Platinum #84 - FIFA 16

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 5/10

Now that it's been made clear what the delay was for, FIFA 16 somewhat returns the series to normality of what you would consider for a FIFA trophy list these days.

The list encompasses involvement in most of the game modes present with FIFA with very straight-forward challenges. Ultimate team, Pro Clubs, Online seasons and Career mode are all accounted for again, with some direct duplication of trophies from previous FIFA games present too.

FIFA 16 also introduces Women's football for the first time ever, along with a fully fledged game mode revolving around the Women's International Cup. There is also a small portion of the list dedicated to this addition.

For the most part, this is an incredibly easy list, and most certainly continues the year on year trend of easy FIFA Platinum trophies that have occurred since around FIFA 13. There is rarely any necessity to extensively divulge into any of the game modes to achieve the trophies attached to them, and this allows you to complete them quickly and move onto the next seamlessly.

Where the exceptions lie, and where most of this game's difficulty rating comes from, are within the Ultimate Team game mode, and sit purely with just 2 trophies.

The "The Invincibles" trophy, awarded for winning all 4 matches in an Online FUT Draft session in FIFA Ultimate Team, focuses around the newly added Draft mode, and requires you to go all the way and win the highest prize in the Draft.

Along with Women's football, the FUT draft is the other big addition to FIFA 16. The concept behind this involves selecting a team based on a random assortment of players presented to the player, and then making these choices based on who would best fit into your squad. You get a "Captain" offered as your first choice, who is usually one of the best players in the game, and this acts as the foundation to picking the rest of the team. The overall idea revolves around being able to match up the best possible combination from the players offered to you, both in terms of quality rating and chemistry. This would then be the final team you take into a knock-out tournament format, and attempt to win 4 matches in a row against other users who have also drafted squads.

The first barrier to participation is the fact the FUT draft has a buy-in. This can be through 15,000 in-game coins, or 300 FIFA points, which are purchased and topped up with real money. 300 FIFA points will see you part company with the monetary equivalent of £2.50, but in EA's ever infinite clever wisdom, you can't buy in a single increment of 300, and instead you'll have to either purchase 200 points for £1.99 twice, or purchase 500 points for £3.99 in order to cover the buy-in fee.

On the flipside, you can build up 15,000 coins through competing within the main Ultimate Team game mode through winning matches, cups and leagues. Earning promotion and winning titles within the Online season does grant some generous coin bonuses, which will contribute nicely towards accumulating the entry fee, but if you can bring yourself to spend real money and take the short-cut of buying in, that may be a more feasible, and certainly quicker option, for most people.

Once you've managed to fund your entry into the draft, and chosen your team, you then have to win 4 matches in a row, which is where the real challenge comes in. The FUT draft is a seriously competitive game mode, and you'll play some very good players who have the luxury of drafting some very good teams. The moment you lose a game, you'll be knocked out of the tournament and you'll have to buy your way in for any subsequent drafts your enter moving forward.

Just to add some perspective to this, I entered the draft 14 times before I managed to win it, and after getting bored of the endless cycle of accumulating 15,000 coins per time, I ended up taking the short-cut and buying my way in via FIFA points. The good news is, after every win along the way, you're rewarded with prizes, which is greater the further you manage to progress, redeemable in the form of packs and prizes. If you can manage to get to the Semi-Final stage, the prizes you get back in return will go a decent way towards covering your entry fee, so this is a nice consolation to have behind you, albeit dependent on solid progression. If you lose early though, this is a costly set-back.

This is also a genuine challenge. It is a top skill to be able to win 4 games in a row in online FIFA. Some very good players almost monopolise game modes like Ultimate Team Draft, because the riches on offer can help them fund their clubs towards the most valuable players in the game, and having access to an exceptionally good draft makes these players difficult to beat. Anybody who manages to overcome this challenge legitimately will have most certainly earned it. I consider myself to be good at FIFA, and it took me 14 attempts, which is evidence to this testimony.

