Project CARS

I original got Project CARS free from Games with Gold with Xbox and it went straight into the backlog despite having some online achievements. I started playing Project CARS after a friend of mine posted about the community events being stopped – of which there is a related achievement which is now discontinued. If you are starting Project CARS now, you will not be able to get all the achievements. You have been warned.

This has taken the best part of six months for me to finish for the simple reason that there is soooooo much racing that needs to be done.

Project CARS is a racing game with the tag line, ‘a racing game by racers for racers’ or something like that. When I started playing I was immediately afraid that I wouldn’t be able complete the game at all. Getting a car around the track in one go proved impossible. That said, I started on the Pro setting. After epically failing, I dumbed it right down to amateur and found that I could then get a car round the track and my hope for completion was restored but only after I managed to win the first go karting race.

As mentioned above, there is a lot of racing that needs to be done. There is a career mode which sees you go from racing the above mentioned go karts all the way up to LMP 1 – which are the cars that do the Le Mans 24-hour race. There is an online mode where you race against other people with a long list of customisable settings; the community events in which you use a specific car to on a specific course to set the fastest time... And then there’s free play… but that’s it. The main feature of the game that I didn’t use was for customising and tuning the cars. I used default settings but this is a big part of the game for racing enthusiasts and something that sets it apart from other racing games.

The one shit thing about career mode is that you get invitational events that you enter year on year. There are a limited amount of these that come up but there doesn’t appear to be anything that shows which ones you won and which ones you haven’t raced so I found myself manually checking each time an even came round until I got it sorted in my head which ones I had done. It doesn’t help that a lot of them have similar names too.

The career mode is purely driven on your performance in various classes and there is no money with which to buy new cars. The sheer amount of races that come up here though, is quite daunting but more on that later.

Graphically, it’s very pretty and lots of detail has been put in to the courses and cars. Musically, it does that thing where it tries to be operatically epic but this is almost cliché at this stage.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Despite being a racing game, it doesn’t half make you do a lot of shit. And it will take a long time. Outside of the multiplayer and community events I’ve mentioned above, the career mode alone will be a time sync. You basically have to win 16 of the main championships which equates to 16 full seasons of racing. Thankfully you can reduce the season length to minimise the race lengths but several championships will have you completing races that are five laps minimum with a mandatory pitstop. Oh, and you also have to defend a championship 3 times, which means you have to complete the same seasonal championship 4 times in a row.

Outside of career mode, there is a lot of random stuff to do but most of it can be done in free play mode using specific cars on specific tracks. A few are worth mentioning though. One achievement requires you to finish 3 consecutive laps within 0.1 seconds of each other. I actually think this is impossible without letting an AI driver do it for you. There is another one that can be done without doing anything and that’s completing the California highway in under 9 minutes in an American Car. If you simulate it from the start, the AI will complete this is around seven and a half minutes.

There is another pain in the ass that can’t be AI done and that’s for completing the Monaco Grand Prix circuit in reverse. Such a pain in the ass as the bends are tight and you can’t crash. However that’s not the worst one. The game also wants you to race continuously for 24 hours. This is utter madness but at least it can be simulated from a race perspective. However, don’t do what I did and leave the penalties on. I thought it would be fine and my AI driver would race by the rules. Apparently not, as I came home from work to find him parked up in the garage after being disqualified.

Multiplayer

I didn’t have much of an interaction with the online community and after my experience on Forza Horizon, I had no interest in doing so from the beginning. One of my friends was kind enough to lend me some of his time to grind out the online achievements in private match ups.

Essentially this boiled down to winning 51 races or at least finish in the podium positions. This is a little quirk of the game’s achievements. The description states ‘more than 50 races’… so 51 races then. Thanks.

In addition to this there is a scary but funny one. You have a win a race using manual gears with no driving aids using cockpit view. This may seem daunting at first but I started up a race with one other random. Another quirk of Project CARS is that the start of a race is totally manual if you set it up without driving aids. But no one reads the sets up apparently as the guy I was racing went storming off the line before the green light and was immediately disqualified. All I had to do was get around the track in one piece. What I didn’t know though is that Monza short course has a chicane at the end that cuts off half the road. I smashed into the barrier and nearly fucked my car beyond working… but it could still go in first gear so I hobbled across the line and unlocked the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Project CARS was a very rewarding, time consuming completion that did offer some racing fun but long outstayed its welcome in terms of going for the 100%. I’ve had my fill of racing games now though and won’t be buying any new ones. Hopefully reviews of Forza 5, Forza 3 and Forza Horizon 2 will follow.

