Octodad: Dadliest Catch

I’ll be honest, I’m not even sure why I paid money for this one. I’m hoping it was on offer at the time because it didn’t feel like £5 worth of game. Anyway, the reason I started playing it was because I was flicking through my games trying to decide what to play while Skyrim installed (the remastered one – oh yeah!) and my step-son got excited about seeing Octodad in the inventory. I thought why not, but almost immediately regretted it.

The controls are mind boggling to the point where, having just finished the game, if I was to pick up the controller again in an hour, I probably wouldn’t be able to move Octodad across a room.

Anyway, the premise is pretty fucked up. You are an Octopus pretending to be human. You didn’t misread that, you are an Octopus. And in the game’s opening you have to get married to a human woman. No one knows you are an Octopus and you have to con the world into thinking you are a regular human. Shit gets more fucked up in chapter 2 when two human kids pop out of nowhere.

Aside from trying to have a family and being afraid of the aquarium, there is also a chef who knows you are an octopus and keeps trying to kill you. I imagine it’s so he can cook Octodad or something but this never really gets addressed.

Anyway on to the juicy stuff – the controls. I understand that this game is supposed to have a back-to-basics style premise. The controls for Octodad enable you to control his right and left ‘legs’ and one arm which can stick to things. Sounds easy right? It’s not. They’ve couldn’t have made the controls more fucktarded if they tried.

When you start out, you are gently introduced to moving around and it doesn’t take that long to get sort of used to it but even then, you only have half control over the character. This is made worse by the fact you are penalised for knocking stuff over. I did wonder what it would be like to try and play a level without knocking any stuff over. It would probably make the playthrough about 20 hours longer than it should be.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

Playing the game is one thing but trying to gather the miscellany of achievements is something else. Basically you have to do a wild variety of different things and not a lot of them are directly related to the story - which is something I do like about achievement lists - however some of shit you have to do with the added pressure of shit controls is not fun.

I’ll mention some of my personal favourites and personal struggles with them. The first one was the secret gardener which tasks you with weeding the garden without stepping on any of the flowers. The path through the flowers is really narrow and the flowers are really sensitive to octopus proximity which isn’t great when Octodad handles like a reversing articulated lorry on ice.

There are two achievements that sort of ruin each other; one for dying and one for playing the whole game without dying. In order to die and get the Trim Your Moustache achievement you have to throw an item on to a branch and then get sucked into a mower. This is hard as throwing anything in this game is beyond ridiculous. Completing the game without dying however is relatively easy. If you play the game on easy, no one will ever know you are an octopus even if you squirted ink in their face.

There were another two that fucked me off due to the bad controls. You have to complete some kind of weird dancing game (apt for an aquarium) without missing a step and running up two escalators against their direction of movement in less than 30 seconds. Both of these tasks require a certain amount of dexterity and coordination, something that you can have masses of but the game won’t afford you any chances to use your own abilities.

And that brings me nicely onto the last one I’ll mention - getting all the collectibles. Now, I enjoy going off the beaten track but having a set of 39 collectibles that require you to be able to climb narrow things, jump and sometimes develop the ability to fly with a character that’s diametrically opposed to walking in a straight line is an episode of blood-curdling frustration. But I got there in the end.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Potential Spoilers: Now despite what I’ve said, Octodad is fun for about an hour but after that, it makes you want to scream or give up. However, if you do manage to get to the end of the game, the kids I’ve mentioned earlier work out you are an Octopus and actually ask the obvious question; why do they exist if daddy isn’t human? Too right. And after playing through the whole bizarre universe, it’s almost nice to see the developers acknowledge that their creation is beyond weird. 

Far Cry 4

Despite owning two predecessors to this one, this is actually the first Far Cry game I’ve played and I’m not sure what I made of the whole experience. I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s a very good, well constructed, free-flowing game but I’m not sure I enjoyed it very much and here are the reasons why.

Far Cr 4 follows the story of Ajay Ghale returning to his home of Kyrat after spending a lot of time in America acquiring a consumer-friendly American accent. Upon his arrival, he is greeted by the local dictator Pagan Min, the guy with the worst fashion sense in the country. As the start of the game, he invites you to dinner and then leaves you alone. Here you have a choice; wait for him to return which results in the end credits rolling, or get up and leave and embark on a 40 plus hour quest to take him out along with all his little lackies.

