Captain America: Super Soldier

I don’t know whether it was because it’s the game after I played Ben 10 but I actually really enjoyed this one. As far as movie tie-ins go, it’s probably better than the first Captain America movie, at least according to the critics. In contrast to the critics, I thought the first Captain America film was good but I’m one of the very few people I know that do. Captain America is the 5^th game of my 8 game Bean Dive but the last two won’t be published for a very long time, if at all. We will see.

Captain America: Super Soldier attempts to fill the gaps of the early part of the movie where Steve Rogers is leading his band of merry men against the Nazis in World War II. It gets this right for the most part and I cannot think of anything fundamentally wrong with the story.

The gameplay is very well put together in that you can get by with the basic attack and dodge actions, but it can be made a lot easier with use of the advanced counter and skill moves that you acquire throughout the game as you gain skill points. This is great because it feels rewarding to develop your skills rather than rely on the basic ‘punch him until he falls down’ tactic.

The only downside is that the levels are quite linear. This can also be viewed as a blessing though, as it makes getting the collectibles at lot of easier. I will cover this more in the achievements section.

Graphically it’s meh but it’s quite old now so that’s expected. The music and voiceovers and top notch, totally in keeping with the period and the voiceovers are done by the actual actors from the movie. All in all, a good buy-in!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

I even have good things to say about the achievement list. You get 25 for playing through the story so it always feels like you are making progress. There are several cumulative ones for repeating actions and killing specific bad guys, the most notable of these are for taking down 101 advanced enemies. There aren’t that many in a single playthrough, so there is a small grind required to unlock this one.

The collectibles are where the game scores points with me. There are loads of collectibles throughout the game and it does the two things I wish every game would do. Number 1; none of them appear in areas that you can’t revisit during end game - meaning none of them are missable. Number 2; they all become marked on the map when you complete the game so you know where to look. The only exception to this is the intel points but these can also be ground out using challenge mode.

Oh yeah, there is a challenge mode that you will need to get golds in all challenges to get some more achievements. However, there is only one that is challenging and that’s more because the platforming is fiddly than it’s difficult to complete.

The last achievement I unlocked, and the only real imbalanced one on the list, was for causing 500 objects to explode. I was so far off this by the time I had done everything else, that I had to travel up and done in an elevator causing exploding barrels to respawn, destroying them, rinsing and repeating. It’s the only blemish on an otherwise solid, fun list.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Captain America: Super Solider was a fun 10-hour completion although maybe my view is skewed as I went in expecting it to be bad. I actually thought it was a better game than X-Men Origins: Wolverine – it was certainly less of a drag.

Ben10 Ultimate Alien: Cosmic Destruction

This is another Bean Dive game and one I added to the list because… I didn’t really want to play it. I bought it for the kids and they played it for five minutes so rather than see it as wasted money, I began cracking through it and it went surprisingly quickly once I got going.

Ben 10 follows the story of Ben 10 in a more basic storyline that the last timeline clusterfuck I played. There is this big alien dude coming to earth to destroy us and Ben and his friends go in search of some device that will allow him to fight said alien and save the world. Again. And this is a point that Ben labours on throughout the game.

I’ve never been a big fan of the Ben 10 franchise and haven’t invested any time watching it. However, the wife had seen some of it when the kids were watching so I asked if Ben was this arrogant and annoying in the cartoon. Apparently he is and I just can’t understand how this arrogant shit bag who has no respect for anything is considered a role model to kids. I’m glad they’ve grown out of it.

Gameplay wise, its all very meh. You walk through levels killing bad guys and get to the end and fight a bigger bad guy with a health bar and win the level. Some of the mechanics and the camera controls in particular left a lot to be desired. I found it very tiresome being turned around to face an enemy I had no interest in fighting because that’s the way the controls wanted me to face.

Graphically, its not winning any ingenuity prizes and the music is the standard faire of the franchise. All very boring.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

There’s not a lot to write home about here either other than one majorly fucking annoying thing that happened to me twice. But I’ll come on to that later. There are 15 storyline achievements for playing through the game from start to finish and you will rack up some others along the way too.

Ones you have to go out of the way for include getting 50 kills as Ben, (same as the previous game), destroying all the cars in the game, destroying all the security cameras in the Amazon level and getting a 100-hit combo. This last one is a ballache as you have to get into a position with a certain boss that doesn’t take damage to pull it off. It’s basically an episode of timing but totally defeats the point if this is the only way to do it. I couldn’t keep normal enemies alive long enough to get a combo that high.