Teslagrad

I got Teslagrad during a sale due to a recommendation and the fact that it was a puzzle platformer – this is one of my favourite genres. Actually I’m not sure if favourite is the right word when I end up screaming at the TV in blood-curdling frustration, but they do provide a challenge that comes in small doses. Also, they only tend to have the one difficulty level and require single playthroughs for achievements. Teslagrad fits this bill perfectly.

Teslagrad sees you take a little boy into a castle after running away from evil looking Russian dudes. You have to use electrical/magnetic powers to navigate through various puzzle rooms until you find your ancestry and travel… somewhere to fight some king or something. It’s all a bit weird from a story perspective.

When you aren’t using powers to navigate through the castle, you will also come across unique and challenging boss fights. These were a change of pace from the rest of the game and usually had one solution for victory and follows the nostalgic pattern of score 3 hits and win. The boss battle pattern changes and gets harder after every hit too.

There isn’t really much more to say about the game other than I found the layout and map of the castle ridiculously confusing. You can backtrack everywhere but there is no option to move the map around (apparently there is but this wasn’t apparent or didn’t work in my game) to see all of it from where you are which makes planning any routes an episode in frustration and luck. Essentially, you need a bloody good memory and I can’t imagine playing this game, taking a long break, and then coming back to it without having to start again due to the fact I would have no idea what to do after I stopped playing.

The game is set as a 2D format where you have to climb up, drop down and move forward through the various rooms of the environment. Musically, it doesn’t do anything to detract from the game – not often I have no complaints in this area. In fact, that’s two reviews in a row.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 40 Achievements

It is almost possible to make it through the entire game without getting any of the achievements bar one. The only one you cannot avoid is for beating the King. This achievement, and part of the game, is one of the most frustrating fights I’ve done for a long time.

He has many cheap attacks and sometimes you can do what feels like the same thing, only to be killed one time but not the other. Once you get used to his attacks though, it’s quite easy to get to the end of the fight but then it feels like blind luck whether you get an opportunity to inflict that third hit or not.

The other 39 achievements are collectible related. There are 36 scrolls which need to be found to unlock the true ending. There is another secret achievement for finding a picture of a cat too. In order to get all of these, I used a handy video guide. This also helped in solving some of the harder puzzles in the game – some of which felt ridiculously luck based.

The hardest one of the scrolls to get involved having to go up a magnet lift thing while avoiding electrical fences that will kill you on one touch. You have to get up there in one go and really fast as you are racing against the scroll which you will be able to see on the left side of the screen. Even if you do get to the top in time, you will need to time a dash jump to perfection to get the scroll. This took me two attempts so you can imagine my frustration after navigating the death maze to miss the scroll and have to start again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Teslagrad was a fun 6 hours of gameplay. The story didn’t grab me but the gameplay was exactly what I was looking for. Achievements wise, it’s very doable but slightly frustrating and challenging in places. It’s certainly doable though. There won’t be much replay value after you have gone everywhere and done everything though.

Letter Quest: Grimm's Journey Remastered

This is another game I bought a while ago but have no recollection of why or on what basis. It’s not quick and it’s not really easy either so I can only assume that I saw someone else playing it and applied a rationale of, ‘it looks easy and all the achievements are offline so I’ll get it.’

Letter Quest follows the story of Grimm as he tries to get pizza. He leaves his house and has to go through various forests and cemeteries battling monsters in a unique way in order to get to the pizza place. It seems like they weren’t offering delivery on this particular night.

The battles consist of having to spell words from a grid of 15 letters that deal damage based on the score of the word. The letters scores are based loosely on Scrabble so unless you are really good at Scrabble you will be working with mostly five and six letter words to kill most of the enemies.

Some of the battles you fight have unique modifiers that allow to deal extra damage by using tiles in a certain way; double letters, tiles from the bottom row, words of x number of letters. However, some of these are sinfully annoying. My personal favourites are ones that mean the enemies cannot be damaged by words of more than 4 or 5 letters. This means that you have to spell lots of words in order to kill the smallest of enemies.

There are two game modes to play – story mode and endless mode. Story mode sees you go on your quest for pizza and you can play each level up to four times for stars. Endless modes requires you to continuously killing monsters until you die.

