Middle Earth: Shadow of War

This feels a bit out of order but I’ve not yet finished all the DLC for Shadow of Mordor and it remains on my ‘to return to’ list which is now over 100 games. I returned to Shadow of War after starting it in 2018. I was rushing through it at the point and found it to be a bit tricky. However, when I returned to it, it felt new and fresh and I couldn’t put it down. That’s not to say it’s without problems though.

The story of Shadow of War follows Talion again as he continues his battle against Sauron in Mordor, aided by Celebrimbor, the creator of the ring. This expands on the first game by giving you more areas to explore and focusses on raising an army of orcs to control Mordor. In terms of the story, it fits in to the gap between The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in a ‘this could have happened’ sort of way which is quite cool, but probably not to the hard-core fans of the franchise.

Gameplay wise, Talion gains experience in an arbitrary levelling mechanic and as you do, he learns new abilities to aid in the slaying and dominating of orcs. The combat is still pretty good though it does take a bit of learning button combinations to best fight most monsters but it’s one of those things that’s easy to learn and satisfying to master.

That said, there are problems with the gameplay that makes the game really frustrating to play at times. Climbing is one of these. I lost count of the amount of times it would not register me pressing up on the analogue stick to pull up on to a ledge. Instead, Talion shimmies sideways along the ledge. Both ways. It gets really annoying, especially when you consider how long the game is.

You can also dominate animals and monsters throughout the adventure and this is another area of weakness. The monster controls are awful with the exception of the Caragor and even then, a Caragor is only good for getting places. The combat is just not good when monsters are involved as It breaks the seamless freeflow combat which is the game’s biggest strength. It’s like baking a delicious salted caramel cheesecake and covering it in sardines.

Fighting the Orc Captains and Warchiefs is where the game excels in terms of having to exploit weaknesses to beat your enemies. However, this also becomes really annoying as most of the time when you initiate combat, they have to have their little introductory speech saying how they are going to kill you or whatever. They are effectively unskippable cutscenes and when five of these guys show up one after another, it breaks the flow of combat. It also doesn’t really add anything as once you’ve heard one Orc mug you off, you’ve heard them all. It really grates, especially during the end game when you are fighting loads of them.

Musically, it ticks all the right boxes but I did start to get annoyed with Talion’s depressing one-liners every time you fast travel anywhere – something else you will be doing a lot. Graphically, despite the traversal issues, they’ve put a lot of effort into making the environments different. For example, I never expected to see a forest or snow in Mordor but they’ve catered for these.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 72 Achievements

In terms of the main game, it’s quite similar to Shadow of Mordor in that there are a few achievements for doing lots of strange things to orcs. I feel like I got lucky with a lot of these too as there are a few luck-based situational ones. An example of this is the one for killing a Drake while riding a Graug as you are dependent on both showing up at the same time. And as mentioned, the monster combat sucks so even if this does happen, there’s still the matter of striking that final blow.

That’s the not the worst one though. The most notable of these is for killing a captain while riding an Olog and this is painful for many reasons. Firstly, you have to be in a fight with both an Olog and a captain or warchief. Secondly, you need to damage the captain until he’s nearly dead which is tricky as they tend to die quite easily when on low health. Thirdly, you need to mount the Olog and effectively use him to kill to captain. This is a pain for an additional three reasons. Firstly, you don’t get a lot of time riding the Olog before he throws you off so you will likely have to mount a few times when attempting this. The second is that while you are off the Olog and the captain has low health, something else could kill it as mentioned above. Thirdly, the Olog is likely to die before the captain as you have to stab it repeatedly in the back to stay mounted.

I actually found an easy way to do this during a Warchief fight when conquering a citadel. It turns out that Ologs spawn continuously during the fight so I was able to keep mounting new ones. This somewhat reduces the luck elements.

Twenty of the achievements come from playing through the main story. There’s also a lot tied to completing all of the side content, which involves finding all the collectibles and completing the side quests. There’s no real difficulty in any of this once the combat becomes second nature.

There are also some fun ones attached to the nemesis system which involve getting your dominated orcs to do specific things, like win pit fights against other Orcs or kill other Orcs in certain ways.

