A Way Out

I got suckered into buying this one as it was listed as a purchase that rewarded a lot of points on Microsoft Rewards – points I’ve never cashed in – but I am apparently saving for a rainy day. Anyway, I initially didn’t want to buy A Way Out because despite its good ratings, it’s a purely co-operative experience and I don’t have enough friends to play with on a regular basis who have the staying power to see through even a short game like this. Plus, they all play on Playstation now.

The game follows the story of Vincent and Leo, two guys who have been arrested for crimes they didn’t commit… well at least Vincent was. Leo was a thief and a swindler. The story mainly focuses around the two characters as they plan a revenge mission and a prison breakout and the interactions between the two characters are the best parts of the game. The storyline and character arcs are both brilliant and it’s just a shame, in my opinion, that it requires two players to experience it or that they don’t appear to put the same amount of effort into single player experiences.

Anyway, in order to actually play it, I convinced the wife to play it with me. She hates dual stick controls (one for movement, one for the camera) but likes puzzle solving so the opening part of the game in the prison was great and she enjoyed it. The later part of the game involves using guns to shoot at people though and at this point, it turned in to her hiding at the back and me taking out all the enemies. Thankfully, the game’s combat mechanics are quite forgiving and this was quite easy.

It does have a lot of obligatory driving sections though and these were the worst part of the game. The driving mechanics are not the best but this isn’t surprising considering how may different set pieces there are. There is also a decent bit where you have to cooperatively canoe down a river and we were pleased with ourselves that we did this, for the most part, without communicating (or killing each other).

Looks and music wise, it’s all very well done and they have really put the effort in to the scenes with accompany suitable sound.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 14 Achievements

Now I mentioned earlier that a lot of friends have moved to Playstation now and one such friend told me that he had made A Way Out his first platinum trophy. As I know he doesn’t play for trophies, this led me to believe that the all of the achievements were story based. What I didn’t factor in is that he did it with my other friend who is a trophy hunter so he most likely made him get all the trophies. I mention this because it is possible to play through the game without picking up a single achievement. None of them are story related and this actually caused me to miss the first one, which is for doing 20 dips in the prison yard.

The rest of the achievements are fairly easy to get and involve performing specific actions at specific parts of the game, and normally only one of you needs to perform the action. However, there is one achievement that does require you to play co-operatively and involves playing two musical instruments together at the same time. It took us a while to get the timings down for this and there was nearly an incident of controller throwing rage from the wife before we took a small break, calmed down and then made it look easy.

Downloadable Content – N/A

If you have someone to play with, A Way Out is a fun and rewarding completion that can be knocked out in under 6 hours, making it a good weekend game. The one draw back is price which is currently £24.99 and feels a bit steep for something so short.

Fearful Symmetry and the Cursed Prince

This is one of my newer purchases of the year as it came up in a sale and I was clearing down my wish list so what better way to cross a game off? The sale price was ludicrously low so I took full advantage and was pleasantly surprise by the game for the most part.

Fearful Symmetry is a puzzle game. You control two characters at the same time and they effectively mirror each other’s movements. At first, this is quite easy to get to grips with but as the levels become more complicated, it becomes rather taxing and for someone like me who isn’t superiorly clever, most levels resorted to trial and error. And then guides.

Obviously the big challenge with these is that you need to watch two screens at once for danger and sometimes this becomes incredibly hard to do. At this point, I don’t see how the puzzles can be solved without trial and error.

There is a story to it too. There are these things called Symmetry Scrolls which your hero is tasked to retrieve. The whole thing becomes a circular journey where you recover the scrolls to save your soul (or something) but in turn, end up cursing someone else. You can play through the story up to three times as three different characters but the second and third characters have special abilities that make the playthroughs different.

In terms of graphics and music, it’s got a classic design using a top-down format so there’s little room for graphical glitches or errors. Musically it paints a great picture of the game world and doesn’t interfere with the gameplay.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 46 Achievements

Achievements wise, there are 25 given out just by playing through the story. In some of the levels there are relics which need to be collected for another set of achievements. Most of these are in plain sight but some are hidden by objects that need to be destroyed. This was very rare though.