In story mode, you can earn coins and upgrade your equipment to make life easier, whereas endless mode you just go for it and can buy power-ups and health periodically from some random dude who turns up to sell you shit.

Outside of the gameplay, in terms of graphics it’s a 2D side-scrolling cartoon and musically, some of the best music I’ve heard in a game for a while. It’s original piano scores for the most part that were enjoyable to listen to right up to the end of the game. It began to wear itself out towards the end though but that’s only because it takes an age to get all of the…

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 60 Achievements

At first, these will come relatively quickly, especially if you have employed a word unscrambler to turn your 15 letters into something that makes sense. A lot of the achievements are for doing certain things like killing monsters, spelling x amount of words with 6, 7 or 8 letters, using specific tiles to spell words and dealing set amounts of damage. Seriously there are loads and to many to list.

The only ones that gave me any real trouble were the ones for getting an entire grid to be filled with plague tiles and duplicator tiles. These boil down to luck as you have to be fighting specific monsters and they have to not attack you in a certain way otherwise it will interfere with the board being filled. Both of these were frustrating standalone achievements.

The end game achievements were just time consuming in the end. You have to complete every level in story mode 4 times to get all of the stars. This takes an age but bizarrely was still not long enough for me to score 100 critical hits. You have a ridiculously low critical hit chance even when you equip stuff that maximises your chances of getting one.

Once these lot are done, you will be at the end of story mode with just the endless mode achievements and spelling loads of words left. By the time I started endless mode, I still had around 1,000 words left before I hit the 2,500 target. Thankfully this didn’t unlock too long after I got to the end of endless mode… achievements wise anyway.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Letter Quest was quite fun and charming at first but if you are going to go for all the achievements, it quite quickly turns into a slog. I had to stop playing at several points as boredom set in and I needed a break. It’s good to have played one of these word games, but I won’t be doing it again.

Tony Hawk's American Wasteland

In a new bid to get some games off the shelf, I’ve employed a new method of picking games – letting my friends do it for me based on a number selection that applies to all the games currently taking up space on the shelves. Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland was one such chosen game that, on paper, looked the easiest and quickest to complete.

Back when I was young, I actually got quite good at the original Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater. On reflection, this was probably my very first venture into a gaming genre that didn’t hold much interest in relation to my gaming patterns at the time and it also required me to go from not being able to land a kickflip at the start to being able to pull off massive combos and get the highest score achievements in the game with relative ease. So essentially it was the first game to teach me, if at first you don’t succeed, keep trying until your eyes bleed.

Anyway, journey forward in time some seventeen years and it turns out I’ve come full circle – not being able to land a kickflip without eating some pavement.

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland has two game modes, Classic and Story. Classic mode is essentially another version of the original pro skater with different maps and similar challenges so this was quite nostalgic for me. There are six levels in which you have to do specific tricks in specific locations, get a certain amount of score and collect some shit.

Story Mode is very similar. Essentially you an unknown skater who is trying to make a name for himself on the skating scene. The main driving force behind the story is that you are trying to build a skate park after your actions get the layabout idiot who doesn’t work for a living arrested. You then need to build the skate park yourself and get other professional skaters and BMXers to offer support.

The ways of doing this involve completing certain challenges in specific locations to get parts of the skate park. This is relatively straightforward if you have some skill with skating games and you haven’t lost all of your acquired skill by playing RPGs – like me.

Considering the game was originally released on PS2 in 2005, it hasn’t aged well at all and looks 13 years old in both character and level design. There were times where I felt like the scenery was interfering with the game and I got caught on invisible walls a lot during my playthrough.

Musically, its actually alright but I think this is a generation thing. I liked the punk rock scene in the mid-2000s, so it was right up my street.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

Most of the game is pretty straightforward in terms of the achievements and the game itself can be made easier by enabling cheats as these don’t disable said achievements.

First things first, playing through the whole of story mode will get you 8 achievements and unlock all of the levels to play in free play mode.

Completing everything in Classic Mode will get another six achievements. I needed the cheats for this due to my inept ability to play the game and the fact that some of the things you need to do seem practically impossible without them.

After completing both story mode and classic mode, all of the levels in the game will be available in free play and to play on Xbox Live. The next thirty achievements are really easy. All you have to do is play free play and set a high score on each of the fifteen levels and play an Xbox Live game on each level too. The Xbox Live ones don’t require you to play with anyone, you only need to launch the game. It’s a bit weird from an achievements perspective but whatever, we’ll run with it.

