DYING: Reborn

On to game number two in the shitty games series and introducing DYING: Reborn, a game that has some kind of weird premise that doesn’t make any sense, and a character with a fish for a head.

In terms of comparison, this game is almost a copy of Your Toy, except Your Toy had an identifiable premise. In DYING: Reborn, your character wakes up in a room complaining of headache. The idea is to… you know what, I have no idea what the purpose or story is about. But you go around picking up all manner of items and solving all manner of ridiculous puzzles. There are TVs which give you some ideas as to what may or may not be going on, but it’s all blah and it gets even more blah when the man with the fish for a head turns up (this is not a spoiler, look at the cover image for the game.)

The gameplay is frustrating and not just because of the unsolvable-for-normal-people puzzles. The control interface is a pile of garbage. It took me a while - and having to press every button going - to work out how to open the inventory. And that was after I picked up around 5 items and couldn’t figure out how to use them. To sum it up, it’s unintuitive.

Looks and sounds wise, both are offensive. The whole game feels like it’s trying to be scary and edgy but the voiceover from the protagonist just seems whiney rather than scared or angry. The whole environment is made to look like what I can only describe as standard faire for attempted, ‘look how scary it is, everything is either broken or covered in blood/red pen.’ This environment construction is not scary when poorly thrown together and it’s clichéd.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 19 Achievements

In terms of achievements, it’s almost a relief that the majority can be earned just for following the ‘story.’ Outside of these, the other three are for getting all memos, watching all TVs and solving all password puzzles. There is chapter select too so that means you don’t need to worry about missable achievements.

I will confess to using a guide for this. The game is only two hours long max and as soon as I realised it was garbage, I wasn’t going to waste too much time puzzling over garbage.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Something else horribly off-putting about the game is the price. It’s currently retailing for £15.99. Considering its length and horrendousness, I got it in a sale for at least 50% off. To be honest, I wouldn’t pay more than £5 for it. It’s an easy completion though, you just won’t have much fun other than laughing at the shitty dialogue.

One Eyed Kutkh

It seems that I went on a Gamerscore-specific buying splooge at some point in the distant past and it also turns out that that some of them are an absolute pile of wank. The series sort of started with Your Toy but after playing another four of these ‘easy Gamerscore’ recommendations, of which One Eyes Kutkh was the second I’ve played, this is effectively the one that started the trend of shittiness once I realised what was happening.

So, on to One Eyed Kutkh. You are an alien with one eye. I never figured out if Kutkh was its name, race or whatever but it doesn’t really matter. The point is, he can’t talk, and he crashes his spaceship into a planet despite pressing many buttons, none of which are the ‘instantly fix spaceship’ button.

Once on the planet, which is a Tardis in terms of size, you distract the sun and the moon and steal their ships. But it doesn’t work and then the planet’s natural inhabitants need to fix the shit you’ve broken. In terms of a story that offers something, it doesn’t do that. The whole moral aspect appears to be don’t fuck shit up in someone else’s house so I’m not sure if the game is designed as a life lesson for kids but it’s stupidly weird and not fun.

Gameplay wise, it’s supposed to be a puzzle game, but it suffers from modern puzzle game syndrome in that it’s either not challenging and closer to a walking simulator or so fucking obscure there’s no logical way to work out what you’re supposed to do. To be fair, One Eyed Kutkh doesn’t suffer too much from this last one. It just suffers from being shit.

Musically and graphically it can fuck off. It’s just poor and annoying in every aspect. Thankfully, I only had to put up with it for less than an hour.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

So less than an hour’s gameplay and the minimum amount of achievements for the Xbox One – clearly very short and there’s also not a lot extra to do. 2 of the achievements are story related and can’t be missed but the other 8 require specific actions in the game world. However, none of them are secret so it at least tells you what you need to do. There’s not a lot to it and with a guide, it pretty much becomes a walking simulator.

Downloadable Content – N/A

As is the start of a theme, One Eye Kutkh is short, shit and non-sensical. The only selling point is the easy Gamerscore and the fact that the game is over relatively quickly. It’s priced at £3.99 so at least it’s not over the top in terms of cost.

