Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear

As part of my ‘no new games 2019’ extravaganza, I performed a cull of my wish list. This involved removing a large amount of games that were either added for an unknown reason, because they looked easy, not because I actually wanted to play them. While going through this process, I bought two games that were no longer available on the digital store, one of which was Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear. This was one of the games on the list because it was easy. And it was.

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear is a rail shooter where you play as a guy called Will (I think) through 12 levels of rail shooting, which is essentially a shooting gallery. It doesn’t really make sense as an Xbox Game in the same way Toy Story Mania didn’t make sense, unless there is a gun accessory I don’t know about. Essentially the game play boils down to moving the cursor around and shooting bad guys before they shoot you and also aiming for their heads to score more points. A bad guy will die if you shoot him in the head, his hand or his toe so it doesn’t make too much of difference as long as you hit them.

In addition to the normal shooting, you also get to pilot three different vehicles during the campaign, the main difference being that you can fire rockets and stuff and blow things up.

In terms of music, it’s got a very typical ‘we are in the army’ feel to it and is very generic. The same can be said about it’s dated appearance as well, as the whole thing is a rather depressing yellow, grey colour.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 34 Achievements

The achievement list is a bit bland and doesn’t offer much variety, however the game does get quite difficult when you start getting in to veteran mode levels (this isn’t a separate difficulty but more of a continuation where you have to do the game again on a higher difficulty.

The easy way of doing this is to plug in some extra controllers which effectively gives you four extra lives as the enemies have four targets to shoot at instead of one. This makes the veteran levels a breeze including the last level which has an achievement attached to it for completing it without reloading checkpoints.

There’s another stupid achievement for completing a level without taking any damage. When you take control of the tank in the tenth mission, you can’t take any damage unless you get completely blown up and die – so you will always finish the level with full health.

There are 16 collectibles in the form of radios you need to shoot throughout the campaign. These were ridiculously hard to see as they blended in to the background really well and fit with the middle ground yellow/grey that’s overtaken this game world.

Outside of these, there are two pain in the ass achievements and the first of these is for using a pistol to kill 250 enemies. The pistol appears to be some kind of backup weapon for when you run out of ammo with your main gun, at least I couldn’t find a way to change to it. It was one of the last achievements I unlocked and I had to settle for firing off 300 rounds of my main gun just to use it. This turned out to be okay because of the last achievement I unlocked. For shooting 25,000 bullets.

I appreciate that this is a rail shooter but the fact I needed nearly three playthroughs and some rubber banding on the helicopter level to unlock this is ridiculous. Why have it so high? Especially when all this does is encourage you to miss a lot – loosely translated as being bad at the game. So playing the game like a 5year old would have got me this achievement faster? Thanks.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear was fun until the end of the normal playthrough. Then it started to repeat itself and become boring. And it’s ugly. However, it is an easy completion and clocks in at around six hours so it doesn’t outstay its welcome too much. Except for that dumbass grind at the end.

Devious Dungeon

Continuing to work through the backlog of games and this is one I got as a reward for giving blood. A fellow gamer who runs loads of promotions offered it to me in advance of my second giving appointment with a promise of another one if I make it to five donations. At the time of writing, I’m days away from donation number 4 and therefore, 3 months away from another free game.

Devious Dungeon is a roguelite game and it’s probably the best one I’ve played (in terms of reference, the only other one I’ve played is Crypt of the Serpent King which was shitty awful.) You take control of an armour-less knight with a sword and descend through 65 levels of dungeon, collecting coins and experience to buy new equipment and level up respectively.

In terms of combat, at first, I thought the enemies were cheap a lot of the time, especially the floating eyes with their blast attacks, but after the first boss fight (of which there are five throughout the dungeon) it clicked that everything is a case of working out the enemiy’s attack patterns and timing.

The dungeons themselves are procedurally generated so the environments and enemies are random in all levels. In order to progress from one level to the next, you need to find a key and the exit door. Sometimes, this will have you going from one end of a long dungeon to the other and back again, but enemies do not respawn so the going back isn’t really a problem. Sometimes however, the exit door, start location and key will all be within 20 seconds of each other. Surprisingly this happened to me towards the end of the game quite a lot, it was almost forgiving.

The coins you collect can be used to buy different bits of equipment to improve your three key stats; attack power, hit points and critical hit frequency, all of which serves to make your character better and therefore, the game a lot easier.