The last one is the biggy. In typical Tony Hawk fashion there are special jumps throughout the levels. To get the 100% completion, you have to find all of these special jumps. You will get some of these while playing the game but some of them are so utterly ridiculous, you wouldn’t think to even look for them. Some of them are also really hard to do. I spent ages working on individual ones on some levels but managed to get through some whole levels relatively quickly. No matter which way you slice it, getting this achievement alone is easily a six-hour time investment and offers the biggest challenge in the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Tony Hawk’s American Wasteland was, for me, a flashback to the past that offered some enjoyable and frustrating game play in equal measure. It hasn’t aged well and hasn’t encouraged me to buy other skating games. In terms of achievements, it would be an easy completion if not for the hidden gaps, but if you’re not fussed about the 100%, it’s a very easy and straightforward 90%.

Refunct

This is a bit of a weird one in that it doesn’t really feel like a game, more like one of those things they put it to entertain you during excessive loading times. I bought Refunct on sale for less than £2 so it didn’t cost anything in the grand scheme of things and that’s a good thing as I’ll come on to in the achievements.

The idea of Refunct is that you have to jump and half-parkour around a strange map with blocks that come out of water. You have to make your way to switches that prompt more blocks to come out of the water and then you have to find your way to another switch. It’s essentially a bare-bones puzzle platformer.

When you jump to different platforms, they change colour. Every time you start a new game, the colour scheme of the level changes. There are also some power cube thingies that don’t do anything other than fulfil a collectable function. And that’s about all there is to it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

Despite the small amount of content within the game, there are a couple of achievements that can be quite challenging. I’ll come on to that later.

As I mentioned above there is a set of collectible cubes and collecting all of them in one game will get you five achievements. There is achievement for completing the game as well.

That just leavers four things to do. There are two related to how much of the ground you colour in. The first of these is relatively easy. You need to make sure the entire world is coloured in so as long as you track what you are doing and get everything you need to before pushing the next button, this becomes straightforward.

The flip side of this is one of the harder ones. You have to complete the game only colouring 33% or less of the world. This means that you have to plan your jumps carefully ahead of time and take specific routes from one button to the next.

The last two are speed runs – for completing the game in less than 8 and 4 minutes respectively. The first of these is relatively easy but the second is quite challenging and took me many attempts to get right. It’s essentially a case of practice makes perfect as you have to memorise the jumps you and where you need to go. There is one major issue I had with this though. At one point you have to jump on to a ledge from a crouched position and the game is quite funny about how you do this to get it right. Luckily on my run where I got this, it let me make the jump on the first attempt which saved me valuable seconds.

This is where my comment about the price comes in. Considering you have a speed run achievement that means it’s possible to complete the entire game in less than 4 minutes, a price of £2 is appropriate for the content on offer.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While not long, Refunct offers a little bit of fun and challenge in the puzzle platforming genre. There’s not a lot of replay value though as it only offers the one map for you to explore. For the price though, you get what you pay for.

Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden

This is another Artifex Mundi title and the last one I am likely to play for a while. At the time of completion there were no more games available on the marketplace and this one felt a bit stale after the time invested in the rest of the titles.

Abyss follows the story of a girl who goes deep sea diving looking for her lover Robert after he goes missing. She stumbles across Eden, an underwater city, similar to Rapture from Bioshock except instead of Big Daddys there are these Wraith things that suck the life out of you. They are apparently trying to resurrect some kind of ‘evil one’ and Robert is the vessel and you need to save him. The storyline is tried and tested and is only really there to give you a reason to go from one puzzle to the next.

The puzzles and hidden picture scenes are essentially the same as before but Abyss does require you to go back and forth a lot and some of the hidden picture scenes reopen despite you thinking you were done with the area some time ago. It’s very similar to the first Enigmatis in this regard.

Instead of doing the hidden picture scenes, you can play a game of dominos which has been in previous games so I’m guessing there won’t be a lot of variety going forward if they are repeating themselves here. Personally, I don’t see why they need to have these additional things and I would rather they just did away with them.

There is also a bonus episode which acts as a prequel to the main games which provides a little more story and some more hidden scenes. Other than this it doesn’t pull any extra punches.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

This is average sized haul for an Artifex Mundi game now and eight of them are related to various parts of the story. There are another eight achievements related to doing all the puzzles and hidden picture scenes without skipping or hints as well as finding three items in three seconds, not making many mistakes and completing both a puzzle and hidden picture scene in less than a minute. Standard Artifex Mundi fare.