Saints Row: Gat of out Hell

A while ago, I committed to doing the only online achievement in this game with my friend who did Saints Row II with me. It’s taken a while for us both to be available at the same time but we finally managed it at the back end of my Bean Dive so I added another game to my backlog. Not to be fully bogged down by a host of unfinished games, I cracked straight on with the rest of the game as soon as I finished 6 out of my 8 Bean Dive titles.

Gat out of Hell picks up where Saints Row IV left off. The earth is destroyed, and the Saints are sailing through space just chilling. The next thing you know, the leader of the Saints gets kidnapped by the devil and it’s up to Johnny Gat (and Kinsey) to bust in to hell, murder a bunch of demons and bust him out of there.

The storyline is almost pointless in terms of how stupid it is but what the Saints Row series offers now is just hours of wacky fun… for the most part. More on that later. The gameplay is the same as Saints Row IV. You gain some super powers, grab some guns and go around completing challenges and taking over sections of the map, called New Hades. Along the way, you meet notorious characters from history such as Blackbeard, Vlad the Impaler and Shakespeare?! Yes, apparently Shakespeare was inherently evil and hell-worthy according to the Saints. Once you’ve taken over most of the map, you annoy the devil enough to face him in battle and once you beat him, you complete the game.

There’s not much to it really – there’s the standard faire of activities and take-over set pieces, the most notable changes being the challenges that involve flying with your new-found demon-slash-angel wings.

Graphically it’s the same as Saints Row IV and doesn’t really need any more. I had a couple of crashes and got stuck on scenery a few times but all in all it’s a fairly solid build. Musically, it does have a soundtrack but like Saints IV you won’t hear any of it because it’s infinitely easier to travel using powers. The background music becomes very repetitive towards the end though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

For the most part it’s a fairly straightforward achievement list. There are only two missables, one for collecting five orb thingys without touching the ground and another for completing an Extraction Facility on a motorcycle. The hardest part of this last one is knowing it’s an achievement (it’s not a secret but you need to read the list) and getting a motorcycle. Vehicles in the game are a bit weird in that there’s only about 5 or 6 different ones and if you need a specific one, it will never show up.

The in-game unlockable abilities are great because you can unlock a collectible indicator which shows you where all the collectibles are. I love it when games do this as it’s then about you collecting all the shit rather than having to search the entire map for the one you missed (I’m looking at you Crackdown).

The rest of the achievements are easy to get but the biggest issue with it is that it’s grindy and repetitive. It would have been nice if the game rounded itself up nicely, but the fact is after you have done everything that Gat has to offer, you will mostly likely have another 10 hours of grinding weapon and power kills on enemies to do. And even this wasn’t enough to get me to the 20-hour mark required for what was my final achievement - for playing for 20 hours. I unlocked this last while asleep as I left it rack up gameplay hours over night.

So the biggest problem with Gat is that it doesn’t have enough content to match it’s achievements and Saints Row IV had double the play time requirement too. It’s just a bit disappointing.

Multiplayer

The only multiplayer requirement is to play co-op online for 3 hours. It doesn’t have to be in on go but that’s what we did and we also used the time to get all of the missable achievements. And it’s always fun to play with friends. I’m just glad I had one rather than having to find a random to play with.

Gat out of Hell was an enjoyable game for around 8 hours or so and this time flies by. After that though, to get the rest of the achievements, it’s a grindy slogfest that will bore you half to death.

Batman: The Enemy Within - The Telltale Series

I’ve taken a new tact to getting my unplayed games completed. I’ve targeted completing the 30 ‘easiest’ games in my collection on both the Xbox One and Xbox 360. I wasn’t keen to do these in order, so I asked my friends again to pick numbers to go through. I think at the time this was number 2, where number 1 was the easiest. That’s to be expected from the Telltale series.

The Enemy Within continues from where the first game left off with Batman fighting crime and taking names. The Riddler is up this time and after the opening scene, it transpires that there’s more than just the Riddler terrorising Gotham. The Enemy Within sees the birth of the Joker in this universe and the conclusion seems to imply that we won’t be seeing any more Batman games from the Telltale boys.