The "FUT 50" trophy, awarded for having a player score their 50th goal for the club in FIFA Ultimate Team, is self-explanatory, though could take a while. The best method is to build a squad around a striker you obtain within your starter packs from the very beginning, and make sure you're playing him in every game possible. This will be quicker in offline cups, because some of the lower standard tournaments, where the difficulty setting is capped at a lower standard, are very easy to not only win games in, but also score lots of goals, giving you ample opportunities to tally them up. If you want the more challenging route, which is what I opted for, you can play online cups or seasons, which is harder as you scale up to into better leagues and tournaments, but ultimately just takes a bit of time.

Winning the online draft is certainly one of the toughest individual challenges in any FIFA game to date. Despite some of the earlier FIFA games yielding very high scores, due to containing some incredibly time-consuming trophies, they seldom involved anything that constituted as a genuine test of skill, bar the odd trophy ("Ton Up" from FIFA 10, for example). They were just incredibly time consuming bordering on the realms of insanity, so this rating is based mostly on challenge alone.

Without the "The Invincibles" trophy, this list is a 3/10 in difficulty at the very most. Whilst the online draft was still a challenge worthy of cranking up the difficulty rating a few notches, it was a much more welcome challenge than sitting there for hours trying to trigger the "Extra Effort" trophy from FIFA 15, and considering the habit EA have of mirroring trophies year on year, and the outside possibility this could have re-appear at any point, I would consider this a good thing all in all.

FIFA 17 to follow.

Notable Trophies -

The Invincibles - Win all 4 matches in an Online FUT Draft session in FIFA Ultimate Team
FUT 50 - Have a player score their 50th goal at the club in FIFA Ultimate Team

Hardest Trophy -

The Invincibles
Win all 4 matches in an Online FUT Draft session in FIFA Ultimate Team

Platinum #83 - FIFA 15

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 6/10

Although it's not unusual for me to be years behind in most cases when it comes to finally finishing off games, this hasn't normally applied to the annual installment of FIFA, with which I have been very punctual with, but there are valid reasons for why this has taken so long, and subsequently caused a backlog of FIFA installments, which are to be shortly discussed further.

Minus the exception, this list fits in line with the direction of difficulty which most FIFA games have moved towards within recent history, with a large number of very menial tasks awarding trophies, covering a healthy range of different game modes.

FIFA Ultimate team, Pro Clubs, Online Seasons and Career mode are all covered to varying degrees, as well as EA Sports Football Club Activities, which is a newly introduced central hub to interact with people on your friends list, by rating, commenting and sharing articles on a news feed about what they're all doing in the game. Barring what we're about to discuss, it is a very easy trophy list.

So, what took so long? There's nothing naturally grindy in this game, first and foremost, which some of the earlier FIFA titles were culpable of, so it isn't a question of having a sink a minimum amount of time into the game in order to achieve the Platinum trophy. When I use the term "naturally grindy", I mean something of a similar nature to a levelling venture or playing/winning a certain amount of games.

The "Extra Effort" trophy, awarded for scoring from the ground, requires you to score a goal whilst your player is lying on the floor, which sounds very inconspicuous, but is absolutely far from it.

There isn't a mapped controller output to make your player take a shot whilst they're on the floor. It just seems to be a case of hammering the "shoot" command button and hoping for the best, but observing the very normal outcome of absolutely no reaction to the ball whatsoever 99% of the time. It seems to be a random animation triggered by unknown variables, other than the fact you have to be lying on the floor somehow, whether that be through a slide tackle, or being felled by an opposing player.

The best tactic to approach this with is to have a second controller, which you will require for this Platinum anyway, and set up an exhibition match, with both teams controlled by the user. It is advisable to tweak certain pre-game variables, such as shot power and shot accuracy sliders, to make sure your shots have a greater chance of resulting in a goal, and also to ensure games are set to the maximum half limits of 20 minutes. If that final detail doesn't emphasise the point that you could be spending a while on this trophy, nothing else will.

From that point onwards, the fun commences. The idea of controlling both teams is that you can drop the ball as 1 of the goalkeepers, and use a player from the opposing team to tackle him from specific angles, win the ball, and hope that, during the motion of the slide tackle, you can trigger an animation that extends this motion into a goal-bound shot, and it's all pre-determined by luck.