Where I struggled was the expert playthrough as it required a lot of faffing around and searching and it could have brought my playtime down dramatically if I had just played on normal first but there you go.

I also struggled to get the motivation up to complete a second playthrough and nab the three achievements related to playing all the dominos games. This sums up how much the game felt like a slog.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Abyss: The Wraiths of Eden is another solid game from Artifex Mundi that offers the same thing as before. As I said though I’ve had my fill of these games so this review probably comes across as negative. It’s still a good addition to the collection and offers new scenery as a lot of the others are turning in to series’.

The Bunker

The Bunker came up as a recommended title a few years back but I didn’t buy it as it seemed quite expensive for what it was. However, it came up in a sale recently so I got it and played it as part of the True Achievements 12 days of Christmas Challenge – which again shows how far behind I am on these reviews. It’s another one I’ve bought and played quickly which makes a change to my usual gaming habits of buying and then letting them collect cyber dust for years.

A quick note on that, I’m not sure if it is being used as a device to get money out of people or what, but the digital marketplace is a treacherous beast. I’ve compiled a list of games I want to buy but I have this devil on my shoulder that keeps on whispering in my ear… what happens if they delist this content from the marketplace? It’s a valid concern. This can happen at any point so the principle of waiting for an item to go on sale or come down in price is now a risk. Game developers could also go bust which leads to delistings and content not being available forever. At least with a hard copy game, you stance the chance of being able to buy an old copy of a delisted marketplace game. But that doesn’t mean I am going to spent in excess of £100 on Kickass 2. Anyway rant over, on to the game review.

The Bunker follows the bizarre story of John, a guy who is born in a bunker after nuclear war breaks out. For some reason, it’s just him and his mum, who immediately dies leaving him alone. Let alone, he sticks to the routine his mother taught him until things start going wrong and he is forced to face demons from the past while everything goes to shit.

The game does well in a lot of areas – story and atmosphere being the two highlights, however there were a few things I didn’t like. The first thing is very personal but I didn’t like having to see John on the toilet while eating his daily helping of food. It was just really unnecessary and didn’t make a lot of sense. Why would you keep your entire food supply right next to the toilet? Mother obviously didn’t teach John any basic hygiene lessons.

The other think, which isn’t as personal, is that I found the navigation controls really clunky. The game is essentially a point and click adventure game, with a really slow moving mouse, as you move through live interactive scenes in the same way as Late Shift.

The highlight is definitely Adam Brown’s portrayal of John, shitting aside. The acting throughout is great in what I can only imagine was a difficult task – playing a character that has had no other human interaction other his mother for 30 years.

The music really adds to the creepy atmosphere and helps emphasise that feeling of emptiness that comes with isolation. However, sometimes it gets obscenely loud for no reason which didn’t make a lot of sense.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 28 Achievements

Considering it’s such a short game (it can take less than 3 hours to run through) it’s got a lot of achievements. 13 can be obtained by navigating John through the various chapters of the main story. There is another achievement available for choosing a different ending but this can be obtained simply by replying the last chapter.

Outside of this there are collectibles throughout the bunker which amount to John collecting his childhood toys. There are nine of these each carrying an achievement and then another one for collecting them all. There are also documents and cassettes throughout the bunker and you need to read and listen to all of these for another two achievements.

Now, the last two I had to get on another playthrough as I missed them on the first run. The first one of these is really dumb. You have to read to your mother, once when she is alive and twice when she is dead, and there are three books you can read. You get the achievement for reading the three different books. However, one of these books, Treasure Island, is automatically picked for you on the third reading so if you chose to read this book on the first two goes, you screw yourself out of the achievement without knowing it.

The last one I got also doesn’t make any sense. There is a puzzle on the wall in your mother’s room and it’s missing a piece. The achievement is awarded for finding the missing piece which shows up at the end of the game… but it only appears if you look at the picture at the beginning?? Why would looking at a puzzle cause the missing piece to appear? It doesn’t make any logical sense.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Bunker is a solid story game but it’s not very long and expensive for the content you get – it’s retailing at £15.99 currently on the Xbox marketplace. Also, once you know what happens, running a second playthrough goes from decent to depressing very quickly so there is little replay value after the first 3 hours.