Skylanders Giants

I’ve been given a new task of getting rid of all games that involve peripherals, mainly because the wife is fed up of having 24 Skylander toys dominate the shelves (I didn’t buy them all!). I set to work on this task thinking that completing Skylanders Giants would be the end of it… but it turns out they are backwards compatible for Skylanders Superchargers, so they’ll be hanging around for a little while yet.

Anyway, Skylanders Giants sees you use the toys and portal of power to revisit Skylands to save it from Kaos again. He is the worst villain ever, even by kid’s standards – full of bad guy cliché and has absolutely no reason for wanting to take over Skylands other than to create a plot to the game. And it doesn’t really need him in this regard.

The main component of the game is obviously the ‘toys to life’ concept of placing the Skylander toys on the Portal of Power and playing with them in the virtual game. It’s a pretty solid concept, the only problem with this being that if you want to go everywhere in the game, you won’t be able to unless you buy additional Skylanders outside of the starter pack. Essentially, it’s a game that costs money in addition to the game for the full experience. In terms of achievements though, it has been developed to be completed without the need to buy additional Skylanders.

I found the gameplay to be laborious and slow. The game is spread over 16 levels and while some Skylanders do have the ability to move slightly faster than others, generally speaking its snail’s pace for most of it.

Graphically, it’s fairly standard cartoon graphics with environments that prevent you from dying by having invisible walls surrounding you at every turn. This sort of goes hand in hand with a lack of jumping and preventing any kind of inventive exploring along with protecting you from insta-death a lot of the time. However, a lot of the environments aren’t very well thought through and there are lots of points where you can get completely stuck on your surroundings, forcing a reload or mucking around with which Skylander you have on the portal.

Musically, it’s so un-diverse and hollow that I think it’s another one that could cause young children to develop unconscious depression. This, along with the fact that the levels themselves are unnecessarily drawn out, is not a good combination.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

In terms of an achievement list, I would say it’s 50% designed for children and 50% for adults and masochists. The game will award you 14 achievements for playing the game’s 16 levels without going out of your way, however there are 16 other achievements for doing something specific in each level. Most of these are linear and will be done just by playing the game in no particularly targeted way.

However, some of the these are fairly tricky and annoying, the most notable of which is Chapter 6 where you have to shoot down some specific flying enemies during robot ‘vehicle’ sections. Some of these enemies give you seconds to shoot them and this is combined with a terrible shooting mechanic where the bullets only sort of go where you are aiming. This leads to a lot of checkpoint reloads, retries and repeated dialogue.

There are tons of collectibles throughout the levels however, the achievements for getting them are limited to requiring 10 ship upgrades, 10 story scrolls and getting all of the collectibles in just one level, not all of them. You also need to beat the time trial on the same level for an achievement. This is potentially to do with the fact the achievement list is designed specifically to be completed by just the 3 starter Skylanders that come with the game.

Throughout the game, you will come across three battles that take place in arenas against waves of enemies. This then unlocks an arena battle mode on your hub ship. You are then required to play through a large and repetitive amount of arena battles for another achievement.

There are another three achievements I would consider a pain in the ass. The first one of these is for playing a minigame on the ship where you shoot projectiles out of the sky. There are three different mini games and they are random so first you need to get the right one which just so happens to be the hardest of the three. Once you’ve got the mini game, you need to do a perfect run. This can be frustrating but thankfully, once you’ve got the right mini-game, you can just die every time you get hit to restart. The painful part is if you try to do this before completing the main game, the mini game will lock itself out until you complete the next mission.

There is a massive grind of an achievement for amassing 65,000 gold with one Skylander. This is totally pointless as it means stacking so much gold you won’t use. Thankfully this carries over across games and some of mine had a lot already on them.