You'll most likely experience situations whereby there is no output whatsoever, which is the most common occurrence, but also other scenarios such as committing a foul on the goalkeeper, or watching the goalkeeper automatically jump straight onto the ball in order to regain possession once you've attempted to dispossess him. The combination of the above makes for a very frustrating experience, and one that explains the drought of FIFA Platinum trophies within the last few years, though this is purely because I wanted to unlock them in sequential order, and not because I got lazy with the other FIFA titles in between.

I would often come back to the game, spend a good few hours attempting to achieve this trophy, only to be an afternoon lighter at the end with nothing extra to show for it. When I mentioned above about how this trophy isn't "naturally grindy", I meant that, because there isn't a specified end goal, you can't put a time-frame upon completion, so you never feel like you're making progress until you actually achieve it, and also have to accept that the amount of time this may take to achieve is open-ended.

As is always the case with trophies based on trial and error, this will be quicker to achieve for  some people than others, but for me, there were many wasted sessions trying to achieve this trophy, which certainly have to be accounted for when assessing this entire list. There were long spells this game went untouched for months, where I just couldn't bring myself to revisit it, but I still came back to it least a dozen times before I finally managed to complete this game, so it was extremely rewarding to finally fulfil the requirements of the trophy.

It seems somewhat irrelevant to discuss anything else in truth, but for the purpose of a balanced review, there are a few more trophies we can talk about;

The "Stylin" trophy, awarded for enabling a custom Free Kick or Penalty Style for your Virtual Pro, requires you to unlock a specific play-style by completing certain in-game accomplishments within Pro Clubs mode.

In order to enable a custom Free Kick style, you have to score 2 free kicks with your pro player in Pro Clubs matches, and in order to enable a custom Penalty style, you have to score 10 penalties with your pro player in Pro Clubs matches, both of which are conditional to a number of factors, such as being awarded a penalty/free kick to begin with, but then also having to score it. There's also the small matter of being elected to take the free kick/penalty by the game, which is usually delegated to the person with the best stats for the related skill.

Naturally, the more people in the game, the less likely you are to be nominated for free kick/penalty duties, so it makes more sense to play in smaller lobbies. It's better to set up a Pro Club with a friend and play together, which will significantly increase the amount of free kicks/penalties you take, simply because there are only 2 of you present, which is the minimum number required for a game of Pro Clubs.

Initially, I angled for the approach of playing cup matches, because they can sometimes go as far as being decided on a penalty shoot-out, which is probably the easiest way to accumulate 10 penalties, along with anything extra you might get in-between, but I actually managed to score 2 free kicks before I scored 10 penalties anyway, but it still took me 42 matches, so there's a decent amount of effort required to obtain this trophy.

The "Tag Team Back Again" trophy, awarded for playing seasons with a guest, requires the aforementioned secondary controller, so if you haven't purchased an extra one, you'll need to do so, or perhaps borrow one if you can, but this is more of a heads up for the purpose of addressing the need for additional peripherals more than anything else.

If you detract the "Extra Effort" trophy, you can lobby a case for this being one of the easiest FIFA titles to date, coming in at around 3/10 in difficulty. If you're luckier with this trophy, it won't be much higher than that, but the degree of difficulty rating will very much depend on your experience with this solitary trophy. I have seen people put in writing that this is a 10/10 for them because they simply gave up on it, which is tough to see happen.

After over a dozen separate sessions solely focused on this trophy way after I had completed the rest of the list, and a handful of occasions that saw me put this game on the backburner time and time again, to the point where I still haven't completed FIFA 16 or FIFA 17, purely because I wanted to be able to review these trophy lists in chronological order, the difficulty absolutely did increase as a consequence of this.

It was an extremely satisfying Platinum trophy to unlock though, and the perseverance thankfully paid off. I would estimate I spent around 20-25 hours on this trophy alone, aiming to spend no longer than 2-3 hours per session on this trophy, purely to make sure it didn't drive me insane. The difficulty rating has scaled upwards from 3/10, finishing at the point where I managed to unlock the "Extra Effort" trophy.

A hard fought Platinum, if not the most difficult on an overall basis. FIFA 16 and 17 to follow shortly.

