Platinum #105 - Geometry Wars 3

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 8/10

I recall reviewing Angry Birds once upon a time, and posing the question how something with such a simple concept could end up being so challenging.

This is the same sort of logic I'd like to place on Geometry Wars 3, a game with a simple concept made challenging by intense dynamics.

The game is simply about controlling a vessel over a map/grid, eliminating enemies as they come at you in certain ways, depending on the specific shape. A large part of success within this game is to memorise the patterns of shapes and how they make any given level play out, developing your strategy to success based around this.

There are a variety of game modes, where some will be as simple as reaching a target score within a certain time limit or number of lives, where other variants will include clearing waves to trigger extra time and only being able to accumulate a score by moving between safe zones.

The variety within the different game modes makes for a relatively immersive experience, with an addictive pick up and play element. The game also contains a Single Player Adventure Mode, a Co-operative Adventure mode, a full selection of "Classic" game modes and Bonus levels, all of which are spread out evenly across the requirements of the medium-sized 31 trophy strong list.

The "Geometry Warrior" trophy, awarded for Earning 3 Stars on all 50 levels of Adventure Mode, is the main focal point of this journey, and will require you to achieve all 150 stars on offer throughout the Single Player experience.

Each level has 3 score requirements, scaling up depending on how well you perform within that level, and these seemed to be very hit and miss in terms of difficulty.

My personal recommendation would be to just reach the conclusion of the Adventure, which simply requires you to "pass" the level in order to move onto the next. This merely requires you to earn 1 star for each level. As you progress through the Adventure Mode, and get further towards the end, you'll be able to unlock upgrades for your vessel, which are important to maximising the 3 star requirements from certain levels. This is why it's better just to go through the Adventure Mode to completion, and come back with a full arsenal to tackle this trophy.

Prior to the commencement of each level, you'll be required to choose a "Drone" and a "Super". The Drone is how your vessel attacks the enemy, and the Super is the power you can trigger externally to support your Drone. The final Super you unlock is the Turret, which was pretty much a failsafe for me whilst going back through these levels. I didn't have any reason to chose anything else once I had unlocked this, and since you obtain it very late on during Adventure Mode, this is another reason to backtrack through the game once you've passed it.

In the end, there were about 9/10 levels which caused me any sort of genuine difficulty, but perseverance is the key to all of this, and the most common theme within this game. Spend time remembering the patterns within the levels and you'll eventually get there. That's not to say skill isn't required though. You'll need to think and act fast, as well as display some crucial sleight of hand to get through this mode and earn this trophy. Things get manic, and fast in some situations. Enemies come at you from all angles and it's an assault on the senses with millions of different things happening on screen at any one time.

As you go through Adventure Mode, you'll pick up a small handful of other trophies along the way, but for the most part these are spread out quite broadly across the game.

The "BFF" trophy, awarded for Achieving 3 Stars on all 10 levels in Co-op Mode, will require you to beat the shorter, but arguably more challenging Adventure Mode within the game. This is exactly the same blueprint as the Single Player Adventure Mode, a series of levels culminating in a final boss level.

The important caveat to this is the fact that the Co-op mode with Geometry Wars 3 is actually local Co-op, and not Online-based. My initial strategy was to attempt this with someone else, and whilst you can probably beat the Co-op mode with somebody who is merely a means to an end, obtaining 3 stars on every level in order to unlock this trophy is a different matter, and the person I chose just simply wasn't good enough to help me get to where I needed to be for this trophy. It's certainly designed in mind of playing with someone with a reasonable level of competence at the game, and that just comes with a learning curve that is simply too steep for another player who is new to the game.

This meant my alternative option was to play solo with an idle controller as the second player, and this ended up being a bigger challenge to me than the Single Player Adventure Mode, despite the Co-op Mode only containing a fifth of the levels.

It may seem like an obvious statement to suggest that I struggled within a mode that was built with scoring targets benchmarked against the assumption that more than 1 player would actually play the levels out, but this is the exact reason this trophy ended up being worth mentioning here. The approach of leaving the second controller idle whilst I chased around attempting to get 3 stars solo felt like chasing a lost cause on numerous occasions, with around 2/3 of the levels especially making it feel like I was reaching a point of questioning whether it was actually physically possible for 1 person to achieve a 3 star score threshold designed for multiple people to achieve together.

I trusted the faith in the tip-off that someone had told me they had managed to do it solo, and stuck at it, eventually getting there. I'm sure it may have been quicker and much less challenging to actually play with somebody else, but the availability of the other person to be with you physically when you need them is a big barrier, compared to just being able to pick it up and play solo whenever you wanted to give it another shot yourself.

