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.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

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Prison Break: The Conspiracy

I purchased this one for another hypothetically easy completion. I had never watched the Prison Break series despite many recommendations and I was afraid the game could ruin the storyline of the series. However, as it states on the back on the box, you play as Tom Paxton, who has a job to ‘interact with and influence the story of season one.’ This put my mind at ease because any interaction with the storyline would have to be nullified as Tom does not play any role in the series.

The storyline is what you would expect from such a game in that it isn’t really under its own control as it tries to fit around an already established cast and plot while still trying to make sense. It does achieve this but it does feel quite forced and although I haven’t seen the first season yet, I’m sure there will be parts of it that don’t make sense.

In terms of the standalone story though, it isn’t too bad and that’s mainly because of the main protagonist, Mr Paxton. In a world of characters doing unbelievable things for their stature and age, Tom Paxton is a thirty-something secret agent hard man who is the perfect protagonist for completing an espionage mission into a prison full of dangerous criminals. His voice is also the right balance of intimidating and aggressive, even when he is not trying to be intimidating. Or aggressive.

The game’s environments are visually underwhelming, but the character facial expressions are actually pretty good. Mind you, Tom’s facial expressions are actually really easy when all he has to do is look intimidating or aggressive.

The gameplay elements are stealth missions interspersed with some fist fights. It never gets any more advanced than that and the only way of doing stealth is to avoid being seen or heard. You can’t lure guards or take them out silently to make your way through areas so it is fairly one dimensional.

That said, I did sort of lure at one point by allowing myself to be seen so that a guard would investigate whether he actually saw something. I don’t think this the intended way to do it though and was more down to my risky cunning than gameplay mechanics.

A few story elements were really lazy as well. At one point, Tom makes a phone call to his boss when he is stuck and his boss tells him he needs to talk to a specific inmate. After the call, the specific character is sitting on the bench right behind Tom. Similar things like this happen throughout the game.

The fighting mechanics are also underwhelming.  You have three things you can do: quick attack, heavy attack and block. You can also use the block button to do a counter and once you figure out the timings, it makes fist fights a procession as opposed to a challenge, especially when one counter move knocks your opponent down allowing you to kick them. Do this twice and the fight is over.

There are a couple of things about the fighting don’t make sense either. When you knock a guy down, you can kick him but he can’t do the same to you. Normally I complain about the AI being able to do things that player characters can’t, however this one felt really unfair. The second thing is that in order to end a fight you have to do a finishing move, triggered by a quick time event. The amount of times I missed this and then had to beat the guy up again was ridiculous. If I knock someone down and kick them over and over again I wouldn’t expect them to keep getting back up.

That brings me on nicely to the issue of quick-time events. I’m not that critical of quick-time events as I believe they have their place and that place is certainly not in Prison Break. You will face quick-time events throughout the stealth sections and they often involve having to rapidly press one button then press another immediately after. There is a small noise that triggers the change and then less than a second before you have to press the next button. Failing a quick time event is game over. As you can imagine, this lovely little feature led to a lot of game overs for me until I had failed enough times to know exactly when to stop tapping one button and pressing the second. As I’ve said in previous reviews, I am not a fan of ‘trial and error’ gaming.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Firstly, as always, 30 of the achievements are obtainable for simply playing through the story. There are three additional ones you can earn by playing the game on hard (Shark) mode; one for winning one hundred fights; one for winning a fight without taking any damage and another for completing the game on hard.

In addition to the hard (Jaws) achievements, there are six grinding achievements. The Mogul achievement for collecting $5,000 dollars can only be done by completing fights in the underground fighting arena. This is coupled with your winning one hundred fights above, getting six tattoos (which is the only thing you can actually spend your money on), spending ten minutes on the two items of gym equipment (which made me realise how long ten minutes is), winning fifty fights and performing fifty reversal moves (counters) in fights.

The biggest challenge of the above is getting over how tedious it is to do it all, especially in a story-driven game environment. We are put in the prison to observe the main characters from the first season, not to make loads of money by competing in underground fights. It’s meant to be a covert operation but I’m pretty sure if you go in and beat up everyone going and get $5,000 for your trouble, you are probably going to attract quite a lot of attention. In addition, part of the story has you bribe a guard to get a specific room, however for some bizarre reason, you cannot use the £5,000 gained earlier and instead have to... compete in another underground fight to get the money??

