rode into Damascus, I think my jaw dropped. At the time, I was amazed. You ride out on top of a hill that overlooks the entire city and you can explore every inch of what you can see. It was beautiful. Modern day consoles will make this look like shit now, but at the time, it was fantastic. I went about exploring and doing side missions and climbing really tall buildings and actually forgot that the reason I was in the city was to kill someone!

This is where the game fails – with the thing that is in the title – assassinations. Despite being called Assassin’s Creed, you spend very little time actually trying to assassinate people and more time doing mini-missions in preparation to the killing. These mini missions are exactly the same, no matter what city you are in, so it feels very lazy in terms of development. That said, it’s kind of balanced with the amount of work that’s gone into developing the scenery and cities, however I’ve always said that you should never sacrifice Gameplay for looks and it feels like that is exactly what the developers have done.

 Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

When I was playing Assassin’s Creed, I was going through a rough time with my Xbox360. It decided that it didn’t like having games inside it and would destroy anything that entered it – much like that movie, Teeth.

My first copy of Assassin’s Creed became unplayable after my Xbox had chewed it up and spat it out. This caused me to send the Xbox off to be fixed which left me without an Xbox for six weeks. This meant it took me a long time to get to the 1,000 point mark due to these unforeseen circumstances and also the fact that there are several collectible achievements in the game which take forever to do.

In my Toy Story 3 review, I mentioned that there was no way of tracking the collectibles. Assassin’s Creed not only has a way of tracking them, it marks them all on your map. You have to kill 60 Templars and collect, wait for it, 420 flags across the different locations. This was at a time when I thought Grand Theft Auto’s 100 hidden packages was excessive.

I think I spent three nights running around collecting flags and kept having the same conversation with my flatmate. ‘What are doing?’ he would ask. ‘Collecting flags.’ I would say. ‘Still?’ he would retort. ‘Yes,’ I would answer. Once I had collected the last flag, I was overwhelmed with a sense of achievement. My flatmate called it a waste of time.

The only real problem with the achievements was the Conversationalist one. In the future framing environment, something I didn’t think I would have to worry about when going for achievements, you have to have all conversations with a girl called Lucy. These are missable and cannot be revisited. I found this out half way through the game and restarted to save a full second playthrough. But I was still very annoyed about it. It added no extra dimension to the game so why they put an achievement in for it, I have no idea.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

Despite the long haul of collecting the flags and repetitiveness of the missions I do have fond memories of playing the game. The scenery is the best part of it and that makes the exploring element much more fun.