Either way, this trophy was worth a couple of notches on the difficulty rating alone, and as soon as I realised this was local Co-op only, I knew this would present it's own challenges at some point.

Once you've beaten both Adventure Modes with 3 stars in every level, you'll actually have only put a dent in this trophy list, such is the vastly spread-out approach here. There are a fair amount of extra-curricular trophies awarded for beating developer high scores across certain levels and fulfilling certain requirements within specific additional game modes away from the Adventure. Most of these are fairly straight-forward, and shouldn't take more than a handful of attempts, however, herein also lies the most challenging trophy within this whole list.

The "Retro" trophy, awarded for Scoring over 10 million on Evolved Classic Level before losing a life, is a tall order, and really tests the skills you'll have picked up along the way whilst tackling this trophy list.

Evolved Classic is one of the more vanilla game modes, where you have 5 lives to accumulate as many points as possible before those lives expire. However, you need to be able to reach 10 million before even losing just 1 of these lives in order to fulfil the requirements of this trophy, and this is tough.

The level reaches certain points where there's a ridiculous amount of things happening on screen at any one time, to the point where it becomes genuinely confusing. Within the early stages of attempting this trophy, which was incidentally the one that triggered the Platinum, I knew this would cause me issues. It wouldn't have felt right for this game to end on a light note, without having one last obstacle thrown at you.

I did find good success in using whirlpools to my advantage, allowing them to suck up enough enemies before destroying them, which releases big scores and Geoms for multiplier purposes, accelerating your score significantly. You will still need large slices of luck in order to somehow not die as you approach the 10 Million score mark, and the 5 bombs you get can be timely saviours when you need them most, but this is still the most skill-reliant trophy in the game, and I spent sessions going for this to no avail before I achieved, and given that this was the final trophy I needed for the Platinum, that was wholly frustrating.

The "Gatherer" trophy, awarded for Collecting 1 million Geoms in Adventure Mode, is worth a final shout purely for it's grindy nature.

The trophy only counts Geoms collected through the Single Player Adventure Mode, and once I had collected all 150 stars in accordance to the above "Geometry Warrior" trophy, I still needed around 300,000 Geoms in order to achieve this trophy, which essentially just required booting up a specific level and replaying it over and over in order to accumulate the excess amount of Geoms left over. It was long winded and unreasonable. 

I felt like I spent a decent amount of time with the Adventure Mode to getting to the point of collecting all 150 stars, and still ended up way off the requirement of this trophy, so it was frustrating to carry on playing the Adventure Mode without any real reason to continue it further other than for the fact that there was another trophy that was reliant on the Platinum. There are a few games that fall victim to having trophies that outlast their content, and this is one of them.

Overall, this list provides a strong challenge. The Single Player Adventure Mode is well fleshed out and contains a reasonable level of challenge that prepares you for some of the extra difficulties that lie ahead.

The difficulty experienced within the Co-op mode will be purely based on which approach you decide to take when tackling it. The Solo experience is probably the hardest method, but the reliance of another person will still require them to master the game to some extent, and I suppose that will be dictated by your own circumstances and how accessible a partner is to you and how inclined they are to stick out a game that requires alot of patience to beat. I found it the harder of the two Adventure Mode trophies purely for the fact I didn't really have a feasible local Co-op option, despite attempting it this way before choosing to just go with it on a solo basis.

The clean up operation is seamless for the most part, with developer high score trophies and classic game mode trophies not really causing too many issues, especially after having the practice of going through 2 Adventure Modes that peak the difficulty of this game. However, the "Retro" trophy will act as a final curveball to test your skills once more as the exclamation point on this list.

Due to the trial and error nature of the game, it's difficult to put a time range on it for total completion. My personal experience was probably somewhere within the 50-60 hour range, though this isn't tracked anywhere in-game, and my completion time from first to last trophy spanned a period of 5 years and 11 months, due to the fact this was a game I picked up and played on a very sporadic basis, making it even harder to nail down an actual completion time.

If you have the patience, this will go along way to beating this game, but you'll need the skill to go with it too.

Notable Trophies -

Geometry Warrior - Earn 3 Stars on all 50 levels of Adventure Mode.
BFF - Achieve 3 Stars on all 10 levels in Co-op Mode.
Retro - Score over 10 Million on Evolved Classic Level before losing a life.
Gatherer - Collect 1 million Geoms in Adventure Mode.

