Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

Following the two previous catch up reviews, I can now focus on a game I recently finished. I know it seems like OCD gone mad after my earlier review of Assassin’s Creed III but I felt that Ass Creed III was so far removed from this lot that I could weirdly justify reviewing it first.

So anyway, there is one reason and one reason only that Assassin’s Creed III was published before these reviews; I had absolutely no intention of ever completing Brotherhood because of the multiplayer. I don’t understand why a game series I really enjoyed decided to add a multiplayer mode when the single player along was perfectly fine, and I understand even less why people like it so much. More on the multiplayer later though.

I almost didn’t continue with the series such is my disdain for multiplayer and also the way the game was advertised led me to believe that the only function of the game was a multiplayer one and that it had no bearing on the Assassin’s Creed storyline. I can’t remember how I found out this wasn’t true but I sucked it up, purchased the game and actually quite enjoyed the single player experience.

It is essentially a continuation of Assassin’s Creed II only slightly better due t fact it was released a year later. The gameplay elements are the same as its predecessor with two notable differences. The first is that you have a new function to recruit young assassins into your mini club in Rome and send them out across continental Europe to complete missions that are completely unrelated to your main goals. You don’t actually do anything either, other than click on a location and get given a chance of success. If you fail, your recruit dies and you have to hire a new one and start again. It is fairly dull but a good source of money which brings me on to the next change.

Instead of having your own private villa to improve, you now move in to Rome and that apparently means that, as an aside to assassinating people, Ezio has also started work as a building renovator and big businessman in the area. Your goals are to buy up all of the shops in the city and rebuild many derelict buildings including the aqueduct. I haven’t read my history on this but I’m pretty sure that Rome didn’t get renovated by some bizarre rich guy with a white cape and I have to question why on Earth they’ve put this in the game.

In Assassin’s Creed II, city renovation was new and you could say it was fair enough as you were renovating a place you actually lived in. In Rome, you are just rebuilding the city for no real reason. It doesn’t make sense in its own context which is a bizarre area to fall down on.

Also, by this point we are moving away from the stupid ‘stealth’ requirements of the assassin from the previous games such as walking slowly to avoid detection. It seems that Ubisoft have accepted the fact that sometimes people run or ride horses quickly and this doesn’t necessarily mean that they are up to no good. Of course, Ezio still walks around with his giant ‘I’m an assassin’ sign, but he has been in Rome for so long now that the guards probably think he’s an eccentric. Especially when you factor in the fact that he fixed the aqueduct for no other reason that it was a broken. And at great personal expense too.

Achievements – 60 Achievements – 1,250 Points

First off, there are the single player achievements which again are mostly straight forward. There are two missable ones for doing stuff as future Desmond but if you do happen to miss these, it’s not too much trouble to reply until the point where you can get them again.

There are some quite interesting ones involving finding certain items and locations and they actually make the most of the various side stories they have set up, namely that of Subject 16 – but no spoilers here. 

I found the single player mode to be quite entertaining, however completing the game was made a major slog and dragged out for several years due to...

Multiplayer

Earning these achievements was a huge pain in the ass. Firstly, I completed every other aspect of the game years before completing these bits and there are two achievements which were insanely difficult to obtain.  The pick of the bunch for insanity is the Abstergo Employee of the Month achievement. This one requires you to get all of the multiplayer bonuses available, one of which is called extreme variety which you only get if you manage to perform fifteen different bonuses in one match, something that doing in a random match is reserved for those people who, at the time of online popularity, had enough time to play the multiplayer over and over again until they were insanely good at it. And even then, there is a still a massive element of luck to it.

This is Assassin’s Creed’s first venture into multiplayer and you can tell from the Assassin’s Creed III achievements that Ubisoft eventually learned that people don’t like having to complete challenges based on the randomness of other players.

Downloadable Content

There is one downloadable content set with achievements which lets you access an additional sequence where you get to play with all of Leonardo’s inventions. Part of this, involves having to get 100% synchronisation across the DLC, which is actually the most challenging aspect of the game. This is what you want from DLC, something that adds something a little different and an extra challenge – thank God there were no additional multiplayer achievements!

