Energy Cycle

Getting this game was more difficult than completing it. It’s only released on the US store and the only way I could get it was to ask my friend in America to buy me a redeemable code (please note that this method of purchase has been mentioned by Microsoft as acceptable under their terms and conditions) which I used to add credit to my American store. Apparently some people do this to save money but the amount of faff involved doesn’t make it worth it. It is, however worth it to legitimately access games I would otherwise be unable to play.

On to the game itself – Energy Cycle is a puzzle game where you have a grid of lights that you need to get to all match. The lights can be three different colours and when you click on one to change its colour, it changes all other lights in the horizontal and vertical lines with it. This is clearly, harder to describe in words than pictures.

The game itself consists of 28 levels of varying difficulty. I have no idea why they picked the weird dog thing as a logo or why he shows up at the end of every level telling you how many moves you used but to each their own, I guess. There’s not a lot else to say about the game so on to the...

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

This will probably me my shortest review so I’m padding a bit with this sentence to introduce the 10 achievements available. In order to get the full 1,000 points, you just need to complete the 28 levels available.

Much like my Cubot playthrough, I gave it my best shot at the start but I eventually caved and used a video guide to do the harder ones.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While not an original concept, Energy Cycle is a solid puzzle game. From a purely gaming perspective, it could do with a few more levels and maybe a bit of variety but it retails at $2.99 currently so there can’t be any real complaints about content or lack thereof.

Crash Time

After my out of order completions of Crash Time 4 and 5, I am now back in the world of order and competing the first Crash Time game. The reasons for playing games in order became even more apparent during my playthrough of this one. To sum it up, it’s a pile of shite and Crash Time 2 will hopefully reveal a drastic improvement from this introduction to the series.

Crash Time see you take control of Semir and Chris, two faceless German traffic cops with a pageant for destruction and ridiculous car chases and neither of them can get out of their cars.

I’m now struggling to think about what I hated most about the game. Was it the tail missions? The instant replays? The fact that it’s called Crash Time and you aren’t really allowed to crash? The dialogue? The glitches? The trains? The respawns?

The tail missions are an absolute joke. I played on hard the whole time but sometimes these verged on unfair. If you get too close you have to back off. But not too much because otherwise they will speed off into the horizon never to be seen again. One of these missions has you start on the verge of failing and you have to speed off and not crash and almost hope that your opponent makes a mistake.

The instant replays were the most sinfully annoying thing in the game. It triggers automatically every time you have an accident and it replays your mistake, which doesn’t look spectacular as the graphics are shit. It also breaks the game play meaning that you have to be aware of where you were before the game decided to show you your fuck up again. Thankfully there is an option to turn this off which I found towards the end of the game but the steering stick is also a button... which when pressed by accident triggers a fucking replay!

Playing on hard means that if you even scratch your car, you can fail the mission. Calling a game Crash Time and penalising you every time you have a slight accident labels the game as an oxymoron or, a poor translation. But it’s not a bad translation because they make a joke in the loading screens that it’s called Crash Time but don’t take it literally. Ha ha ha.

The dialogue is awful but what else is new. This is more funny than anything else.

The gliches I experienced were just twatish. On one mission, the vehicle I had to follow fell through the game floor forcing me to restart the mission. The general game mechanics seem unfair too. During pursuit missions where you have to not damage the opponent’s car, the opponent will occasionally crash due to nothing you’ve done causing you to fail the mission.

The trains. My God, the trains. Crashing maybe off limits but racing is part and parcel of the game. So why the fuck would you have a fucking train crossing on the road during a race? If you are in the lead, it allows your opponents to catch back up effectively serving as a mid-race reset. It’s so stupid.