There are other collectibles for collecting three sumo slammer things in each level and this is where more of the gamplay functionality can do one. Ben can change in to 4 different aliens in any level. There are three you need to complete the levels and one you can select yourself if you like them. All the aliens have unique abilities. Two of the sumo slammers require you to have specific aliens in your foursome to be able to get them. However, if you reach a checkpoint and turn off the game and come back to it later, any alien you had selected is replaced by the default. And you can’t change it. This caused me to slightly lose my shit with the game. Thankfully it was near the end.

You also have to get to max level with all your aliens but if the game fucks you like it did me, this is fine because the extra replays of the levels will net you enough experience points to do this.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Ben 10 Ultimate Alien: Cosmic Destruction is a very below average game that offers little enjoyment and no replay value. It took me less than 10 hours to get all the achievements, so it’s middling in terms of a speed completion.

Zenith

Here’s another Bean Dive and the first one I’ve gone back to since completing games for my American friend. I sampled a review before diving in to this game and the review was scathing but potentially unfair for reasons I will discuss.

Zenith follows the bizarre story of Argus Windell as he gets caught up in an adventure to save the world from the Unexpected, the worst named evil character in the history of role-playing games. The thing to note about Zenith is that the whole thing is satirical, and the majority of the story is there to take the piss out of RPGs and other games, and even itself at certain points.

It got off to a very good start where Argus is talking to some potential attackers and tells them that he had to come this way to get away from the singing, man-size spiders. Of course, his attackers don’t believe him and it’s meant to be a play on the standard ‘lie’ that game characters tell to get out of sticky situations… but when the spiders actually show up and save Argus (more through luck than design) I actually found it hilarious.

Running into satirical versions of characters from the Final Fantasy series was also fun, especially the ones based on Tidus and Cloud. The game des well at highlighting how annoying Tidus was and shows how Cloud – or Claude, as he is referred to – as the strong silent type shouldn’t actually work in the real world. You also run into Tifa who bitches about Claude running off with a flower girl. It’s all very tongue-in-cheek but as I could relate to it, I found it funny.

Another funny bit was a conversation I had by sheer chance. I ran into someone called Gerald who is Zenith’s answer to Geralt from The Witcher series, and he talks about how he can’t remember what his epic quest was because of all the side quests he had done. It reminded me of my Skyrim review and is so true of the RPG genre.

In terms of the actual game story, it’s okay but it feels like it’s only there to play on the character tropes of ‘strong female’ and ‘reluctant hero’ but it works for the most part and produces a few genuinely funny moments.

Zenith is a funny ‘game’ though because the gameplay sucks. And I mean really sucks to the point where I felt the only reason I got to the end was luck. You get potions for health and mana and some equipment, which I’m not convinced offered any kind of real noticeable bonus. Because your character is so shit at staying alive, most of the game is incredibly difficult and it doesn’t feel like it’s by design. Unfortunately for me, this undid all the good work that went into the dialogue and story. Literally no effort has gone into it and if this was meant to be part of the humour, it falls flat.

Graphically, it doesn’t look great and I found the music to be cutting and massively repetitive.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

Achievements wise, there’s not really a lot to do and this is only a good thing considering how shitty the gameplay is. 6 achievements are earned from getting from one end of the game to the other and based on the difficulty spikes, this is the hardest part of the achievement list.

Outside of the storyline achievements, there are achievements for killing enemies and destroying barrels, but all of this should unlock before the end of the game through normal gameplay anyway. The only possible exception would be the achievement for killing 500 enemies as when the game gets difficult, you can get away with just running past a lot of them.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Zenith wins a lot of points for its humorous story but shits all over itself with the game play. It’s a real shame too because the bare bones were there to have a fun to play game. It would have worked as well if it was overly easy but the unintentional difficulty – which is solely because of the game’s poor design – made it a slog to get through. That said, it still took me less than 10 hours to get to the end.

Crash Time III: Highway Nights

The first thing that made me laugh is the way that these game titles translate on the Xbox 360 console. Crash Time 2 has a number whereas this one has roman numerals. No idea why but I’m sure it made sense to someone.

Anyway, this is the final Crash Time game of the series for me and I dived straight in after completing Crash Time 2. I even started playing it before completing Crash Time 2 due to that insufferable grind for the State of Emergency achievement.

Crash Time III puts you back in the shoes of Semir and Ben, whose American voices are now almost indistinguishable from each other, as they go on the trail of some left wing extremists who are blowing up cars in the city. It actually has a story arc where you see the end of the game in the opening cinematic and the game takes place over the seven days leading up to this opening event.

Along the way, there will be car chases – which were a little more forgiving than the previous game – and races as you go undercover to infiltrate some street racing guys… that spend all their time racing around a race track and not on the street. It’s all a bit weird but I would expect nothing less at this point in the series.