There’s also a totally unnecessary online component to the game which sees you either avenging over players in solo missions where you can kill or dominate the orcs that killed them, or you can compete in online conquests where you invade other player’s forts and attack them. It draws out the game play that already exists, doesn’t offer anything new and is a little irritating. There is another achievement tied to doing one of these conquest battles using a skin from the Blade of Galadriel DLC too so my advice would be to make sure you do one of these in the skin before reaching the rank of Captain in the online area – as that’s what the achievement requires you do to. Ranking points are awarded for completing online conquests to gold or silver standard and from a combined score of all your forts you’ve conquered based on the level of Orcs you have garrisoned there. It’s essentially a mini-grind depending on how much you played the game while doing the story.

Downloadable Content

There are two single player DLC packs that offer something slightly different. The Blade of Galadriel sees you play as Eltariel who has a different set of skills to Talion but the core gameplay is the same.

The achievements only require you to clear her content and use some of her special abilities a set amount of times.

The real challenge is in the Desolation of Mordor DLC where you play as Baranor. Again, there is some solo stuff to do here but the key difference between this one and the rest of the main game is that if you die, all of your progress is reset – it’s effectively a game over. You do keep some abilities and main missions stay completed but the area totally resets each time you die.

The main challenge here is to complete the DLC with a gold rating. It goes without saying that this has to be done in one life. You also have to be quick and kill as many captains as possible as well as playing on Nemesis difficulty. As I had pretty much done everything in the game just before taking this on, I was fairly well equipped and it only took me two attempts to complete. That’s not to say it’s easy though.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War is one of the most fun games I’ve played for a while despite the grindfest at the end of the main game. The DLCs also offer a slight change of pace and a challenge that’s rewarding. Definitely recommended.

Secret Service

This one was another ‘I’m just looking through the second hand section of the games shop’ purchase that cost me next to nothing about 2 years ago. I’m not even in to shooters really, so I’m surprised I even thought it would be a decent pick up.

Secret Service follows the story of Agent Doyle who uncovers a secret government conspiracy to kill the president and arm some terrorists. As a Secret Service Agent, it’s up to him to put a stop to it, even if that means having to gun down other Secret Service agents. The plot is bit contrived but Nolan North manages to pull off some characterisation as Doyle despite everyone else around time trying to overcomplicate matters and confuse things. It is surprising to find Nolan North in such a game though. It’s certainly not the high point of his career. 
The gameplay sucks a big fat one to go with the mediocre story. The terrorists you face throughout the game have about four phrases that they rinse and repeat over and over again to point where you are more likely to shoot yourself in the face just to put an end to it all. The gunplay is samey and there are very few weapons, however this does make running out of ammo a near impossibility even on the harder difficulty setting.
Environments are bland and I pretty close to the Original Xbox era in terms of quality. Some of the levels, despite their simplicity, can be easy to get lost in as everything looks exactly the same. That said, I don’t know a lot about American government building design so this may actually be deliberate as a sort of half-assed defence mechanism. If it was, it didn’t work because even the super-secret underground subway is full of terrorists.
Sound wise, the only good thing is Nolan North. The rest is either contrived Americanised bullshit in dialogue and standard ineffectual background music.

 Achievements – 1,000 Points – 48 Achievements
 Achievement wise there are a few that make the 100% a ballache, namely the one I went for first, which is for completing the game without dying and not on easy mode. I coupled this with completing the game on the hardest difficulty and it made sense after I got through the first level unscathed. After that though, it’s an exercise in dashboard quitting every time you die and finding some half decent Amazon Prime (Netflix) show to watch while you constantly reset the game. This is made even worse with the fact the game is littered with laser trip mines that will insta-kill you and you can only see them with night-vision googles. Forget to equip them, take one step forward, die, reload, repeat.
 It’s painful but not impossible and once this part is done, that the most frustrating achievement completed. There is another one that requires a full separate playthrough though and that’s for getting through the game without using night vision googles. This is obnoxious because that means navigating dark hallways and getting past the trip mines by already knowing they are there. The only feasible way to do this is by using videos because some sections of the game are overloaded with tripwires and if you don’t have a grenade to set off a chain reaction, it’s hours of trial and error to remember where the lasers are.
 I doubled this one up with a collectible run through picking up the game’s 50 or so mobile phones that are scattered around the levels. 
 There are also quite a few weapon specific ones, all bar two of which will come from targeting specific kills and replaying levels. The other two involve shooting every weapon in the game which is a pain because there are few weapons and some of them only appear once so it’s almost another set of collectibles. The other bigger pain is for killing 5 enemies with one grenade. The terrorists never seem to hang around in groups big enough to get that many kills but there are a few spots where checkpoint reloads can be exploited and then retried until you get lucky.