Lastly, there is one missable achievement for playing through the whole game without getting spotted –so no continues basically. I was actually excited about the prospect of only having to do one playthrough of the game as hard (Bruno) mode was available from the start. However, I didn’t want to play through the game using a guide and it became very tedious resetting the Xbox every time I came across a new area and got caught straight away, so I sucked it up and played through the game a second time on easy to smash this last one out and take the 1,000 points.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Prison Break is a very ‘meh’ game. Playable but it didn’t take my breath away. A stealth game with only one way to play has absolutely no replay value either so I won’t be playing it again. Overall, the experience is underwhelming and disappointing.

NBA 2K6

Another sports game from 2006 when developers only put achievements in because they had to. It has five achievements that take a maximum of thirty minutes attain if you do it right.

There’s not really that much to say. The controls are as simple as NHL 2K6 which makes it an easy game to pick up and play and the graphics and sound effects are as expected from a 2006 release.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 5 Achievements

All achievements can be unlocked in one game if you get it right:

1.      Get a Triple-Double – All of your players have six in-game stats by which they are measured. You simply you have to get ten of each of three of them. Easily done by tackling, assisting and scoring with the same player.

2.      Score 50 Points With Any Player – Self explanatory.

3.      Score 140 Points With Any Team – Again, self explanatory.

4.      Make 15 Three Pointers In One Game – Score 15 times from outside the area in one game.

5.      Grab 20 Rebounds With Any Player – This was the only one that posed an issue for me in that I didn’t really know what a rebound was. What I did was go long from the half way line, hit the back board and score from the rebound. I managed to do this 20 times with three players before the end of a twelve minute game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

And that’s pretty much it. One game; five achievements; boxed and returned. Simple. It is probably the second easiest 100% I’ve done behind Avatar: The Last Airbender: The Burning Earth.

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes (Xbox One)

LEGO Marvel Super Heroes is my first Lego game on the Xbox One and my third Xbox One completion. It was hard slog in the end but I’ll cover that in the achievement section.

Super Heroes is a massive step up in terms of Lego games and not just because the last game of the genre I played was the despicable LEGO Indiana Jones 2. The first point of note is that the characters are voiced. I didn’t expect this from a LEGO game and this leads nicely into my next plus point. The game has its own storyline!

In a world when all the super heroes can exist without worrying about breaching any copyrights, they have to team up to fight... all the evil super villains in the Marvel Universe. The overarching evil is that the Silver Surfer has turned up again, bringing with him Galactus, the destroyer of worlds. In a related side-plot Doctor Doom, Magneto and Loki are teaming up to create a weapon to take over the world... with hilarious consequences as always because it’s a Lego game.

The graphical overhaul given to the game is also fantastic. I thought that it looked spectacular compared to anything I had played previously, and it feels like a lot of effort has gone into its development. They have over 115 characters to collect, most of which are intricately designed.

In terms of audio, Super Heroes suffers from the same musical issues as all its predecessors in that the music is good for the first five minutes but it is not built to be repeated for hours at a time.

The gameplay is where all of these games fall down and Super Heroes is no different, although compared to Indiana Jones 2 it felt like heaven. The first noticeable fall down was the new flying mechanic. Characters like Iron Man and The Human Torch have the added ability of flight, however this is incredibly difficult to control. If you are flying in a straight line, you can press A to go up and B to go down, however there is an apparent delay between you pressing B and the character actually moving down so this makes the ring races an absolute nightmare. Also their ability to change direction when moving is almost non-existent which is annoying and also not in keeping with their ‘super’ abilities.

There is also the now standard feature of characters getting stuck on scenery which is now part and parcel of any Lego game.

Additional features include a sandbox New York City (because every game has to have a sandbox of New York City these days) and big Lego characters, some of which can transform into their alter egos. Oh, and Spiderman can transform into Peter Parker as well.

The flying mechanic is my biggest bugbear by a long way though. It terms of gameplay annoyances, I don’t think I have anything else to complain about.

Achievements – 45 Achievements – 1,000 Points

There are no missable or secret achievements! This means, by default, there are no secret missable achievements. There are 15 individual levels which all carry their own achievement and there are also the obligatory ‘do x with y character’ achievements. One of these includes smashing up Loki with Hulk in a similar fashion to the Avengers Assemble movie and another for throwing Wolverine with Colossus which is nothing like X-Men: The Last Stand, but I think it was meant to be.

