Darkest of Days

This is a North America only game and also a pretty clever game title that works on so many levels. When I initially got Darkest of Days, I thought it would be based during either World War I or World War II and be a traditional war shooter. The only reason I got it was to make use of the American Xbox I own as it’s not a genre I would usually play.

Now, the reason that I think the title is clever. As soon as I started playing the game, I realised that the gameplay, game design and construction is so bad that it’s a circular reference to gaming in general and that playing the game is most likely the darkest day you will experience in the medium. Bad joke aside, here’s why.

You play as a guy called Morris who is fighting during Custer’s Last Stand. You may be led into thinking that this is therefore a game set during the American Civil War. You will immediately hope not though as soon as you are asked to wield a shitty pistol at some Indians. The aiming mechanics are bad, and the graphics and gameplay generally don’t lead a lot to you being in for a good ride.

Anyway, Morris gets injured and is about to be killed when outta nowhere, a portal appears and some dude drags you into the future. I know what you’re thinking – what a twist! It gets better too as your mission becomes travelling back through time to World War I, World War II and The American Civil War to rescue some people of significance to the future timeline while you try and find the father of time dude who invented the concept of time travel.

The premise is fairly good, original and inventive however it’s completely derailed by the shocking graphics and gameplay that would have been more at home on the original Playstation. It got worse the more I played as they tried to create that war time effect of having loads of guys fighting each other at the same but all this did was murder the frame rates and make the game unplayable at points.

The difficulty is another thing that puzzled me. There are three difficulties to play on and I spent most of my time playing on easy but this doesn’t seem to mean anything at all difficulties seem to have the same ridiculous difficulty spikes. My favourite thing in all games is not knowing how or why I died and the enemies range from not being able to hit a barndoor with a banjo to being able to snipe you from 750 metres with a World War II rifle. Get fucked.

Musically, its grating and the characters swear more than necessary and I couldn’t listen to a lot of the contrived dialogue.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

Another limited list and despite the frustrations, its probably possible to get through it in around 8 hours. It felt a lot longer for me due to the constant death and shitty frame rates causing me to vomit in my mouth repeatedly.

Anyway, from playing the game without worrying about anything else, 4 achievements will be earned. Technically 5 for playing the ridiculously shit hidden mission at the end of the game where the game developers thank you for playing and tell you how much effort they put in to making this pile of smokeweed.

There are five miscellaneous achievements available and these are best done on easy at the beginning on the game. The first one alludes to the game having a sense of humour. It’s called Horse Puncher and it’s awarded for punching a horse to death. This is easily done in the first mission when Indian arrows from point blank range do nearly no damage to you. You can run into a crowd of horses wailing on the melee button and this will unlock easily.

The next two are for killing yourself, either with a grenade or via drowning, both of which are easy to do in the first World War I mission.

The next two are strange as it’s a gun-based game but you get awarded for completing a level without killing anyone and also for punching 25 dudes to death. The second one is made even more bizarre as generally speaking, you have to run through their bullets to apply the killing blow – another cause of constant death.

After each mission you will be awarded upgrade points to apply to either your skill with pistols or rifles. There is a limited about of points available and there are two achievements for upgrading both the pistol and rifle to the maximum level. The easiest way to net both is to save all the upgrade points until you have the 40 required to upgrade a weapon fully, upgrade one, then reload a previous save and upgrade the other.

The last achievement is for completing the game on the hardest difficulty level but thankfully there is a Bioshock-style work around where you can play the game on easy right up until the end and then change the difficulty to the highest one and then finish the game. This is the only blessing in an otherwise dyer experience.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Darkest of Days will definitely be remembered as a dark point in my gaming history. The basic gameplay mixed with grey/brown environments was bad enough but throw in the terrible gameplay functionality and it really is just a pile of smoking garbage. I wouldn’t even say it was easy due to the variable AI ability an it’s certainly not worth anyone’s time investment.

Nevermind

With a new social challenge of True Achievements came a new excuse to buy games on the wish list when they go on sale. That’s how I came across Nevermind, a quick to complete adventure game ideal for this year’s iteration of the Great True Achievements Score Challenge. I don’t have the time to compete with the elite of the field for this as the competition runs for 48 weeks. Thankfully, the challenge only requires getting to week 10 and the score available from Nevermind was enough by itself to get through one of the earlier weeks.