The gameplay is very solid and I particularly liked the shooting mechanics. The reason for this is something I’ve mentioned in other reviews – I like to be able to aim at someone’s head and actually shoot them in the head. Far Cry 4 does this very well which makes clearing out an outpost with a sniper rifle, or bow and arrow, an absolute joy.

One criticism is that the world is very large and it takes ages to get anywhere. Most of the roads and vehicles are useless and driving is fucking difficult so I ended up walking most places, especially when looking for collectibles. This really drags out the play time, especially for me who spent a lot of the time walking miles from an outpost only to die and have to start again. I think this is probably more to do with me sucking at the game though.

Another part of it I couldn’t get on board with was the characters of Yogi and Reggie. These were two of the most infuriating characters in gaming history. You encounter them, go on some kind of acid trip bender and wake up without any of your stuff... then you keep going back for more?! It makes no sense. And they are annoying characters who seem to be in the game just to make English people look like drug addicts.

Graphically, it’s lovely. It’s a very attractive world where everything looks amazing and it’s pretty much glitch free. A lot of work has to go in to making a world where you walk from one end of it to other without getting caught on scenery or falling through the floor. Bravo.

Musically, it’s very blah and bland, although effort has gone in to make it sound authentically Kyrati. On the sound front, the most annoying part of the game is the radio host Rabi Ray Rana. He calls himself a freedom fighter but doesn’t actually do any fighting other than spilling shit over his pirate radio station. All he does is bad mouth Pagan Min and does so on a very short loop and ends up saying the same thing over and over again to the point where I was so sick of hearing him say ‘the elephant in the room’ that I actively avoided driving even more despite the additional time it added to my playthrough.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 57 Achievements

Achievements wise there isn’t anything majorly difficult, just time consuming and a few you need to be aware of if you want to save time. For example, one achievement requires you to clear an outpost without being detected. This is much easier to do at the beginning of the game as there are less guards. If you miss out early on, you can replay the outposts to get this.

Completing the campaign fully will net you most of the main game achievements with a few exceptions. The more memorable ones for me were for killing a dude with an arrow from over 60 meters (I had to practice a lot to get the distance right) and killing two targets with one shot from a sniper. With this second one getting two guys to line up was a massive pain in the ass.

There are four grinding ones which annoyed me. You basically have to reply certain outposts to hammer out the requirements relatively quickly. You need to kill 30 enemies with an elephant, 30 enemies with mortar rounds (so you have to play an outpost with a mortar and set off the alarm), 50 enemies with fire and you have to distract 15 enemies with rocks. Considering the easiest way to clear an outpost is to sit back with a sniper, I barely did any of this and just worked on the achievements separately.

Multiplayer

There are two elements to the multiplayer; online versus and co-op. The versus mode only has one achievement but it requires you to finish a public match of each of the game types. It requires six players to actually start these matches and no one was playing the game when I wanted to so I had to get some friends to help get it – annoying when all you have to do is play a match.

The co-op was a bit stupid too. You can join anyone’s game but playing in co-op is much more of a friend thing to do. Playing with random people never works for me and I would more than likely end up playing with some fucking idiots, so had to get someone likeminded to get the achievements. The achievements themselves take less than half an hour to get if you do have someone so it’s not too bad. But still, it’s an unnecessary addition.

Downloadable Content

There is one single player DLC expansion that has you take Ajay into the Valley of the Yetis. It’s a weird additional piece of the game that doesn’t really make any sense as some crazy people are trying to kill you for whatever reason.

Thankfully the DLC is just a single player expansion of the main game with a new area to explore and new challenges to complete. I found this a real pain in the ass to get to the end of but I think this may have been because I was bored of the gameplay by this point and no amount of wacky storylines could change this.

Far Cry 4 is a very good game but I did find it monotonous and boring after a while. I guess no matter how good a game is, that can’t guarantee personal enjoyment. That said, I will be playing some of the other ones in the series with the exception of Far Cry 2. That one can jump of a bridge.