As you play through the game, you unlock two additional characters who need to play through the same levels except they have special abilities to help navigate the levels. One of these characters burns things with a fire power and this is where the biggest pain in the ass part of the game comes into play. In one level you have to burn something while standing on a square that kills you if you stay on it for too long. The fire power performs itself so slowly that you have to time this to perfection in order to complete the level. It feels a lot like trial and error as to whether the game lets you do it too.

Once you’ve completed all the normal levels, bonus levels and collected all the relics, you are done. As mentioned above though, some of the latter levels are so tricky that without a walkthrough, would take a regular person a very long time to get right.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Fearful Symmetry was a fun game up until the levels became stupidly complex. It’s still an easy completion though and is fairly cheap at £8.39.

Brave: A Warrior's Tale

The next game that came up to play was one that caused me to stop before diving in to. I don’t normally do this but as I was at a point where I couldn’t immediately play it, so I took stock of some of the reviews people had written for the game. To sum up, they weren’t very nice, to the point where it put me off playing the game as they gave the impression it was a broken unplayable mess.

This sort of set me up for something of a straight forward completion as the game was a lot better than expected – not good by any means, but also not a broken unplayable mess as advertised.

The story follows Brave, a Shaman/Warrior, who is recalling the tale of his battle with the Wendigo, a being of immense power that looks like some kind of hell demon. The Wendigo has destroyed Brave’s village and performed some kind of mind control over the other villagers and it’s up to Brave to retrieve Spirit Dancer’s amulet and save the day.

In terms of gameplay, it really does suck. It’s a basic platformer with a terrible jump mechanic. Jumping comprises the majority of the game so I can see why people gave it a lot of stick. There are lots of instant-death floating platform sections but while the jumping is a bit shit, the checkpoints are really forgiving so it’s not the end of the world.

The combat sucks too. As you progress through the game, you are given a tomahawk and a bow. The tomahawk is fine as you just run at enemies and hit them but using the bow is just an episode in sheer frustration. There is an aiming mechanic but I couldn’t work out if there was a way to switch targets and Brave seems only to be able to aim in one direction so if your target strafes you, Brave will not be pointing his bow at any enemy that is likely to attack you.

There are also vehicle/animal sections where you take control of animals and have to run through checkpoints. This seems to be in the game because it was released at the height of obligatory vehicle sections no matter what kind of game it was. I’m just grateful that there wasn’t an underwater level.

In terms of general errors, I did fall through the game floor once which was terribly annoying, however the same thing happened to me when playing Agents of Mayhem so it shows that games appear to have made little progress in this regard.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 14 Achievements

It’s a small list and can be broken down into three categories. The first are the main story ones and for getting to end, you will get 8 out of 14 achievements.

The next ones are for completing some of the vehicle sections without getting damaged or missing checkpoints. The first of these is for piloting a canoe down a river without taking damage. This is actually quite easy as there is no time limit and you can just go slow and avoid all the obstacles. The second is for flying an eagle through all checkpoints without missing any. This is a bit harder as there is a timer attached to it but I didn’t have any issues.

The last lot are the most frustrating and they are for picking up all the hidden collectibles of which there are 48. I followed a guide for these but they are still problematic and here’s why. The levels are so nondescript that finding directional landmarks to use is really difficult. There is no compass function either so ‘go north’ is useless and unhelpful too.

In order to get the collectibles, you have to do one of two things; either call a bird to drop one or follow a trail of footprints. Some of the birds are impossible to see and there is no way anyone would just stumble upon them, even if you were looking. The footprints thing is also a royal pain in the ass as you have to find one, then find another but it can be in any direction. This doesn’t make logical sense because the footprints point in certain directions (because they are footprints) and it’s a game so why make it so convoluted?

Downloadable Content – N/A

I didn’t have lot of fun with Brave: A Warrior’s Tale but it was nowhere near as bad as some of the reviews made out, which probably made the experience a lot more bearable. It takes around 8 to 10 hours to complete with the collectibles so it’s relatively short but I can’t recommend playing it.

Agents of Mayhem

After buying Agents of Mayhem in a sale, I let it gather digital dust for a few years before I was ‘forced’ to start playing it by the UHH contest. Initially I thought it was okay – I wasn’t required to play more than half an hour of the game for the contest and while that can be enough time for a game to shit all over itself, Agents of Mayhem delayed this for a good four hours or so.