Nevermind places you in the body of a doctor working for some company that specialises in analysing and repairing (I think?) the memories of its clients after they’ve suppressed horrible memories that they can’t face. In terms of games, it’s quite similar to Layers of Fear in the way that it plays. There are also echoes of The Park during some of the gameplay elements as well as you explore some frankly disturbing images the game conjures. It’s more emotionally jarring that visually scary with some of the iconography and representation focussing on some real issues that people face.

Criticisms of the game are also similar to The Park in that it takes an age for your character to get anywhere as they have the walking pace of a snail. If a snail had legs.  The looking mechanism also feels severely handicapped even if you adjust the sensitivity to max. So essentially in a game where the walking and looking are the two main gameplay elements, they are both the worst aspects of the game.

Where the game does strive though, is the atmosphere it creates and this is done by the scenes you explore, which are all intricately designed and thought out, and the accompanying music and eerie sound effects add to the immersion. This also makes it feel like the gameplay is part and parcel of the atmosphere the game aims to create.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

It’s another short list and takes around 6 hours to get through. There are four individual memories and a tutorial, which is essentially Hansel and Gretel, to play through and just doing this will net you 6 achievements.

Unfortunately, the game makes an error next with its achievement list and requires you to play through all of the memories again for a second time to collect an additional set of memories. The memories don’t change so it’s effectively an entire second playthrough that feels redundant and unnecessary as there is no reason why these couldn’t have been incorporated into the first playthrough.

This is made even worse during the last memory where you have to play through a third time as there is an alternate solution to one of the puzzles that contains one of the memories. You also have to finish the memory for the collectible to register so that’s three full playthroughs of this bit for the completion and as it’s the last mission in the game it’s one of the more convoluted ones to complete.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Nevermind is a good atmospheric story game that falls down on a combination of slow gameplay and replay requirements. It’s painful once you’ve been through the whole story to not be able to speed things along during a second playthrough. This isn’t helped by the fact that the second playthrough feels entirely unnecessary when the memories could have been put into the first playthrough.

Still, it’s another quick and easy completion to add to the pile.

Tacoma

Despite telling myself I wasn’t going to jump on sales this year, I have failed on several occasions to restrain myself. Especially when games on my wish list keep cropping up for less than £5. In response to this, I severely whittled down my wish list removing any trash that I didn’t have a reason to keep on there, limiting myself to wanted titles, platformers and open world games. Tacoma doesn’t fit into any of these categories but I think someone recommended it so into the collection it went.

Tacoma follows the story of Amy, who is tasked with going aboard the abandoned space station, Tacoma, to retrieve an AI program at the request of some corporation. The game centres around exploring the various areas of the station and recovering the memories of those that were aboard. Amy uncovers that the crew were in trouble after something collides with the station and the memories describe their attempts to escape certain death.

Game play elements are fairly limited and while it’s labelled an adventure game, it’s closer to a visual novel. You cannot die and the objective is to look at the memories left behind by the crew to work out what happened while the main goal is retrieving data and the gathering of memories appears to be something to do while you wait for data retrieval to happen.

Some of the load times were a bit long and Amy doesn’t walk very fast. I was able to get through the game is just over 3 hours despite this so there’s no a lot to do and what’s there is drawn out. Looks wise and sound wise it doesn’t put a foot wrong and it all contributes to the isolated atmosphere of the station and the crew’s perils.

Regarding the other characters, there’s a real mix of lore surrounding them and they are all interesting in their own right. They do appear to have gone full on in pursuit of the diversity card as there is a heady mix of races and clear gay and lesbian characters. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with this but it does feel a little forced at times, especially with Andrew’s secret gay relationship.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 12 Achievements

A short game with a short list but a rather weird one too. The list is 90% collectible based and really tests your ability to explore… or prepare.

There are five achievements for performing various actions on the station, such as playing basketball, rebuilding a science skeleton, going to the gym and rebuilding a broken sign. Sickeningly, some of these ridiculously obscure actions are hidden behind secret achievement blockers making unlocking them naturally nearly impossible unless you have bizarre natural tendencies to do weird shit for no reason.

There is another achievement for finding 7 cat memories and some of these are in really obtuse locations where I can only imagine you need to know where to look in order to find them. Again, there is another one for finding a wedding ring towards the end of the game and as you can imagine, something so small is incredibly hard to find… unless you already know where it is.

