Death Squared

Another Ultimate Head to Head game was next on the list for completion and it was annoying me for a while. Death Squared is a puzzle game and that’s fun to play and has basic controls so it didn’t take a lot of re-learning to go back to, yet for some reason I kept putting it off. Until one weekend I decided to sort it out and finish the damn thing. Well, that’s a half truth. I did party mode one weekend and then the main game on another weekend. But I still took a few months of break in between.

Death Squared has a sort of story mode where David is testing robot AIs with an AI companion. They share witty banter where David is a useless employee and is constantly being put through his paces as the AI winds him up. Most of this is just background irritation for the most part but there are some genuinely funny bits interspersed with the annoyance. My favourite bit involves David having to install a software update throughout most of the game and he keeps refusing the update. When he finally caves and allows the AI to update it, another software update is required immediately after. His outrage is comical.

The gameplay is simple but, I have to say, it can be incredibly fussy and infuriating. In the main game, you control two square robot AIs and are tasked with navigating them to the exit platforms. You have to get both bots onto both platforms to complete the levels. There are 80 levels, each getting progressively more complicated. It takes a while to get through it all too. Most of the levels consist of hidden traps and lasers which take a lot of trial and error to get past.

I mentioned that it was frustrating and here’s why. The analogue sticks move the bots and the right stick moves the blue one and the left stick moves the red one. I think. I have no idea if that’s correct and therein lies the problem – I got this wrong so many times which caused bot-death on several occasions. Incredibly frustrating, especially when you’ve navigated past the hard shit to just fall off a single platform when you are about to complete the level.

Also, the bots hate you. There will try their hardest to die at every opportunity and if you misjudge a movement by a millimetre, the bot will fall to its doom. Sometimes they will even ‘get stuck’ and blow up, again in a very unforgiving manner.

Now, picture these frustrations and imagine having to deal with four bots instead of two. Enter Party Mode. It’s more puzzle levels with the addition of two extra bots and you can switch between who you are controlling by using the bumper buttons. It’s essentially the same but with more complications. The last level here in particular takes an age to get through so imagine the blood curdling screams getting to the very end of this level to then lose green-bot because it got slightly to close to an edge.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 25 Achievements

Completing both story mode and party mode will earn 10 of the achievements. Aside from this, there are a few miscellaneous things to do such dying 50 times in one level, making all 4 bots dance at the same and making them all die at the same time. All three of these are best done in party mode and the last two can only be done in party mode as you need 4 bots. There are also achievements for skipping the intro and watching the credits, this last one can only be done after completing the game for some bizarre reason, despite it having a credits bit in the options.

After these, there are three other things that need to be done. The first is completing 9 levels in a row without dying. Thankfully these can be any 9 levels so the first and easiest levels can be replayed until the bots decide not to commit suicide in consecutive arenas. To be fair, it’s tough to die once you know the level layouts and this isn’t too tricky.

The next thing is collecting secret items. There are ten secrets in ten different story levels and you have to do some strange shit with the bots to get them. Some of the later ones are quite complicated too but there are loads of video guides out there to help.

The last one involves dying a lot. 999 times to be exact. I got to less than half of this by the time I was done with everything above so it’s mini grind but thankfully one that can be done with an elastic band on one of the party levels repeatedly killing all four bots at once.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Death Squared is a fun but occasionally frustrating puzzle gaming experience. It took me around twelve hours to complete doing probably about 80% of the game without the use of video guides. However, the last levels do become a sequence of repeatedly horrible trial and error without guides.

Candleman

The next game on the easy list was Candleman, a platformer where you play as a candle that can jump. I can’t remember why I had this one but looking at the reviews of the game, they seem to give the indication that it was quite good.

The story appears to be that as a candle, you want to be able to light up the world so you need to travel to the lighthouse to learn its secrets. The narrative that accompanies the story feels very pretentious where it appears to be one of those ‘guess the underlying message’ things, that’s always done with a child storytelling voice but using language that a child wouldn’t understand so makes no sense in its own context. I get that the game needs framing though, otherwise it’s a just a candle jumping about from place to place.