There’s not really a lot else to say by now. The stories are multiple choice dialogue games where you can choose to say one of three things or nothing at all. This one felt a little longer than the other games though but I’m not sure if this was because I keep playing them late at night and falling asleep or they were just longer. I found myself taking between 2 and 3 hours to finish an episode rather than the usual 1 to 2.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 30 Achievements

Play through the story from start to finish and you will net all the achievements. Except one word of advice is to not skip the end credits at the end of episode 5. I did this, and the final achievement did not unlock as there is a post credit cutscene and for some bizarre reason, despite this not being the end, it doesn’t have a checkpoint and I had to play the whole of the 5^th episode again to get the last achievement.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While I quite liked the game overall, it did drag on a bit and you spend a lot more time being Bruce Wayne than Batman. And that last achievement glitch irritated me beyond all measure. This is one for the Batman fans and not necessarily achievement hunters, although it remains a straightforward easy completion.

King's Quest

King’s Quest is the last of my eight Bean Dive games that will be fully completed this side of 2018 as the other 2 involve lots of online grinding and some stuff I potentially won’t be able to do. Time will tell…

Anyway, King’s Quest follows the story of Graham… or Gram as he is referred to by most of the cast that can’t seem to say Graham, as he recalls the stories of his youthful adventures to his grandchildren. The first episode of the game, which is the pre-DLC game, focusses on how Graham becomes a knight by winning a tournament.

The game play has you move Graham around the relatively small open world town of Daventry – a town name I hated throughout my time playing as it sounds a little bit like a domestic cleaning product. The general aim of the game is to find items to use to complete your quests, and occasionally make dialogue choices.

In terms of what King’s Quest offers, its essentially 60% story, 40% puzzles. Some of the puzzles without the use of a guide would be tricky to figure out but it’s all reasonably fair in terms of allowing you the freedom to figure everything out – there is nothing that’s massively obscure.

Without ruining the game, there’s not really a lot else to talk about other than style and music. The graphics are reasonably cartoony which suits the story telling aspect and the music goes with it quite well. It’s also telling that I played the game and all DLCs for nearly 25 hours and the music didn’t get annoying in the slightest.

Achievements – 1,800 Points – 53 Achievements

Right, so while King’s Quest is probably listed as an easy completion due to its gameplay and story focus, getting all the achievements in one playthrough is a bit of a task. This is because 34 achievements are missable and not related to the story and it requires a few tactical saves to reduce unnecessary play time.

For the main game (episode 1), there is a lot of pissing about you need to do to net them all. There are 17 Achievements in the main game with 13 random things you need to do. A lot of these, and a theme for some of the missable DLC achievements, involve you having to repeat a dialogue or action over and over again to get all of Old Graham’s changeable dialogue to be played. Or dying stupidly which causes one of those, ‘oh wait, that’s not how it happened!’ moments that make the death just part of Graham’s awful memory.

Downloadable Content

There are 4 DLCs which extend the story of Graham’s adventures from the first episode. I’ve said before with these style games that I don’t consider the additional episodes to be DLC but this one carries 1,000 points from the from the first episode alone with another 200 on offer per additional episode.

The first two DLCs require partial multiple playthroughs to get every story outcome with achievements attached and the most frustrating part of the hunt was having to play through a story game for a second time. Thankfully though, the cutscenes are fully skippable and this showed how the short the game is if you skip through the fuzz.

From episode 4, things take a drastic turn from jovial to horribly dark storytelling. It becomes even weirder when the dark turn issue is resolved, and everyone just carries on as afterwards as if nothing happened. I won’t go into more than that but it’s at this point that Graham’s character stops being charming and comes across like a massive twat.

Things get even more weird in episode 5 and even more depressing when we reach the end of the story. Most of this last instalment feels a lot like playing through Graham’s onset of dementia. It’s dark but also a brave move addressing a very real, heart-breaking issue that people go through and actively capturing it in gameplay.

King’s Quest was a slog at times – especially during the second and third episodes where I had to replay a large portion of them. But overall, it’s a solid story game that asks questions of the players towards the end. I would definitely recommend it for a relaxed playthrough just for the story alone.

Your Toy

Your Toy is a game on the American market that showed up on an easy achievement list thingy and as it was pretty much free in the grand scheme of things, I thought why not give it a go?

