Firewatch

So there was a massive gap in completions lately owing to taking part in the Ultimate Head to Head contest and I sort of got side-tracked with other things while gaming took a back seat for a while. But it soon became time to tidy up the mess I’d made and the first game in line for finishing was Firewatch.

In Firewatch, we play as Henry who leaves his home town and ill wife to go and live in a forest watching out for and calling in forest fires… hence the term Firewatch. You play out a weird little scenario that addresses certain aspects of being alone, namely paranoia. While there is a decent narrative story here as the relationship between Henry and Delilah unfolds, the game element is very tedious and annoying at times.

So where to start? Firstly, the narrative choices. A game with narrative choices like this implies that there are different courses to follow. Upon completing I did a quick Google fact check to see if there was any replay value and there wasn’t.  A bit disappointing considering the game wants you to make choices.

The only other gameplay aspect is the exploring factor. It’s hard to know where you are going but it’s okay because they give you a map… that you have to look at as if you were actually exploring a real forest by holding it up in front of you as you are walking around. It’s annoying having to constantly check the map and orienteer. Not exactly my idea of escapism.

Lastly are my issues with Henry as a character. He sucks. He’s not playable in a way that I like, you can’t be overly evil or good; you can only pick different shades of whiny in terms of dialogue responses. There isn’t humour or a satisfying end result either. The journey is still good though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

It’s a 4 to 5-hour completion and another minimal list of achievements, none of which are missable, however most of which aren’t story related either. It’s possible to wander about in woods just following objectives and you will net 5 out of 10.

The other 5 are all mini-collectibles for wandering off the beaten track and encountering chance events, such as finding a turtle and getting attacked by a racoon. These are all easy to find… but only if you know where to look. The map is quite vast and sometimes tricky to navigate but there are no real problems with completing the game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Firewatch, while not a great gaming experience, is a solid narrative one with a brave subject matter. However, the big issue with this one is the price. It’s retailing on the Xbox store for £15.99 which isn’t worth it for what it offers.

Black & White Bushido

Before the clean up after competing in True Achievement’s Ultimate Head to Head contest, I decided to finish up this little game I was using to keep my streak ticking over. The game takes less than an hour to get all the achievements however, I spread this out over many weeks specifically for streaking purposes.

The game itself is a simple 2D samurai fighting game that seems to be purpose built for couch co-op – a seemly dead idea of having real life people come to your house to play games with you. You fight in a multitude of different game modes and environments where the basic concept is to slice your ninja opponents in two with katanas. There are other items that drop such as smoke bombs, shuriken and tacks to add to the limited gameplay.

The idea is a simple one that’s very well constructed – this is to be expected considering how little game there is but the idea of the fun you get from it is to play versus with your friends. The gameplay is fast and furious, and this makes the multiplayer a lot of fun.

Musically, it’s very apt but I didn’t really play it long enough to find out if the music becomes obnoxious or annoying.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

All but 2 of the achievements can be earned in versus mode which means if you have multiple controllers, the achievements are a literal walk in the park... or pagoda. The only two that can’t be earned in versus are for getting a score of over 3,000 points in Challenge Mode. This is quite easy too and doesn’t take too long once you’ve learned the basics of the controls.

The others are all very straight forward and can be easily set up with two controllers. Some of them can also be easily earned against the bots as well, however one of the more trickier examples include clashing in the air ten times. This requires an action from a bot or another player. This obviously cannot be guaranteed in matches against bots. Also getting ten double kills is trickier with bots but would require three controllers if you want to do it yourself.

Which brings me on to the last achievement I’ll mention and that’s awarded for playing a co-op game with four players. This is only tricky if you don’t have 4 controllers… or friends with Xboxes who live locally. Thankfully, I did have the latter though most of my friends play on PS4 now.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Black and White Bushido is a really easy completion that offers replay value once completed through local co-op – as long as you have the friends locally to play with you. To be fair, there is also an online mode to play but I am slowly weaning myself away from online multiplayer as it’s not something I want to continue doing. It probably means my completion reviews will dry up shortly… once I’m caught up that is.

FIFA 07

This one has been 4,293 days in the making in terms of a completion. I obviously haven’t been playing it for that long, but I was recently looking for a monotonous game to work on while preparing for an exam and FIFA games tend to fit the bill for this.

Now the first thing I noticed is how much worse it is than future FIFA titles, including FIFA 08. The engine that drives FIFA 07 is terrible and the football that comes off it feels more luck-based than skill-based in terms of scoring, passing, making tackles and pretty much everything football related. My favourite one was the ref blowing for a free kick every time my player went anywhere near the opponent, but when they make a late sliding challenge and my player goes off injured, that’s fine.