The one that caused me to scream, and even my partner turn around and ask, ‘How is that fair?’ is to do with the AI respawning after they fuck up. Some missions, you have to fully damage a car to get it to stop. So If I ram my opponent off the road, pin them against a tree and put them in a position where I can damage them until they are destroyed, why the fuck can they respawn on to the road and speed away from me? It’s so, so cheap. My favourite time the game did this to me was when I pushed the car on to the barrier at the edge of the road and I could damage the car while my opponent slid along the barrier. As soon as it had stopped sliding for a few seconds, it respawned 700 meters further down the road causing me to fail the mission for being too far away from my opponent. This caused me to use some choice language: fuck you, you fucking game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

There are 9 missions in the game each carrying 3 achievements for completing the mission on easy, medium and hard. Completing the game on hard nets you 27 of the achievements which is an achievement in itself because it means you have managed to stomach all of the shit I’ve mentioned above.

Outside of the missions, you have to do all of the usual Crash Time stuff like drive all the cars, drive on all the tracks and drive 1,000 km. This time though, they didn’t offer enough content to get to 1,000 km before you race on all the tracks and complete career mode. I had to do an additional 100 km after doing everything.

There are few random ones in there too like doing a loop-de-loop in the sewer and jumping fully over the river. The first achievement I unlocked was simply for pushing the police light button. This one seems to indicate they were struggling for ideas.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Crash Time is a poor racing game by any standards that doesn’t even agree with its own title. It’s the most difficult game in the series which isn’t a massive surprise considering how poorly constructed it is. It’s an avoid for Gamerscore hunters and just general gamers alike.

Dragon Age: Origins

This one goes back a long long way. I think it was back in my first year of university that I stuck Dragon Age in to my Xbox for the first time. I earned six achievements in about five hours of play, came across one monster I couldn’t kill first time, then stopped playing. I didn’t find the game play too engaging if I’m honest which may have contributed to my apathy. Anyway, after about five months of dipping in and out of the game I finally completed the last few DLCs and nailed the achievement list.

Dragon Age is/was a new action adventure RPG with an original story and characters. You play as the Grey Warden who can be from one of about six different backgrounds and also male or female. Your goal is to unite the land of Ferelden against the all consuming evil known as the darkspawn. The darkspawn and led by the archdemon, a giant ugly dragon type thing and your ultimate goal is to kill the archdemon and save the world from death and destruction. Simple enough, right?

The different character you chose makes a difference to the opening 2 hours of the game and the decisions you make will result in different outcomes that affect your personality and how other characters perceive you. The way the game is constructed is actually quite good if your mind hasn’t been destroyed by all the bang, bang shooty fun going on at the moment. All of the other party members you can recruit on your adventures have an opinion of you which can be influenced positively or negatively depending on your actions. Some of them will actually attack you if you make a decision they don’t agree with, which can result in some hilarious consequences.

One example of this is that you can actually ‘romance’ four of the in game characters. By ‘romance’ the game actually means ‘have sex with’ but you have to get some of them to fall in love with you before they will consider taking their clothes off. You can get Leliana to fall in love with you and doink her, then take her on one of the main quest missions. The decision you make at the end may force her to attack you and you will kill her – a strange turn of events considering she was rolling around semi-naked with you just the previous morning.

When I say bang, bang shooty fun destroying minds, Dragon Age is not the fastest game in the world. The combat is more about strategy than speed and dexterity and the dialogue takes forever to get through. That said, I did invest in the characters a lot and as Leliana was so hard to romance, I actually did buy in to her background in the end. I must have not been the only one either because she has her own DLC.

The gameplay element is the bit which resulted in me becoming bored. Now, there are difficulty levels and I must confess I played on the lowest one but only because the game doesn’t appear to have any kind of difficulty curve. There are some super hard bits early on and really easy bits later in the game. The attacking and defensive structure seemed too complicated for me to do well – you basically have an attack wheel and you can learn various attacks and defensive skills from levelling up. You can’t max out the skill trees so you have to pick your stuff carefully. I could never do this well so I didn’t invest too much time in it. Despite not doing this, it still took me in excess of 100 hours to complete the game.

Achievements – 1,750 Points – 76 Achievements

God, where to start with this one. Nearly half of the achievements relate the numerous DLCs so starting at the beginning feels like a reasonable idea.

There are six different types of character you can play as. Each has their own origin story and there is an achievement for completing each one. I did a couple of these at the end of the game after completing my various playthoughs but don’t panic, you do not have to complete the game six times.