There are also pipe solving mini-games which is how you hack things. There are two achievements associated with them for completing 30 and for completing 10 in a row without failing. However, you can play this in the extras menu in the game rather than suffering through additional playthroughs and you can also make the puzzles really easy by scaling down the difficulty setting so it’s not arduous which makes a nice change.

The last lot I’ll mention are the zero point achievements for blowing yourself up with a grenade, shooting a whole magazine without hitting anything and the aptly named, The Exact Opposite of Your Job for shooting the president. This last one can only be done at the end of the game so don’t do what I did and unload on the President in the first level – this will not work.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Secret Service was very much a slog to get through and the not dying playthrough kind of ruined any enjoyment I might have got from the game. It’s a very bland and unenjoyable experience but can be completed in under 15 hours.

It's Quiz Time

Now there’s a bit of a story behind this one. When the game was released, you couldn’t complete it because one of the achievements, the only one associated with solo play, would not unlock even if you met the requirements to unlock it. Normally I wouldn’t buy a game in this circumstance but I like quiz games and I looked into it and it appeared that the developer was looking into getting it fixed. However, this appeared to be a lot of hot air as nothing happened for two years.

Then, out of nowhere, they released a 2019 update which not only gave the game much needed new content but also fixed what was broken. While I already had half of the game finished, this game me the impetus to go back and finish it off.

It’s Quiz Time is a quiz game with a companion app – where you launch the game on the Xbox but play using your phone or other portable device. This is great because it allows everyone to play and no one to see your answers.

There is also a really annoying host AI called Sally who insults everyone for the entire game and speaks in a robot voice that becomes quite tiring after a while. However, she will attempt to read names you input into the game and she doesn’t have a censor… so there is an opportunity for lots of childish fun here.

The quiz itself is quite varied with lots of different rounds rather just a straight forward Q&A. One of these can lead to fights though. A round called Describe It tasks you to name things associated with a specific subject. Your opponents have to say whether or not you are getting things right and so, if at the end, you haven’t got a lot right, you can call shenanigans and check the answers yourself. Nothing like a game to test honesty.

Musically, I found it to be horrific after a while. It’s just dreary and depressing and when you are playing several quizzes in a row either by yourself or with friends, this really stands out.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 38 Achievements

Most of the achievements are associated with playing the game and completing some of the rounds in various ways. The biggest issue with trying to get the achievements is having the right amount of devices to do it.

For example, I doubt anyone has eight devices just lying around but that’s how many you will need to complete an 8-player game.  The only real way to get this one is to invite friends over and play the game properly.

There are also two date sensitive achievements for playing on Christmas Day and for playing on Halloween. However, due to the nature of the game being online all the time, you cannot use clock manipulation to unlock them so you have to wait to the exact day in order to get them.

Most of the other achievements can be unlocked with two devices and in a two-player game. There are some exceptions to this, mostly involving the Showdown round. This is where the leader competes against the other players in a fastest-finger-first scenario. In order to get the achievements associated with this game mode, you need three players. You need to win as the team and win individually and also win individually five times against a team. There’s another 3 person achievement for having someone join mid game.

Now, the biggest pain in the ass is for playing a 4 player game where all four players score over 10,000 points. Thankfully, like many of the other achievements, you can use custom games to create a game of 2 rounds of The Big Finish and then pause the game when each question comes up, google the answers and enter them on the four devices. Again, having four available devices isn’t going to be the case for everyone so it could be a case of finding friends who are willing to help with this one.