The gameplay is a lot more refined from the second game but they introduce a day and night cycle. While this adds a bit of realism, it also makes it a lot hard to see what’s going on when the sun goes down. Also, the colours used in the textual overlays were poor choices as I couldn’t see what my targets were for most missions.

While I say it’s more refined, it still suffers from the standard Crash Time bullshit of resets favouring the AI, the environment being your worst enemy and a terrible control system. It’s kind of hard to get wound up by this game as it’s so much better than Crash Time 2, despite doing most of the same things. That’s another criticism I suppose, it doesn’t really offer anything new.

Along the lines of not offering anything new, the game even makes fun of this as some point. Semir has to drive a tank and he makes a quip about the fact they pulled the same shit in the previous two games… though I can’t remember driving Crash Time’s version of a tank in the 2^nd game? Anyway, I did find this highly amusing and it endeared me to the characters a little more.

Looks wise, it hasn’t aged well either and as I’ve said, the environment interferes too much with the gameplay. Musically, it’s quality. It’s got the same soundtrack as its predecessors and it goes really well with the gameplay for the most part.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

After the horror show that was Crash Time 2, we are back to a more standard list without a horrible grind. There is still a grind but nowhere near as horrible or depressing as train-gate.

The main point of concern with the list, and probably the game itself, is that two achievements are unintentionally missable due to a glitch. Around the half way point, you will be given a car list with a load of cars that need to be collected. In order to get them, you need to go into patrol mode and will randomly appear. Once they appear you need to pull them over and steal them. There are ten cars to collect and you can supposedly do this at your leisure. However, if you don’t do it before completing the last mission of the game, you will lock yourself out of the achievements for getting 100% and for unlocking all cars. The reason for this is that there is a mission that follows collecting the cars and this mission won’t appear if you have already completed the game – a glitch that will never be fixed.

Aside from these, there are a lot of samey achievements like destroying 100 cars and 1,000 objects. Driving 1,000 kilometres makes a return too. Outside of the main game, there is some mild grinding to do but at least it offers some slight variety. The first two are quite small. There is a replayable mission in patrol where you have to drive a 13-checkpoint race which awards you with discount tickets. You need to get a million discount tickets and you get 20,000 ticket points per checkpoint. Another small one is for destroying ten opponents. I only managed three by the end of the game, so I needed to grind this out playing the early training mission over and over again.

The last ones are all racing related. You must do a race on all the race tracks and in every vehicle in the game as well as winning a total of 50 races. In addition to this you must race two of the circuits for 30 laps. I am pretty sure these two need to be done in one go too.

It’s a very repetitive process and the various tracks of different lengths make the 50 wins a bit of a grind but at least the courses are varied. The 30 laps on the two circuits were the biggest pain but there is a trick – you don’t have to win the race, you can start the race up, leave it and cross the line after the AI has completed the laps and you will get the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Crash Time III is probably the best game in the series but I’m not sure that’s saying much. It does offer some non-serious, light hearted amusement but not enough to warrant the monetary or time investment. It took me around 15 hours to complete the story and grinding races and I’m glad to finally be done with the series.

Crash Time 2: Autobahn Polizei

Okay, so the last two games on my sales request list are the last two games in the Crash Time series. A series I stopped playing as it got repetitive but in hindsight, I should have cracked on as the last two games were easier on paper and I also wouldn’t have had to refamiliarize myself with everything that pissed me off the first three times I played these games.

Anyway, Crash Time 2 puts us in the shoes of Semir and Ben and no one explained what happened to Chris from the first game. It’s like they just changed Chris’ name to Ben and hoped we wouldn’t notice. Story wise, I’m not even sure there is one. You just chase guys down, pull them over or smash them to bits. The aim is to complete a series of cases, which are in no way connected to each other, and once you do the last case, that’s it – game complete. At least in the ‘game’ sense.

The main issues I have with the game don’t concern the non-committal journey from A to B, but the way you get there. The first thing was working out what I had to do. You are given briefings on what your goal but when chasing after opponents, this became a bit of guess work until I managed to crack their code. You will either be required ‘stop opponent’ or ‘force opponent to stop.’ The latter means ‘use driving skill to pull them over’ but the former means ‘smash the fuck out of them until their car explodes.’ This was in no way clear from the outset, but the handy loading screen hints told me what they meant about seven hours after I had figured it out. Thanks.