Xbox Fitness

I know this isn’t really a game so this review is probably just going to seem a bit like me showing off the fact that I actually completed it (only 172 gamers have done so as at the time of publication – I was the 74th) and to moan about Microsoft.

Xbox Fitness is not a game. It’s a fitness program that launched with the Xbox One but it carries achievements. When I started playing it, I thought that I was fairly fit and how hard could it be? Well I answered that after doing a 30 minute Mossa fight workout which pretty much left a puddle of sweat on my lounge floor. So hard. If you do it properly.

I continued sporadically jumping in and out of it every month for ages – I tend to do a lot of exercise outside of the home so I didn’t really fancy doing more exercise after playing football or squash. However, all of that changed around a year ago when Microsoft announced that they would be shutting down the Xbox Fitness program with effect from 1 July 2017.  This sparked outrage from the Xbox community, many of which had paid for content from the program. Microsoft were forced to refund these users for all of their paid content due to a breach in the terms and conditions – that the workouts would be available for life. This is probably the only time a gaming company has not taken the ‘service may be removed at any time’ line and played off that.

Anyway, the year’s advance notice (6 months in terms of the free content which stopped being available in December 2016 – the only content I had) was enough to push me to start working in earnest to get this one finished – and also meant that I was forced to abandon my pilates workouts in favour of more ‘achievement-beneficial’ workouts.

Achievements – 1,825 Points – 31 Achievements

Everything the base game asks you do is nothing compared to the additional achievements added via title updates.

There are four things you have to do – earn workout stars, complete stamp cards, win friend challenges and gain height through jumping, squatting and climbing apparently... there wasn’t a lot of climbing involved and I’m not sure what even constitutes climbing.

Completing the stamp cards has a very cheap work around. One of the workouts gives you 4 stamps when you complete 9 workouts but after you complete 8 workouts, if you quit out of the workout as soon as you can, it gives you the stamps but not the workout completion so you can rinse and repeat this FOR HOURS until you get to 100 stamp cards complete.

You also have to win 200 drill challenges against friends which was actually one of the easier things to do once I started working on the harder ones. By the point of winning this achievement using a combination of fight, dance and recovery workouts, there were only two achievements left to get and two of the most notorious ones I’ve won – Peak Performance and Run the Day. Peak Performance was the last one I unlocked and is for climbing, jumping and squatting for 100km. In order to get 1km a day I had to do three 30 minute workouts a day. Every day. For nearly three months. It’s one of the most ridiculous things I’ve done for achievements if I’m completely honest.

Real Downloadable Content – N/A

Xbox Fitness was an experience in terms of a completion and one that benefitted my personal fitness in the long run. Unfortunately no one will even be able to play the game again following Microsoft’s decision to remove it from service. It’s a real loss for the community too and quite a lot of people enjoyed and invested a lot of time into it. I’m sure Microsoft have their reasons and I’m sure even more sure they are business related.

Portal 2

I broke a cardinal rule with this one which is playing games out of order but my friends had raved about how good Portal 2 was so I couldn’t help but dive in when I saw the game in the local CEX store.

Portal 2 follows the story of Chell, a girl who wakes up from stasis in the middle of a crisis at the Aperture Science Enrichment Centre, a place that it seems has been built simply to test people’s ability to complete computer game puzzles. The Centre is falling apart and, with the help of the weird floating eye robot Wheatley, Chell must escape the facility lest she die.

On the other side of the coin, GLaDOS, the centre AI, is trying to kill her and just wants to continue putting you through all of the portal challenges that the game centres around. However, failing these challenges will result in death anyway so there is a real impetus to not fail these.

The game’s main strength is around the puzzles and their ingenuity and use of a physics engine which adds an extra dynamic to solving them. That said, for the most part, there is one way to solve the majority of the puzzles and only a few instances where they are multiple ways to reach the goal and these alternate routes are mainly down to abuse of the arena rather than having multiple purpose-built routes to the exit.

The game also gets a lot of praise for the characters and ‘dark humour’ but I didn’t really find it funny. I thought it was more silly, especially in relation to the near death experiences, and in some cases it’s a bit childish and some of the lines can be found on the playground at primary school.

