ABZÛ

I had an original reason for starting this one. I recently decided to take part in a True Achievements site challenge where I had to earn an achievement from each letter of the alphabet in order. This works in that you get an achievement beginning with the letter A, then the letter B and so on. You can unlock other achievements in between but they won’t count towards the challenge. When I got to Z, I only had one achievement across all of my games that qualified – Zombie Repeller from Halo 3. This looked to be too much of a pain considering the alphabet challenge was timed so I opted for a new title. With the Zen Master achievement, ABZÛ fit the bill.

ABZÛ is an underwater exploration game where you are a diver who is swimming underwater, exploring and making friends with lots of different sea life. There isn’t really any reasoning behind the story but it is sort of revealed that there are some strange problems in the oceanic world and it’s up to you to save the ocean.

The game mechanics involve swimming and finding stuff and you can also interact with some of the larger fish to swim with them. It’s more about the journey than the gameplay and the oceanic world is well crafted with lots of attention to detail. I didn’t get stuck on any scenery (one of my gaming bugbears) and I didn’t get lost all that much despite the in-game world being quite big.

The sound effects consist of generic watery style music which at first is okay but after a while it starts to wear thin despite the fact it’s a relatively short game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

A short game and a short achievement list to boot. There are various things required to get the 100%. The first thing you can do is jump out of the water. The next thing is to grab a big fish and do a flip. Later in the game, you will come across giant squid and you can ride these too for another achievement.

There is another achievement for bursting through 15 schools of fish in jet stream sections where you go really fast. After you have done this bit, there aren’t any more specific achievements to get until you complete your collections of stuff. You have to find all meditation points (this is the Zen Master achievement) and while you are meditating, you need to watch a fish eat another fish for another achievement. This is irritating because it’s not down to you, the player, whether or not you get this as it’s totally luck based... but thankfully seems to happen a lot.

There are another two collection achievements for releasing all fish from hidden pools and finding all the sea shells. This last one is a bit of a funny one as there is one shell hidden in the end of game credits which you can pick up as it’s an interactive scene.

There are two unavoidable ones that relate to the story and another one for riding a blue whale until it jumps into the air.

The last one I got nearly caused me to have a rage blackout. There is one small section of the game where the water is frozen and you can jump out of the water on to the ice. This is meant to trigger the Artic Explorer achievement however many people, including me found that this didn’t work. Luckily, and that’s all I can describe it as, I replayed the level, went there again and hung out for the long haul. It popped eventually but it’s still a bit shoddy. As you can tell, I clearly don’t like it when things don’t work the way they should.

Downloadable Content – N/A

ABZÛ is a straight forward completion - glitches aside - that offers light enjoyment without any major challenges. It’s one for the achievement hunters and doesn’t offer much in terms of replay value.

Blazing Angels 2: Secret Missions of World War II

Going way back, the original Blazing Angels title was one of my first completions on the Xbox 360. I remember it being a relatively straight forward completion and a game with multiplayer without multiplayer achievements so when I saw there was a sequel, I jumped right on it. This was back in 2008 – it turns out that Blazing Angels 2 does have online multiplayer and some rather overzealous achievements to boot.

2008, and anything I played pre 2011 was done so without any consideration to whether I could actually complete the games I was playing (due to closed servers or not fun multiplayer, just to clarify) so after finishing the single player, I put this one back on the shelf for an indefinite amount of time... until 9 years later, someone else who bought the game came along and allowed me an avenue to actually get the remaining online achievements.

Blazing Angels 2 is a flight combat simulation game where you replay fictional missions from World War 2. The campaign involves flying different planes around and blowing stuff up and shooting stuff out of the sky.

Graphically I don’t think it’s held up too well against most modern titles but the flying controls are straight forward, it’s a simple game to play and the AI aren’t cheap so all in all, the single player is a solid 7 out of 10.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

There’s really no great shakes with the single player campaign. 19 achievements are gained by completing the main campaign missions.

Outside of this, there are achievements for doing certain things multiple times, obtaining Ace ratings, acquiring all technology and completing stunts (which is a collectible one as you have to find the stunts in the missions).

Outside of this, you also need to unlock all the planes and complete all secondary objectives, which is the real challenge of the single player campaign. This will most likely require a few mission replays to get but the game tells you what you need to do. It’s challenging but not beyond the average gamer with patience.