Notable Trophies -

Extra Effort - Score from the ground
Stylin' - Enable a custom Free Kick or Penalty Style for your Virtual Pro
Tag Team Back Again - Play Seasons with a Guest

Hardest Trophy -

Extra Effort
Score from the ground

DLC #112 - Resident Evil 6 - Survivors

The Survivors pack, the second within Resident Evil 6 DLC offering, adds a further 5 trophies to the game, all focused around the new Survivors game mode.

As with the first DLC pack, Onslaught, this is purely a game-mode add-on pack, and the Survivors mode is a traditional elimination match where the sole objective is to be the last individual or team member standing in order to win the game.

This involves executing other players, and the game finishes when either the 5 minute time limit runs out, or when there is only one person left standing. The game can be played as a "Death match", which is every player for themselves, or a "Team match", which is where you're split into teams of 2, and both variations allow for a maximum of 6 players per game, so things can get very fast paced and hectic.

It seems very run of the mill, and the truth is, it is, but there is a twist. Zombies patrol the map and will attempt to distract you whilst you're trying to kill other players, and when somebody is killed, they're not permanently out of the game. Instead, they respawn as a zombie, and if they can kill a human controlled player, they will re-join the fight in their human form and get a second chance. Out of the 5 trophies within this set, 1 of these is awarded for doing just that and returning to the game as a human character, and most of this list isn't terribly challenging. 

The Gold trophy requires you to win 5 games in a row, which you should achieve naturally in tandem with going for what is the most challenging trophy in this list by some distance;

Take 'Em All Down - Defeat 100 agents.

The "Take 'Em All Down" trophy, awarded for defeating 100 agents, is very self explanatory, and also a large number for the limited amount of opportunities presented to the player within each game. This is an elimination style game mode after all, you don't exactly respawn and chain together killstreaks within 10 seconds as if you're playing Call of Duty, so 100 kills in these circumstances is a tall order.

With that being said, I have to confess, I never really managed to reach a good standard of skill level with this game, and where the Onslaught DLC pit you against zombies, rather than directly against another human character, Survivors is purely a versus game mode, and this is where I started to struggle. 

This was due to a few reasons. Firstly, the controls are somewhat unconventional in some instances (Hold X to run, Hold L2 to display an arch for throwing a grenade, and the R2 button to throw the grenade, for example), which I found difficult to adjust to and made controlling my character a challenging experience with a learning curve attached to it, which I gradually overcame, but spent a while doing so. Secondly, there were much better players than me who had unlocked better characters with better weapon load-outs, so I found myself on the back foot a lot and playing to a disadvantage. This led to dying a lot, and also frequently ending games with either zero kills, or maybe the odd single kill. 

During my just over 16 hour quest for these trophies, which spanned 287 games, compared to the 3 hour journey of the Onslaught pack, the best I managed to do in a game was 3 eliminations, and I only managed to achieve this twice. I did eventually get the hang of the horrible controls, and started to gain experience which unlocked better versions of the basic characters, with better weapon loadouts, and in turn, my performance did improve. I started to finish games with 2 kills quite frequently, but still also went through spells of drought where I just couldn't get anything, which was incredibly frustrating.

Persistence was the main necessity here, and whilst I appreciate it may not take alot of the better players very long to reach 100 kills, I accept I somewhat struggled through this, and stumbled towards the end goal, taking much longer than I should have done due to just not being very good. For as long as you're making progress towards an end goal, I don't mind grindy ventures. When you're levelling up, even when you perform badly, you still earn experience points, so you never quite feel like you're wasting your time and effort, and you also understand you will improve and eventually earn more experience through being a better player. Here, I was jumping from game to game earning zero kills frequently, and also being killed a lot in the process, so there was often no progression towards my end goal, which is one of the most frustrating things, and also the most difficult thing about this trophy.

The only consolation was that I unlocked most of the other trophies along the way, so I didn't really have to give any of them much thought. I notched up 5 wins in a row for the only Gold trophy, won without anybody on my team being killed and returned to the game as a zombie, all of which are feats yielding trophies, but this could have been much shorter than 16 hours, and for some people it will be, just not me.

All the more rewarding to finally see this trophy pop nonetheless, and this makes the Onslaught pack feel like a warm up exercise in comparison. As previously mentioned, I spent just over 16 hours on this DLC according to the in-game statistics screen, and struggled through most of it in my quest for 100 kills. At least I now have a stronger selection of characters at my disposal in preparation for the remaining 2 DLC packs that await, but whether it makes a difference is another story.

