Late Shift

I recently went on another purchasing spree using the True Achievements wish list function that highlights games that go on sale. Late Shift popped up on one of these so I thought I would get it and play it in ten years time. However, I then decided to ask my friends to randomly select some of my easier games so I will actually play and complete them. Late Shift was the first game to be selected in this way.

Late Shift is a bit of a strange game. I read a review before playing it which made it seem like a Tell Tale style game and to some degree it is. It plays like a TV episode of some sort where you make decisions as Matt, some student guy with an obsession with the word ‘mate,’ who is working at some hotel car park as the night watchman. A guy breaks in to the car park to steal a car and Matt ends up going along for the ride at gun point.

The review boasts seven different outcomes based on the decisions you make, and I put this to the test early on. When the robber has you at gun point you can run away or choose to drive him out of there. However, both of these choices result in the same outcome and there is no way of avoiding actually getting involved in the game’s story... even though this could quite easily have been accommodated as one of the endings.

Some of acting in this was quite funny and didn’t make a lot of sense if you change your mind about stuff half way through playthroughs. As an example, if you start by going against the robber’s scheme, Matt will be a shaky mess for most of it. However, as soon as you get stuck on having to go along with them, his comfort levels with his situation seem to skyrocket. He also becomes much more adaptable to the life or death situations he’s faced with automatically.

In essence, my biggest issue with the game is the fact that the seven different endings are basically decided by two decisions you make, and this is the same criticism I have of TellTale for the most part. At least there are different endings for Late Shift though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 20 Achievements

I completed the game in only a few hours on the same day so it doesn’t take long to do and you can abuse the above two decision points to reach all seven endings in as little as two full playthroughs.

There isn’t much to the gameplay elements and the majority of achievements are earning via making choices as certain points in the game. Make a decision a certain way and you will get an achievement – choose differently and you won’t. You only need to know when these choices occur.

There are individual achievements for each ending and two cumulative achievements for watching all the endings.

The last achievement I unlocked was for finding all the main chapters and this is actually a really good achievement as the game requires you to see all of its content if you want to unlock them all.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Late Shift was an enjoyable experience that didn’t outstay its welcome. Despite Matt’s inability to use a different greeting other than ‘mate,’ I did find myself wanting the characters my decisions influenced to do well, to the point where my last playthough ensured the best outcome.

The only issue I really had was the occasional frame rate drops which I experienced at certain choice junctures. It’s kind of bad though as most of the game is cutscenes so these should have been flawless.

Crackdown

Okay, several years ago I went through a phase of buying games just because. Not because they were easy and not because they were quick but simply because they were games. Crackdown must be one of these games as I can’t think of any other reason as to why it’s in my collection. Anyway, one of friends who I completed Saints Row II with pointed out that he needed to complete Crackdown and there was a requirement for completing all of the main ‘missions’ in co-op mode. So we did it.

Crackdown is game I can’t make sense of. You are an agent who looks like a criminal and you go around the city killing criminals in the form of three gangs, taking out their leaders and wiping the gangs from existence. Once you have done this to all three gangs, you have completed the game and then can wonder the city doing fuck all for eternity.

The gameplay mechanics really wound me up throughout my time playing the game. A lot of it is centred around the five stats that you can increase to make your agent less shit. These involve shooting stuff with guns, collecting agility orbs, shooting stuff with rocket launchers, punching and kicking people and my personal favourite, driving.

The driving mechanic is total shit. You can get into vehicles Grand Theft Auto style and drive everything in the game but most cars handle poorly and it’s actually quicker and more convenient to run and jump everywhere. You can use agency cars but only if you take them from the agency headquarters so it makes the game’s own fast travel system redundant if you want to use cars as you can’t fast travel in a car.

While I’m talking about driving, I’ll also mention the map mechanic too as that’s garbage. It’s not an interactive map, you cannot set waypoints and you can’t see the entrances back to the agency headquarters which, when you are trying to take vehicles back to impound, is really fucking irritating. I basically had to spend a lot of time learning the map so I would know where to go and how to get there using the roads.