When I was playing without achievement guides, I also managed to completely miss one for getting three streaks of at least 15 kills. I replayed one campaign mission to do this after restarting the multiplayer... ah the multiplayer.

Multiplayer

So there were approximately zero players still playing Blazing Angels 2 in 2017. Not much of a surprise considering , not a lot of people bought the game and it’s nine years old. So I approached one of my gaming friends and we embarked on a quest to get this finished. There are 18 achievements total for multiplayer which encompass doing a variety of things across several different multiplayer modes.

The first mode is Skirmish which has three achievements attached to it. You and your partner(s) have to destroy all targets with a set amount of lives. There are six missions and you have to complete two of them to 100%, 3 to 50% and all of them to 25%. While doing this, you can also get the achievement for assisting your wingman 25 times.

There is an achievement for playing one match in each mode and another for getting kills in 15 different aircraft. This second one isn’t so bad because you can change aircraft after you die so when you are trading off kills, this one can be done over three games for the Early, Mid and Late time periods for which different planes are available. There is another ridiculous one for making 15 kills in a row without dying. I’m not sure how possible this would be in a real match.

Once all of these little ones are done, it only leaves three big things to do. You have to get 300 kills in adversarial game types, which is a bit steep when only playing with one other player. The bigger pain in the ass is getting the squad match wins which you have to do 50 times. There is a hosting issue with this one too where the host doesn’t seem to get any wins but I was abusing a quit out method to get these where your opponent, who is also the host, quits out after one kill.

Now, for the big one. Even after doing all of that you will have racked up maybe ten hours of online play. You will have two achievements remaining for getting 25 and 50 hours of online multiplayer under your belt. This would be ridiculous doing legitimately and I suppose it shows that the developers thought they had put together an enjoyable multiplayer experience. I’m not convinced but my gaming history doesn’t show a great deal of multiplayer accomplishment so who am I to say what’s good and what’s not.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Blazing Angels 2 was one of those completions where I breathed a sigh of relief to be done with it. It was rewarding but not enjoyable. Not a lot of people have seen this through either. I finished the game in June 2017, nearly ten years after release and I was only the 257^th person to complete it (taken from Trueachievements.com).  The single player is solid even if the looks don’t hold up well – the multiplayer is the only put off from an achievement hunter’s perspective.

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.

Skyrim

I’m not even going to pretend I didn’t love every single second of playing Skyrim for a second time. More than 200 hours of investment for the achievements and the only time it wasn’t fun was when I couldn’t carry all of my shit back from the dungeon raid to the shop to sell it all. Such a great game no matter how you chose to play.

Skyrim sees you, the player, become Dragonborn, someone who can commune with dragons, is the kin of dragons... and just goes around murdering a bunch of dragons. But let’s be honest, doing all that Dragonborn shit, like saving the world from Alduin, can wait until you have become leader of the companions, Archmage of the college of Winterhold, stolen everything and killed everyone –including the Emperor of Cyrodiil. Seriously, it did actually get to the point where I was walking to the next dungeon looking for some artefact or another when I realised... there’s this badass dragon that I’m meant to be killing and saving the world... and I’m dicking around with some bandits in a cave!

In all seriousness the actual storyline follows the Dragonborn in their pursuit of super evil Worldeater dragon Alduin. You travel far and wide in order to track him down and kill him and save the world. Not really a spoiler for a remastered game and not surprising that you, the playable character, wins the day.

Graphically it’s stunning to look at and it’s awesome being able to see a mountain in the distance and knowing you can climb it. However, this is a Bethesda game so that means glitches and lots of them. There was one thing that bugged me when I played the game on the 360 and this was in relation to the quests you receive. One quest fucked up and pointed me to a dead end in a castle because I had completed a questline which killed off some NPC dude that I was meant to talk to. I thought to myself, the remastered edition will fix this, but I wasn’t willing to risk it so I made sure I did the specific quest first to get it out of the way... only to have another quest glitch out along the way. For fuck’s sake. It was nowhere near as bad as the Borderlands glitch though.