I recently created a list of my games that require some kind of online involvement and aimed to prioritise these achievements over others for fear of server shutdowns causing yet more unobtainable achievements to appear. Rather annoyingly, Agents of Mayhem has one achievement with such an online requirement and it took so long to get that I thought I would finish the game off in its entirety while the control scheme was fresh in my head.

Agents of Mayhem is almost a spiritual successor to the Saints Row game series given that it’s similar in style and developed by the same company, Volition. The basic elements of gameplay are that you have a group of Agents that you select three of to undertake missions to stop the dreaded Dr Babylon from taking over Seoul – and by extension, the entire world. You run around Seoul with your three agents, shooting a bunch of ‘bad guys’ called Legion in order to stop Dr Babylon from taking control.

Now, I started asking the question of the game – exactly who are the bad guys here? Legion soldiers tend to show up when you hurt innocent people in Seoul so it’s almost like they are the police force. When this happens, you build up a wanted level and when you max it, a giant robot shows up to kill you. In this element, it’s just like Gat out of Hell but instead of being set in hell, it’s set on planet earth… so the Agents of Mayhem are the equivalent of Team America for all intents and purposes.

Before getting on to the achievements, the game had so many glitches that I stopped counting them. During my time playing the game, there were countless graphical fuck ups that affected gameplay but the worst of these included, not driving over a ramp and treating it like a wall, falling through the floor of the game forever (there’s no benefit to this like in Mafia II) and proper game crashes which happened to me on two occasions. Essentially it feels very broken and almost rushed into release and considering its age, it seems that it won’t be improved.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 49 Achievements

I would say for the most part, it’s an easy list with the exception of 5 or 6 achievements. Completing all of the missions in the game will net 11 of the 49 on offer and you will get a load by wandering the environment and completing small side objectives.

Outside of the main missions, each agent gets a personal mission that you can complete. Doing this with all of the agents gives you additional missions with three specific agents who have been put into arbitrary groups. You then get a special mission for the three agents in question and there are four special missions encompassing the 12 non-DLC agents for a further four achievements.

The driving in the game sucks balls but there are a few achievements for driving around, namely for jumping over 50 meters, doing a 360 and finding 10 jumps in the city.

There is also a weird kind of mini game called global offensive where you can send your agents off to other areas of the globe to do… something. All you have to do is sit back and wait for them to complete their objective. Once you’ve cleared the whole map of ‘missions’ it will unlock a Legion Lair which needs to be completed at difficulty level 10. This is probably the hardest thing to do in the game difficulty level wise, but once you have levelled your agents enough, it’s still fairly easy, you just need to not run in to loads of guys guns blazing. The VR simulations which are required for another achievement only go up to difficulty level 9 so are slightly easier than this.

While talking about difficulty specific stuff, one of the more taxing ones requires you to complete all normal missions at difficulty seven or higher. Once again, with the right level agents, its pretty easy and the difficulty goes all the way up to 15 so there’s a lot of leeway here. The difficulty lies with the game’s general shitiness as loads of people have reported this one not unlocking when meeting the requirements for it.

The online one is probably the most taxing but only because of how poorly designed it is. The idea is that you work with 5 other people to complete contracts and you get three of these contracts offered every day. The achievement is awarded for completing 15 of these contracts. However, what people do is set them up then do fuck all towards their completion. While I was doing this, I think I only had one person help in any noticeable way on one contract. And you can imagine how fucking irritating it is doing the job of six people by yourself. Thankfully some of the goals are more achievable than others and some of the online community highlighted some decent grinding spots but it still took an hour or two a day to get one of the three completed. Needless to say, it took me a lot longer than 5 days to get 15 done.

The last achievement I unlocked was for getting all agents to level 20 and completing their personal missions and this is only because outside of three or four agents, the others are redundant so you won’t use them. Grinding out the last lot of experience points didn’t take too long after completing all the other objectives, but was still a noticeable, unwanted grind.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Agents of Mayhem was a terrible game to play due to the issues mentioned above. It doesn’t have many redeemable qualities as it feels shallow when it’s trying to be funny and the gameplay is mega repetitive. It’s a real shame after the strength of the Saint’s Row Series too, and I think that Saints Row The Third is probably the best game put out by Volition.