 Graphically it’s also nice to look but it doesn’t do anything special. That said, when the gameplay is as solid as this, it’s hard to care what it looks like.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Right so on to the good stuff. A lot of these will unlock just through playing through the game but there are a load of achievements for doing certain things at certain times but none of these are overly complicated once you know how to complete each test chamber. There are a few notable mentions for some of the more trying ones.

There are 2 collectible related achievements where you have to read all doors in a certain chapter and smash a load of monitors in another chapter. Finding the monitors and working out how to smash them was fairly trying and required some thought and planning.

The hardest achievement, outside of co-op, was to complete Test Chamber 10 in less than 70 seconds. Even knowing how to do it, it still took me several attempts to get the timing right for some of the jumps you have to make.

Outside of the main game, there is also a specially dedicated section for co-op. This is why I put off playing the game for so long as it’s best done in local co-op and I don’t have enough local gaming friends... I did manage to get some help with this though. Me and one friend ran through the first three chapters and I managed to finish the rest of the game on my own using two controllers and ninja juggling skills. However, ninja skills aside there was still one achievement I could not do by myself and that was for completing 3 co-op chambers in the Mass and Velocity course in under 60 seconds each. For this I had to loop in the Missus to run the other player to get to the end in time. She is not a gamer in any sense and it took a long time just to get her used to using both analogue sticks at once! Dedication.

There are two online ones and one that required a session. You need to hug three people from your friends list and complete the first part of the co-op with someone who has never played the game before. This second one, I did using a second account.

Downloadable Content...

It doesn’t have achievements but there is a challenge mode DLC which is essential for the chamber specific achievements as it allows you to play the individual chambers without the story. This cut hours off of the time it would have taken to complete Chamber 10 in less than 70 seconds without it.

Portal 2 is a solid gaming experience. I didn’t enjoy the humour but lots of other people did and apparently I don’t really get Stephen Merchant as a funny man so maybe it’s just not for me. It would still be a welcome addition to any Gamertag though.

Forza Horizon

This was a case of nearly cocking up a full completion for two completely different reasons. I was very, very lucky to be able to add this to my completion list but more on that in the DLC section. I wasn’t even planning on playing Forza Horizon but then it went on Xbox’s Games with Gold and I’m not one to turn down a free game – unless it’s Battlefield. However, shortly after going on Games with Gold, 2 of the achievements became discontinued due to the leaderboards suffering from connectivity issues. I waited and watched the forums to see if the issue had managed to fix itself and after a couple of weeks, it did. Rather than run the risk of assuming the fix was permanent, I decided to get those done on push on to complete the game.

Forza Horizon is an open world racing game where you are taking part in the Horizon Festival, a racing festival containing lots of different racing events... obviously. The goal is to complete events and rank up to get new wrist bands to enter new events.

That’s pretty much it for story and gameplay but some of the events are a little different. Early on you have to race against a plane but in reality, this boils down to a time trail event. There are also point scoring events but these are limited to the Horizon Outpost events and thank god because they are easily the most difficult things to do in the game.

The music features a typical sound track for the racing genre and based on my Need for Speed review, my feelings on this are clear. It’s the least enjoyable part of the experience and Forza also has the same issue as other racing games in that you seem to hear the same three songs over and over.

Graphically it’s very pretty to look at it but I have to question the point of this. I can understand making the cars look good but adding as much detail to the environment seems pointless when the idea of racing is to look where you are going at all times!

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 70 Achievements

For a racing game, Forza Horizon has a varied achievement list that requires you to do pretty much everything it has to offer. I basically tried to do everything I could from the get go before focussing on events and completing the game. This included driving along every road in the game and collecting all the Horizon signs. The second one actually has a purpose because you get free upgrades for all your cars once you get them all.

Another thing you have to do is win one race on hard but this can also be done on the time trail event, or showcase events. This makes it easier as you have a fixed car so all tuning and car selection issues are done for you and there are no other racers there to fuck you up.

You also have to challenge and beat 10 festival racers. These are guys who are driving around in free roam and as you approach them, you can challenge them to a race. This seemed to take a long time to grind out, the biggest issue being once you’ve raced them, you could be miles away from everyone so you have to get back to the central areas to find new racers.