In fact on to that, the maximum amount of full playthroughs you need is actually only one if you use tactical saving. You will, however, need to play for a while as a character of the opposite sex as you need to romance heterosexual male and female characters. That’s not to say Dragon Age doesn’t encompass homosexuality as there are two characters who swing both ways allowing you to engage in both gay and non-gay sex scenes.

There are four total romances and five achievements attached to them. The hardest one to do is Leliana because, to be frank, she is a fussy bitch. The others you can bed simply by engaging in casual conversation but Leliana, you’ve got to talk to her, complete her personal quest and bring her flowers before she will even consider getting down and dirty. Then to top it off, you have to have some very specific conversations with her giving the exact responses required. I managed to achieve this about half way through my first playthrough and after I did, I felt like the rest of the achievements would be easy – and I was right.

Throughout the course of the game, you are presented with 5 moral choice decisions in the main plot lines which are obviously designed to spawn a second playthrough, however a few well placed tactical saves can get around this which results in 10 achievements for the price of 5.

In addition to the moral choices, there are four different endings you can get which are in no way related to any choices you make outside of the last hour of the game. Again, another few tactical saves at the business end of the game can result in the least amount of work for the maximum reward.

There is another requirement for a partial third playthrough if you are not planning on doing the DLC. You need to get the three different classes to level 20. Thankfully, there is a glitch that can be exploited at the beginning on the game to get to level 20. Having done it twice, I have to say it’s not quick when you have to rinse and repeat the same conversation over and over again but it’s a lot quicker than playing through the entire game three times.

Outside of this, there are a few other things you need to do such as intimidate and persuade a certain amount of people,  kill a certain dragon, inflict 250 damage with one hit (use a mage’s mana cleanse ability) keep your troops alive in the final battle(most easily done by not using them) and kill 1,000 darkspawn. This last one is the most arduous. You have to personally kill the darkspawn but the game only tracks the party kills, not your individual ones. Also, there isn’t an infinite number o darkspawn in the game once you get to a certain point. Thankfully, it counts kills up to a death or reload which means you can rinse and repeat the final battle over and over to grind this one out.

Downloadable Content

There are a grand total of eight DLCs available for Dragon Age. Three of them form part of the main game so playing it when I did was actually an advantage for these. The 3 DLCs in the main game aren’t really noteworthy but two achievements are missable. During The Stone Prisoner missions, you can miss one of the two achievements available if you don’t do the correct actions at a certain point in time. In Warden’s Keep, you will come across a potion which you have to drink but the game asks you if you want to destroy it.

The other five are standalone DLCs which can be played at any point. Leliana’s Song and Darkspawn Chronicles are not connected to the storyline from the main game whereas the other three are. Leliana’s Song has another two missable achievements where you need to either collect some stuff or perform certain actions at the beginning of the DLC.

Darkspawn Chronicles sees you take control of the darkspawn for the final battle and you have to kill the grey wardens. This is only DLC that is wildly different from the main game and it’s a massive faff for the achievements. You basically have to get all the different types of darkspawn to like you to the maximum level. If they die as your companion, the like meter resets and you have to start again. You also have to save an ogre at the beginning and keep him with you for the entire DLC. It’s quick but not straight forward.

The next one on the list is Awakening which serves to extend the story from the main game. You don’t keep your companions from the main game though and I found it difficult to invest in these new characters. By this point I was bored of the game play too. There are three missables in this DLC, two of them are related to a choice you have to make so another tactical save is needed. The other one is for upgrading your hold fully which you need to complete side quests for. This DLC is massive and takes up to ten hours to complete. It felt like twenty after the boredom set in.

The last two DLCs see you complete smaller missions and thankfully neither of them have any missables – the only DLCs to not have them. Nothing really worth mentioning other than the fact that the game difficulty comes in to play here. After not having to do anything on any specific difficulty, the two DLCs both have bosses that need to be beaten on hard. Witch Hunt isn’t particularly difficult if you have maxed your level but Golems of Amgarrak offers a ridiculous boss fight that it nearly impossible if you don’t prepare with over 300 health potions or exploit a glitch where you can’t be hurt. As you can probably guess, I took the glitch option and smashed him on the first attempt – very rarely do I get to say that even with glitch exploitation.