The agility stat also provided a minor annoyance too. You have to jump around collecting agility orbs to level up your jumping ability but the thing I don’t get is that every time your agent jumps, he flails his legs around like he is falling to his death. Not only was this irritating to watch, a lot of buildings in the map cannot be climbed. But they look like buildings that can be climbed. So I make jumps towards ledges that look grabbable only to see my agent flail around like a twat before landing on the ground perfectly fine.

That just leaves the combat mechanics and again the game falls short of basic expectations. When aiming at enemies you lock on to them but there doesn’t appear to be a way of flicking on to another enemy once you are locked on without resetting and starting again. This is made even more irritating by the fact that ‘Agent’ is just as likely to lock on to someone half a mile away than someone shooting him and also just as likely to lock on to a corpse. The hand to hand combat is garbage too. ‘Agent’ will just kick the guy and then stamp on him to finish him off. It’s really hit and miss as whether he will connect with the enemy in the first place too.

Sound-wise, the sound track is just offensive noise for the most part and when your shield goes down, which will happen a lot, the designers thought that having a really annoying beeping sound continuously going off was a good idea. It got to the point where I actually wish they had just killed me.

Crackdown has not aged well either. It looks like a game from 2005 and having spoken to some of my friends who played it when it came out, they said how revolutionary it felt as the time. The controls are archaic too which probably influenced a lot of my thoughts when playing the game.

Achievements – 1,250 Points – 50 Achievements

There is a lot of bollocks here and on reflection, I’m not sure what was hard and what was time consuming. Once you have got a firefly rocket launcher and the decent assault rifle, all of the combat becomes repetitive and relatively straightforward so the main game stuff, if playing on easy, will fly by for the most part while feeling like taking forever. There’s only one thing to do. Murder tons of dudes.

Outside of all of the specific achievements for killing people in certain ways and driving like a turnip for a large amount of time, there are a few things I will remember doing for a while. The first one of these is collecting all the orbs.

There are 800 orbs to collect, carrying two achievements, one for agility orbs and one for hidden orbs. There are 500 and 300 of these respectively. There is a fairly solid guide that I used for the hidden orbs but there isn’t a guide for the agility orbs. I went looking for one and found a couple of maps but there are so many that there wasn’t really a way of using it effectively to know which orbs I had and which ones I didn’t and once I was up to 496 orbs, looking for the last four was blood-curdlingly frustrating. It highlights game progression now as most games have in-game collectible tracking or at least separate map-area recordings... but Crackdown is the entire map and there are 800 orbs. Go and find them.

I got down to needing one more agility orb before moving on and trying to find all the hidden orbs and amazingly the last one was in a really obvious place that I thought I had cleared out. This always seems to be the way of collectables with no tracking.

Other than this, there were stunt markers, street races and foot races that need to be completed. The footraces were simple enough bar one which was a total fucker, but the street races were just impossibly hard without having fully maxed driving skill and access to a DLC car which made all of them really easy. The biggest one was the stunt markers though, there are 39 of them and they are all apparently really difficult to get to and as such there are lots of videos where people work as a team to co-op and throw the cars through the rings. It’s actually not as difficult as the videos made out which shows that when a game is old enough, people will find convoluted ways of doing things for the sake of it.

Downloadable Content

As mentioned above, there is DLC and there are two packs to download – the free for all pack which introduces two achievements, and the Getting Busy pack which has the car I mentioned above and also some more achievements for dicking around in cars.

The achievements for the Free for All pack are both frustrating. You have to complete all of the missions again in time trail mode on the hardest difficulty and you know how much I love doing things twice so that can suck my balls. The other one is worse as it requires you to collect and impound a certain amount of cars... but if you’ve already killed all the gangs then some of these won’t appear anymore so you need to respawn the gangs in order to get them. Also a lot of the cars look the same and you are supposed to get a message telling you whether or not the car you are in can be impounded or not but for me, this didn’t come up straight away and instead it would tell me which bullshit song was playing – information I didn’t need or ask for.

The Getting Busy Bonus Pack, aside from having a really stupid name, introduces another five achievements. One of these was a co-op one for completing a stockpile mini-game which we did as part of our co-op playthrough. There are another two for doing silly shit like pinning five people to a car with a harpoon gun and doing three flips in a vehicle.