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear

As part of my ‘no new games 2019’ extravaganza, I performed a cull of my wish list. This involved removing a large amount of games that were either added for an unknown reason, because they looked easy, not because I actually wanted to play them. While going through this process, I bought two games that were no longer available on the digital store, one of which was Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear. This was one of the games on the list because it was easy. And it was.

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear is a rail shooter where you play as a guy called Will (I think) through 12 levels of rail shooting, which is essentially a shooting gallery. It doesn’t really make sense as an Xbox Game in the same way Toy Story Mania didn’t make sense, unless there is a gun accessory I don’t know about. Essentially the game play boils down to moving the cursor around and shooting bad guys before they shoot you and also aiming for their heads to score more points. A bad guy will die if you shoot him in the head, his hand or his toe so it doesn’t make too much of difference as long as you hit them.

In addition to the normal shooting, you also get to pilot three different vehicles during the campaign, the main difference being that you can fire rockets and stuff and blow things up.

In terms of music, it’s got a very typical ‘we are in the army’ feel to it and is very generic. The same can be said about it’s dated appearance as well, as the whole thing is a rather depressing yellow, grey colour.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 34 Achievements

The achievement list is a bit bland and doesn’t offer much variety, however the game does get quite difficult when you start getting in to veteran mode levels (this isn’t a separate difficulty but more of a continuation where you have to do the game again on a higher difficulty.

The easy way of doing this is to plug in some extra controllers which effectively gives you four extra lives as the enemies have four targets to shoot at instead of one. This makes the veteran levels a breeze including the last level which has an achievement attached to it for completing it without reloading checkpoints.

There’s another stupid achievement for completing a level without taking any damage. When you take control of the tank in the tenth mission, you can’t take any damage unless you get completely blown up and die – so you will always finish the level with full health.

There are 16 collectibles in the form of radios you need to shoot throughout the campaign. These were ridiculously hard to see as they blended in to the background really well and fit with the middle ground yellow/grey that’s overtaken this game world.

Outside of these, there are two pain in the ass achievements and the first of these is for using a pistol to kill 250 enemies. The pistol appears to be some kind of backup weapon for when you run out of ammo with your main gun, at least I couldn’t find a way to change to it. It was one of the last achievements I unlocked and I had to settle for firing off 300 rounds of my main gun just to use it. This turned out to be okay because of the last achievement I unlocked. For shooting 25,000 bullets.

I appreciate that this is a rail shooter but the fact I needed nearly three playthroughs and some rubber banding on the helicopter level to unlock this is ridiculous. Why have it so high? Especially when all this does is encourage you to miss a lot – loosely translated as being bad at the game. So playing the game like a 5year old would have got me this achievement faster? Thanks.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Heavy Fire: Shattered Spear was fun until the end of the normal playthrough. Then it started to repeat itself and become boring. And it’s ugly. However, it is an easy completion and clocks in at around six hours so it doesn’t outstay its welcome too much. Except for that dumbass grind at the end.

Devious Dungeon

Continuing to work through the backlog of games and this is one I got as a reward for giving blood. A fellow gamer who runs loads of promotions offered it to me in advance of my second giving appointment with a promise of another one if I make it to five donations. At the time of writing, I’m days away from donation number 4 and therefore, 3 months away from another free game.

Devious Dungeon is a roguelite game and it’s probably the best one I’ve played (in terms of reference, the only other one I’ve played is Crypt of the Serpent King which was shitty awful.) You take control of an armour-less knight with a sword and descend through 65 levels of dungeon, collecting coins and experience to buy new equipment and level up respectively.

In terms of combat, at first, I thought the enemies were cheap a lot of the time, especially the floating eyes with their blast attacks, but after the first boss fight (of which there are five throughout the dungeon) it clicked that everything is a case of working out the enemiy’s attack patterns and timing.