The main game of Dragon Age was enough for me. The extra DLCs gave people more of what they wanted but playing it when all of them were released, it became more of a chore than anything else. There are a total of 35 missable achievements across all of the DLCs and game so getting all the achievements in the quickest time takes a little bit of planning and lots of patience.

Dragon Age was a rewarding completion despite the onset of boredom towards the end and I haven’t written off Dragon Age 2 or Inquisition just yet. Maybe their reviews will appear here in 2025.

Ben-Hur

This was a freebee that got a bit of stick but I’m not sure why. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a horrible game but it isn’t a real game experience as it only takes 10 minutes to get through... if you don’t die repeatedly like I did.

Ben Hur is a chariot racing game that sees you complete three races for a maximum of 9 laps of an oval circuit. But you won’t do that. What you will do is try to destroy all of the other chariots by ramming them in to walls, whipping their horses and just generally do everything you’re not supposed to do in modern racing games.

In terms of the game play it feels really unfair. Some runs, my chariot appeared to be made of pink wafers in that it crumbled as soon as it went near another chariot, whereas my opponent’s chariots were weapons of mass destruction in comparison.

That about covers the gameplay elements so on to the...

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

With a game that can only take ten minutes comes a relatively short achievement list that proves if something is marginally difficult but quick, people will persevere with it.

The first two I got were for completing laps in under 120 and 60 seconds and considering how one-dimensional the course is, these two are pretty pointless. With your waffery chariot, it should be considered an achievement for simply finishing a lap.

The next one I got was for destroying an enemy chariot. Again, this shows how shit I was at the game as I finished a lap before destroying a chariot for the first time. This ties in with the achievement for winning a race as the only way I actually managed to win was by destroying all of the competition.

This is where the achievement list gets annoying. You can win a race if everyone is destroyed but the AI is so equally competitive with each other, and stupid, that they will destroy each other or crash into walls before you get a chance to destroy them all. There are two achievements for destroying all chariots in one race and destroying all chariots in all three races. To get the last one though, if an AI opponent does crash in to a wall of its own accord, you can simply kill yourself and restart the race keeping the result from the previous race if you are in race two or three. You also get an achievement for completing all three races and winning. But you have to restart a race if you don’t win so this achievement is just for completing the game.

There are another two achievements for destroying 1 and 5 opponents with the whip attack mentioned above. Getting whip kills is incredibly fussy and after the first one, you have no way of knowing how many you’ve got. You’ve got to keep whipping and cross your fingers!

The last achievement I unlocked was for winning a race without using a health potion and based on my wafer chariot comments you can probably understand why. The only way I found to do this was to actually win the race by racing. However the game suffers from Mario Kart Syndrome in that no matter how hard you race, or the AI races, you never really pull away from each other. And you have to actively avoid the health pick-ups which is the opposite of Mario Kart.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Ben Hur is a quick but irritating completion. On the whole, it’s easy but not as easy as it’s advertised (videos for 1,000G in ten minutes can be found on YouTube). It doesn’t deserve the furore against it though – it’s a free game with easy Gamerscore, the operative word being ‘free.’ It someone gives something to you in exchange for nothing, you aren’t obligated to enjoy it. Take the easy option and just don’t play it.

Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures 2

On to part two and thankfully the end of Pac-Man’s Ghostly Adventures... 2. The first thing I noticed is that it is almost a carbon copy of the first game. Rather than repeat myself again – something not really considered a bad thing by Bandai Namco – I will attempt to point out some of the differences.

The game is longer than the last one. I didn’t view this as a good thing at all. I questioned whether I would actually finish the game after I laboured through the first five levels of the first world. There are in excess of forty ‘different’ levels in this thing and most of them are the same except with different scenery and a few other exceptions to be listed below.

They have removed the arcade games and replaced them with vehicle levels. This isn’t a bad thing at all. It means there is more variety to the main game levels and these provided a nice break from the monotonous killing of ghosts and jumping from tree to tree.