The gameplay itself is fairly solid. It’s almost 100% platforming in nature with various collectibles scattered throughout the levels. Most of the levels are linear though so there’s no real exploration to it, it’s just a case of getting from A to B. There are some puzzle elements but very basic in terms of pressing buttons in a certain order and working out how to climb up stuff in the later levels.

What makes it unique is that as you are a candle, you are slowly burning down so there is a hidden timer to your actions. You can also burn faster by pressing a button to light up the place a bit more. This is necessary for some darker sections of the game but despite this, and with the numerous checkpoints, it doesn’t add much challenge to finishing the game.

Graphically, it’s pretty, atmospheric and pretty glitch free in terms of the environment, I didn’t encounter any issues where I got stuck and couldn’t continue. Musically, it builds on the atmosphere, but honestly, with the gameplay, you won’t notice the music as much when you’re actively doing something that involves your attention.

Achievements – 1,500 Points – 15 Achievements

In terms of the main game achievements, there are two goals; complete the levels and find all the candles. The one thing I found surprising is that it takes quite a long time to get through some of the levels and this can be mildly frustrating when you miss the one candle that’s off the beaten path. I also found out that if you do miss a candle, it’s easier to restart immediately than carry on and come back to it as the candles stay lit when you replay.

Outside of this there are another two achievements for dying once by running out of wax (I got this by dying in level with fire when I failed to avoid it) and for also failing five times then completing a level (and I did this is the same level. That fire is a bitch.)

Downloadable Content

Another three chapters were released as a free update to the game. It essentially offers more of the same gameplay with an additional 500 Gamerscore so in terms of what it offers, if you enjoyed the game it’s perfect.

Candleman is a perfectly adequate, but a little slow, platforming game. It’s a quick completion without any issues with the gameplay. It’s enjoyable for the gameplay, despite the overly unnecessary high brow narrative.

Backyard Sports: Rookie Rush

I had put off playing this one for about a month simply because I couldn’t face the fact it wasn’t really doable in one sitting. I don’t even know why. I also couldn’t face relearning how to play American Football, but thankfully the game wasn’t too difficult to get through and now I don’t have another American Football game in my backlog. And it’s going to stay that way.

Rookie Rush is a much-improved version of Backyard Football 10 with multiple modes with which to have lots of fun in. The general gameplay is improved too but it still suffers from borderline childish commentary, though that has also made a significant improvement since the last game. That’s not saying much though as the commentary from the last game was more at home in kindergarten.

In terms of gameplay, the premise is the same. You select your attacking and defensive plays, cross your fingers and hope for the best. I had several instances where my quarterback decided to just throw the ball out of play rather than towards my running back who had made a decent run into the middle of the pitch. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to this, just every now and then, the RNG roll decides it’s time for a bad quarterback through.

This was also the same on defence. You can time your tackles as much as you like, sometimes you will make the tackle, other times you won’t. To be fair, I did benefit from this almost as much as I lost out so it does go both ways.

In terms of story, bizarrely there is a story mode where you go around beating teams and signing their best players on to your team. It doesn’t make a lot of sense but at the end you win the cup game at the fun fair so everyone is happy.

Musically, it was so annoying that I still couldn’t get the terrible music out of my head after I’d finished the game. At least the commentary was more forgettable, though the main, repetitive annoying bit that happened a lot was when the commentator says, ‘Hey, I was watching that’ when you skip the replays. And there are lots of replays and you’ll want to skip them all.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 45 Achievements

The big put off for me was the five to six hours it takes to get through the game (coming from the guy that put 50 hours into FIFA 12…). However, once I got past it, it wasn’t so bad as the games were not total episodes of frustration.