The last one is for completing the game on Nightmare mode and this is obtuse because Nightmare mode doesn’t  unlock until you complete the game once. So you have to play through the whole thing twice if you want 100% and this is just as likely to kill you from boredom that anything else. On top of that, the enemies do silly amounts of damage to you and they are very spammy with their attacks, especially towards the end of the game, filling the screen up with near unavoidable lasers that kill you with one hit. I had the luxury of having a lot of Skylanders but if you just have the base game ones, not only is this a chore but it’s a hard one to boot.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Skylanders Giants is a very middle of the road game with an expensive gimmick that doesn’t really excel. It’s not an advert for getting the rest of the series and I won’t be doing so. I do already have Skylanders Superchargers but that will be the last game I play in the series.

Assassin's Creed: Odyssey

The next game in the neverending run of Assassin’s Creed games is Odyssey. In terms of my progress, I am only missing the one game in the series for the complete set and that’s Assassin’s Creed Chronicles India which I will get to one day and hopefully soon.

I kind of broke from my pattern of clearing up some of the older games to play this one as I was really keen to get into it. However, I quickly found out that it’s not a game you can just pick up and play as I soon found myself 5 hours in and feeling like I hadn’t gone anywhere.

AC: Odyssey follows the story of Alexios… or Kassandra as you go on a journey of revenge to destroy the Cult of Kosmos, a group of people who I can only imagine are the ancient Greece version of the Templars. Along the way, you can help loads of people and make a name for yourself as the Eagle Bearer. There are dialogue decisions for the first time in Assassin’s Creed history so you can play any way you want. You can even decide to be straight, gay or somewhere in between.

In terms of gameplay, there is another massive open world map to explore and this is where a lot of play time will be spent. It took me ages just to fully explore the starting island, then you hit the open sea to get a real feel for how big the map is. Thankfully the ship travel is relatively quick but there is still a lot of ground to cover. The most frustrating thing about this is the bizarre positioning of some of the fast travel points. In some of the larger locations, they are few and far between, but then on some islands that are tiny, there are four of five within a stone’s throw of each other.

In terms of combat, I found that it suffered the same issues as Origins in that it is possible, and satisfying, to get through a location without being seen and killing everyone, but there is always that one guard that sees you and if he does, all of his mates come to cut you down. I could imagine this becoming very frustrating having to either be killed or run away to come back once they had seen you but playing on easy, it’s possible to leave a pile of corpses and just carry on in most scenarios.

When going from place to place and potentially needing to get around in a hurry, I was often faced with the same thing preventing me from doing so. The environment. For the most part, it’s very polished but for some reason, Alexios has no issues scaling a bronze statue with no discernible handholds, but gets stopped in his tracks by small mounds of earth. Seriously, some of the bits that aren’t climbable are just laughable. Also, I played the game for over 120 hours but still couldn’t find a way to make my horse go faster than a trot when within 100 metres of semi-built up areas. If he did, I reckon my play time would be closer to 80 hours.

Achievements – 1,850 Points - 93 Achievements

The main game offers up a normal 50 achievements but the expansive DLC ups it to 93. I think it’s done now though which is odd as it would have made sense to take the score up to 2,000.

Out of the main 50, there is just the one missable achievement but it’s only missable if you play like an amoeba as it’s for spending the night with another character. Loosely translated – get laid. When I say this is missable, it’s really difficult to play this way as from chapter 5 onwards, pretty much every sub-quest dialogue will give you a romance option. Some of them are just funny too. The first one I had was Odessa (potentially the first romance available in the game) and you literally just throw lines at her until she cracks and takes you to bed. She doesn’t take much cracking either and neither does anyone else for that matter.

Concerning the rest of the list, there’s no great shakes. Following the main story and eliminating all targets will most likely leave you with very little left to do. Don’t take this as it’s a quick game though, because doing all of this, and the character specific side quest achievements (which are all secret) will take a while simply because of the size of the map.

Some of the more notable achievements are for getting your ship up to legendary status, which involves grinding for materials to upgrade it, defogging the entire map (there are some areas you don’t need to go to during the main game) and everyone’s personal favourite, clearing all underwater locations.

This last one has had some issues with locations not completing and the achievement not unlocking but I was fortunate enough to be playing after this was patched. There are only 42 underwater locations, each of which are a pain in the ass because nothing underwater in games is good.