The last two are for completing the Street Races introduced by the DLC. There are 36 of them over 6 courses and most are pretty much impossible to win normally. What you have to do, and I think they designed the game this way, is start the race, go back to the agency headquarters – without a map – get the agency Supercar which is one of only three cars you can select on the street race mode, drive it back to race and park it just passed the start line. Now if you restart the race, the supercar will be there and you should be able to actually win the races.

This is massively time consuming and in my opinion, redundant. Why would you want to do street races in Crackdown? An open world, free roam third-person shooter that’s own game mechanics makes the use of cars redundant. This isn’t real racing so what’s the point?

As I said earlier, Crackdown has not aged well and the main difficulty of the game is battling with the archaic controls. I certainly won’t be entertaining the sequels any time soon.

Eventide 2: The Sorcerer's Mirror

I swear these storylines are becoming even more ridiculous. Eventide 2 sees you doing some rock climbing with your niece Jenny, who is then kidnapped by the Russian sorcerer who then uses magic to cut a rope and send you plummeting from the rock face to your death. Just kidding. That wouldn’t be much of a game now would it? While you don’t actually die, this opening scene is ridiculous in that the sorcerer uses magic to cut a rope when a knife would have done the job a lot easier, and earlier in the scene, you use a knife to cut through a tree branch like it’s butter. Not to mention the Deus Ex that sees you survive the fall just because there wouldn’t be a game otherwise!

The remainder of the story sees you travel to the Sorcerer’s mansion making friends along the way as you try to rescue your niece. Naturally, she has been kidnapped as she looks a little bit like the sorcerer’s dead lover and needs to be sacrificed to bring her back to life.

This is where my main annoyance with the game is. I only know this part of the backstory because there are about six storyboard sections which are supposedly puzzles that don’t take any intellect to solve, but are essentially unskippable dialogue bits which are annoying on second subsequent playthoughs. But it also feels like a very lazy and stupid way of telling the story. Why do I need to complete some weird storyboard puzzle thing to open a gate to a cemetery and does that mean the gravedigger has to watch that shit every time he goes in there? It’s mental.

The game introduces two new mechanics; combining items and moral choices. The combining of items is a nice touch and it’s a wonder this hasn’t been in previous games as it did add a level of enjoyment to the series.

On the flip side, the moral choice mechanic can do one. It boils down to you, the player, being able to make five dialogue decisions throughout the game that will slightly alter the course of events you encounter. It’s ridiculous on many levels and here is an example.

The first moral choice you make is about whether or not you lie to the innkeeper about buying a drink for the gravedigger. If you tell him the truth - you are buying it for the gravedigger - then the gravedigger will have the key to the cemetery. However, if you lie and say it’s for you, the innkeeper will have the key and you have to do the same events in a different order. It’s totally redundant as a choice and how the fuck does this alter who has the key?!

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

It feels a lot like I laboured through this list and the reason for that has a lot to do with the moral choice mechanic in the game. You do all the standard stuff like complete the game on expert, do all puzzles without skipping and complete all picture scenes without using hints and this will net pretty much all of the achievements.

Outside of this, there are not standard collectibles to get which include talking to all imps in the game (pretty hard to miss), collecting all glimmering mirrors and imp cards (slightly harder to find but not impossible). The biggest issue with the collectibles though, it how segmented the game is. Once you get through five or six scenes you cannot go back and explore. Not a problem for me but I can see how this would be irritating if you missed a mirror or card in the middle of the game.

Back to the moral choices issue, there is an achievement for playing the game again and making different choices. However, what this should say is the following: Play the games once making all choices on the left side of the screen which results in pink flowers on the book and then play it again making choices on the right side of the screen which gives orange flowers on the book. Oh, and do both of these playthroughs back to back otherwise you won’t get the achievement.