As part of the now standard achievement to get 100% completion, you have to collect gold bricks by doing mini-missions in the sandbox. Some of these missions are escort missions. I hate escort missions at the best of times but these were some of the worst I have seen. The Lego characters you control can move quite fast in the sandbox but the characters you don’t control can’t keep up with you. This makes the escort missions drawn out, slow and annoying.

To be fair, other than striving for 100% there is nothing too out of the ordinary here. The biggest struggle I had was the sheer size of the game. It is the biggest Lego game by far and collecting all of the Mini Kits, Stan Lee in Perils and Sandbox collectibles took me a very long time. The most frustrating aspect of it was the air races but that was a minor inconvenience in the grand scheme of things.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite how it might come across in the above, LEGO Marvel Super Heroes was actually sort of fun which was really nice compared to my previous Lego experience. The only downside is that if you are going for 100%, it all gets a bit repetitive and I thought the story missions were quite boring and too long, so replaying them for the Minikits was dull. However, it is still one of the best Lego games and worth a play.

Eat Lead: The Return of Matt Hazard

I didn’t know much about Matt Hazard before purchasing it. I’ve got into this habit of looking at games in shops and looking up the achievements online before deciding whether or not to buy them. Matt Hazard was not advertised as difficult but I didn’t look further than the fact that they were all offline achievements. I saw this as meaning an easy game and it will be the last time I use that as a measure!

The game follows the story of Matt Hazard, a video game ‘star’ from the 80s who is about to make his comeback and I’m not speaking metaphorically. He is a game character making his comeback. The story is the best part of the game which is something of a rarity for shooting games.

You have to take Matt through several levels of bad guys as the owner of the company that makes the Matt Hazard games tries to kill him. I mean, in the game ‘kill him’ so it’s not like he will actually die but I found the whole breaking-the-fourth-wall aspect incredibly funny. Especially the way that Matt interacts with Sting Sniperscope, the guy who is meant to be replacing Matt. He constantly mocks him and in generic computer game script, Sting can’t quite deal with it.

Another gem from the in game dialogue occurs in level six when Matt has a face-off with a bad guy from a fake JRPG game from before voice actors and has to physically scroll through dialogue boxes. When he asks to talk the JRPG out of fighting, he responds with ‘...’ which causes Matt to go a tirade about the use of ellipses and how much of a gamer’s time is wasted scrolling through ellipses.’

Another aspect that made me laugh is how many other games Hazard pokes fun at. As mentioned above there is a general pop at JRPGs but there is also mockery for World of Warcraft, (Bill the Wizard) James Bond (Kitty Abundanza – who also highlights that everyone loves Bond even though he continuously cheats on women), Halo (Master Chef) and the surely copyright infringing Captain Carpenter (who is Mario in a blue costume and is a carpenter instead of a plumber).

In addition to the storyline, the sound, inclusive of in-game music and voices, are really well done. The music is very fitting to what’s going on in the game and has a very catchy ‘success’ theme. Matt himself is voiced by Will Arnett and Wally Wellesley is voiced by Neil Patrick Harris and it is amazing how much extra credibility the characters have because of this. It actually feels like they care about the characters and invest in them.

Visually the game is below par, but that could also be to do with the parody from the story. And it is in keeping with what the game is trying to do.

However, no matter how much parody you introduce, at the end of the day a game is still a game and it is there to be played. If you are going to execute the above stuff really well then please, please get the gameplay right.

Matt Hazard is a cover based over-the-shoulder shooter and the major problem with this is that Matt  constantly gets in the way of enemies, preventing me from seeing or aiming at bad guys until it’s too late. This is annoying but not as annoying when I try to take cover and prevent myself from being shot, Matt will just casually strafe to the right. All the time. Into the line of fire, mid-reload without a sense of self preservation and then shout at me like it’s my fault! This is one of the worst kinds of game bugs out there and it sure as hell isn’t my controller either (testing carried out).

Also the over the shoulder camera means that the shooting becomes based more on luck than skill. First person would have been much better. The amount of times I was killed with one shot while in cover was ridiculous towards the end. Other criticisms include a limited variety of bad guys, and the fact there are only eight levels, however towards the end of my playing of the game I was grateful for both of these.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Generally speaking most of the achievements can be earned during a single playthrough. Without going out of my way, I managed to bag 36 of these on one playthrough. You get four at once for completing the game; five if you do it on the higher difficultly available from the start. This seems like they wanted to have fifty achievements for the sake of it.

Other achievements include getting 50 kills with the various weapons in the game. I had two of these left over at the end and the only reason for this was the fact that they are secret for some bizarre reason.