I have to say from the moment I started playing, I thought that Your Toy was a horrible game. The basic premise is that you have thrown away a toy bear, perhaps by ripping it in half or something, and the entire game appears that this wonton destruction has created this nightmare you now face. You spend the majority of your time running from a bear monster thing that chases you, and the rest of the time solving puzzles that are so obscure that only the diehard trial-and-error enthusiasts will see out without the use of a guide.

In terms of gameplay, the most frustrating part of it is the ridiculously slow and laborious movement speed of the game’s protagonist – or teddy bear killer with no soul, whatever you want to call him. Getting from room to room, and even getting around the same room, is sheer frustration. There’s also a zoom function where you can look at stuff, and sometimes this is the only way to interact with things. That’s pretty much it for the controls, the whole thing is a just a bizarre adventure game, if you can call it that.

Another note on the puzzles, as well as being convoluted they also change from one game to the next and several people have reported that their puzzles have become incompletable. When this sort of thing happens, it makes the convoluted nature of the puzzles look more like bad game design.

Looks wise, it’s not easy on the eyes. It’s very gun-metal grey and shitty brown for the most part despite being about an angry decapitated bear in what appears to be a nightmare situation. It wouldn’t have killed them to introduce some colour here and there.

Music wise, it goes out of its way to be creepy in keeping with the nature of the game, but due to the poor gameplay and unengaging ‘story’ the background music becomes more of an annoyance that atmospheric.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

The achievement list for this one is a mixed bag between story related achievements, stuff that’s totally missable and some real luck-based bollocks that all games could live without.

You can get nine achievements from playing through the game without worrying about what you do and another 11 are missable. My favourite of these missable ones is the luck-based one for finding a key in the cave on your first try. The achievement is even called Good Luck just to really rub it in. To get the achievement, you must break a light with a hammer and the key is randomly in one of these lights. However, you can restart the checkpoint when you don’t find it and go through some of the longest stupid menu loading and loading screens I’ve ever had to sit through. At least it felt that way.

The last missable achievement is the big one for picking up all the items in the game. Obviously with this being missable it means that there are several items in the game that do not have a use. And looking everywhere in this game is slightly less fun that ripping out your own teeth.

I also experienced some achievement unlocking issues throughout but considering the shocking state of the Xbox One achievement system at present, I don’t think I can blame this on the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Essentially, unless you have OCD and a tendency for self-harm, use a guide when going for the 100% here. Better still, don’t play it at all. I can’t consider a game to be truly easy if it’s only easy with a guide as well. It’s difficult to find a recommendation here so I will just stick this one in the ‘avoid’ pile for all time.

The Station

With the easy games of my Bean Dive slowly coming to an end and the many, many horrible issues I’ve had with my hard drive on the Xbox One filling up (to the point where I’ve uninstalled Elder Scrolls online with its 90GB of space), I thought I would take the time to knock out a few of those smaller games I bought that auto installed on the drive that take a relatively small time to complete. The Station was the first of these that I started and finished in one sitting due to its easy list and short completion time.

The idea of The Station is that you are exploring an abandoned space station in search of survivors after a distress signal was sent out. Some aliens have attacked it and you need to find out what’s happened. This is no lead dialogue, the object of the game is to explore and find stuff. I thought the story was very meh right up until the end and I get the feeling this was the one reason the game was made. And I enjoyed it. It made the playthrough, despite its brevity, worthwhile.

Gameplay there’s not a lot to do. It’s essentially a non-combat walking simulator that’s better than the others because it has a story and doesn’t concentrate on art of fannying around with some highbrow other meaning bullshit.

Musically and graphically it’s atmospheric and pretty. It’s doesn’t outstay it’s welcome in terms of the music and if you don’t spend too long staring at the scenery, you are unlikely to notice the imperfections there too.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

With six of these being unmissable story related achievements and the other five being missable ones, there’s not a lot to talk about here. The entire thing can be done in less than an hour too.

The missable ones relate to solving puzzles, finding specific items and picking up all the audio logs. The audio logs are quite easy to see as they are big blue orbs. The puzzles were relatively tricky and involve some clever mind work but they, like many other things, are made easy with the use of a guide as they don’t change per playthrough.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Station, while being a quick completion with an easy achievement list suffers massively from overpricing. I got it in a sale for around £4 which is probably about worth it. It retails at £11.99 which, for an experience of less than an hour, simply isn’t worth it for the story.