So this resulted in me playing through the game three times as lying to the innkeeper about who the drink is for is a bad choice. So one playthrough for everything and then two back to back playthroughs for this one achievement. As I said earlier, the moral choices in this game can do one.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Aside from the moral choices the game felt a bit shit. This is a combination of the story boards which felt lazy, and the moral choices which also felt lazy. That said, it’s still a quick completion as the story is somewhat shorter that the others.

Mega Coin Squad

After completing this one, I tried to find out why I actually bought the damn thing. Was it Games with Gold? No. Was it Easy? No. Was it Cheap? I’ll be honest, I couldn’t be bothered to look back through my payment history to find this out but I’m guessing it’s the only reason I would have paid cash money for it.

Mega Coin Squad sees you take control of... the Mega Coin Squad as they travel to a strange new world to... collect coins. There are five playable characters at the start of the game, each with their own reasons for joining the Mega Coin Squad but this wasn’t obvious from the intros you get and I didn’t really engage with any of them. That said, I don’t think the back story is the main selling point of the game.

The game itself is comprised of a series of three coin-collecting missions followed by a level where you must fight enemies and collect a Mega Coin. This process is repeated four times for one playthrough of the game. The levels themselves are Mario style platforming set pieces where obstacles, enemies and coins phase in and out of existence. You have to collect a set amount of coins and put them in a giant pink piggy bank to complete the level.

Each of the coin collecting levels has three challenges; one for completing it under a set amount of time; another for banking your coin target in one go and another for completing the level without taking any damage. The first two are fine but this last one can suck my dick. The game feels ridiculously unfair at times regarding when enemies hit you and when you can defend yourself and the controls are very sensitive so it’s quite easy to fly into a pit of fire by mistake. My personal favourite example of how unfair the game is occurred when I was standing on a platform above some spikes and the whole thing faded out of existence... but apparently the platform I was standing on faded first so I landed on the now invisible spikes and took damage. As I said. Suck my dick.

Graphically it’s pretty similar to Super Nintendo Mario and this is fine for its purpose but fuck me, the music is annoying. It’s like it’s been designed to be both penetrating and grating at the same time and whatever you do, do not leave the game at the menu and do something else. It’s the kind of shit that horrible neighbours leave on loud and go out for the day. Fast paced, high-pitched and repetitive.

There are some reports of frame rate drops from some of the gaming community but I didn’t experience a lot of this. There were a few times were the game became slightly jittery but not often and I only noticed after I had been playing for a while.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

Of the 22 achievements, you get 10 from completing the main game with the 6 different characters available. You start with 5 but unlock a bonus character after your first run through. In addition to this there are 3 grind ones where you have to bank a total of 100,000 coins. The hardest level requires you to bank 999 coins which gives you a picture of how much grinding is required. You can go in excess of the banking amount though so the easiest way to do this is to replay level 1-3 over and over again maximising your banking each time.

There are 3 achievements associated with completing all the challenges in the game. You have to do this in one level, one world and then in all levels. Getting the challenges for not getting hit is where the majority of my OTT shouting was done – especially if this happens at the end of one of the harder levels.

There are also two timed achievements for completing a level in less than 60 and 30 seconds and this goes hand in hand with the challenges. You get power ups from completing the challenges and these can greatly speed up your level clearances. The double jump is pretty much essential to get early on too. Once you’ve got a few, replay level 1 until you get it down to less than 30 seconds.

The last two achievements are the hard ones and ones that I thought would risk the completion for me. The first of these is for completing the whole game in less than thirty minutes but there is a work around for this. You can quit to dashboard if you die or are too slow so all you really need is patience and persistence for this. I actually did it with one of the slower characters on my second genuine attempt at this.

The last one, I am pretty proud of myself for doing and more so because of the way I did it. You have to complete the entire game in one sitting without dying. I didn’t really try this, I just sat down, turned it on and took it a level at a time. Te key really is patience and if some coins look too hard to get and you only have one life, don’t risk it, just wait for a better opportunity. I was massively surprised to nail this first time, especially because I so rarely do things first time. But I’m not going to sit here and say it was easy. That would ignore all my screams of frustration as I got used to playing the game to a reasonable standard.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Mega Coin Squad is not something I will look back fondly on. The music was grating, the game play was inconsistent and there’s not much variety. I’m still pleased to have completed it though so it does carry a weird sort of satisfaction with me.