The level designs are more intricate... but still linear. There is only one exception to this rule. One of the last levels in the game has a split path. All the rest have a single direction of travel that you follow from start the end.

For two boss battles, Pac-Man gets specially abilities. You can turn into King Kong to fight a T-Rex and get really big to fight a robot. They are one-offs though so it doesn’t add another level of gameplay.

Now for some of the similarities. There is a completely pointless ‘home’ zone where you can walk around having even more pointless conversations with the other characters. You can also unlock some challenge levels in the home area but you don’t get anything for completing these.

Pac-Man is still the most sinfully annoying character ever. This is naturally made worse by the fact that I’ve had to put up with him for two games.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

It’s got 25 achievements so you would think they are the same as the last game right? Well, they’re not. For the most part.

There is only one achievement you will unlock through playing the game and that is for killing 5 stone monsters as granite ball Pac. This is by default a main storyline achievement because you have to kill 5 or more stone monsters to finish some levels.

You have to complete one of each of the different vehicle levels without losing a life. There are 3 of these. You also have the same kill enemies with various Pac forms including the scared ghosts, which will net you another 5 achievements, however another difference here is that you have to use each form’s special move to kill the ghosts. You can’t just chomp them. This was quite frustrating as Metal Pac because his special move attracts ghosts but all you have to go is release the special button to kill the ghosts for it to count. It treats it as a special kill score wise if you press the normal chomp button so I thought my kills were counting when they weren’t. Annoying.

There are two achievements for exploring the home area. You have to speak to all of your friends, which takes a few minutes of exploring, and review all of the character bios which is just flicking through in-game screens about the characters.

There are a few other self explanatory misc ones but if you are playing for the 100% these will come naturally anyway. The biggest pain, and time sync, is that you have to complete all of the levels getting the top score. By default, this will get all of the achievements for playing the game that I have mentioned but you get one achievement for getting the top score in each level of each zone. There are five zones and what I consider to be an excessive amount of levels.

To get the high score, you have to collect all the fruits in each level which carries another achievement. To get all the fruits, you have to visit all arcade zones within each level which carries another achievement. What doesn’t make sense is that there is an achievement for getting all high scores in each of the five zones and then another one for getting all gold medals – which is the same thing as getting the high score in all the levels so it’s redundant.

I mentioned above that there was only one level with a split path and incidentally the creators actually used this to make you replay this one level to net a separate achievement. They are betrayus challenges throughout the game and an achievement for completing all of them. All of them are story related except for the one in this level which is found by going down one branch of the split path. On the other path is all three fruits you need to get the high score. It seems like a really bizarre choice to have only one level out of nearly 50 that has two paths to completion – and one I can’t think of a decent explanation to. Just because?

Downloadable Content – N/A

Ghostly Adventures 2 is a sequel that doesn’t really try to do anything different and offers the same gameplay from the first game. If you liked the first game, this one will be right up your street but if you didn’t like the first one, this one isn’t going to change your mind.

Juju

One day I was thinking to myself, ‘I haven’t played a decent platformer for ages,’ and I was scrolling through the most recent bout of Xbox Live sales and came across Juju. A quick glance at my True Achievements profile told me that it was a moderately easy platform game so would fit the bill perfectly. I have to admit that it wasn’t particularly high up my next to play list, but I finished Crash Time 4 and couldn’t be bothered to get up and put another game in console. So I just played Juju as it was installed on my Hard Drive.

I’ll be honest, I didn’t really pay much attention to the opening scene of the game. There is a purple bear and he looked happy. I may have fallen asleep. So I then started to play it and the first thing that grabbed my attention was the main menu. Now, the usual main menu will have various words like, ‘New Game’, ‘Settings’, ‘Load Game’ and maybe sometimes ‘Credits’, ‘Achievements’ and ‘Quit.’ Juju has none of these and instead offers a series of symbols which can be down to your own interpretation as to what they do. Basically it’s down to gaming knowledge to know what to click on so I don’t know what a child is supposed to do in this situation.