Some of the other achievements involve having to recruit legendary lieutenants to the ship and using overpower attacks with each weapon. Another two I had to go out of my way to get was for getting a maximum bounty, which just involved slaughtering all civilians and the reloading the game when done, and for killing a leader while an area has low resources but again, this was easy once you know it’s a thing.

Downloadable Content

The DLC can be broken down into three sections:

The Lost Tales of Greece and Mythical Creatures

These are nice little missions that have been periodically add to the game. They each carry one achievement for completing the quest or killing the monster. It’s a shame that there aren’t more monster quests as these are the most fun.

The most recent Lost Tales of Greece expansion didn’t carry an achievement which has led the community to believe that there won’t be any more added to the game.

The Legacy of the First Blade

This is a 3-part DLC containing 15 achievements in total. These are a continuation from the main story and adds more to the legacy of Alexios/Kassandra. There are 3 achievements for completing each part’s missions and on top of this, you need to kill another set of dudes who want to kill you and learn new abilities and use them. On top of this, each part contains a miscellaneous thing to do just to mix it up.

The Fate of Atlantis

Again, it’s another 3-part expansion but this one focusses more on the outside universe of Assassin’s Creed and is more attuned to the craziness from the Tyranny of King Washington in Assassin’s Creed III.

Fate of Atlantis sees Alexios travel to Elysium, the Underworld and eventually Atlantis to free some people from oppression and find some answers with regard to his wider role in the franchise. Of the achievements here, there is more killing and exploring to do, as well as completing the questlines.

Overall, Assassin’s Creed Odyssey is an excellent game. The characters are relatable and well developed, the game world is stunning and despite some of the travel issues, it’s very well balanced. On top of that, the season pass keeps on giving and no one is really sure when the DLC train will end. In this regard, it’s also certainly value for money and also includes remastered versions of Assassin’s Creed III and Liberation. If you are a fan of the franchise, you can’t go wrong.

Death Squared

Another Ultimate Head to Head game was next on the list for completion and it was annoying me for a while. Death Squared is a puzzle game and that’s fun to play and has basic controls so it didn’t take a lot of re-learning to go back to, yet for some reason I kept putting it off. Until one weekend I decided to sort it out and finish the damn thing. Well, that’s a half truth. I did party mode one weekend and then the main game on another weekend. But I still took a few months of break in between.

Death Squared has a sort of story mode where David is testing robot AIs with an AI companion. They share witty banter where David is a useless employee and is constantly being put through his paces as the AI winds him up. Most of this is just background irritation for the most part but there are some genuinely funny bits interspersed with the annoyance. My favourite bit involves David having to install a software update throughout most of the game and he keeps refusing the update. When he finally caves and allows the AI to update it, another software update is required immediately after. His outrage is comical.

The gameplay is simple but, I have to say, it can be incredibly fussy and infuriating. In the main game, you control two square robot AIs and are tasked with navigating them to the exit platforms. You have to get both bots onto both platforms to complete the levels. There are 80 levels, each getting progressively more complicated. It takes a while to get through it all too. Most of the levels consist of hidden traps and lasers which take a lot of trial and error to get past.

I mentioned that it was frustrating and here’s why. The analogue sticks move the bots and the right stick moves the blue one and the left stick moves the red one. I think. I have no idea if that’s correct and therein lies the problem – I got this wrong so many times which caused bot-death on several occasions. Incredibly frustrating, especially when you’ve navigated past the hard shit to just fall off a single platform when you are about to complete the level.

Also, the bots hate you. There will try their hardest to die at every opportunity and if you misjudge a movement by a millimetre, the bot will fall to its doom. Sometimes they will even ‘get stuck’ and blow up, again in a very unforgiving manner.

Now, picture these frustrations and imagine having to deal with four bots instead of two. Enter Party Mode. It’s more puzzle levels with the addition of two extra bots and you can switch between who you are controlling by using the bumper buttons. It’s essentially the same but with more complications. The last level here in particular takes an age to get through so imagine the blood curdling screams getting to the very end of this level to then lose green-bot because it got slightly to close to an edge.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

Completing both story mode and party mode will earn 10 of the achievements. Aside from this, there are a few miscellaneous things to do such dying 50 times in one level, making all 4 bots dance at the same and making them all die at the same time. All three of these are best done in party mode and the last two can only be done in party mode as you need 4 bots. There are also achievements for skipping the intro and watching the credits, this last one can only be done after completing the game for some bizarre reason, despite it having a credits bit in the options.