The Turing Test

True Achievements puts on a playlist every month where they have a featured game that everyone plays. I haven’t taken part in one of these before but I did in November as The Turing Test was the nominated game and it was being given away for free as part of Games with Gold. Instead of accumulating further unplayed games, I thought I would try and get another one off of the list.

The Turing Test follows the story of Ava Turing as she wakes up in a research facility on Europa (A moon of Jupiter I believe?). She is going in search of her crew with AI, TOM accompanying her. The story line follows Ava’s interactions with TOM as they discuss AI and the value of the life from the perspective of a human versus a machine. There are no hilarious consequences here, but I did find the dialogue exchanges interesting for the most part.

The gameplay itself sees you using an equivalent of the portal gun to move energy around to try and get through a series of rooms. There are seven chapters each with ten levels of gently increasing difficulty that you must traverse in order to try and get to the rest of your crew. You are introduced to different mechanics as you travel through the levels so the game evolves as you progress. It is also very Portal­-esque in this approach.

I was also very proud of myself for completing this one as I only had to use a video guide for the very last puzzle of the story. Such is my mind that I think the puzzles must have been easier than what I’m used to, or I’ve become more puzzle-gaming clever in my old age? Who knows. At certain points I thought that maybe I wasn’t solving them in the way the game intended them to be solved... but that’s just more points for me for ingenuity.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 15 Achievements

In terms of achievements, there isn’t much else to add. 8 of them are obtained from completing the game. There are seven secret areas, one per chapter, that need t be solved for the 100%. These are in the same place in all chapters though so you don’t need to do much searching for them.

Again with the optional puzzles, I was able to solve most of them without the assistance of video guides with the exception of two but one of these was really stupid. The first one was in chapter 2 where you have to walk slowly across a light bridge. There wasn’t really any clues I could see that pointed towards this being the way to do it and compared to some of the other puzzles, this one was a little outside the box.

The other one was in chapter six and this annoyed me a little bit. You have to solve various light orb puzzles to unlock gates to get to the end of a long corridor. At the end of this corridor is another gate that appeared to be locked and I couldn’t see a puzzle I needed to solve to open it. I watched a video where the guy doing the puzzle just walked through the door without doing anything! He also thought it was locked and when I tried again it let me though. No idea why this was the case, but this was the hardest room to solve to get 100%.

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Turing Test took me around 7 hours to complete without the use of guides. With a walkthrough it can probably be done in less than three so it’s a completionist’s dream as well as a pretty solid puzzle game with decent story element to boot.

The Walking Dead: Michonne

Okay so I had actively put off playing any of the new Walking Dead Tell Tale games for a while, mainly because the storylines and music were depressing and the main characters were just really bad at surviving. As nice as Clementine is, she’s not going to go around beheading zombies left right and centre is she. Michonne goes some way towards rectifying this. The reason I decided to get on this now was because it was on sale for Halloween, along with about ten others I won’t play for three years.

I don’t profess to know anything about the comics so I did a little research before writing this review. She is a character from both the comics and the TV series but I’ve not kept up with the TV series at all. The game is supposed to explore a period of time in the series where she is absent from the main cast. The story in the game sees her meet up with a guy named Pete who takes her on a ship to sea and she makes some other friends.

Interestingly she is quite a cold character so staying silent through the whole three episodes of the game feels like a valid option. In addition to this as I mentioned above, she is quite handy with a machete too and the game has a lot of quick time events where you slice up zombies real nice. These are also more forgiving in terms of the time you have to avoid death - probably due to the fact there are so many more of them than normal. It makes sense in terms of the character you are controlling though.

The decision making, supposedly the major plus point of the series, is again suspect here and I did a little bit more research to avoid additional playthroughs after a decision I made resulted in an outcome I didn’t like. Essentially, none of your choices mean anything to end outcome. If you make a decision not to do something, the same outcome will happen later in a different way. It defeats the point of having choices in these games if those choices don’t actually mean anything. I realised this at the beginning of episode three so stopped caring about my decisions from this point onwards.