Looks wise, it’s a 2D SNES graphics style which caused my wife to question why I was playing such an old looking game when I had more modern stuff in the collection. The reason I gave was that I was given it as a gift and, of course, the…

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 23 Achievements

You can get the majority of the achievements in this game quite quickly as they are tied to buying stuff from the shop, levelling up and checking the map screen. This leads to earning 12 achievements before the first boss fight, assuming you get another two ones for picking up a tome during a level and hitting an arrow in mid-air.

There are then five achievements tied to the individual bosses. By the time I had killed the final boss, I only had two more achievements to get. One of these is a bit of a grind as it involves collecting 100 keys. Completing the game, assuming a few deaths, will still leave you around 30 short of this but it is a simple case of starting the game again with loads of equipment and playing levels until you get the remaining amount you need.

The last achievement I earned was for dying 25 times and this is a testament to how easy the game is. For me, this essentially boiled down to taking my armour off and standing in front of the dragon boss around 15 times. Easy, but when this is required 15 times in a row, it’s still boring.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Devious Dungeon was a quick completion coming in at around 5 hours. It was pretty fun but towards the end, the dungeons and gameplay became quite repetitive despite the procedural nature of the game. It retails for £8.99 so you are looking at over £1 per hour of game play which just isn’t worth it.

World II: Hunting Boss

From the image of this game on the digital store you could be forgiven for thinking this is Monster Hunter: World lite. But it’s not. Far from it.

At the start of the game, you pick one of three characters and off you go on a monster killing ‘adventure.’

The gameplay is simple. You run around hitting the X button to attack the monsters and using special abilities with cooldowns to inflict more damage. You also have a pointless stamina bar which serves no other purpose than to annoy you. As mentioned, the special attacks have cooldown so having a stamina bar doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially as there appears to be no way to manage your stamina to keep attacking for longer. There is also an XP based levelling up system which serves a purpose but again, just serves as being annoying because when a mission gets hard to point of being unable to complete it, your only option is to replay the missions you’ve already completed to level up – which is boring as sin.

There isn’t a story either unless you count the weird one-liners that go at the start of every fight. The fights themselves appear to be against 1 of either 4 monsters or a team of three humans who are exactly like you.

You fight through 5 missions as just your normal character before being joined by the other two characters you could have started the game with for the remainder of the game. They are next to useless when they are at a lower level but will kill everything themselves once you’ve levelled up a bit so they are completely unbalanced.

In terms of looks, it’s massively cartoony and I encountered a couple of game-breaking glitches where the game forced me to restart. My play time was around four and a half hours so that’s pretty bad in terms of glitch/time ratio.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

In terms of the achievements, a lot of these are hand outs and some are just obnoxious. 15 are gained just for playing through the missions up until Class B Monsters/Humans. Completing 10 of these gets you the ‘hard’ achievement but this can be 10 of the same mission as long as it’s in the B Class area so you only need to be able to win the first one.

Outside of this, the really irritating ones involving having to suck at the game so badly, you actually have to play badly on purpose to get them. You need to fail 10 missions which is easy enough, just stand there and get ganked. The other one requires you to get an A rank in 5 missions. This is actually difficult as the ranks are assessed on the speed you get through the missions. There is no indicator of time so it’s pure guess work to start with and then you need to rely on your AI compatriots not slaying the monster too quickly (assuming you don’t do this in the first 5 missions before they join you).

The worst achievement though, is getting to level 20. Essentially this involves replaying the same mission over and over again to grind out the XP. It’s a small grind but unenjoyable grind in a bad game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

World II: Hunting Boss justifies its £2.50 price by being short and awful. I’m not sure why Square Enix published this but I certainly won’t be playing any more of it.

Phineas and Ferb: The Quest for Cool Stuff

I’m not even going to pretend I know anything about Phineas and Ferb. It’s another American import and probably the most American game I will play until I get to Darkest of Days. I had no real idea who any of the characters were and I’m still none the wiser and it will stay that way.

However, I was pleasantly surprised by the game for the first 10 or so minutes I played it. Soon after that though, things started to unravel.

Phineas and Ferb follows the story of… Phineas and Ferb, two strange looking children who are either super intelligent or just have super-active imaginations. They go on a quest for cool stuff using a bizarre digging thing in their back garden. They build a museum of cool in which to celebrate.

There is also one of the coolest characters I’ve seen in video games – Perry the Platypus. Whoever thought to give a platypus a fedora and pose him as a crime fighting detective deserves some serious praise. He also has his own theme tune.

The gameplay itself revolves around a simple platforming mechanic as you navigate the super cool digging machine through a variety of different levels, jumping from platform to platform and collecting stuff for the museum. As you progress, you unlock bits of the machine that allow you to explore different parts of levels, like a better drill to get through harder rocks or a headlight to see in dark places – though in reality, the headlight makes no difference so it’s just a device to force you to revisit areas you could not previously go to.