Scoring is another major component that feels luck-based. I was reminded a little bit of my time with FIFA 2006 World Cup where on the harder difficulties, the only sure-fire way to score goals was to chip the goal keeper. In this game, it doesn’t really matter what type of shot you use, it’s RNG on where it will go. Towards the end of my game, I realised there was a sweet spot where if you shot just as the keeper comes out, it will result in a goal most of the time. But because of the ludicrously shit touches your player takes before you get in position, most of the time the keeper just picks the ball off your feet.

With the power of hindsight, FIFA 08 made some vast improvements to the game engine which makes the game much more playable. At the time of release, however, this wasn’t known, and FIFA 07 was just another average football game where the only redeeming quality over Pro Evolution Soccer was the fact it’s fully licensed.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 11 Achievements

FIFA 07 was released in October 2006 and knowing the state of my life at the time (university where local football co-op was a must) I assume I bought it quite close to release. So why has it taken so long for me to complete?

The first reason is one that still annoys me even though I’ve finished the game. There is an achievement for getting an average of 4 goals per game over 50 games. In terms of real football, this is stupid because no team in history (in sensible leagues) has ever achieved this. Anyway, to top it off, in the game, this was heavily glitched. I kept a spreadsheet to track my progress and when I got to an average of 4 goals per game in my last 50 games, no achievement. This was at some point in 2007 so it took me 11 years to get over the injustice.

Anyway, during that first period of playing the game some 11 years ago, I did manage to unlock achievements for going a season unbeaten, going 20 games without a card, having a 60 game winning streak and earning 50 man of the match for midfielders. So in terms of achievement numbers, I was half way there.

When I started my campaign for completion, goal getter was the first on the list. I set my game times to 20-minute halves and I played as awesome teams against rubbish ones and tried to get 20 plus goals per match. I kept track and scored easily over 200 goals in 15 matches, but it still didn’t unlock. I’m not sure what the game is looking at for stats, but I had nearly averaged 4 goals per game over 150-odd games when it eventually unlocked for me.

Other than the goal getter achievement, the list is pretty straight forward. You have to get another 50 man of the match awards for defenders and strikers and all of this needs to be done on semi professional difficulty. That’s exactly semi professional difficulty. You don’t get anything for playing on a higher difficulty which I found out the hard way as you also have to win 20 matches as the World Eleven team on Professional. I tried getting defender man of the matches here by passing the ball around at the back when I had the lead… but none of them counted. This is a bit stupid seeing as it’s supposed to be harder to play on Professional but whatever… because of the last achievement.

The last achievement is for winning 300 matches. In play time alone, that 40 hours if you play on the smallest time of 4 minutes a half and that doesn’t include added time, stoppages and loading screens. In addition to this, do not ever let your controller turn off. If you do, you will go back to side selection and the match won’t count. This only happened to me once, but it was still really irritating.

Downloadable Content – N/A

FIFA 07 is not the best football game you can play and it’s not a quick completion either. It also feels very unrewarding for what it is with only 11 achievements. The big gap between the 300 wins and everything else is demoralising. If it wasn’t for taking a break for exam preparation, I don’t think I would have made it.

Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna)

I’m never playing a game with a fox in it ever again. First, Seasons After Fall, now this. It’s too much.

Never Alone follows the story of Nuna as she travels through 8 chapters of puzzle-platforming with an Arctic Fox friend. It’s all going really well until some large ugly man wants to get his hands Nuna’s Bolas. That’s right. Anyway, during one of these run ins, he snaps the fox’s neck. Yep. Another dead fox. Thanks for that. Anyway, after the fox ‘dies,’ it becomes a weird boy ghost thing that’s dressed as a fox. This was the point I lost all interest in the story as it became far too bizarre and I didn’t get it.

Gameplay wise, it’s a puzzle platformer where you have to use the fox/ghost boy to make some spirits appear which are then used for platforms for Nuna and Fox to get through the levels. This took me a little while to figure out when trying to rope swing across on one rope, when actually I needed two. I died a lot trying to figure this out.

In terms of the platforming, it’s not the cleanest. There were several points where it was difficult to make jumps to certain areas and it didn’t feel like it was by design. An example of this was towards the end of the game where you are climbing up through some kind of cave but one of the jumps is only possible to make at a very precise moment that doesn’t come around a lot. Very frustrating to say the least.