The basic story is that you have to save your father (a giant panda) from some evil bat thing call Calypso and rebuild some kind of wooden stick that has powers or something. Juju has three main abilities at the start of the game; dashing, jumping and playing the bongos – a unique and pointlessly annoying game mechanic – and you have navigate very slowly through a variety of different environments, jumping from platform to platform, and fighting giant bosses that your small purple bear has no right beating.

The gameplay caused me a great deal of discomfort. As I’ve mentioned above, Juju moves retardedly slowly to the point where getting anywhere is an episode in frustration. Thankfully most of the levels are quite short and are only dragged out by the fact that you have to collect loads of pickups as you go. After playing games like Tomb Raider I think I can now say with some confidence that the connection between me pushing buttons to make Juju jump or dash, and Juju actually doing these things is slightly off and this resulted in me dying a lot. Trying to do the same jump five times and getting five different results was really annoying and this was a frequent occurrence.

There is also an apparent co-op element and I actually read a short article on the game where the creators said they had tried to create something that wasn’t too easy for some gamers but not too hard for others. However, having finished it, I think the creators imagine those two gamers as the same person. Having to combat the shitty controls during the harder optional levels – which are shockingly more difficult that the main game ones – was an episode in screaming for me. So a poorer gamer, i.e. a child, would probably cry. And I also don’t think a child would find the main game difficult at all. So what I’m saying is it was a nice try but it failed spectacularly.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 19 Achievements

There are 19 achievements to get while playing Juju and 8 of them can be obtained through main story progression.  There are 4 achievements for doing specific things while playing the game; hitting 3 enemies with one dash; making 4 enemies dance at once; completing a level without losing any hearts (without being hit) and getting through a level without picking up any pick-ups. This last one is actually quite challenging as pick up are pretty much everywhere and you have to avoid them all.

There is one achievement for completing a level in co-op and because I have no friends I’m willing to subject my compulsive habits to, I did this replaying the first level with two controllers.

The last six achievements are for getting all the coins and completing all the bonus levels. This is where the game goes from stupidly easy to stupidly hard thanks in part to the games controls. At one point you get the ability to swim underwater and while underwater levels are constantly slated in many other games, this really does take the biscuit. You have to swim away from instant death as bear than can only dash away in a straight horizontal line whilst having to avoid seemingly unavoidable obstacles which would otherwise be avoidable if you could dash diagonally. Really irritating.

Having to collect all the coins was really, really repetitive. There are three secret teleports in every level that take you to one of six different mini game-like collect-‘em-all puzzles. There are 72 teleports throughout the game and only six mini-game variants. Doing the same six levels 12 times each isn’t exactly excitement central.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Despite all the repetition, Juju is still a relatively quick completion. That doesn’t say a lot about the game though considering how repetitive it is. The difficulty curve between the main levels and unlockable levels is really jarring. By itself this isn’t a bad thing but I think it’s down to the level designs not being in sync with the controls available so it’s a design failure in my eyes.

Crash Time 4: The Syndicate

As per my Crash Time 5 review, I played Crash Time 4 out of sequence order due to online multiplayer and taking the opportunity to get them done when it arose. These two games highlight exactly why if you want to see if a series is good, you should only get the first game and buy the others if you like it. I wasn’t particularly enamoured with Crash Time 4 but it was better than 5, though that’s not saying much.

Crash Time 4 follows the story of Ben and Semir as they attempt to take down The Syndicate, a bunch of supposed criminals who never get out of their cars, spend all their time driving around the city and park in strange locations. Seriously, other than the police telling you they have committed crimes, there is no proof that these guys do anything more than speed and commit the occasional parking offense.

My biggest problems with game revolve around the gameplay elements. It’s better than Crash Time 5 in many ways – you have a semi-open world to explore which means the story is less linear, but you are made to do the same things over and over again. My bigger gripe with this is the police radio you have and how needy every other fucker on the force is. You will be contacted asking for help a disproportionate amount of times even when you are on your own missions. What’s annoying about this is that if you accidently accept an incoming cry for help – easily done by pressing the wrong button – you will abandon your current objective and be criticised for doing so!