DLC #111 - Battlefield 4 - Final Stand

This final expansion for Battlefield 4 adds yet another 4 new maps (which have a consistent winter theme), along with a host of new weapons, gadgets and vehicles.

There isn't a new game mode added this time round, but there are 5 new trophies to go after, which will prove for a challenging venture.

Killing an enemy in specified ways are the order of the day, and 2 of the 5 trophies in this package are awarded for obtaining environmental kills, using the icicle and titan engines on the Hangar 21 map to obtain a solitary kill.

There's also another 2 trophies awarded for obtaining a kill with an assortment of new offensive units, including the HT-95 Levkov, XD-1 Accipiter, Rorsch Mk-1 and the Schipunov 42 and playing on each of the 4 new maps at least once, but these are all worked into the new batch of assignments you'll need to complete in order to unlock the remaining trophy within this DLC;

King in the North - Complete all Final Stand Assignments

This is the third out of three packs which contains a trophy regarding completion of the newly added assignments within the package. Where China Rising and Dragon's Teeth had 10 assignments to complete for the respective trophies, Final Stand is 2 short of this with 8 to complete, but despite this, still contains a very challenging set of objectives, which are broken down below as was the same with the previous DLC packages.

Assignment 5 - Destroy 15 vehicles with the HT-95 Levkov

This objective within assignment 5 requires you to destroy 15 vehicles with the HT-95 Levkov, which is the newly added Hover Tank. Despite possessing a powerful single shot, it's slow to reload, and because of the fact it hovers, it moves quicker across the ground than most other types of tank, but can be also harder to control as a result. The slow rate of fire is the tricky part though, and most enemies will either evacuate the vehicle when it's close to being destroyed, or will end up beating you first with a vehicle or explosive device which can be used much quicker, both of which will deny you when it comes to accumulating kills. The good thing is, there seems to be a small grace period post-evacuation where you can destroy a vehicle and it will still count towards this trophy, so it's important to make sure you destroy a vehicle, even when it's been abandoned, just in case. This one is a slow burner either way though.

Assignment 6 - Destroy 10 vehicles with the Rorsch Mk-1

This objective within assignment 6 requires you to destroy 10 vehicles with the Rorsch Mk-1, which is the newly added Railgun, a long-range scoped weapon, which fires an electro-magnetic pulse of energy, always providing an insta-kill on impact of an enemy soldier. However, vehicles are a different story, but firstly, it's important to note that the Rorsch Mk-1 is not a traditional weapon equipped as part of a loadout. It's a battlefield pick-up, meaning it spawns at certain locations, only on the 4 maps contained within this DLC package, and if somebody else has picked it up before you, you'll have to wait for it to respawn, which can be frustrating if you're purely trying to complete this assignment. Secondly, despite being extremely powerful versus soldiers, it's considerably weaker against most vehicles. 

Against tanks, choppers or any other heavily armored vehicle, it deals anywhere between 10-20 damage per shot, and it also requires a manual reload after every single shot, so the fire rate of the weapon is extremely slow. It's common for the vehicle to either be evacuated or destroyed before you get any sort of killing blow yourself, so your best bet is to interrupt an assault on a vehicle and hope you're dealing a killing blow to it, which will take luck and subsequently alot of time to chip away towards the total of 10. It is effective against smaller, weaker vehicles such as the snowmobile and the XD-1 Accipiter, but the weapon also has roughly a 2-3 second wait from pressing the trigger, to releasing a shot, so you need to gauge the firing distance to meet your target, which is harder to do for the fast-moving vehicles such as these, so there really isn't a sure fire method to obtaining this assignment objective effectively. It's a sound enough tactic to observe firefights and jump in to steal a killing blow, but it will require some trial and error to accumulate 10 kills.