After these, there are three other things that need to be done. The first is completing 9 levels in a row without dying. Thankfully these can be any 9 levels so the first and easiest levels can be replayed until the bots decide not to commit suicide in consecutive arenas. To be fair, it’s tough to die once you know the level layouts and this isn’t too tricky.

The next thing is collecting secret items. There are ten secrets in ten different story levels and you have to do some strange shit with the bots to get them. Some of the later ones are quite complicated too but there are loads of video guides out there to help.

The last one involves dying a lot. 999 times to be exact. I got to less than half of this by the time I was done with everything above so it’s mini grind but thankfully one that can be done with an elastic band on one of the party levels repeatedly killing all four bots at once.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Death Squared is a fun but occasionally frustrating puzzle gaming experience. It took me around twelve hours to complete doing probably about 80% of the game without the use of video guides. However, the last levels do become a sequence of repeatedly horrible trial and error without guides.

Candleman

The next game on the easy list was Candleman, a platformer where you play as a candle that can jump. I can’t remember why I had this one but looking at the reviews of the game, they seem to give the indication that it was quite good.

The story appears to be that as a candle, you want to be able to light up the world so you need to travel to the lighthouse to learn its secrets. The narrative that accompanies the story feels very pretentious where it appears to be one of those ‘guess the underlying message’ things, that’s always done with a child storytelling voice but using language that a child wouldn’t understand so makes no sense in its own context. I get that the game needs framing though, otherwise it’s a just a candle jumping about from place to place.

The gameplay itself is fairly solid. It’s almost 100% platforming in nature with various collectibles scattered throughout the levels. Most of the levels are linear though so there’s no real exploration to it, it’s just a case of getting from A to B. There are some puzzle elements but very basic in terms of pressing buttons in a certain order and working out how to climb up stuff in the later levels.

What makes it unique is that as you are a candle, you are slowly burning down so there is a hidden timer to your actions. You can also burn faster by pressing a button to light up the place a bit more. This is necessary for some darker sections of the game but despite this, and with the numerous checkpoints, it doesn’t add much challenge to finishing the game.

Graphically, it’s pretty, atmospheric and pretty glitch free in terms of the environment, I didn’t encounter any issues where I got stuck and couldn’t continue. Musically, it builds on the atmosphere, but honestly, with the gameplay, you won’t notice the music as much when you’re actively doing something that involves your attention.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 15 Achievements

In terms of the main game achievements, there are two goals; complete the levels and find all the candles. The one thing I found surprising is that it takes quite a long time to get through some of the levels and this can be mildly frustrating when you miss the one candle that’s off the beaten path. I also found out that if you do miss a candle, it’s easier to restart immediately than carry on and come back to it as the candles stay lit when you replay.

Outside of this there are another two achievements for dying once by running out of wax (I got this by dying in level with fire when I failed to avoid it) and for also failing five times then completing a level (and I did this is the same level. That fire is a bitch.)

Downloadable Content

Another three chapters were released as a free update to the game. It essentially offers more of the same gameplay with an additional 500 Gamerscore so in terms of what it offers, if you enjoyed the game it’s perfect.

Candleman is a perfectly adequate, but a little slow, platforming game. It’s a quick completion without any issues with the gameplay. It’s enjoyable for the gameplay, despite the overly unnecessary high brow narrative.

Backyard Sports: Rookie Rush

I had put off playing this one for about a month simply because I couldn’t face the fact it wasn’t really doable in one sitting. I don’t even know why. I also couldn’t face relearning how to play American Football, but thankfully the game wasn’t too difficult to get through and now I don’t have another American Football game in my backlog. And it’s going to stay that way.