The dungeons themselves are procedurally generated so the environments and enemies are random in all levels. In order to progress from one level to the next, you need to find a key and the exit door. Sometimes, this will have you going from one end of a long dungeon to the other and back again, but enemies do not respawn so the going back isn’t really a problem. Sometimes however, the exit door, start location and key will all be within 20 seconds of each other. Surprisingly this happened to me towards the end of the game quite a lot, it was almost forgiving.

The coins you collect can be used to buy different bits of equipment to improve your three key stats; attack power, hit points and critical hit frequency, all of which serves to make your character better and therefore, the game a lot easier.

Looks wise, it’s a 2D SNES graphics style which caused my wife to question why I was playing such an old looking game when I had more modern stuff in the collection. The reason I gave was that I was given it as a gift and, of course, the…

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 23 Achievements

You can get the majority of the achievements in this game quite quickly as they are tied to buying stuff from the shop, levelling up and checking the map screen. This leads to earning 12 achievements before the first boss fight, assuming you get another two ones for picking up a tome during a level and hitting an arrow in mid-air.

There are then five achievements tied to the individual bosses. By the time I had killed the final boss, I only had two more achievements to get. One of these is a bit of a grind as it involves collecting 100 keys. Completing the game, assuming a few deaths, will still leave you around 30 short of this but it is a simple case of starting the game again with loads of equipment and playing levels until you get the remaining amount you need.

The last achievement I earned was for dying 25 times and this is a testament to how easy the game is. For me, this essentially boiled down to taking my armour off and standing in front of the dragon boss around 15 times. Easy, but when this is required 15 times in a row, it’s still boring.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Devious Dungeon was a quick completion coming in at around 5 hours. It was pretty fun but towards the end, the dungeons and gameplay became quite repetitive despite the procedural nature of the game. It retails for £8.99 so you are looking at over £1 per hour of game play which just isn’t worth it.

World II: Hunting Boss

From the image of this game on the digital store you could be forgiven for thinking this is Monster Hunter: World lite. But it’s not. Far from it.

At the start of the game, you pick one of three characters and off you go on a monster killing ‘adventure.’

The gameplay is simple. You run around hitting the X button to attack the monsters and using special abilities with cooldowns to inflict more damage. You also have a pointless stamina bar which serves no other purpose than to annoy you. As mentioned, the special attacks have cooldown so having a stamina bar doesn’t make a lot of sense, especially as there appears to be no way to manage your stamina to keep attacking for longer. There is also an XP based levelling up system which serves a purpose but again, just serves as being annoying because when a mission gets hard to point of being unable to complete it, your only option is to replay the missions you’ve already completed to level up – which is boring as sin.

There isn’t a story either unless you count the weird one-liners that go at the start of every fight. The fights themselves appear to be against 1 of either 4 monsters or a team of three humans who are exactly like you.

You fight through 5 missions as just your normal character before being joined by the other two characters you could have started the game with for the remainder of the game. They are next to useless when they are at a lower level but will kill everything themselves once you’ve levelled up a bit so they are completely unbalanced.

In terms of looks, it’s massively cartoony and I encountered a couple of game-breaking glitches where the game forced me to restart. My play time was around four and a half hours so that’s pretty bad in terms of glitch/time ratio.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 22 Achievements

In terms of the achievements, a lot of these are hand outs and some are just obnoxious. 15 are gained just for playing through the missions up until Class B Monsters/Humans. Completing 10 of these gets you the ‘hard’ achievement but this can be 10 of the same mission as long as it’s in the B Class area so you only need to be able to win the first one.

Outside of this, the really irritating ones involving having to suck at the game so badly, you actually have to play badly on purpose to get them. You need to fail 10 missions which is easy enough, just stand there and get ganked. The other one requires you to get an A rank in 5 missions. This is actually difficult as the ranks are assessed on the speed you get through the missions. There is no indicator of time so it’s pure guess work to start with and then you need to rely on your AI compatriots not slaying the monster too quickly (assuming you don’t do this in the first 5 missions before they join you).

The worst achievement though, is getting to level 20. Essentially this involves replaying the same mission over and over again to grind out the XP. It’s a small grind but unenjoyable grind in a bad game.

Downloadable Content – N/A

World II: Hunting Boss justifies its £2.50 price by being short and awful. I’m not sure why Square Enix published this but I certainly won’t be playing any more of it.