The robot digger thing has two functions, one controlled by Phineas, the other by Ferb. With Ferb, you can jump better and do a spinny attack. With Phineas you can kill enemies with a drill.

So what started to suck about the gameplay after ten minutes? To sum up in one word; jumping. The jumping mechanic is total shite. It suffers from similar issues to JuJu in that forward momentum does not equal a better jump to clear a larger gap. There were so many times I missed jumps because the game decided I hadn’t done something in a very exact way to get enough distance on my jump.

There are occasional jumping sections where you play as the individual characters outside of the digger. These are timed and the jumping issue caused me to fail a few times. It’s not game-breaking but it is annoying. Dying in levels, when you fall into bottomless pits, doesn’t carry too severe a punishment either so it doesn’t make the game harder – it just feels like poor design.

Speaking of unintentional, there are two bits where you have to collect items as both Phineas and Ferb. At the end of a Ferb bit, Phineas says ‘Great job Ferb!’ and you can see Phineas in the background watching so this makes sense. However, when you complete these bits as Phineas, he still says, ‘Great Job Ferb!’ at the end. Ferb is nowhere to be seen so this is just a cut-and-paste to the point where it doesn’t make sense.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

Despite the gameplay issues, it’s possible to get through the game in under 5 hours and you will nab 8 achievements for doing so. Most of the other achievements are earned by collecting everything in all levels which is essentially all that’s required for the 100% completion.

There are few annoying elements to this. Burford’s races force you to replay levels for no other reason than to beat his time, and upgrading the museum of cool and buying all the customisation items costs more in-game currency than you will accumulate throughout your playthrough so there is a small need to replay levels at the end. It’s so small though, that I don’t think it can be called a grind.

Collecting all of the items is really easy as the game is so linear with the exception of one level where you go into outer space. In this one level, the collectibles are in really obscure locations and out of the way and it’s the only time I had to use a guide to find anything.

As Perry the Platypus, you need to find all the gnomes instead of treasures but these are easy to find as well.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Phineas and Ferb was an okay experience that tried it’s best to shit all over itself which is a real shame. However, it has introduced me to Perry the Platypus so it will always have a special place in my heart. All in all, another quick and easy 1,000 Gamerscore. If you live in America, that is.

Jurassic Park: The Game

The next game on the hit list is another American only game and one of the early TellTale games and I have to say, they’ve made vast improvements since this outing.

It’s a story-based game where you follow Gerry, Jess, Nima and some dickhead marines around Jurassic Park in the aftermath of the first film. The marine come to rescue the likes of Jess and Gerry but this soon turns in to a quest for survival and trying to make money out of dino embryos.

In terms of the characters, Tell Tale haven’t changed much in terms of their design. All of the characters move between being endearing and irritating at a whim and their moral compasses appear to be attached to ridiculously strong magnets. In addition to this, the dialogue options don’t seem to tie up with what they actually say. A lot of the time, it appears to be inconsequential what option you pick because they will say whatever they want.

In terms of the gameplay, it’s basically an 8 hour long quick time event. These are the only real interactions you have other than clicking on objects in the environment to generate further bits of meaningless dialogue. There are also a few puzzle bits but not a lot, so I would it’s limited in terms of gameplay.

The quick time events are ridiculously unforgiving too. You have to know what’s coming before it comes to get through most of them. The button prompts change speed and flick all over the place. Thankfully though there are loads of checkpoints throughout these segments.

In terms of looks, it’s now very dated and the frame rates are poor when loading into a scene for the first time. It feels a little bit like it’s been glued together and quite badly. Sound wise, it’s typically good as it’s stuck to the original soundtrack for the movie and therefore, sounds epic.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Playing through the game without worrying about the achievements will net half of them. The other half mainly require completing all of the quick time events in one go without making any mistakes. As mentioned earlier there are checkpoints during the scenes but this also becomes a problem later on.

There are a few scenes where the checkpoints occur directly after a point that’s easy to fail. This happened to me during one of the last scenes in the final chapter of the game. The problem with this was that once you activate the checkpoint, you then need to replay the scene without any checkpoints at all or start the episode again from the beginning. However, this particular section was even more problematic.

There is an achievement for using three flares to look down some corridors after this scene. You get the flares by picking them up during the QTR action sequence, however the action I missed was for picking up one of the flares. Even replaying and completing the scene didn’t work as when I came to use the flares in the next section, I only had two of them as replaying the scene does not overwrite your last save. This meant restarting the episode again and making sure that I didn’t miss the flares during the cut scene.