Rookie Rush is a much-improved version of Backyard Football 10 with multiple modes with which to have lots of fun in. The general gameplay is improved too but it still suffers from borderline childish commentary, though that has also made a significant improvement since the last game. That’s not saying much though as the commentary from the last game was more at home in kindergarten.

In terms of gameplay, the premise is the same. You select your attacking and defensive plays, cross your fingers and hope for the best. I had several instances where my quarterback decided to just throw the ball out of play rather than towards my running back who had made a decent run into the middle of the pitch. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this, just every now and then, the RNG roll decides it’s time for a bad quarterback through.

This was also the same on defence. You can time your tackles as much as you like, sometimes you will make the tackle, other times you won’t. To be fair, I did benefit from this almost as much as I lost out so it does go both ways.

In terms of story, bizarrely there is a story mode where you go around beating teams and signing their best players on to your team. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but at the end you win the cup game at the fun fair so everyone is happy.

Musically, it was so annoying that I still couldn’t get the terrible music out of my head after I’d finished the game. At least the commentary was more forgettable, though the main, repetitive annoying bit that happened a lot was when the commentator says, ‘Hey, I was watching that’ when you skip the replays. And there are lots of replays and you’ll want to skip them all.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

The big put off for me was the five to six hours it takes to get through the game (coming from the guy that put 50 hours into FIFA 12…). However, once I got past it, it wasn’t so bad as the games were not total episodes of frustration.

There are two main categories of achievement here – ones earned from specific actions in matches and ones earned for winning matches. Despite my ineptitude and lack of understanding of American Football, I was able to get all bar one of the in-match achievements, the last one of these was for scoring a Safety, which seems like an impossibility without a second controller. This involves making a tackle in your opponent’s end zone. Other luck-based ones include collecting a fumble and making an interception but thankfully these came quite easily.

That just leaves completing the modes. There is Story Mode, Season Mode and Tournament. Story mode holds the most achievements as you get one for each player you recruit into your team and then another for finishing it. Season mode requires you to win 5 games in a row, make the playoffs and win. Tournament mode is technically the most time consuming. There are six tournaments you need to win and you also need to play in a custom tournament.

Winning the tournaments can be sped up by simulating the matches but this is a massive ballache because you will lose matches that, on paper, you should win. It’s highly recommended that this is done after completing story mode and unlocking some of the better teams in the game. Simulating is still miles quicker than actually playing the tournaments so it’s just a case of crossing your fingers and keeping at it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While Rookie Rush was a relatively quick and easy completion, and the most enjoyable American Football game I’ve played, I’m happy to be done with the genre. It was a bit of a drag towards the end and even setting the time to one minute quarters, games just seemed to drag on and on.

Horse Racing 2016

Okay, let’s see how many mean words I can fit into one review. Horse Racing 2016, in terms of game, or any entertainment medium for that matter, is a pile of horseshit. There are no redeeming qualities to it at all and here’s the quick summary.

Premise – there are some bizarre season layouts where you take a horse and compete in 5 races against some ridiculously imbalanced AI. That’s it. But not only is that it, they felt it necessary to drag this shit out for 11 seasons – so 55 races. The last season includes some shitty, pointless show jumping as well – something that wasn’t present during the rest of the game.

Gameplay – As you can imagine, there isn’t a lot of technical stuff you can put in a horse racing game without making it some kind of simulation where you take care of the horse and the better you do at that, the better the horse becomes. There’s none of that, you just pick a horse, start a race and if you fuck up the start, you will lose the race. Whoever thought it was a good idea to have the player repeatedly mash the A button to make the horse go faster is a fucking idiot.

Aside from the A button, you can also use another button to make the horse jump fences, though you need to press this when the fence is a speck on the horizon to time the jump correctly (an even bigger ball ache in the aforementioned show jumping) and you can press another button to whip the horse to make it go faster… or whip it too much to make it stop and lose the race.

Looks – total ass. I’m not even going to be nice about it, the game is so poorly textured, it’s a joke. It looks like it was constructed on a computer from the 80s. Some of the last levels had rain that wasn’t even hitting the ground, it’s so poor.