Also, I think I mentioned this in previous reviews, but the reset function is total bullshit. If you reset yourself after getting stuck on some arbitrary scenery or something, you are not going to catch the guy you are chasing unless you get lucky. This is even more bullshit as it works the other way when you are tasked with destroying an opponent. Several times, I had my opponent pinned where they can’t possibly get away… but they just reset and drive off. So you lose if you reset and lose if they reset. Fuck off.

Another issue I had, which I think is ever present in these games, is the lack of functionality in switching to and from reverse gear. In most games, you just hold down the brake until the car goes backwards. In this, you have to press the brake button again after the car stops. I have no idea why they made this decision but it’s fucking annoying, especially when you need to pull off a fast change of direction. Which is all the time.

Sound wise, I have to say on a rare plus, the music is great. It’s borderline heavy metal and some of the riffs are easy listening that don’t get too repetitive over the game’s lifecycle. The dialogue is rubbish but that’s expected from the series and I also had a sound glitch for the first 25% of the game where it would just cut out. I’m not sure if this is my copy though or the game in general.

Graphically, it looks its age and it’s not going to win any prizes. In addition, I found the interactions with the environment to be clunky where some items would get stuck on you and stop you moving.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 35 Achievements

I would say that putting up with the shit I’ve mentioned above is the biggest challenge for 90% of this list. You will get 6 achievements for completing the main story and there are no missable or difficulty specific achievements to speak off.

Outside of this, there is the standard Crash Time faire which are all really easy to do and can also be done fairly quickly. None of these are secret either so it’s also straightforward to work out where you need to go. Some of the more notable ones for this game are to drive for 50 km in manual transmission and to drive for 30 minutes on patrol without being interrupted. This second one is essentially asking you to not play the game for thirty minutes.

An exception to this is the MadCop mission where you explore the city to find car parts. These are in some ridiculous locations, but can all be found using a video guide.

Another grindy one is for winning 50 single races, but you can grind this out relatively quickly by playing the same short circuit over and over again.

Now for the annoying ones. There are two of these. One is for causing 10,000,000 damage in one race and the only way to realistically do this is to start a race on the freeway course, turn off the damage and smash into cars until you get to 10,000,000. You can double up and get the achievement for destroying 100 cars as well. It will feel like a lifetime to get this far as Crash Time manages to make crashes boring.

Now for the bitch. Once you have completed the game and done the above achievement, you will likely have caused around 40,000,000 worth of damage. To get the last achievement, you will need to cause 1,000,000,000 worth of damage. I haven’t mistyped that. The best is, the fastest way to do this is to take the most expensive car in the game and drive it onto train tracks to get hit by a train. If the train destroys your car, you will get 1,000,000 worth of damage. That’s 0.1% of the total required, meaning you will have to repeat this tedious process close to 1,000 times to get the achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

If the last achievement wasn’t there and I didn’t get that sound glitch, I think Crash Time 2 would be my favourite game in the series. As it stands, it’s poorly made, feels rough round the edges and outstays its welcome as far as completionists will be concerned. With the last achievement, it takes around 20 hours to complete the game, which is about 6 hours more than it should be.

Family Game Night 4

This is the last title I needed to buy to for my American friend and I’m not sure if I saved the best or worst to last.

Let’s start with what I liked. Playing through the first game show. That’s it.

Family Game Night 4 is a game that consists of playing five games; Connect 4 Basketball, Yahtzee Bowling, Sorry Sliders, Bop It and Boggle. You can either compete against an AI opponent or a human player and you have to play all 5 games in a best of three scenario, with the exception of Boggle, to complete a game show.

You can also play the individual games under another menu. The individual games offer a slightly different variant to the one that’s part of the gameshow and these do have slightly more variety. But essentially that’s all there is to the game.

The controls are a bit awful though. For Sorry Sliders and the Bowling, the power meter is very fiddly. You have to slide it very carefully to avoid overshooting and it takes a lot of practice just to not get a full power shot. This is meaningless in the bowling which is a 100% game of luck but in the Sliders it becomes really frustrating when you have slide one slider for the win and overshoot and lose.

My biggest annoyance though is the voice over guy. He sounds majorly sarcastic when you win and overly condescending when you lose. And he can’t be interrupted at certain points, especially the end of the game show which is unskippable bullshit every single time you complete a game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 31 Achievements

I’ll start with the ones that aren’t part of the game show. You have to play all games outside of the game show and this will net a couple of achievements. There are also achievements for playing the special variants of the games available outside of the gameshow too.

In addition to above, the Bop It ones provide a little challenge in that the AI is so fucking stupid that you won’t be able to get the achievements for getting 30 commands in a row without some human help. Or using two controllers – which is what I did.