Despite many labelling this as an unnecessary addition to the series, I thought that there was enough content here to justify a full title. I still question the necessity of multiplayer but even if people like it, which apparently they do, there is no reason to have achievements for it. Surely leaderboards and bragging rights is enough for those that enjoy online multiplayer?

Assassin's Creed II

On to Assassin’s Creed II and introducing one of the greatest Itialians that ever lived – Ezio Auditore di Firenze!

Assassin’s Creed II is essentially Assassin’s Creed in different clothes but as I’ve previously stated, it was great fun so I had no problem with this at all. And also, the developers addressed the biggest problem of the previous game in that Altair’s personality could be likened to that of a piece of wood.

In contrast, Ezio is just as likely to fuck your wife than assassinate you (and will more than likely do both). He also has a decent motive for revenge in that the Templars killed his family versus Altair’s, ‘I’m an assassin so let’s fuck up dem bitchez!’

Visually, it is standardly improved across the board and Ezio’s assassin outfit is a tad more discrete than Altair’s... a tad. He still may as well walk through the streets of Italy with a big Assassin sign above his head and he also suffers from the syndrome of being labelled as such if he moves faster than a seventy year old man.

On to the gameplay and they have expanded on the non-assassin things you can do - you can now build your own hideout! Many people have criticised this, but I found it relatively enjoyable. It gave me a sense of purpose, like I was building my own assassin hideout which was great. Incidentally it is also the location of where Future Desmond and his band of do-gooders are hiding out in the modern world, so it was all very well rounded.

The storyline flows more smoothly here too in that you don’t have to start every mission or sequence from the same location. It was actually like the developers looked at their last game and tried to improve it which makes a great change. That said, it does suffer from the same platforming issues present in the previous game. When faced with the choice between plummeting to his death and jumping to the pretty obvious ledge, Ezio will often pick death. Maybe it has something to do with endless amount of meanlingless sex he has, who knows.

Ezio does have another favourable quality over Altair – water doesn’t kill him. This means that some of the unexplainable, dumbass, jumping decisions described above aren’t the end of the world. They are simply annoying.

Achievements – 50 Achievements – 1,000 Points

The achievements for this can be broken down into a few specific categories. Stuff you need to collect, stuff you need to buy to improve your house and stuff you need to do to various enemies, like killing them and stuff.

It’s all relatively straightforward with the exception of 1 missable achievement which you can only get during one mission, and maybe the feather collection as these do not appear on the map.

Downloadable Content – N/A

In summary it’s an easy 1,000 points and nowhere near as time consuming as the first in the series. I did find myself becoming bored towards the end though after having explored eight different cities across the two games, collecting crap and performing a limited amount of assassinations.

Assassin's Creed

Back in my university days, Assassin’s Creed was released and I immediately thought, ‘yes that is exactly my bag baby,’ and went out and bought myself a copy. It was okay, I had learned to survive without food by this point and could spare the forty quid to buy a new release.

Of course this was years ago and I’m writing a retrospective review mainly to get up to date with the recently completed Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

The very first Assassin’s Creed revisits the Crusades where you take on the role of Altair, an assassin who goes about killing Templars because that’s what he is; an assassin that kills Templars. Although, in actual fact you are Desmond Miles, some dude in the future who has been captured by an evil corporation and forced to relive ancestral memories so that the bad guys can find the Apple of Eden, a powerful device that is owned by Altair’s mentor in the twelfth century. Or something like that.

Basically the whole Desmond thing is just there for framing and the main game is jumping about ancient civilisations as Altair.

The first time I rode into Damascus, I think my jaw dropped. At the time, I was amazed. You ride out on top of a hill that overlooks the entire city and you can explore every inch of what you can see. It was beautiful. Modern day consoles will make this look like shit now, but at the time, it was fantastic. I went about exploring and doing side missions and climbing really tall buildings and actually forgot that the reason I was in the city was to kill someone!

This is where the game fails – with the thing that is in the title – assassinations. Despite being called Assassin’s Creed, you spend very little time actually trying to assassinate people and more time doing mini-missions in preparation to the killing. These mini missions are exactly the same, no matter what city you are in, so it feels very lazy in terms of development. That said, it’s kind of balanced with the amount of work that’s gone into developing the scenery and cities, however I’ve always said that you should never sacrifice Gameplay for looks and it feels like that is exactly what the developers have done.

 Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

When I was playing Assassin’s Creed, I was going through a rough time with my Xbox360. It decided that it didn’t like having games inside it and would destroy anything that entered it – much like that movie, Teeth.

My first copy of Assassin’s Creed became unplayable after my Xbox had chewed it up and spat it out. This caused me to send the Xbox off to be fixed which left me without an Xbox for six weeks. This meant it took me a long time to get to the 1,000 point mark due to these unforeseen circumstances and also the fact that there are several collectible achievements in the game which take forever to do.

In my Toy Story 3 review, I mentioned that there was no way of tracking the collectibles. Assassin’s Creed not only has a way of tracking them, it marks them all on your map. You have to kill 60 Templars and collect, wait for it, 420 flags across the different locations. This was at a time when I thought Grand Theft Auto’s 100 hidden packages was excessive.

I think I spent three nights running around collecting flags and kept having the same conversation with my flatmate. ‘What are doing?’ he would ask. ‘Collecting flags.’ I would say. ‘Still?’ he would retort. ‘Yes,’ I would answer. Once I had collected the last flag, I was overwhelmed with a sense of achievement. My flatmate called it a waste of time.

The only real problem with the achievements was the Conversationalist one. In the future framing environment, something I didn’t think I would have to worry about when going for achievements, you have to have all conversations with a girl called Lucy. These are missable and cannot be revisited. I found this out half way through the game and restarted to save a full second playthrough. But I was still very annoyed about it. It added no extra dimension to the game so why they put an achievement in for it, I have no idea.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

Despite the long haul of collecting the flags and repetitiveness of the missions I do have fond memories of playing the game. The scenery is the best part of it and that makes the exploring element much more fun.

Fantastic 4: Rise of the Silver Surfer

This one was bought as part of a four for £20 deal from Gamestation so I wasn’t expecting big things from it. However, even with my initial low expectations I was left with a brand new feeling of disappointment, only achieved by playing probably the worst game ever released.

Anyway as always, firstly an overview. As you would expect the game is based, very loosely, around the plot of the movie with some bizarre additions. It’s been a long time since I’ve watched the movie, which was also a pile of wank if memory serves, but I’m pretty sure they didn’t fight a giant green dude called Super Skrull and I’m also sure they didn’t travel to a Russian Space Station to fight monkeys.

It’s hard to find someone to say a kind word about the film and even harder for the game. To start with, it’s graphically awful. The looks are more at home on an early Playstation 2 game, not the dizzy heights of Xbox360. Equal effort was put into the dreary repetitive soundtrack, and  despite my unfavourable view of these elements of the game, they are in fact the better ones.

The gameplay is probably the worst I have ever experienced in the history of games and that is some award considering some of the games I’ve played in the past. The gameplay is ridiculously unimaginative. There are three areas the developers have worked on.

1.       The gameplay environment. Their work consisted of having six different levels with different wallpaper. They are all corridor based fighting sections where you have to fight enemies and press a button to unlock the next corridor.

2.       The characters’ special attacks. Each character has four special abilities that you can upgrade. They are all used once at some point and then can be completely disregarded for the rest of the game afterwards. The only reason they are there is because there are four characters with ‘special’ powers. As you level up said abilities, they haven’t bothered to improve the way they look or the graphical actions of you performing these abilities, so the only reason you know they are upgraded is because the enemies die faster. The only ability required to complete the game is The Thing’s ground pound attack which makes all of the other character abilities redundant.

3.       The enemies. The same as the above. There are two... no wait, three! Three different enemy types. One that cannot shoot you with a gun, one that can and one that can fly. The lack of development is so severe that when use The Thing’s ground pound attack, this is capable of destroying the flying enemies as well.

This goes back to my Toy Story review of how the game was release solely to make money off the back of the movie and this is even more evident here due to the complete lack of effort that has gone into make the game. This is meant to be the Fantastic Four and the characters are about as fantastic as manure.  