There is so much more I can say about this game and I could go on and on for days. But there is one thing other that caused me to become irrationally irritated, related to your optional family. I married Ysolda who is a typical Nordic lady and is very lovely. But I am a giant lizard with horns. What part of her went, ‘thank you for that mammoth tusk. I know we aren’t the same species but that’s a lovely amulet so let’s get married.’ It’s not just the cross-species issue, but as soon as you marry her, she turns into a wet blanket who never leaves the house and doesn’t seem to care if I fuck off for weeks at a time exploring dungeons and shit. Also, she didn’t seem to care when I started spending all my time with some girl vampire who I have an unnatural connection with.

There are technically three DLCs from the 360 version that are incorporated into the main game. Dragonborn sees you travel to Solsthiem which is an island off the coast of Morrowind – so much so that you are actually treated to a bit of Morrowind theme music during your time here.  You are on the trail of Mirrack, another Dragonborn who is evil in his own sort of way and imprisoning the inhabitants of Solsthiem.

The other story one Is Dawnguard where you join the vampire hunters... or join forces with a vampire. Either way, you get to buddy up with the saucy but repetitive Serana, a vampire who will join you to fight against the vampires. You develop what I only describe as an overly inappropriate friendship if you chose to get married earlier in the game as I’ve mentioned above. While you are travelling with her, she has about three one-liners which she constantly says over and over again to the point where I just wanted to cut her into little pieces.

Achievements – 1,550 Points – 75 Achievements

I personally invested over 200 hours getting the achievements for this one and the chances are if you are playing it, you will go out of your way to tick them all off. So what are the most notable ones?

Well first off, there is an achievement for having 100,000 gold. This much gold will see you through the painful process of building houses later on. Actually building the houses is what nearly screwed me out of the 100%. It turns out that if you do the Dark Brotherhood questline before building the house in Falkreath, you run the risk of locking yourself out of being able to build it at all. I thankfully managed to reload an earlier save to finish off this arduous task.

It is proper repetitive too. You have to build three houses in total and getting the materials, doing the building and buying the land are really boring. It was boring as a standalone DLC and it was boring here too.

Speaking of the Dark Brotherhood, 3 of the achievements for completing their questline are missable as you can attack them and get a quest for destroying the Dark Brotherhood which replaces doing their missions.

Another missable one, which I found fuckassingly annoying was the one for collecting all of the Deadric items. Without a guide, you could quite easily cock this up without realising. The most notable of these is the Masque of Calvicus Vile which you actually get for ignoring the request of Calvicus to kill a dog. I spent the early part of the game smashing these out as much as my level cap would allow.

Another missable one is for capturing Fort Greenwall or Fort Sunguard which is the half way point of the Civil War questline. Apparently you can lock this out if you progress too far through the main story without starting the civil war quests. As I concentrated on doing anything but the main story,  I didn’t experience this issue.

A few other notable ones include killing a Legendary Dragon. This is harder than it may seem because in order to spawn a Legendary Dragon you have to be level 78. The hard part isn’t killing the dragon, it’s getting to this level.

In the 360 you could use a skill book called the Oghma Infinium over and over again to level up. This was a glitch which could be exploited by using a bookshelf and reading the book from the shelf. Bethesda didn’t fix the possibility of glitched quests but they did decide to remove this handy bit from the remastered version. Funny, that. Thankfully there are other ways to get to 78 and the way I did was by exploiting fast travel with an illusion spell that tricks the game into thinking your using illusion while fast travelling. You level up the one skill to reach 78 reall quickly by rinsing and repeating this.

The last achievement I unlocked was for completing the Lost to Ages quest which isn’t overly difficult but it is really long and convoluted, at the end of which you get an item that would probably have benefitted me if I had got it about 100 in-game hours earlier.

Downloadable Content – N/A

So to sum up, Skyrim is one of the only games I would play again even after getting all of the achievements. I wouldn’t play as a lizard again though. He seemed to die far more easily than the Nord counterpart. The next time I have a spare 200 hours, I’ll dive back in.

Lego Harry Potter: Years 5 - 7

I’m slowly coming to the end of the Lego franchise, or at least I thought I was. It seems for every backlogged completion I knock out, another two new ones take its place. At this current time, following the completion of this stupid thing I have finished 13 out of a possible 23 released Lego titles and despite the colourful facade these are far from leisurely pleasure cruises.