The other thing about the decisions is that they often boil down to which character you want to like you more. There are outcomes that are often a split path and there doesn’t appear to be a way to get everyone to agree or like your choices. On the flip side, if you want to be a total asshole, it’s probably only possible to get a handful of characters to hate you. It’s not real life so at least allowing the player the ability to ‘win’ once in a while would be nice.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 21 Achievements

With most TellTale games, there’s not a lot to say here. Complete the game will get you all of them across the three episodes. I still don’t consider the extra episodes to be DLC. They are part of the main game and the cost of the game should be considered the price of all three episodes. So...

Downloadable Content – N/A

The Walking Dead: Michonne is one of the better TellTale Walking Dead games but the lack of real choice is still a massive bug bear of mine. Also when are we going to be able to play as Rick Grimes? That would be a major seller for me and most others, I’m sure.

Lost Grimoires: Stolen Kingdom

This one was a pile of shit that nearly caused me to lose my rag and also caused me to email Artifex Mundi with my issues.

Lost Grimoires follows the story of some twat who comes to a town to be an apprentice to some other twat who is so obviously the bad guy that it hurts. The biggest criticism of the story is that so much it only happens because of stupid decisions made by our character that we are not in control of.

The game also introduces ‘dialogue choices’ in quotation marks because they are not choices at all but merely boxes you need to click on. What’s made worse is the fact that your character is voiced in parts so why the fuck these bits couldn’t just be conversations, I don’t know.

The game is a lot shorter than the others. There is no bonus adventure after you complete the game either, which isn’t too much of a loss as these are normally unnecessary tag-ons anyway. They do introduce a new game mechanic though where the items you find in the environment are used as parts of recipes to make other items. This was quite good and it’s nice to see a new game mechanic.

The music is incredibly frustrating and irritating too. Actually I’m going to labour on this point. The music and sound effects are imbalanced in a lot of these games but it became really apparent here. The music was so irritating during certain sections that I turned it down. But it’s connected to the in game dialogue which means turning the sound down turns the dialogue down. It means that subtitles are a must which makes having dialogue redundant.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 13 Achievements

It’s another standard set of Artifex Mundi achievements here, but they are slightly reduced from some of the other titles. You only get one achievement for completing the game – two if you played on expert. I think this is also the easiest game in terms of an expert playthrough without any hints. The puzzles were not as advanced as some of the other ones I’ve played and the structure was a lot more forgiving this time round.

In addition to the main game and typical achievements, you need to collect Kestrel symbols which are hidden in the standard one per scene, however there is a difference this time which caused me to miss a collectible for the first time in a long time.

In previous Artifex Mundi titles, there are sections where you have to use codes to find routes through forests, mazes and the like and Lost Grimoires is no different in that you need to navigate through a dark sewer. In previous titles, these areas did not contain anything for you to collect that was missable and this is where Lost Grimoires differs. There is a Kestrel symbol in this section and due to my past experience with the game, I didn’t even think to look for it. This meant a partial second playthrough was required in a game where you don’t need to do one. That was annoying.

But not nearly as annoying as what happened to me when completing the game. So after completion, there were three achievements left to unlock. The Kestrel one I knew about and apparently I wasn’t quick enough to complete a hidden picture scene in less than a minute either. But the third one, for completing six hidden picture scenes in a row without using hints, had not unlocked despite the fact that I had done the whole game without using hints.

After replaying the opening to get the kestrel, the six scenes without hints unlocked and just seemed to be delayed. However, the one for doing a scene in under a minute refused to unlock even then. In the end I had to uninstall the game, delete my save data and start again. This worked for me but there are reports of other achievements not working and doing this didn’t address it either. It’s hard to say whether it’s the developer or Microsoft at fault here though.

Downloadable Content – N/A

 Lost Grimoires is the weakest title of the series thus far. It’s not a bad game, it just feels a bit rushed in how it was put together. Unfortunately, I am most likely to remember the game for the glitched achievements and I did write to Artifex Mundi about this. They pointed me in the direction of the True Achievements website and told me that loads of people had unlocked it... nothing like shifting focus away from you!