The last achievement I unlocked was for playing 30 games. Custom games of one round of Showdown are the way to go if looking just to get this achievement. The clock counts down by itself so you can watch something else while you play… if you have another device to do that on too.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s Quiz Time is a great concept but unfortunately, it’s not very well executed. The way the game has been published doesn’t lend itself to frequent updates so most of the content is now two years out of date. I’ve also encountered issues with the question database where some answers are wrong leading me to become very annoyed at points.

Unfortunately, it needs a bit of love, a quicker interface and more people to play it otherwise it’s destined to join the heap of unsupported games which could have been great.

Road Rage

Once upon a time, there was a game called Road Rash and the marketplace cover art for Road Rage looked just like it so I thought I would give it a go. The problem with this is while Road Rash was a good game in its time and would have offered nostalgia, Road Rage is a steaming pile of shit with no redeemable qualities whatsoever. And also bears no similarities to Road Rash.

Road Rage has some vague story which is delivered via phone calls but I’ll be honest, as soon as I realised that the game was crap, I didn’t bother listening or reading the text for this and just bombed it from mission to mission as fast as possible.

The gameplay is atrocious. It’s billed as an open world motorcycle game which sounds fine in principle but it’s not when the motorcycle physics are this bad. You will fall off (which is translated in game-world as ‘blow up’) every time; you hit a car at no matter what speed; you hit an AI opponent; an AI opponent hits you (so the AI is coded differently to the player); you look like you are going to hit a car; sometimes when you go near a lamppost and sometimes just for no reason at all.

The actual game missions are four or five different variants, either a street race, checkpoint time trail, assassination where you have to take out other AI, races where you have to take out multiple AI, or escaping the police. The hardest of these is taking out the multiple AI in a race. One mission has you tasked with taking out 10 of them and this is another area where the game is utter garbage.

You have a weapon which you can swing to your left or right. You press the X button to ‘initiate combat’ with an AI and the computer will take control of you and move you roughly alongside the AI. I say roughly because 9 times out 10, what it will do is position you in the perfect position to be taken out by the AI before you can do anything.

In terms of the missions, there is this one which is a difficulty spike and another assassination mission where the targets are at either end of the map and you have a stupidly small time limit in which to get them all.

Graphically, it looks piss poor for current generation and the amount of crashes I experienced felt likely down to the poor design of the game more than anything. Musically, it’s actually okay and the soundtrack I swear was done by the same guys that did the Crash Time series but that’s the only minor redeeming quality of the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 33 Achievements

There’s not really a lot to the achievement list and a lot of this will come quite quickly as you start playing. Fifteen achievements will be obtained via playing through the main storyline with only those two difficult missions standing in the way of this happening with relative ease. You will also be buying stuff along the way such as weapons, new bikes, bike upgrades and bike parts. There are also achievements associated with spending money.

If more money is needed at any point, the easiest way to get it is to replay any escape mission and when it starts, pause the game. The police can’t chase you but the countdown is still decreasing in the background meaning it takes 30 seconds to get the cash reward. This can be repeated as many times as needed. Another glitch but at least this one works in the player’s favour.

As you play the game, you unlock different parts of the map and in each part is a single collectible for you to find for a total of 7 achievements. After that’s done, if you haven’t hit any pedestrians with your weapons yet, you will have four achievements left.

This is where the achievement list decides to join the rest of the game in being shitty. In order to get the full completion, you will need to hit pedestrians 1,000 times with your weapon. The biggest problem with this is the game feels the need to go in slow-motion for every hit so that 1,000 hits starts become more dragged out. Not to mention, for the gameplay, it’s an obnoxious number to start with. If you didn’t hate the game already, you definitely will by the time this is finished.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Road Rage is a terrible game and another sort-of racing game off my list thank god. Despite all I’ve said, it’s still relatively quick if not repetitive and boring completion, but still to be avoided.

Korgan

One of the free games available on Xbox is Korgan and it’s easy to see why. It’s a top-down dungeon crawler where you play as three tropes; warrior, mage and hunter, as you explore three different areas killing enemies and collecting stuff.

There’s not a lot to it other than that. The three characters have their individual skill sets and you quickly realise that the warrior, a go to for most games, is completely useless. The mage and hunter’s ranged attacks are much more effective and some enemies have shields that can’t be penetrated by the warrior’s attacks.