So, specifically Lego Harry Potter Years 5 -7 (LHP57) – I was at a major disadvantage story wise because I had not watched the movies and this meant that none of the cut scenes or interactive story bits made any sense to me. On the bright side, when I played catch up, I hadn’t ruined the movies for myself either so every cloud. Needless to say, the storyline follows the movies so if you’ve watched them you already know what happens. If you haven’t then you won’t know what’s going on.

The gameplay... just. I don’t know. You learn spells and you go through levels using the spells to get to the end. And you do it all again on freeplay if you want the achievements. I have to say I had to look up what to do twice when playing the game normally because I couldn’t work out what the game wanted me to do. I’m not sure if it was my own stupidity or lack of Potter knowledge that caused this. But that aside it’s for the most part very cleanly put together. I only had to start the game three times after getting stuck on shit and, on the bonus level, getting forced out of the map. But it’s essentially the same Lego formula that I keep going back to – the levels take ages and it’s repetitive.

I won’t talk about the graphics because Lego but the music was insanely repetitive, cringy and just shit to listen to.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 49 Achievements

26 Achievements are gained from playing through the story and there’s not a lot of note outside of that either, other than the fact that the open world sections of the game could potentially have you searching for hours and hours to get the last character token that you missed on the first run through. As always the 100% is the biggest ball ache of the Lego franchise as it requires you to play through every fuck ass level twice.

Bizarrely for a Lego game, there is a missable achievement. When playing through Year 7, you have to deliberately visit Hogwarts as you don’t actually go there. If you don’t do it during the story, you will need to replay the first 2 years of the game. Not cool but chances are you will do this by accident. Thankfully this isn’t a secret achievement either so the game at least warns you about it.

There are a few other annoying ones. There are some instances where you are required to duel with other characters within the game. However, these only happen at certain points and you have to use certain characters to win the duels. The duels are the most overly convoluted, drawn out process in the game so having to do them twice is a ball ache anyway. But having to pick a specific character and play a specific level and then duel a specific character?? It’s not difficult, it just irritating.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The easiest way to sum up the game is an irritating repetitive adventure that’s not fun. I played it for the achievements and I no doubt will play more Lego games in the future... and I’ll probably dive straight into Lego Batman3 next. I will complete them all. Eventually.

6180 The Moon

I’ve started compiling this list of potentially easy completions and offline only games as I attempt to make a full transition to games I can complete by myself – again, why you probably won’t be seeing Destiny or Elder Scrolls Online here any time soon.

Anyway, 6180 The Moon follows the story of the Moon as it travels through the solar system, like the moon does, to find the Sun as it has disappeared. Along the way it meets our other friends from the solar system – Earth, Venus and Mercury.

The premise of the game is that the Moon has completely forgotten that it’s the moon and can apparently travel past all of the other planets in search of the sun. Once it gets to the sun, the sun tells it that the reason it has disappeared is because the Moon is still up and needs to go down for the sun to appear. It’s utter bullshit and you could argue that it’s a kid’s story but the gameplay doesn’t exactly appeal to a child audience.

6180 The Moon is a 2D side-scroller format where if you fall through the bottom of the screen, you appear at the top and vice versa. It’s a simple but frustrating mechanic in that it boils down to trial and error unless you are a super genius who can work out the pattern the ball will move in before you make a jump or drop. This is why the supposed storyline doesn’t fit with the gameplay – a child would become frustrated as soon as the Moon didn’t do what they wanted and I like my controllers to stay in one piece.

Looks wise, it’s a fairly cheap game and doesn’t need to be glamorous for the gaming experience. The music is dreary, supposedly to mimic the emptiness of space or whatever but in my opinion the game is best played muted.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 16 Achievements

At the start of this review, I mentioned that it was a quick completion and according to my stats, I managed to rattle through in less than an hour of play time which is pretty good going. 11 of the achievements are awarded for completing all of the puzzle levels and as I said, once you get used to the gravity function, most levels become straight forward.

Of the other five there’s not really a lot worth mentioning. You have to jump 200 hundred times and break 500 blocks, both of which will happen through normal game play unless you are really, really good and manage to get through all the levels first go.