Music – just no. It would have been better if there was no sound at all rather than the bizarre noise the game makes.

Obscure references to the TV show Lost – I don’t know if it’s different which each ‘new game’ you start and it took me a while to notice but all of the jockey names were a mixture of character names and actors from Lost. And some of them were spelt wrong too. I wasn’t going to start a new game to see if I got a different TV show though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

The achievement list comes down to winning the majority of the races. You need to win 50 races total, which is the last achievement I unlocked in the game because most of the races are either unfair and you lose regardless of your start, or you do a sprint race where you horse has the stamina to get to the end and you win regardless as long as you don’t mind having a sore finger from repeatedly smashing the A button over and over again.

Aside from winning and competing in races, there is one other achievement for and I quote, ‘Win Championship in Top Three.’ Winning is race is defined by finishing in the top three so over your 11 seasons, you need to get enough points to be in the top three positions. This isn’t missable as you replay races you did poorly in to get more points. How do you know which races you did poorly in? You don’t because there is no player list that shows your results. At least it wasn’t obvious to me and the menus are so limited so that it’s unlikely I missed it.

Once you’ve done those two things, you’ll be done with a game you wish you never started.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Horse Racing 2016 is just a shit game. There’s nothing else to say about it. If you don’t believe me, you can pay the developers the £7.99 asking price and find out for yourself but it’s better value to saw your own leg off.

A Way Out

I got suckered into buying this one as it was listed as a purchase that rewarded a lot of points on Microsoft Rewards – points I’ve never cashed in – but I am apparently saving for a rainy day. Anyway, I initially didn’t want to buy A Way Out because despite its good ratings, it’s a purely co-operative experience and I don’t have enough friends to play with on a regular basis who have the staying power to see through even a short game like this. Plus, they all play on Playstation now.

The game follows the story of Vincent and Leo, two guys who have been arrested for crimes they didn’t commit… well at least Vincent was. Leo was a thief and a swindler. The story mainly focuses around the two characters as they plan a revenge mission and a prison breakout and the interactions between the two characters are the best parts of the game. The storyline and character arcs are both brilliant and it’s just a shame, in my opinion, that it requires two players to experience it or that they don’t appear to put the same amount of effort into single player experiences.

Anyway, in order to actually play it, I convinced the wife to play it with me. She hates dual stick controls (one for movement, one for the camera) but likes puzzle solving so the opening part of the game in the prison was great and she enjoyed it. The later part of the game involves using guns to shoot at people though and at this point, it turned in to her hiding at the back and me taking out all the enemies. Thankfully, the game’s combat mechanics are quite forgiving and this was quite easy.

It does have a lot of obligatory driving sections though and these were the worst part of the game. The driving mechanics are not the best but this isn’t surprising considering how may different set pieces there are. There is also a decent bit where you have to cooperatively canoe down a river and we were pleased with ourselves that we did this, for the most part, without communicating (or killing each other).

Looks and music wise, it’s all very well done and they have really put the effort in to the scenes with accompany suitable sound.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 14 Achievements

Now I mentioned earlier that a lot of friends have moved to Playstation now and one such friend told me that he had made A Way Out his first platinum trophy. As I know he doesn’t play for trophies, this led me to believe that the all of the achievements were story based. What I didn’t factor in is that he did it with my other friend who is a trophy hunter so he most likely made him get all the trophies. I mention this because it is possible to play through the game without picking up a single achievement. None of them are story related and this actually caused me to miss the first one, which is for doing 20 dips in the prison yard.

The rest of the achievements are fairly easy to get and involve performing specific actions at specific parts of the game, and normally only one of you needs to perform the action. However, there is one achievement that does require you to play co-operatively and involves playing two musical instruments together at the same time. It took us a while to get the timings down for this and there was nearly an incident of controller throwing rage from the wife before we took a small break, calmed down and then made it look easy.

Downloadable Content – N/A

If you have someone to play with, A Way Out is a fun and rewarding completion that can be knocked out in under 6 hours, making it a good weekend game. The one draw back is price which is currently £24.99 and feels a bit steep for something so short.