Assignment 8 - Win 10 rounds on Operation Whiteout
- Win 10 Rounds on Hammerhead
- Win 10 Rounds on Hangar 21
- Win 10 Rounds on Giants of Karelia

This assortment of objectives within assignment 8 requires you to win 10 rounds on each of the 4 new maps. At this point, it would normally be relevant to mention the other objective within the final assignment from previous DLC packs, which is to clock 10 hours playing on the new maps, but these objectives will see you eclipse way beyond 10 hours, making that objective irrelevant in this instance. There isn't really much to explain here, but simple maths allows us to come to the conclusion that you'll need to win a total of 40 matches. You can opt to play shorter game modes, such as deathmatches or small conquest, but it makes more sense to play longer game modes because you'll need the extra time to unlock other prior objectives and assignments, and because there are alot of vehicular-based objectives, you have to play certain games like conquest and rush to be able to use the full map and the wider range of different vehicles and weapon pick-ups which become unavailable in certain, smaller modes. This is certainly the most time consuming assignment within the DLC, and you'll also have to make additional time provisions for the inevitable defeats along the way.

This is just a shade less challenging than China Rising, which takes the crown for most difficult piece of Battlefield 4 DLC, but this isn't terribly far behind, and runs in at a very close second. It isn't exactly a photo finish, and China Rising is certainly tougher purely for the focus around the most difficult aspect of Battlefield, which is the air combat. However, there are some challenging assignments here, and and it's definitely the most time consuming expansion out of the five for this game, simply due to the fact you'll have to win 40 matches and master the majority of the new vehicles and battlefield pick-ups added to the game as part of this expansion. I would estimate the completion time for this DLC to be anywhere around the 25-30 hour mark.

The Battlefield 4 DLC was a step up from Battlefield 3, which also came up with it's own challenges along the way, but these assignments would test even the best Battlefield player, despite the fact that though 2 of the DLC packs don't even contain a trophy for completing all of the assignments. A proud 100% for anybody to have in their collection nonetheless.

DLC #110 - Worms Battlegrounds - Alien Invasion

The Alien Invasion expansion adds 5 trophies to Worms Battlegrounds, along with a few new weapons to experiment with, a small collection of new missions and the addition of a new game mode called Bodycount. All of the newly added trophies are linked to the new additions which this DLC brings with it.

Out of the 5 new trophies added as part of this package, 3 of them are obtained through the new mini-campaign, where the narrative is based around an alien clan crash landing a UFO onto planet earth, and facing an immediate threat from earth locals, with the ultimate goal of completing all of these missions and escaping back into outer space with the UFO fully intact.

This follows the same structure as the main game's story missions, a series of simple and linear levels, but every mission within the Alien Invasion campaign has 2 primary objectives. One of these objectives is to eliminate every enemy worm on the map, and the other objective is to make sure the UFO is not destroyed by the enemy team, so you'll have to focus on protecting this too.

The "Houston We Have a Problem" trophy, awarded for completing all Alien Invasion missions, is the reward  for beating all 10 of the new levels, and earns you the solitary gold trophy in the package. You can also earn a further 2 trophies from this part of the package through completing a specific level in a specific way, and also using each of the new weapons once, of which there are 6.

As was the same with the levels from the main game's campaign, none of these missions are particularly difficult, and should only take around 2-3 hours to beat all 10, and also pick up the other couple of trophies within the main campaign.

The remaining trophies are achieved through the newly added game mode Bodycount. The concept of the mode is to accumulate points via killing enemy worms placed all over the map, and using certain methods of killing worms, or achieving multi-kills, in order to score more points. The more enemy worms you can kill per turn, or the more worms you can kill in more creative methods, the more points you'll score, and the mode is simply all about how many points you can score before your team of 2 worms is killed, or by the time the clock runs out.

It's very similar to most games that include a variation of a horde type mode, but this is much slower paced due to the turn based nature of Worms games, and enemies are spawned with very low health to help you along a little bit and make them easier to kill.

Neither of the 2 remaining trophies for this mode are difficult at all, both requiring you achieve 50,000 points in 1 game of Bodycount, which is really easy, and also to rack up a cumulative total of 250 kills in Bodycount, which can also be done across all of the 4 maps exclusive to the mode. This will stretch the package by a couple of extra hours, but is simply a matter of replaying the game and getting the kills in.

An easy piece of DLC to finish Worms Battlegrounds, and should take no longer than 4-5 hours.