My favourite achievement (not!) was called May The Forza Be With You and basically requires you to play Forza 3 or Forza 4 to get some content unlocked in Forza Horizon. There is a work around but I couldn’t be bothered with this so I now have Forza 3 awaiting completion on my tag.

Multiplayer

Unfortunately, but to be expected, there are multiplayer achievements here but thankfully, none of them require you to win loads of races. All you have to do is complete 25 races and get to level 25, none of which required a boosting session but it did require me to play with random assholes for a while. I got the one message from someone who thought racing was slamming into me on the first corner, crashing and then losing to me. Such was the rage that I got a semi abusive message from the idiot. But that’s the problem with online gaming – there is no filter on the morons.

Other activities included playing all of the Playground Games events, selling stuff on the storefront, and the one that was nearly the cause of an incomplete game, beating Rival’s times in 10 events. To get this easily, you can race against the same rival over and over again so once someone sets a bad time, you can rinse and repeat.

The last online one I got was for completing 10 free roam challenges which did require a boosting session as it required you to work with others. This actually takes a few hours as some of the events are in-game time sensitive and really long.

Downloadable Content

There are two DLCs and both of them have their own ridiculous challenges, the second of which was the second cause of a completion failure.

The Rally Expansion has two online achievements, one for completing rivals events and one for actually winning 10 stages. I did boost the second one but this was down to the fact that not a lot of people were playing the rally mode.

The other achievements basically require you to complete the Rally event, complete a rally without taking damage, purchasing all of the rally cars and, the hardest achievement in the game, winning a rally stage on hard without a driving line and using manual transmission. I have never really played a game using manual transmission before and this took me over 45 minutes of racing the same 4 minute track over and over again before I managed to unlock it.

The second expansion, the 1,000 Club Expansion Pack, basically adds something to main game where you can earn five medals in every car. You have to earn medals in different manufacturer’s cars for different achievements but the catch is that you require optional DLC to get enough cars from some of these manufacturers and if you don’t have the DLC, you can’t get six of these achievements. And all the DLC is now delisted. This DLC also includes the most time consuming one which requires you to each a medal in 146 different cars.

Now, where I cocked up is that I knew the date the DLC was being delisted and yet forgot to download the additional content... however it appeared that the developer also forgot so I was very lucky that I was able to download the content two days after the delisting date.

Forza Horizon is one of the more fun racing games I’ve played. It seemed to have just the right amount of events that were varied enough before it got tedious and repetitive. Unfortunately it’s now not completable if you haven’t downloaded enough DLC so not one for completionists but the delisting should reduce the cost of the game.

Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures

I downloaded both of the Ghostly Adventures games as part of another Xbox deal and rather than sit on them for months/years, I decided to give the first one a go. It had a relatively easy achievement list coupled with a friendly child feel and a low estimated completion time (something I will start focusing on more over the coming months) so I thought it wouldn’t take up too much of my time.

I managed to complete the game across three real-life days but my word, it was a slog and here’s why. While the overall completion time is relatively short, the game itself is monumentally repetitive. Most levels are the same and don’t offer a massive variety of gameplay elements.

Ghostly Adventures is a basic platforming game when Pac-Man double jumps and chomps his way through various levels. He can also change into six different forms but most levels are an episode of repetition – follow the path, eat the ghosts, get the fruit. There is a storyline running through the reasons why you have to do what you have to do but it has no bearing on the gameplay in any way. This isn’t really a criticism but more of a point that the story didn’t add anything to the game for me.

In addition to the main game, there are arcade games that unlock as you progress. These do offer some different gameplay elements but not a lot has gone into making them and they feel tacked on.

The most annoying part of the game, however, is the sound effects. The music is ‘plinky-plunky’ and repetitive as with most games of this type, however the most annoying thing is Pac-Man’s voice. He makes Spiderman look modest with how often he refers to himself as ‘awesome’ and this continues throughout the entire game. As there are quite a few levels, which is noticeable when they are all essentially the same, this really began grating me towards the end. Despite what he says, his voice is generally annoying too.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

The achievement list is fairly straight forward if not frustrating. You get 9 achievements for playing the game from start to finish.  There are achievements for killing 100 ghosts in 5 of pac-man’s forms, but not Rubber Pac for some reason, and another for killing 300 scared ghosts. I targeted the scared ghosts when I realised it was an achievement and got that before the end of the game. 4 of the others came with generally playing it but I had to grind out ghost kills as Metal Pac as you only use him three or four times while playing – which is shocking considering the lack of variety in the game.