Aside from this, another one that often goes missing is for completing the first episode without dying. I didn’t take any chances with this and made sure I immediately reloaded whenever I made a mistake on the first playthrough to ensure I got it.

At the end of the game, there is a multiple-choice achievement where the story line splits. This appears to be Tell Tale’s first foray into multiple endings, and this is the only decision that impacts the storyline as far as I’m aware. It’s not very far after a reloadable checkpoint though so it’s not too painful to replay.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Jurassic Park: The Game was an interesting journey into the earlier TellTale franchise, if not a bit messy and rough in places. It’s a solid and enjoyable story experience but the over-the-top quick time events get old fast. It takes anywhere between 8 to 10 hours to complete so is fairly decent value for money.

Oxenfree

So the 2019 completion train continues with Oxenfree. The 2018 Ultimate Head to Head Contest brought me within 1 achievement of completing this game but the last achievement required a third complete playthrough so it got put off. That is until February of this year when Oxenfree became True Achievements’ playlist game and that gave me the push I needed to finish it off.

Oxenfree follows the story of Alex, a girl with green hair, who goes to an island with her friends to have a party on a beach. One thing leads to another and they end up exploring a cave and causing lots of weird goings on. I won’t say much about the story because it’s quite good and original. It’s really well constructed. As mentioned above you need three playthroughs to get all the achievements and on the subsequent playthroughs, the characters become subtly aware of the fact they’ve done this all before. In addition to this, there are various moments where you can see other player’s decisions later in the game. On the first playthrough this was incredibly eerie.

Gameplay wise, you need to make your way through a series of set pieces that involve dialogue decisions where you can either be nice, mean or silent. Getting from set piece to set piece involves a lot of walking and I mean a lot of walking. The worst thing about the game is how slow Alex walks. She’s clearly in no rush to go anywhere even when her friends are in peril. Another element of the gameplay is the radio that Alex uses to deal with the supernatural elements of the story. You need to tune it to the correct radio frequency but there are a lot of frequencies to go through and if you move too fast you will miss the correct frequency without realising. This just adds an unnecessary additional timeframe to the game and removes any kind of pace you may have thought was building.

Outside of the this, the artwork of the game has been widely praised but to be honest, it’s very bland and the accompanying strangeness made it very hard to look at, especially when it made you think there was problem with your television. Musically, they’ve tried to create an air of creepy atmosphere, which again is okay for the first playthrough. But by the next two, the music appears very disjointed and grates a little bit.

In addition to the above, I managed to run into a glitch where the game wouldn’t let me progress because… I’m not sure why. It could be because I interrupted a piece of dialogue or it could be because I didn’t take the exact path the game wanted me to take. Either way, this was a mild irritation right at the end of my last playthrough and I could have lived without it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

13 achievements, 3 playthroughs and only 1 achievement guaranteed from whatever you do. Initially on the first playthrough it’s advisable to just play the way you want and focus on getting the collectibles. There are two types of collectibles; Adler letters, which you can just pick up, and anomalies which you need to activate using your radio. This really drags out the first playthrough making it the longest – unless you leave the collectibles until later.

While doing all of this, I concentrated on being nice to everyone. When I started the game, it was because I had to get the Matchmaker achievement in the UHH contest which involves getting the characters of Ren and Nona to date and you need to nice to both of them to encourage the relationship. At the same you time, you can be continually nice to Jonas, who is your step brother and accompanies you for most of the game. This will get you the new beginnings achievement for befriending him.

If everything goes according to plan, there will be four achievements left and another three can be earned simply by playing the game again and saying nothing – expect for the last bit where it can’t progress without you making a dialogue decision. All other dialogue choices fade out if you don’t pick them.

Then there is just the third playthrough for getting everyone to hate you. While I don’t enjoy playing out of character, this did produce some laugh out loud moments when Alex is really mean out of nowhere and the other characters start hating on her. A lot of people have complained about this achievement in that it hasn’t unlocked for them but it was pretty easy to see all the opportunities to be nasty. There are a few bits of the game you may have to intentionally do badly though but this is still unconfirmed.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Oxenfree was fun in places despite being slow-paced most of the time. Having to play it three times for the completion was a bit much for me and the differences were really minor and didn’t change much of the game play experience. I’m glad to have played the game but I’m also happy that I’ll never have to play as Alex again.