In addition, there are flying sections with the Human Torch because, you know, they may as well make use some of their special abilities (considering flying is about as useful as paper condoms in a corridor based game environment) and these sections leave a lot to be desired. The flight plain and the environment don’t balance which means you spend half the time flying into the ceiling or flying into floor.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 19 Achievements

As per the actual game, the achievements are a load of crap as well. It’s fairly basic to have stackable achievements where difficulty is concerned and it pains me to have to play through a game twice but this was made even worse by my discovery of something new to complain about which fucked me off so badly that I don’t even know what to say about it.

The cut scenes cannot, I repeat, cannot, be skipped. They can’t be skipped and the game wants you to play through it twice. They can’t be skipped and there is a requirement to grind out ability points to upgrade all the characters’ abilities. Why can’t they be skipped?! It is one of the most fucking annoying development issues I’ve ever come across. Do I want to watch the same cut scene twenty times to grind out ability orbs? No! Fuck you Take 2 Interactive, you lazy cunts!

There are also achievements for collectibles which are generally easy to find due to the corridor nature of the levels however, several were hard to find in last level again due to the ‘only having a requirement to use abilities once’ extravaganza. Earlier, I mentioned that the Human Torch can fly but this is pointless due to the corridor-style nature of the levels, however, in the last level there is a raised area that can only be reached by flying. Never has this happened in any of the previous five levels so why now? Just to be different? To add a new dimension to your one dimensional piece of shit game?

Downloadable Content – N/A

It’s just shit. There’s nothing else to say other than that. The game play is shit. The aesthetics are shit. The sound is lousy (just to be different) and everything else is complete balls. The sheer lack of effort into the development of the game has led to a very shit and very forgettable gaming experience.

Toy Story 3

The reason for Toy Story appearing on the list is that I was subscribed to Boomerang Games in order to rent simple games instead of paying real money for them. I had James’ Cameron’s Avatar sitting on my shelf gathering dust for the best part of three months before I realised this endeavour was a giant waste of fake money. So I returned Avatar and cancelled my membership – but not before they dispatched Toy Story 3. This effectively gave me a week to complete and return the game to avoid being charged – cue an epic three days of charging through the game.

Playing the game at breakneck speed made me notice all the massive flaws with it, but I will break this down as I go through. The first thing I noted was that, considering the age recommendation of ten-plus, this game is insanely difficult. I remember watching my nephew play it a few years ago and he was just wandering around the Wild West and I thought to myself, this could be an easy 1,000 points. How wrong I was but I’ll cover that in the achievement section.

The first thing that pissed me off was that, after completing the first ‘real’ level, you are put into the mini-game environment of Woody’s Roundup. I say ‘mini-game,’ but in essence this portion of the game will take you longer to complete than the actual levels.

However, this wasn’t the frustrating thing. In a game designed for ten year olds, I thought that I had to actively find the next level within Woody’s Roundup. It wasn’t until I got fed up with it and turned it off for the evening, that I found out that the main missions were outside of this area. There was no instruction on how to get back to main game board and it was only after playing round up for a little while longer that I discovered there were warp areas that take you back up there. A prompt would have been nice, or even better, as this is a game for ten-pluses, a walkthrough of how to do it would have been more appropriate. To be honest, I may have missed a prompt, but if I missed it, how is a ten year old supposed to get it??

Now for my favourite subject, and not one I get to talk about a lot – glitches. This game is glitchtastic! There were several instances of being caught on scenery, crashing into invisible walls, and falling through the floor, which all adds to a fantastic gaming experience.

Vehicles make the game even more impressively shit. The controls for vehicles are shoddy at best. The driving functionality seems to stop at, ‘we managed to make it go forward and turn left and right and plug it full of boosts and power ups.’ Either no one said, ‘great, now let’s work on putting those functions into the gaming environment and smooth it out so that it works properly.’ Or no one cared about it in the first place. I think the latter is more likely because it was released at pretty much the same time as the movie and so I can only deduce that this was done as a money spinner.

Oh yeah, and on top of that, graphically it’s a pile of wank (hence the glitches as well) and also, as much as I like a sound track to stay true to its source material, the Toy Story theme is annoying at best but after listening to the clinky-cluncky bullshit in a repetitive game environment, it actually becomes quite depressing.