There’s another for dropping through the screen 10 times in a row. I got this one on one of the first levels by complete accident. You also need to clear a level without jumping and also clear a level without using the drop of light pick up thing. I had to actively pursue doing a level without jumping but the drop of light one was another accident.

Oh, all of the non-story based achievements are secret, which is a bit backwards but there you go.

Downloadable Content – N/A

6180 The Moon is a quick, easy and cheap completion but it’s not very rewarding and also frustrating at times. A Gamerscore whore’s dream but nothing more.

Men In Black: Alien Crisis

I didn’t know this game existed until a couple of weeks ago. I did a bit of research and it seemed to be a relatively easy completion and I have to say I wasn’t disappointed for the most part.

Men In Black is a rail-shooter (not a third person shooter) that follows the story of Peter Delacoeur, an art thief who gets caught up with some aliens and a plot for some idiot to try to take over the world/destroy everything. It’s a fairly bland story, the highlight of which is Frank the Pug with his quippy dialogue. Honestly, the story is nothing to write home about – stereotypical, one dimensional characters and no Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones in sight. Bleurgh.

The gameplay confused the fuck out of me after the opening cut scene. You pick up a gun and some aliens are attacking you so my thought was to run to the nearby van and take cover. This was impossible though as I soon realised that my character movements were limited to a very small left and right window. This is an absolute nightmare as the enemies can throw grenades which you seemingly can’t avoid. It ‘s stupid too because after seeing it be thrown and watching it sit there, knowing it’s going to explode, you physically can’t get out of the way.

There are also some really shitty investigation/dialogue sections where you have to talk to people and scan stuff. Talking to people is the questionable bit as you have what seems like a choice over dialogue options... but none of them are actually choices. It’s just going through the motions and in terms of a game that’ primary function is a rail shooter, is totally unnecessary.

The third and final aspect of the game play involves flying car sections and there is something here that I can’t quite get my head round either. The Xbox controller – in fact, most modern gaming controllers – has two analogue sticks designed for use by humans with two hands and two thumbs – one on each hand. Yet for whatever reason, the designers decided that the left stick is pointless and that the car and the targeting for the gun can both be assigned to the right stick. Totally fucking stupid but there you go.

 Achievements – 1,000 Points – 38 Achievements

11 Achievements can be gained from completing the story mode which can take around 3 hours. While playing through story mode you will unlock weapons and abilities that you need to use to unlock further achievements. There is one for each weapon and ability, the most notable being the bubble gun thing. You need to shoot 7 civilians with the bubble gun so you can wipe their memories at the end of the missions.

There are some achievements for getting kills in the car and total kills in general. 900 enemies and 70 bikes to be precise. In the car you, also need to take out three platforms covered in enemies and take out twenty enemies using the rockets on the car.

There are also three achievements for playing the V R Missions in solo mode and you need to get a score of 300,000. I did this first go without trying so it’s not challenging.

The above are all very blah. There are only three achievements worth mentioning for their shittiness. The first is the competitive VR missions. For a start, they make you replay sections of the story. You have to play it in two player split screen and all you have to do is complete the missions. There are twelve of them so it’s repetitive, boring and pointless. All it did was piss me off because I had to get a second controller out to play with no one.

The second is for completing story mode on elite agent. What’s the difference between agent and elite agent you ask? Well, elite agents get all of the weapons unlocked from the beginning of the game and don’t need to watch the cut scenes or dialogue because they’ve seen it all before. That’s right, it’s a difficulty that doesn’t unlock until you’ve completed the game already and it’s actually easier than the first play through. The key word for this review – pointless.

The last one is the biggest pain in the ass. There is one mission in the car where you need to avoid all of these purple mine things. The car’s general controls make this a fucking pain, but it’s essentially trial and error with 3 sections of purple things and no check points. The second bit is a cunt because you have to move the car down and then up, something it is incapable of doing at any kind of pace. The worst thing is though, because of the lack of checkpoints and the fact that this bit isn’t at the beginning of a mission means that you will have to replay through the first section a lot unless you get ridiculously lucky – this caused me to become hateful towards the dialogue so have your mute button handy.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Men in Black is a fairly easy but boring completion with a load of pointless achievements that cause a lot of a repetition. It’s quick despite the double playthrough though so a Gamerscore hunter’s dream, even with that stupid mine dodging achievement.