Looks wise, it’s very pretty even though it’s cartoon graphics and the music is very in-keeping with the setting of the game. That doesn’t stop the backdrop and fox death from causing minor depression though.

Achievements – 1,175 Points – 19 Achievements

There’s not a lot to the achievement list here. 9 out of 15 are awarded for playing through the main story where the remaining 6 are for picking up all of the cultural insights throughout the game. Most of the these are on the main path the game follows, but a couple are tricky to get to and require a bit of lateral thinking.

Downloadable Content

After completing the main game, there’s the Foxtales DLC which sees the return of the fox as a fox and not as a boy ghost which is exactly what I wanted. In addition to having the fox back, there are another 4 achievements. 3 are main storyline related and the other one is for finding yet more cultural insights. In doesn’t take long to complete and it’s fairly cheap.

Never Alone is a fairly straightforward completion that will take 4 to 5 hours to run through including the DLC. The platforming elements are frustrating for the most part but there is a lot of history to learn from the cultural insights. It’s not a very rewarding completion but a completion nonetheless and hopefully the first of many on the road to UHH recovery.

Grim Legends 3: The Dark City

A return to Artifex Mundi had seemed well overdue and now there are another four titles available from a series I had cleaned up. It was time to get back into the point and click adventure mode and find some hidden objects.

Grim Legends III has the same story arc as most of the other games in the series. There is a guy who you think is against you, but it turns out he’s not against you after all and then you work together to stop the evil monster, all while listening to some bad voice acting and finding hundreds of objects you don’t need.

The main aspect of these games isn’t really the story, it’s very much the casual puzzle game play and while Grim Legends III doesn’t offer much new, it is a case of don’t fix what isn’t broken. With one exception. Get rid of the story boards. They aren’t puzzles and they are bad storytelling devices.

The music was forgettable but a note on the artwork; a lot of effort goes in to the design of these games where everything is hand designed and it looks great. A major plus with these types of games is that you can’t get stuck on any scenery as it simply won’t allow it. They are almost glitch proof too as if you can’t progress, it’s highly likely you’ve just missed something.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 29 Achievements

As with more of the modern games, there is a high percentage of story related achievements and Grim Legends III has 10 of them. 11 if you include playing through on Expert although playing on Expert means ‘playing the game’ where as casual means ‘watching someone else play the game.’ Okay, so maybe it’s not that bad but Expert requires you to figure out where to go and explore, whereas Casual will just tell you.

The best part about the remaining 19 achievements is that they are all missable. You get your standard Artifex Mundi ones for not skipping any puzzles or games (so playing the game) as well as the collectibles and these are the only real issue.

The game has such small points of no return that it’s difficult to get all of the collectibles on one run. Thankfully I only missed one very early on when doing a sweep up.

Outside of these, there are rune battles that need to be won without making any mistakes and memory mirrors that need to be solved within a certain amount of time. The Rune Battles weren’t too bad, but the memory mirrors were a nightmare. They are essentially a sequence of puzzles that aren’t a problem by themselves, but the time limit is the killer, especially on the final one. I had to replay most of the game after failing to get this one in the 3-minute time limit given to you.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Grim Legends III was still a relatively quick completion despite the need to replay most of the game. It’s not the best Artifex Mundi game but certainly not the worst and if you don’t mess up and use a guide for the puzzles, it can be completed in less than 5 hours.

Saw II: Flesh and Blood

While still trying to clear out my big backlog, Saw II felt like the right game to play next. It appeared to be a medium length completion with a linear path – so relatively straightforward. The one thing I didn’t bank on was my Xbox 360 hard drive having a meltdown over playing the game. Luckily this was overcome by… using a different Xbox 360.

Anyway, Saw II follows the story of Michael Tapp, detective Tapp’s son, as he is imprisoned by Jigsaw and has to make his way through a set of life-endangering puzzles where he meets people from his past and will have to save them – it’s not like the movies, if you don’t save them it’s game over and you have to start again.

Gameplay wise, it took me a while to get on board with it. Michael doesn’t control very well for the most part, getting stuck on various bits of furniture and not being very good at running. Whenever you have to do anything quickly, it’ difficult and not by intentional design. The combat is also laughable and to be honest, frankly pointless. There are so many things in the house that can kill you, you really don’t need some random dudes who want to kill you for no reason, running at you with baseball bats, only for you to press x, perform a quick-time event and insta-kill them. Seeing as I’ve mentioned quick time events, the game is littered with them. Almost every time you open a door you have to do some kind of button prompt to avoid Michael suffering from instantaneous death.