Achievements – 1,000 points – 38 Achievements

The main focus of the Toy Story 3 achievement set is collectibles – 11 out of the 38 achievements relate to collecting things. Normally I wouldn’t have a problem with this because generally speaking, games will have one of two things; an inbuilt way of tracking what you’ve picked up or a useful non-official site where you can create your own tracking of what you’ve collected. Toy Story 3 really goes out of its way to make this harder for you because not only does it not have an in-game tracking system for the 100 plus collectibles scattered throughout Woody’s Roundup but once you’ve collected one, it doesn’t tell you which one it is anywhere, meaning that you can’t track what you have and have not collected yourself, which again feels like another shortcut. I mean, how difficult would it have been to put the names of the collectibles under the collectibles once you have collected them? I suppose it is a lot of work if you are trying to rush a game out to match the film release.

This essentially means that if you want to track what you have and don’t have, you need to know about the achievement before you start playing Woody’s Roundup – which, in my humble opinion, is stupid.

The remaining achievements are story based and you don’t have to go too far out of your way to get them. However, the glitchy nature of the game made even the easiest of tasks very tiresome.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I will never play this game again for fun because it’s not. I’m glad I rented it and that it doesn’t have to sit on my shelf collecting dust. I managed to get through all the achievements in three days and I will tell you now, these were the longest most arduous three days in my gaming life.

007: Quantum of Solace

Life is all about lessons and I learned a very important one before playing this game. Never let your girlfriend/wife pick your next game. Mine are listed alphabetically so she just picked the first one on the shelf. I suppose it was a good thing in a way because I wouldn’t have played it for another 5 years otherwise.

 A little history of my involvement with this game; I bought when I was still drunk after an all-nighter at University probably at some point during early 2009. It came with an Xbox360 custom front plate (which I never used) and I also bought nine other games. Bad times.

Anyway, after spending in excess of thirty quid on it, it became an ornament until the later part of 2013 when the conversation in the first paragraph happened and I broke the plastic seal and started playing.

Normally I wouldn’t offer much comment on the storyline of a movie based game as standard practice assumes that you essentially play out the movie. However, I didn’t think there was enough action in Quantum of Solace to warrant a video game and Activision agreed with me. Halfway through the game, we switch movies back to Casino Royale and play out the entirety of that one as well, before returning to the Quantum of Solace theme for the final mission. So it doesn’t do exactly what it says on the tin.

Music wise, it hits all the right notes and I have to say, this is normally the best part of movie based games. It doesn’t give out high hopes for the rest of the game if the sound is the best part though as, in my opinion, it’s the least important factor in the complete game experience. Visually, it’s okay. It didn’t make my jaw drop or irritate me in any special way.

Gameplay wise, it is just another shooter where you have to navigate through a series of conveniently placed chest high walls, making it a cross between Gears of War and Call of Duty in what it offers. To me, it offered very little in terms of enjoyment and I doubt it would offer anything to fans of the first person shooter. Because of my huge balls (and unwillingness to do two playthroughs of game unless it can’t be avoided) I went straight in on the hardest difficulty level and didn’t encounter too many hold ups. I’m pretty shit at shooters, so this makes it an unchallenging unoriginal game.

The biggest issue I had with it was the quick-time events which are surprisingly affected by difficultly. On the highest difficulty level you have somewhere around about half a second to act. This didn’t effect the overall difficulty of the game as if you fail, you start back at the beginning of the quick-time event. It is just fucking annoying to have to repeat something three times because I don’t have the reactions of a fly (which, incidentally, is a really annoying insect.)

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

The single player was hassle-free bar the quick-time events. There are a couple of level specific achievements but nothing too taxing and nothing secret! The collectible achievements are also stress free with only four or five collectible per level and a clean up only takes a few hours max after an initial playthrough on the hardest difficulty. However, the 1,000 points was not completely straightforward because...