The gameplay is basic as well. There are two different kinds of attacks and it’s basically just smash your way through the levels completing the objectives and defeating the easy bosses which have repeated and predictable attack patterns.

Graphically, it leaves a lot to be desired. It’s again very basic in terms of looks and the environment rendering is terrible. What’s even more galling about this is that Korgan is billed as an episodic game and the first episode (the free game is the prologue) is priced in excess of £20. I don’t know how anyone thought that the prologue would advertise enough to convince people to shell out that much money for something this bad.

Musically, it’s forgettable. It tries to do that thing where it has appropriate adventure music but because the gameplay is so bad, it becomes irrelevant.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

Playing through the prologue will net four of the achievements. Five if you complete all of the easy secondary objectives.

Some of the other achievements involve having to use the different characters. For some reason the hunter cannot see traps so there is an achievement for disarming them with the hunter. The mage can freeze enemies and there’s an achievement for killing ten frozen enemies. There’s also an achievement for killing ten enemies via any means and another for collecting 1,000 crystals which is the in-game currency.

There is a teleporter that allows you to travel back and forth between the different zones you visit and you have to use once for an achievement.

There is another non-achievement for dying ten times. Each character has its own health bar so you can avoid death by using health potions or switching characters. There is no real punishment for death though, as you level up from killing the monsters and monsters respawn if you die so you just get stronger with each death.

Downloadable Content – N/A for achievements

I’m glad I didn’t have to pay any money for Korgan. If it wasn’t free, I wouldn’t have bothered playing it and despite the fact the prologue can be ran through in less than three hours going slowly, it’s not worth the time to see what it’s like. If you like dungeon crawlers, there are far better games out there.

Forza Motorsport 3

Back to one of my old games here and one that I only started so I could complete the first Forza Horizon game. That was over 3 years ago now which is scary in itself.

Forza Motorsport 3 is a basic racing game, similar in layout and structure to Forza Motorsport 2… only much, much longer in terms of races. More on that later.

The game follows the standard Forza philosophy. You start with a measly amount of money, buy a moderately priced car then begin racing your ass off, earning more money and upgrading and buying new cars to compete in more races.

There is Season Mode that helps drive the monotony of this exercise where you race through years of world championships of progressive grades of car. This lasts 6 years and at the end of it, it really takes ages to get through the final world championship as it just keeps going and going.

The main plus points of a racing game are having a wide variety of track selection and cars. Forza 3 has lots of cars but there’s no real point to them as loads of them handle the same and it’s a case of excess not really offering much in terms of variety. And because of the number of races there are to do, it’s the same with the tracks. I lost count of the amount of laps I had to do around Silverstone for example, and all this did was tell me that the Silverstone GP circuit it one of the most boring race arenas there is.

Then there’s the AI. In some races you will be lapping the AI a lot and guess what. They have no concept of moving over to let the race leader through and will just act like you aren’t there. This hasn’t been coded into any game I’ve played with the exception of Project Cars where I attempted to simulate a full 24 hour race only to wake up and find I had been blue flagged and disqualified. I would find it acceptable in the Horizon series but not here.

Music wise, again it’s not something you would notice if you didn’t have to do 7,000 races but it’s a limited soundtrack. The one plus side is that you can turn the music off and listen to your own. And my word, some of the songs on the soundtrack are utter trash, attempts at being alternate and cool but only serve as being tropes for alternative music types.

At least the tracks all look the part and the quality of drive and handling of the cars is good but that’s about it.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

There’s a whole raft of crap to do here but most of it actually comes quite quickly. Racing through season play will get a lot of stuff done including getting the relevant driver levels, car levels and completing stuff.

Unfortunately, there are some online requirements for buying and selling stuff and sharing designs. Two of these are likely unobtainable now as they shut down forzamotorsport.net and you had to upload a photo to the site. Another one for selling a tuning setup, vinyl or design is dodgy due to the intermittent nature of the servers as well. There are another 4 that require an online connection but thankfully none that require directly playing with other players.

Another two notable ones are for owning at least one car from every manufacturer (much better than buying every car in the game, thanks Forza 2) but again this will come with time, and more notably for performing a lap scoring over 100,000 drift points. This one took some guidance and practice and I hate drifting so I put it off forever but actually managed it on my second lap once I got used to being able to control the drift, which is infinitely easier here than in Forza 5.