Musically while it does keep to the theme of Saw, it becomes very repetitive playing the same notes over and over again, normally directly after a quick time event – of which there are loads. Graphically, it hasn’t aged well and looks more dated that its 2010 release date.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 50 Achievements

Of the 50 achievements, 13 of them are earned by playing through the main story. Outside of the main story, there are three categories of achievement – difficulty specific, collectibles and fucking irritating.

I’ll cover the fucking irritating ones first because they are the most fun. Now, games do not need 50 achievements. There is no law or code that requires developers to have a specific amount of achievements (10 is the minimum on Xbox One now). There would have been nothing wrong with only having 46 achievements in the game. Hell, Condemned even went as far as not having 1,000 points total Gamerscore.

My point here is that we do not need, nor do we want to have to play Saw II on Halloween or Christmas Day so please don’t put achievements in your games for these things. There is still the traditional work around of going offline, changing your date settings and playing to trick the game into thinking it’s a specific day. But still, why have them in there?

Also in this category, are the missable ones for making a decision at the beginning of the game that impacts the end of the game and has achievements attached to both choices. This essentially makes you play the whole thing twice. This is only an issue with a game like this because it’s so linear with no other way to play. The only difference is the end where you get to see a different cut scene. Totally pointless but there is a workaround. If you pass the test at the beginning, you can play the whole game and see one ending and then reload the last chapter and getting the other one. But it only works this way around.

On to the collectibles of which there are three sets and a lot of them. However, as the levels are linear there isn’t a lot of exploring that needs to be done to get them, with the exception of the Billy dolls. These take some getting and you will need to solve some difficult puzzles to get them all.

Lastly there are the achievements for beating certain times for certain puzzles throughout the game on both normal and insane difficulty. The only one of these that’s a pain in the ass is the gear box puzzle because after you complete it, it’s a checkpoint meaning if you fail, you have to start the chapter from the beginning each time. Even if you know you weren’t fast enough and quit, the last checkpoint is far enough away to be really irritating every time you play it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While Saw II was not an overly stressful completion, it was rather dull and clocks in at 10 to 12 hours in terms of time. There’s not a lot of replayability and it’s more of an action game than horror so even if you do play it on Halloween, it’s unlikely to give you a scare.

Fragments of Him

My next one on the ‘Easy’ list was Fragments of Him and this is another testament to not buying games because they are easy.

Fragments of Him is a narrative driven game that’s more of a visual novel than anything else. It’s a game told from multiple character perspectives that revolve around this guy, Will. Will has made a big life changing decision in that he has left his girlfriend Sarah to pursue a relationship with Harry. Over the course of these narrative exchanges and perspectives – and there are four of them – it’s discovered that… none of these people are very nice. They all seem to behave in very strange ways or hold deep prejudices which they aren’t afraid to vocalise. I suppose, from a narrative point of view, it’s good as it doesn’t shy away from prejudices that do exist, but that doesn’t excuse the other characters.

The worst one of these is Will himself. After upsetting Sarah, he spends most of the game wondering whether being with Harry is the right thing to do. However, as this is portrayed in the game, his biggest issues seem to be around whether he showers or has breakfast first. When he’s sweating these basic choices, it makes him come across as one of the one self-centred characters in entertainment history.

That’s a nice thought to lead on to the gameplay. Essentially, it’s point-and-click in style. You walk around clicking on environmental objects and they appear accompanied with some character narrative – in Will’s case, it’s mostly inane drivel about soap or cereal.

What I’m trying to say is that there isn’t a lot of gameplay and the gameplay that is there leaves a lot to be desired. Moving the characters around the environments is a slow and laborious process, especially when you are required to navigate around people and obstacles. Apparently, everything in this world needs a massive berth for you to be able to get past it.

Sounds and looks wise, it’s not winning any prizes. It’s very depressing in places and it’s gone for a non-detailed look to the characters. This is probably to avoid detracting from the narrative which is the main point of the game.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

It’s another minimal list here and seven of them are given for getting to end of the game – something that takes less than 3 hours to do.

The other three are situational ones which require Will to do some things. One of them is for interacting with a board in the kitchen during one of his scenes and the other two are either/or achievements which revolve around my earlier comment. If you go to shower before breakfast that’s one achievement. And you get the other one for having breakfast first. It obviously requires a scene replay but it’s a short scene and not much of an inconvenience.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Fragments of Him is a short and easy completion but it’s not something I would categorise as fun. I can see how the character-driven story would appeal to people, but for me, the characters were unrelatable and didn’t feel very real.