While there are achievements that unlock during the course of play, there are a set that only unlock when you finish the game. The problem with this is obvious – you only find out at the end of the game whether you’ve missed something and while I was able to unlock all bar one of the achievements, the one I missed – for finding all the AR Records – was because I didn’t click on one square during my playthrough. Thankfully, it’s not a long game and nothing becomes permanently missable. Even with my need to revisit locations, it still took less than 3 hours to complete.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Tacoma is a relaxing and interesting game to play though it does verge a little close to a walking simulator at times. Achievement wise, it’s easy with a guide but makes it slightly harder to enjoy the underlying story if following words to ensure you don’t miss stuff.

Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sloggers

Another one of my American backlog games, Sandlot Sluggers is a baseball sports game in a cartoon fashion. In terms of similarity, style wise it’s the same as Rookie Rush but far less obnoxious in terms of achievements.

There are several modes to play in Sandlot Sluggers but for the achievements you only need to play story mode and play now to get them all so I won’t be mentioning the other modes.

The game was a real pain in the ass to learn how to play and even now, I’m not sure I know how to play the game. When you play Story Mode, you create your own character and then have to play with some really shit characters against teams that are better than you. When you beat them, you get a new team mate until you’ve formed your All Stars team and can take on the Bullies. It’s fairly contrived but serves to provide a story for a game that didn’t really need one.

The game play itself consists of pitching and batting. Pitching is simple enough. You have to throw the ball at the square on the screen by selecting a pitch type and using a power meter. The AI then rolls the dice regardless of what you’ve done and they will either hit the ball or not. Strike out three of their players with good fortune and then you can bat.

Batting is the same as pitching in that it feels like complete luck as to whether you hit a home run, hit the ball straight up in the air, get a strike out or just hit the ball into the field. There are various objects in some of the playing fields which will grant automatic doubles or triples but most of my wins felt like luck in the early game.

Aside from just batting and pitching, there are also power ups you can use. As a pitcher, they make the ball do weird things but again as you’re playing against AI in story mode, it’s up to the game whether this makes a difference or not. When in bat, you will get some abilities that mean the ball cannot be caught which is useful when the game decides you are going to sky the ball.

That’s essentially it for the gameplay. As mentioned above, looks wise it’s cartoony and sound-wise, the commentators are annoying but no where near the level achieved by the other games in the Backyard series.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

9 of the achievements are awarded by default by playing through and winning in story mode. Loads of others will be unlocked along the way and the ones that aren’t – for completing specific actions during a game – can be easily set up with two controllers in Play Now mode.

There are some exceptions though, the most notable one being for winning every game via the mercy rule. This means that you have to set the game up so that the mercy rule is on, then you have to get a 10-run lead after the bottom of the inning to auto win without playing the whole game. Doing this for every game is a ballache, especially early on when your team is utter shit.

Another story mode one that’s a bit of a pain is for completing all the mini games and unlocking the boosts. The minigames themselves are really easy but if you fail one and skip, you will need to play all of them again for the achievement.

Some of the more notable Play Now achievements were painful too as they involved going through the entire roster to get the same player to score a single, double, triple and home run. I kept losing track of who had done what so every time a play finished, I was crossing my fingers that it was the right one.

A few others have you playing full five-inning games and performing specific actions at the end and it was here that the game started to drag. Getting the achievements in the easiest way involved striking out teams all the way to the final inning and then performing an action. Luckily this didn’t happen to me, but I could easily see going through the pain of getting to the fifth inning only to mess up the action and having to play through again.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Backyard Sports: Sandlot Sluggers hasn’t made me want to play more baseball games and on review of my collection there are still two more to play. I will be glad to see the back of them to be honest and certainly won’t be buying anymore.

That said, Sandlot Sluggers was a two-day completion clocking in at under 6 hours of play time so it’s not that bad for completionists.

Inside

Inside is a game that’s had a lot of critical acclaim after its release in 2016. I subsequently bought it a few years later and didn’t play it… then it became free with Xbox Gold so what better time to play it. It’s just another kick up the ass to get through my historic games, something I’ve made a lot of in roads with this year.

Inside is a side-scrolling adventure, puzzle game where you play as a boy who must have some kind of super powers as he is being hunted by some dudes who keep trying to shoot him with tranquiliser guns. There are a few puzzles along the way and lots of exploring to do in a multi-directional 2D plane.

In terms of the praise the game got, and this may be controversial but I’m not sure it’s warranted. In places, the game is clever and some of the puzzles are unique in terms of how they are solved but I didn’t really feel like the game was massively breaking new ground and the silent protagonist and lack of any real information towards what’s going on didn’t give the story anything extra either.