The arcade levels I mentioned above each carry an achievement for completing all the levels they contain. I found these fairly straightforward and managed to get them all on my first attempt which saved me having to play them repeatedly.

On top of these there are a few other for doing certain things like getting 50 lives in one go and getting Pac-Man’s health up to six, which you do by obtaining cheery pie things and multicoloured slime pick-ups which you get throughout the game. Neither of these needed to grinded out though because the last achievement for collecting an arcade coin from every level requires you to play most of the repetitive levels once more to add to the repetitiveness. That’s a whole lot of repetitive.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As I think I’ve repeatedly mentioned, Ghostly Adventures is quite repetitive but I suppose it is to be expected as it is a kid’s style game. It’s a fairly easy completion on the face of it but I did find it quite boring, especially towards the end.

Driver: San Francisco

I got this one as a Christmas present from my mother, who hardly ever buys me games, back in 2011, I think. I must have been going through a phase because I requested this one and Need for Speed: The Run, I game I completed before I started writing about completions.

Anyway, Driver is another one of those games where I completed the single player a million years ago (hyperbole) and left the multiplayer because I didn’t have a sickness. Well, now the sickness has developed and I went back and put the effort into finishing the multiplayer... by buying another copy of the game, but more on that the later.

The story sees you take control of Detective John Tanner... sort of. Driver is an open world game where in order to streamline the gameplay, John is in a coma and his subconscious is floating around the city taking control of cars in order to catch the guy that put him in the coma in the first place. Yes, it’s that bizarre.

Along the way you will have to do lots of crazy stunts in various cars as you progress through the game. The driving game play is pretty solid to be fair but saying that, they did create an open world and then circumvent any real exploration factors by comatosing the main character – a bit of a bizarre decision.

The music and graphics are acceptable for the type of game. The music is good but gets very repetitive after a while. When I was playing the multiplayer, I kept getting 5 year old flashbacks to having to listen to the same tune over and over again when driving around the city.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Of the 50 available achievements, 11 are story related but in reality there are loads of other small ones which you will naturally attain. There are only a handful that you have to really work for.

Some of these harder ones involve completing the in-game activities. You need to do 50 of these to get an achievement. You also have to do all 80 dares throughout the game. From what I remember, these aren’t too difficult, just time consuming. Other time consuming and awkward things involve having to purchase all the cars from the garage, switch into vehicles 1,000 times and drive 1,000 miles.

The last achievement I picked up from my single player experience was for collecting all 13 of the movie clip things – shocking considering there are only 13 of them. They are put in really hard to reach places and you have to be pretty inventive to be get them, using car transporters as ramps. Getting the position right was painful though.

There are two other notable achievements. One of them pays tribute to Back to the Future by having you complete challenges in the Delorean. The other wants you to be really stupid and complete a Getaway Activity in a Car Transporter. I can’t even remember how I did this but it pre-dates my use of guides so I must have got lucky as it’s apparently quite difficult to do.

Multiplayer

So the reason this is a late 2016 (still behind on the reviews) completion rather than 2012 is due to the multiplayer that I didn’t even attempt. All of the achievements bar three can be obtained with two players so I went through the painful and repetitive process of grinding out most of these alone.

The three that require other people involved having to play Blitz, Capture the Flag and Carry the Torch and do things a certain amount of times. This is made even more annoying because you have to get to certain multiplayer levels before some of these game types even unlock – this made it even more necessary for the second copy as I had to get to the relevant levels before I could play these games with other people.

The rest of it was just horrible grinding up to level 38 to unlock the Master achievement. In relative terms it didn’t actually take me that long but it was still a shitty task that I’m not proud of completing.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Driver is a solid single player driving experience that I remember as an enjoyable escape for the most part. The multiplayer is unnecessary and considering the age of the game, will now likely be impossible to complete legitimately. If you are a completionist and bothered about legitimate online play, then steer clear. It’s still worth it for the single player though.