Now for the last one. This is just stupid and it’s for completing every single event race in the game. Thankfully you can simulate the races and this still counts so I was able to watch some TV while the AI did a lot of the work for me. It takes a lot of time though and this is where all of my complaints about the game originate. You notice a lot of shit when you do a lot of races.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Let’s be honest, no one is going to play this game now, not with the amount of sequels currently out (we are on Motorsport 7 at the time of writing) and even if you did, you will be fed up with it before the end of that last achievement and it’s now impossible to complete anyway.

There’s a lot to be said about games with little to no content but games that rinse and repeat their same content over and over again? No. Just no. But thanks.

The Witness

Completing The Witness served to remind me that it had been over a year since I started the game which is quite a scary thought. However, it’s also been reassuring to see the game show up on a few ‘best games of the decade’ lists which is a far cry from most of the other games I’ve finished recently.

The Witness is an open world puzzle game with a difference. Where most games like this give you a linear path with progressively more difficult puzzles, The Witness dumps you on an island with some tutorial puzzles to teach you the basic concepts and then you’re off to explore.

The island itself has 11 lasers on it which need to be activated and directed towards a mountain to unlock the final set of puzzles. To activate the lasers, you need to master some line puzzles. These vary from simple mazes to complex puzzles where the solutions are found by manipulating the scenery to see the solution or by figuring out the complex rules involving dots on the lines and coloured squares. None of these are explained, it’s up to you to figure out and managing to do so is very rewarding.

In terms of navigation, this can be quite slow and frustrating at times, even more for me when I forgot that there was a sprint button. Even with the sprint button though, it still takes ages getting anywhere and then there is the element of not knowing where you are going that adds to this. In addition, there is also a boat which you can activate and use at various locations as a sort of fast travel. It’s also the only way to reach one of the areas so needs to done at some point.

Everything about the island is deliberate and well-crafted and I didn’t get scenery stuck or trapped at any point and the same can’t be said for many other triple A titles. In addition, the music is atmospheric and clear – and it has to be as some of the puzzles are based on the sounds in the environment so if there was overbearing background music, it would destroy this game mechanic.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

It’s a short list and simple enough for the most part. 11 of the achievements are for activating the lasers scattered around the island and all of these need to be activated to unlock the final challenge in the game – and that’s where the real challenge is.

Activating the lasers is simple enough in that if you get stuck you can use a video or picture guide to get past any overly difficult bits and to assist with the navigation of the island. I’ll admit to resorting to this when I revisited the game after a long hiatus as it helped me get my bearings and point me in the right direction.

So that just leaves the last two achievements. The next one is just for completing the game and there is small taste of what’s to come with this one. You have to solve two puzzles to open a door that combine some of the elements from the puzzles you’ve already played. The issue? These puzzles are random and they reset after a very short amount of time so there’s an element of luck, where you can get a really basic puzzle, and an element of skill, if you are quick enough to solve the puzzle that comes up regardless of difficulty. To show my ineptitude at the game at this point, I swear some of these weren’t even solvable.

Anyway, this door pales in comparison to the last achievement, simply titled Challenge. This area is in the same area as the end game but doesn’t unlock until you’ve unlocked all of the lasers. Essentially, it’s a sequence of 14 randomly generated puzzles that get progressively harder. Oh, and this time, you’re on a timer too as you have to complete it before the music stops, which is two pieces of classic music that comes in at just under 7 minutes. Oh, and you can’t pause it otherwise the challenge resets.

I’m pretty sure I got lucky as I managed to complete this on my tenth run after getting progressively better at it over time. Though I did have some help. One part of the challenge requires you to enter a maze which is actually a mirror image of one the puzzles you’ve solved before. I got my partner to take a picture and guide me through the maze. Essentially, it’s a solid challenge, one that a guide can’t help with and one that is very rewarding once completed.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Witness is one of the best puzzle games about and critically acclaimed by many sources as well. It’s well worth a play and even after completing the achievements, there are still more puzzles and secrets hidden by the island for you to find.