The rest are all obtained, one way or another, by going for the big one – playing fifty game shows. Playing this many gameshows allows all of the annoyances I’ve mentioned above to really sink in. There are many ways to make it quicker but going for this achievement further highlights problems with the interface.

Sorry Sliders has the unskippable intro which makes the game the longest part of a run. Yahtzee bowling is just pure luck so you may as well sack it off. As mentioned above, the AI is pretty stupid in most games but will sometimes pull a quick move out of nowhere in Boggle or Basketball to steal wins. This all adds to the game’s ending where the cash cards are turned into money but it’s totally random. Once, I won all the games, only for the AI to get the biggest card handed to them at the start. This meant all the cards had to be drawn which adds minutes to each game show.

Getting to the 50 games will get all bar one achievement and that’s for getting 1,500 Points in Boggle. This is a bit weird because if you get a win, it’s 25 points to win and you can get a maximum of 29 points for a win. So even if you get maximum points on every game – which is so unlikely to the point that it won’t happen – you will still need up to ten games to finish it. For me if was 8.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Family Game Night 4 is so weak and devoid of content, I can’t understand how it’s a standalone title. It hasn’t endeared me to the other games in the series and this will likely be my last venture in the genre – not including games already bought and started of course.

Talking in real terms, a game show will take you around 15 minutes to complete meaning an estimate for completion of around 12 to 14 hours. They will be some very boring and repetitive hours though.

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL

This was the next requested game of the three I didn’t own and while I think it was better than Looney Toons it’s not great by any means.

The story mainly revolves around Dexter as he travels through universes assembling a team of Cartoon Network characters to fight the ultimate evil and save all worlds. The ultimate evil is a remote control. Which I suppose can commit the ultimate evil of changing the channel away from Cartoon Network.

I must admit, there was some nostalgia here. When I was little, I used to watch Johnny Bravo, Captain Planet and Dexter’s Lab (sometimes the Powerpuff Girls) but some of these other ones I had never even heard of. Who the fuck is Chowder and why does he have to continually belch? I don’t get it. But I also didn’t get Cow and Chicken either and they didn’t make the cut, thank God.

The gameplay is like Super Smash Brothers in that you have two attacks and boss battles turn into a clusterfuck where it’s impossible to know what’s happening half the time. When you are not in a boss battle, it’s a side scrolling beat ‘em up although it’s generous to call it a beat ‘em up when there are only two moves you can do. The health system doesn’t make a lot of sense either. When I was playing on hard it looked like my player character could take up to 300% of damage? What’s the point in this? Why not just have a health bar like normal beat ‘em up games? It just adds to the obscurity of not knowing what’s going on.

The controls caused me a bit of an issue too. Apparently, the jump button, which is required for the side scrolling and is very important for staying alive during boss fights, defaults to the Y button. This game doesn’t pre-date standardised controls so why the fuck isn’t it the A button like every other game?

It’s based on Cartoon Network cartoon characters so it’s predictable as to what I’m going to say about the music and graphics. The music is repetitive and irritating. I think I may actually play Skyrim again just so I’ve got something nice to say about music. The graphics are as you would expect from a cartoon-based environment although some of the likenesses were good – Captain Planet aside.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

The first thing I did before tackling this game was check for missables and difficulty specific achievements. There are no missables but there is an achievement for playing the game through on hard. This is one of the worse parts of the achievement hunt, not because it’s hard but the game is so boring, I struggled to play it for more than an hour at a time. If you do play the story through on hard, you will net 11 achievements. In reality it’s 13 achievements as you should get the score related ones from doing this.

The next thing I did was clear up all the things you need to do in story mode. There are a few speed run achievements but none of these are particularly troubling, with the exception of SECTOR V which requires you to complete one of the longer levels in under 5 minutes. Basically, this is trial and error so you have to do several runs to work out when you need to race through and when you need to be careful on the platforms.

There are also achievements for doing certain fights without dying. One of these fights is against a character called Aku and it was a total pain as it seemed like luck as to whether one of his attacks blew you off the map or not. This took me several attempts before I lucked out and finished it.

After this, its case of using battle mode to get all the other achievements by using two or three controllers and getting PTE finishes and assists with specific characters. The one exception to this is getting three knockouts at the same time with Captain Planet’s special attack but this is easily done in one of the end levels.

You also need to spend your points to unlock the stages, characters and alternate costumes, some of which you will need for the achievements in battle mode. This is a small grind but less painful that playing through story mode.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion XL is an easy completion but it seriously lacks in the fun department. I wouldn’t recommend playing this one either. There are much better games out there. Even Gamerscore wise, I don’t think it’s worth it.