There are two main categories of achievement here – ones earned from specific actions in matches and ones earned for winning matches. Despite my ineptitude and lack of understanding of American Football, I was able to get all bar one of the in-match achievements, the last one of these was for scoring a Safety, which seems like an impossibility without a second controller. This involves making a tackle in your opponent’s end zone. Other luck-based ones include collecting a fumble and making an interception but thankfully these came quite easily.

That just leaves completing the modes. There is Story Mode, Season Mode and Tournament. Story mode holds the most achievements as you get one for each player you recruit into your team and then another for finishing it. Season mode requires you to win 5 games in a row, make the playoffs and win. Tournament mode is technically the most time consuming. There are six tournaments you need to win and you also need to play in a custom tournament.

Winning the tournaments can be sped up by simulating the matches but this is a massive ballache because you will lose matches that, on paper, you should win. It’s highly recommended that this is done after completing story mode and unlocking some of the better teams in the game. Simulating is still miles quicker than actually playing the tournaments so it’s just a case of crossing your fingers and keeping at it.

Downloadable Content – N/A

While Rookie Rush was a relatively quick and easy completion, and the most enjoyable American Football game I’ve played, I’m happy to be done with the genre. It was a bit of a drag towards the end and even setting the time to one minute quarters, games just seemed to drag on and on.

Horse Racing 2016

Okay, let’s see how many mean words I can fit into one review. Horse Racing 2016, in terms of game, or any entertainment medium for that matter, is a pile of horseshit. There are no redeeming qualities to it at all and here’s the quick summary.

Premise – there are some bizarre season layouts where you take a horse and compete in 5 races against some ridiculously imbalanced AI. That’s it. But not only is that it, they felt it necessary to drag this shit out for 11 seasons – so 55 races. The last season includes some shitty, pointless show jumping as well – something that wasn’t present during the rest of the game.

Gameplay – As you can imagine, there isn’t a lot of technical stuff you can put in a horse racing game without making it some kind of simulation where you take care of the horse and the better you do at that, the better the horse becomes. There’s none of that, you just pick a horse, start a race and if you fuck up the start, you will lose the race. Whoever thought it was a good idea to have the player repeatedly mash the A button to make the horse go faster is a fucking idiot.

Aside from the A button, you can also use another button to make the horse jump fences, though you need to press this when the fence is a speck on the horizon to time the jump correctly (an even bigger ball ache in the aforementioned show jumping) and you can press another button to whip the horse to make it go faster… or whip it too much to make it stop and lose the race.

Looks – total ass. I’m not even going to be nice about it, the game is so poorly textured, it’s a joke. It looks like it was constructed on a computer from the 80s. Some of the last levels had rain that wasn’t even hitting the ground, it’s so poor.

Music – just no. It would have been better if there was no sound at all rather than the bizarre noise the game makes.

Obscure references to the TV show Lost – I don’t know if it’s different which each ‘new game’ you start and it took me a while to notice but all of the jockey names were a mixture of character names and actors from Lost. And some of them were spelt wrong too. I wasn’t going to start a new game to see if I got a different TV show though.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 10 Achievements

The achievement list comes down to winning the majority of the races. You need to win 50 races total, which is the last achievement I unlocked in the game because most of the races are either unfair and you lose regardless of your start, or you do a sprint race where you horse has the stamina to get to the end and you win regardless as long as you don’t mind having a sore finger from repeatedly smashing the A button over and over again.

Aside from winning and competing in races, there is one other achievement for and I quote, ‘Win Championship in Top Three.’ Winning is race is defined by finishing in the top three so over your 11 seasons, you need to get enough points to be in the top three positions. This isn’t missable as you replay races you did poorly in to get more points. How do you know which races you did poorly in? You don’t because there is no player list that shows your results. At least it wasn’t obvious to me and the menus are so limited so that it’s unlikely I missed it.

Once you’ve done those two things, you’ll be done with a game you wish you never started.

Downloadable Content – N/A

Horse Racing 2016 is just a shit game. There’s nothing else to say about it. If you don’t believe me, you can pay the developers the £7.99 asking price and find out for yourself but it’s better value to saw your own leg off.

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.