Tower of Guns

The next one is a sort of double header and also comes with the end of an achievement hunting thing for me known as ‘The Stack.’ Stacking is where you can have two versions of the same game with the same set of achievements so can earn them multiple times. I’ve done this before with Tell Tale games when they have gone free with Games with Gold but some people take this to the next level. You can have up five different versions of Batman: Arkham Asylum, which is a good game, but not complete-it-5-times good. The most notorious game for this is Minecraft which can be stacked a horrendous 11 times, including on Nintendo Switch.

Anyway, my point was for some obscure reason, Tower of Guns has a special edition which is available in Europe and for some bizarre reason I bought it and earned all the achievements twice. I have no idea why as I hadn’t played Tower of Guns to know if it was good enough to warrant two playthroughs. It’s not and I’ll be saving future stacks for games that deserve them. Like the Ezio Collection or L.A. Noire perhaps?

Tower of Guns is a very simple game. You are given a gun and a tower and you go from floor to floor shooting stuff to progress. The more you play, the more stuff you unlock such as different guns and different perks to change the way the game plays. For example, I found the game nearly unplayable without the TooYoungToDie perk on. Probably because I’m so shit at the game that the enemies loved seeing me enter a room so they could get some decent target practice in.

You fight your way through a series of rooms and then face a giant boss. Once the boss is dead, you move on to the next level. There are five levels that need to be cleared and once you have done this, you have completed the game. You are assessed on your overall performance across all runs so if you die 49 times and win once, you are given a win ratio of 2%.

Aside from Normal Mode, there is an Endless Mode which puts you back at the start so you can go around again… against harder enemies.

Looks wise, I found it to be too close to Borderlands to like and once you’ve done ten runs, the music will start to drive you mad. There are these things called Hugbots that if you don’t kill them, you get taken to this special place to get special rewards (the rewards were always shit and ineffective when I went there) and the music gets worse, like they are singing at you. No one wants that and no one asked for it.

Another issue I had a few times was when I started getting not-totally-shit at the game, some of the levels filled up with so many enemies that the game couldn’t cope and the frame rate fell off the edge of a cliff.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

It’s a small haul that took me 7 hours the first time and less than 6 on the second playthrough so it’s not bad but the gameplay will make you want to power through and get it done as quickly as possible which is why my second time was quicker despite RNG not doing me any favours. That sums up completing 80% of the list - Random Number Generators.

Anyway, starting out will knock two out straight away. You get an achievement for killing a boss, so completing one level, and an achievement for unlocking your first gun. These ones are just handed to you for taking part.

The next ones are sort of miscellaneous and there are four of these. Showing how badly designed the game is in places (and confessing this in loading screens does not make it acceptable) there is a ‘TILT’ function which allows you to respawn at the start of the floor. Doing this 10 times in a row for no reason, however, is an achievement. There are also achievements for staying airborne for 45 seconds (easy when you find a level with an air elevator that pushes you up) and the true random ones for killing 350 enemies in one level and dying while a boss is exploding. The former is random because I encountered very few levels with 350 plus enemies in them even if you hang around, and the latter because it requires you to get shot after you’ve killed a boss. I had to force the issue with this in the first game and commit suicide as the boss was exploding to get it to unlock.

The next two are for actually finishing the game which highlights that there is something called an Uberwin where you fight something called the Maw but I never did this because you don’t need to. You also get another achievement for completing ten runs, win or die. I’m trying to lay these out in order as the next ones are the actual work…

There are two achievements for unlocking all the guns and all the perks. Both of these follow the same trends of having to complete various things in the game to unlock them. Getting 5 health pick ups in one life was a pain despite the fact it gives you two for free on each run. Finding five secrets was also painful as the level design hides things really well and only allows you to get some of them if you have specific jump power ups – so more RNG.

The biggest RNG issue I had though, was on my second run. You need to destroy 24 ‘tanks’ to unlock one of the guns and in the Special Edition, these seem to come at a premium.  I did loads more proper runs to try and get tanks, but none would spawn until levels 8 onwards in Endless Mode and sometimes not even then. Typically, when I only needed one more, 5 spawned at once and at that point, I felt like the game was just taking the piss.

After this is all done – which took me between 20 and 25 runs on both games – you simply have to get a gun that fires explosive rounds, point it at your feet, and fire until you are dead. Rinse and repeat and before you know it, you will have completed 50 and 100 runs and unlocked the last two achievements.

Downloadable Content – N/A

According to True Achievements’ genre team, this is my first foray into the Roguelite genre of games and I can’t say it’s made me want to play more of them. I do have a couple in my collection – Spelunky and Paranautical Activity but they are so hard they will likely never appear on this blog… or will they? No. They won’t.