There are two achievements for collecting 20 each of the in game power ups. This required additional playthrough time as I didn’t see enough of them in one playthrough to get twenty.

A few others that I missed were bizarre scenario-specific achievements with varying degrees of stupid. One of these was to kill all enemies in the butcher shop with headshots. The scenario itself was straight forward but when you factor in the fact that it is a secret achievement, it becomes stupid. Also in the same level as the butcher’s shop you have to traverse a dance-floor area without killing any of the dancers. This is also secret but the dancers can be killed by the enemies who are trying to kill you, which puts the achievement into the luck-based stupid pile.

The achievement for destroying potted plants is repetitively stupid because you need to destroy 30 of them and there are only seven throughout the entire game. Luckily they are all in one place and they are at the beginning of a level but still, making you replay the same minute of a level is stupid.

Another few stupid ones are for killing a bandit from behind, destroying all the meat in the butcher level (secret) and my personally stupid favourite, killing three testers with one grenade. This is a special one because there are only two points in the final level of the game where three testers will appear at once. And only once in a blue moon will they appear in a place where they can all be killed with the same grenade. This is also at the end of the level which makes the preparation for trying very tiresome and just slightly inconvenient.

And lastly, completing a shitty game (in the area of gameplay) TWICE because you can’t play it through on the hardest difficultly from the start is totally fucking stupid. Several people have said that you can use a code to unlock the hardest difficulty level from the start but I didn’t find this out until after completing my first playthrough.

Downloadable Content – N/A

When you factor in the above gameplay complaints with playing the game on the hardest difficulty, (for a second time) it becomes a monotonous chore where I found that my survival was more dependent on luck than my skill at aiming without being able to see my targets. I certainly will not be touching or even going near the game again, which is a real shame when you consider the amount of effort they put into the story and characters.

I didn’t mention this above because it was low on my list of annoyances but the cut-scenes aren’t skippable either which is extra stupid on a second playthrough. The level of the story almost made me forget this though which is a testament to how good I thought it was.

Murdered: Soul Suspect (Xbox ONE)

Murdered: Soul Suspect has a unique story. You play as Ronan O’Connor who is immediately shot dead at the beginning of the game. That’s right, immediate protagonist death! Game over.

Only joking – you play the entire game as Ronan’s ghost as you try to catch your own killer. You join forces with the oxymoronic teenager, Joy who is a medium and can see you as you travel through the various areas of Salem trying to find clues to the identity of your killer.

It’s probably because I’m still getting used to the graphical superiority of the Xbox ONE, but I thought the game was really well designed and very pretty. The characters look really well done and their facial expressions pull off their actual moods and dialogue very well.

The sound effects are appropriately eerie for the ghost realm of Salem but they are not overdone like they are in most games of the same genre. There is no solid background music that grinds down your soul which adds the emphasis of when you are actually facing danger. When demons come up, there is a noise that actually made me jump a few times and that is good use of effective sound.

The gameplay elements are mainly investigative with the occasional fighting of demons. You will mainly have to search different locations for clues, some of which required a lot of graft without a guide to help. You get scored based on how well you do which felt like a bit of kick in the face with how obscure some of the clues were to find.

The demon fighting is interesting. In order to kill them, you have to sneak up behind them and complete a quick-time event to execute them. It makes the game very in-keeping with its own genre and doesn’t convert to the ‘kill everything in sight!’ mentality that dominates most modern day releases.

One of your ghost abilities involves being able to possess people to read their thoughts... and also cats. When you possess a cat, you can control it to get to hard to reach places and this is, by far, the coolest feature of the game, especially when you can press ‘Y’ to make the cat meow at a whim.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements

Okay the basic thing to remember before embarking on an achievement quest is that you only have one save per playthrough and there is a point of no return which will make 29 of the achievements impossible to get. The game does warn you of this though so it’s not too much of a problem.

Solving the mystery and completing the game will net you 19 achievements. The other achievements are for getting all of the collectibles. After that, you’re done. The only tricky part about the collectibles is gathering the ghost girl drawings. They are the only ones that don’t show up glowing on the map, however you can sort of locate them by using the strange images scattered throughout the gaming world.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I did enjoy playing the game, however after one playthough it offers no replay value. That’s the main problem with story-based games. There isn’t anything that varies from the linear progression which is same issue as I raised with the CSI series.

That said, I did think it was a very well executed story with an original idea and is definitely worth giving a go.