The main part of the game is arresting all of the members of The Syndicate. To do this, you have to pull them over to take them into police custody but to actually arrest them, you then have to do an escort mission to take them from the police station to the jail. You can escort a maximum of three Syndicate members at a time and if you catch too many at once, they will either escape (how?!) or get let out because you don’t have enough evidence to hold them (despite the filmed majorly destructive intercity car chase catching them in the first place).

Here is an average 10 minutes of gameplay doing a police transport mission:

1. Start driving a police transport mission.

2. Radio goes off informing you of a stolen car. This gives the option of abandoning the police transport mission. You ignore it.

3. Radio goes off highlighting suspicious location. You ignore it and carry on with the mission.

4. Radio goes off telling you that the stadium has been bombed (for the fifth time today, I might add) and that some Americans are there. All squad cars report. You ignore this because it’s the fifth time it’s happened in the last hour so there can’t actually be a stadium left.

5. You start wondering why you haven’t arrived at the destination yet. It is always the same destination so why does it take a disproportionate amount of time to get there? It varies from mission to mission to get from the same place to the same place.

6. You will be attacked by two criminals who you can arrest by stopping them.

7. You arrive at your destination. None of the problems that happened on the way there are relevant but you have another two people you have arrested that need to be taken to prison.

8. Go back to step 1 and repeat.

Steps 1 to 7 comprises about 60% of the game. Another 30% is putting up surveillance cameras and driving to supposed criminal hideouts (which are illegal parking spots at worst and private garages at best) and the remaining 10% is doing the actual in game missions. Sadly, the only way to complete the final few missions (of which there are 5 total) involves getting to around 80% completion. So you will have to do a lot of escorting and camera-putting-up to do just to complete the main game.

The most annoying thing out of the above though, is the fact that the radio keeps giving you new shit to do but will make you quit your current objective. Pressing the wrong button at the wrong time will make you quit your objective without any ‘are you sure’ prompt which is fucking annoying but there you go. It only happened to me twice though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 39 Achievements

Shitty gameplay aside, there are still achievements here so let’s get this over with. There are 5 achievements for the main storyline and you’re bound to notch up most of the situational achievements along the way. There is one exception to this and that is the game’s one missable achievement. You have to take out 10 of your opponents and this is harder than it sounds because it is so easy to simply pull people over using the pit manoeuvre.  To take them out, you have to damage them enough to stop them and this is made difficult by the fact that you car takes damage when you are damaging the bad guys. Thankfully 10 isn’t too long-winded a number to get to but if you do what I did and target this at the start, once you’ve done it, the rest of the game flies by.

After getting all of the situational achievements and beating the main game, including setting up all cameras and getting 100%, you will still have a few things left to do. All of which involve driving for a long time. Makes sense as it’s a driving game right? A lot of the stuff has just been copied across to Crash Time 5 like drive on all tracks, drive all cars and drive 1,000 miles but Crash Time 4 drags it out a lot more.

You have to win 50 single races and in order to unlock all the cars in the first place. You have to complete loads of ‘championships’ in career mode because these cops take part in illegal street races during their down time apparently. Once you’ve done all this, there will still be 2 achievements left – for racing 30 laps each around two different courses. You will have already covered 1,000 km by this point so these achievements are totally unnecessary. The last one I got was for doing an off-road course with pebbles that if you slightly touch them, will send your car flying into the sky. It takes between 45 minutes to an hour to do just one of these two – so basically an additional hour and a half of boring gameplay if you want the 100%.

Multiplayer

There are 9 achievements for online play compared to the three on from Crash Time 5, which suggests that these guys realised that online for these games is a bag of wank. For Crash Time 4, you have to play in three different modes. You have to win 20 deathmatches including one without dying - easy if you set the kill count to one. You also have to win 20 checkpoint races and 20 normal races. I boosted this with someone else and it takes about 5 hours with two people trading wins. To be fair, 20 is a nice number compared to some of the others in online gaming but I still find this stuff unnecessary.

Downloadable – N/A

Crash Time 4 was missing some of the humour from its successor which is disappointing because it’s not strong enough to take itself seriously. The arcade racing style is forgiving which makes it playable but it’s not massively fun.