That’s without mentioning the ending of the game which made absolutely no sense and raises questions as to why the protagonist even went on this little escapade in the first place. So it’s not fantastic, but it is very competent which I shouldn’t find surprising in the modern gaming world as most new releases set the bar so low that it’s really easy to achieve mediocrity.

Looks wise and sound wise, again it’s competent in that there could have been no background music at all and it wouldn’t have made a difference such is the focus on the game play, and I didn’t get stuck on any unintentional environmental bits all the while the independent artwork looks the part.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 14 Achievements

My playthrough for 100% took just under 4 hours but the game itself is slightly longer. It’s another list that actually finishes before the main story so achievement wise, there’s nothing to drive you to the end of the game. I finished it anyway but I kind of wish I hadn’t after experiencing the bizarreness of the game’s conclusion.

All 14 of the game’s achievements are tied to finding secret collectibles hidden throughout the game. Some of these are obvious while others take a bit of effort and for these you will need, either a bizarre ability to figure out obscure things… or a guide.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Inside is a well made, competent game with exploration and puzzle, platforming elements. With a completion time of just over 4 hours, it doesn’t outstay its welcome and it’s a quick 1,000 Gamerscore for the achievement hunters.

The Godfather II

For a while I was looking forward to playing The Godfather II. I skipped the first one in the series as it had some DLC that was no longer available and based on my experience here, that was a great plan as The Godfather II, to be polite about it, is a flat uninspiring gaming experience.

The story and premise are fairly simple – you play as some faceless goon, Dominic as he climbs the mafia tower in service of Michael Corleone. You have to wipe out other crime families and take over the city by controlling all businesses. There are other missions and an underlying story but none of the voice actors seem to care about this and I, in turn, didn’t either.

My first impressions of The Godfather II weren’t all bad. The driving mechanics and controls were really good considering it’s a 2009 release and it great to be using the triggers to drive rather than the A and B buttons. However, that’s where it ends. Once the takeover mission mechanics were explained, I lost interest and didn’t play it again for over a month.

Also, the shooting is god-awful (no pun intended) with horrible auto-aim that seems just as likely to kill you than save you. If you are in a gunfight with more than one person, Dominic will lock on to some dude hiding behind a chest-high wall 500 feet away, rather than the guy standing in front of you with a shotgun.

What else sucked? The whole structure of the game, if I’m honest. If you have taken over businesses, the rival families can take them back by attacking them. It happens a lot and at the beginning the game, where everything is loosely explained in a very dull way, it wasn’t clear how to prevent this.

Essentially what it boiled down to was taking out all of the made men from a family so they couldn’t attack you while taking over their businesses and sending any of your other family members to defend your locations if they are attacked. Except taking out all of the made men will take a long time and is hugely repetitive. Just like all of the other activities I’ve described.

So it’s basically an over simplified, boring version of Grand Theft Auto with terrible voice acting to boot.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 41 Achievements

When I eventually started getting into the game, the achievements came quite quickly. Most of them can be earned through playing the main story and overtaking all crime rings and businesses. Along the way you will likely rack up the 750 kills too.

There are some notable ones and this is again where I got slightly hung up on progressing the game. The first of these is simple enough. You have to eliminate 5 made men. The first one is a given in a ‘this is how you do it’ kind of way but the next four, you have to pick up favours (more repetitive work) to gain kill conditions and then kill them in a specified way. A concept that makes no sense – strangling someone means perma-death but headshots? Just flesh wounds, no worries. It’s a missable achievement as you will run out of made men if you wipe out all families but they will annoy you so much by attacking your businesses that you will want to take them out anyway.

The next is for completing all execution styles and to be honest this is the hardest work the game offers because the requirements are so irritating it’s not even funny. To get an execution, you have to injure a mobster enough to get an execute prompt and press the right stick with a certain weapon equipped to get either a standing or kneeling execution. The kneeling ones are stupid because getting an execution with the magnum or sniper rifle means you have to shoot them in the leg with a different gun, change guns then run up to them to execute them. Run up to them. With a sniper rifle. Super dumb.

There are also some environmental executions and thrown weapon executions, the most painful for me was throwing a bottle at someone to get the killing blow and I still feel I was lucky with this. I had to throw the bottle after damaging an enemy enough but before my allies killed them. You also have to pick up a bottle in the environmental so it’s conditional on whether there’s a bottle around to begin with.