Multiplayer

... of the horrendous ball-ache, pile of shit, pointlessly bollocks multiplayer achievements. The first time I reviewed a game with these achievements, I pointed out that they are horrible additions to most games for two reasons, one of them being that they only have a limited time where people will play online before moving on to other things. There was no one playing this game when I tried to start legitimately earning these achievements which means I was left to try boosting for them with others. I have to extend my thanks to the multiple people I played with to clear this and some of the conversations we had made it less of a pain in the ass but there were a few aspects to this which made the whole episode far more painful than it could have been.

Firstly, another reason that I don’t like playing online is that there appears to be no restrictions on the types of people who are allowed to interact with others. There was one guy who came into our group chat to say ‘I am retarded’ over and over again. It’s not true though. He wasn’t retarded. He was a fucking moron.

Secondly, the multiplayer doesn’t allow for you to be put restrictions on your matches. We couldn’t stop random players joining our games if we didn’t have eight players. I don’t understand a game with online capacity that doesn’t give you the option of putting these kinds of restrictions in place. It meant that we were unfortunately subject to more of the garbage mentioned above.

Thirdly, the one achievement that has us all playing for ages was ‘For England, James?’ which requires the players to get 100,000 credits. We were playing Golden Gun Mode where each player can score 970 credits per game. Each game is 7 minutes long. This means that, playing in this way, without any allowance for 12 year old dickheads mentioned above, it takes no less than 12 hours to get this achievement and that’s using a boosting method.

To put this into perspective, there are other achievements for buying all of the weapons for online play and the total cost for this is less than 100,000 credits... what is the point is playing once you unlocked everything there is to unlock? I suppose this is reserved for the people that actually enjoy the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

In summary, the single player was short and sweet and the multiplayer was arduous and shit. I did make some friends though so it wasn’t a tragic loss although I am amazed how easily people can come together in common hatred for something...oh wait, hang on...

CSI: Crime Scene Investigation - Deadly Intent

Deadly Intent is the second game in the CSI series, not that it matters much as there is no direct linking between the games. It seems a bit futile to label the flaws that were present in the other games here so I will try to concentrate on those unique to Deadly Intent.

After the D-Pad/Analogue stick separation from Hard Evidence, the developers decided to go roughly somewhere in the middle with their next game. You can use either the analogue stick or the D-Pad to cycle through the menus this time, however it seems that the D-Pad has a little more power than the analogue stick. I had a continuous problem of opening a menu and trying to use the analogue stick to select a piece of evidence only for the game to cycle backwards though the evidence to the beginning.

I thought there must have been something wrong with my controller and the hardly used D Pad was getting stuck. My controller is very old to the point that my left analogue stick has lost its shape and the hard plastic underneath has started showing.  Also, the left shoulder button only works if you press on the far right of it.

You may be thinking, ‘how are Adam’s controller issues relative to CSI Deadly Intent?’ Well, considering the above paragraph, I went out and bought a new controller with the expectation of the above mentioned problem going away. It did not. Glitches that prevent you from being able to play the game the way it is meant to be played are the biggest problems with games.

So despite forking out for a new (much needed) controller, I still had to do battle with a fucking computer to select a piece of evidence that I wanted to use! Needless to say, I was not impressed in the slightest.

I know I said I would focus on the main elements of this game, but it’s tough not to mention the characters’ severe personality switches. Another brilliant one revolved around one suspect, who clearly thought they were going to get away with it, who was being really forth coming and nice to us... until we got a sniff that they were involved with the murder and then started being really uncooperative and demanding legal representation.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 28 Achievements

Again, it is a very straight forward run through these achievements. You can net the majority of the achievements on a single playthrough and any that you do miss can be easily obtained by replying one of the cases.

That said, they commit the cardinal sin of having secret achievements that are not story related and you have to do something out of the ordinary to get them. I don’t understand why games do this. It’s like going to work and getting to the end of the day to have your boss turn around and say, ‘You were shit today, you didn’t meet all your objectives.’ which I would then follow with, ‘what didn’t I do?’ for him to then say, ‘I can’t tell you, it’s a secret.’ Fuck. Off.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Bugs and shitty controls aside, it is an easy 1,000 points but the menu control error thing sucked any kind of fun out of playing the game. The series does show that they improved the games as the series went on though. Fatal Conspiracy is by far the best in terms of cleanness, variety and character development and that’s enough to encourage me to get the next instalment, if one is ever released.