Outside of this and clearing all the crime rings and businesses, there are safes in every location and favours you can earn from public officials. All of these collectibles are location-marked so finding them isn’t a problem, however the same can’t be said for the fire arms. None of these are too far out of the way but you do need to look for them and using a guide is probably the best way.

The last achievement I unlocked was for completing the game so there is no post game grinding, thought there could be depending on the order you choose to do things. The executions are one you’ll want to do prior to the end game as there will only be two guys left you can do executions on once all the families are wiped out. This sounded stupid so I did it as soon as I could.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Godfather II was a boring and forgettable gaming experience where both gameplay and story fail to deliver. I wouldn’t recommend it unless you want to be bored for 12 or more hours doing the same repetitive tasks.

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India

Completing all I could of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey encouraged me to go back and finish the only unfinished game in the series Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India.

The game follows the story of Abaaz, an Indian assassin as he goes on another 10 missions of side scrolling, assassination fun. Now, the thing about the Chronicles series is that they are actually proper assassin games where the main objective is to get through the level without being seen and without killing anyone that isn’t a target. Essentially, it’s what Assassin’s Creed should be rather than the ‘get seen, kill everyone’ that the main series has become (and has been since Assassin’s Creed II).

There are two types of level in Chronicles: India. You have your normal ‘progress through the level past the guards to the end goal,’ missions. These missions will usually have a secondary objective which you don’t need to complete but if you do, it will net you points. The more points in a level you get will determine what extra abilities you unlock for Abaaz including carrying more items, more health and more damage. The health and damage upgrades are totally pointless if you play the game as it’s meant to be played as you get the higher scores for completing levels without being seen – so no combat.

In addition to the sword you will never use, you have the ability to whistle to distract guards, chakrams which can be used to cut ropes at certain points of the game and kill guards if you hit them right, noise bombs which are whistles that don’t originate from you, and the auto-win smoke bombs that once you can carry enough of, none of the other items matter. Except for the chakrams which need to be used to progress past certain points.

This accounts for half of the game and the other half are speed run levels of which there are 4 – more than any other Chronicles game. I was happy for this though, as I’m generally better at these types of levels. Anyway, you score points here based on the speed of completion.

Looks wise and music wise, I personally think it’s very good. My only criticism and I think I mentioned this in the Russia review, is that when you are trying to go quickly, which is most of the time, the way the buttons are configured caused to slide into the back of guard’s legs a lot, totally ruining my stealth approach. This is because the stealth button is the same as the slide button when you are running so if don’t stop running quickly enough, you will knock into a guard and then be hacked to pieces.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 18 Achievements

The achievements are mostly straight forward and can be broken down into groups. You only get two of the achievements for playing through the main game.

The next set is for getting golds in the three styles, shadow silencer and assassin, 30 times across all playthroughs. You can rinse and repeat checkpoints to get these, though I don’t see the point between silencer and assassin as choking someone out and not killing them is pretty much the same as slicing them up real nice in terms of the result.

The next batch are obtained by performing certain actions in certain sequences and there are 4 of these. 3 involve speed running certain levels and the fourth is for clearing a section in sequence 8 without taking any damage. All of these can be done with a little practice.

Penultimately we have the biggest batch of the lot with 6 achievements for doing the same shit over and over again. The most painful of these, and the last achievement I unlocked was for multi-killing 200 enemies, so essentially 100 multi-kills. There is a good place to grind this out in the last sequence of the game but it’s overly grindy in comparison to the rest of the list as multi-kill opportunities are few and far between when you play through normally.

The last two achievements are for completing the game in certain ways, namely without killing anyone and without being seen while playing on Plus Hard mode. Plus Hard Mode doesn’t show you the enemy’s vision areas essentially making it harder to not be seen. And it only unlocks after completing the game once, so you have to do two full playthroughs no matter what.

These two are a lot easier than they sound though as the game tracks which sequences you’ve met the criteria in, meaning that you only need to complete each sequence meeting the condition and not the whole game in a row. The only issue is that the game doesn’t tell you which sequences you’ve done so if you don’t remember then this could become more complicated. Although, as a pointer, during sequences 9 and 10, you can kill everyone and it doesn’t invalidate the achievement so if you are missing one for the not killing anyone achievement, it’s not these sequences.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I have mixed feelings about my time with Chronicles: India. I really struggled to get up the enthusiasm to play it but now I’ve done it, I do look back on it fondly. I think it offered the right level of challenge, where it’s not overly difficult but not straightforward. I would certainly recommend the series if only to experience what a true Assassin’s Creed game should be like.