Hardest Trophy -

Retro                                                                                                                  Score over 10 Million on Evolved Classic Level before losing a life.

Platinum #104 - Crash Bandicoot : Warped - (Part of the Crash Bandicoot N'Sane Triology for the Playstation 4)

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 5/10

Originally released on the Playstation 1 in 1998, Crash Bandicoot : Warped, would serve to be the final title of the traditional Crash Bandicoot Trilogy.

Whilst Crash Bandicoot 2 didn't really seem to make massive strides in terms of differences to Crash Bandicoot 1, there are much more noticable differences within Warped compared to Crash Bandicoot 2.

The level design is the most notable of these, with a host of new types of level dynamics added to the game that go beyond the traditional platforming Crash Bandicoot was known for. Levels within Warped now include dynamics such as road racing, underwater platforming, flying and hanging, and allow for much greater level variety than previously seen.

The trophy list remains consistent with the prior 2 installments, with a moderately sized list checking in at 27 trophies in total, and the approach being exactly the same as before in terms of strategy.

The "Cortex N.Carcerated" trophy, awarded for Defeating N.Cortex, caps the game off after the now standard protocol of collecting 25 crystals has been achieved, along with beating the relevant boss for each area. One of the other notable changes within Warped compared to it's predecessors is that the levels are grouped into 5 across 5 different time-zones, each of which is relevant to a specific era in time and contains it's own themed levels, providing more of the variety mentioned above on top of the new game dynamics.

As before, you'll also earn a series of progression-based trophies for each of the bosses you defeat as you make your way through the 25 levels that award crystals, and it's still an incredibly easy journey up to this point if you're simply looking at just beating the game and defeating Dr. Neo Cortex to reach the conclusion of the story.

Naturally, the greater challenges come from going back though these levels and earning the gems and relics, which serve exactly the same purposes as before. 

The "Bringing Down the House" trophy, awarded for Earning 42 Gems, is where most of the post-game work will come from. 

As before, gems are awarded for either collecting all boxes within the levels, but in some instances where a level contains 2 gems, the second gem is awarded for a secondary requirement, depending on the type of level it is. For example, if it's a road race, the gem will be awarded for beating the other competitors to first place within the level, or if the level is set within a futuristic theme, the gem will be awarded for having to backtrack from a future starting point to collect certain boxes that were not previously available first time round. There are also 5 coloured gems which have to be earned in order to unlock specific routes within other levels which will also award a secondary gem in some instances.

It is also important to note that, once you beat the original 25 levels within the main game, a bonus zone is unlocked that not only contains 5 fresh levels that award their own gems which will count towards this trophy too, but there are also an additional 2 gems awarded within a couple of secret levels which can only be found through performing certain actions that can take you to these levels, though these are attached to a couple of the secret trophies on offer. This is also the only way to achieve 102% completion, upon the achievement of which will award a further trophy.

The "Boo-Yah, Grandma! Boo-Yah!" trophy, awarded for Earning 30 Relics (gold or better), sets the same requirements as previously outlined within the other Crash Bandicoot titles, and despite still being the most challenging trophy in the list, isn't actually as tough as it was in comparison to the previous games.

The main reason for this is the fact that you unlock the run ability once you've collected all 25 crystals and beaten Zone 5, which subsequently makes speedruns for relics much easier, if required. It is important to note though, I did actually manage to achieve the gold relics as I went through each zone, and didn't have to rely on the benefit of the run ability in order to succeed here, even with a couple of the more slightly challenging time trials, of which there are literally only a few.

Some of them took a slight degree of mastery and multiple attempts, but there was nothing to stop me in my tracks, and progression was still relatively seamless throughout the journey. I did opt to come back to a couple of time trials at the end once I'd cleared everything else, but that was the only extent to which the troubles went.

The list does also contain a handful of secret trophies, some of which already alluded to are tied to unlocking additional levels you'll need the Gems and Relics from in order to fulfill the requirements of other trophies within this list. The others are for just for fun, and reference a couple of cool Easter eggs along the way.

Despite the fact the game itself does have some obvious differences in game advancement compared to the previous 2 Crash Bandicoot titles, the trophy list has remained consistent to such a degree that it can be hard to produce a fully elaborate review without feeling like you're repeating much of what has been said before. Maybe this is just a trend to expect for Naughty Dog games in general, but it has the same feeling as the Uncharted series, trophy list wise.

What I will say is, I actually felt like Warped was the easiest out of all 3 games contained within this trilogy. One of the obvious things that stuck with me about the other 2 games was how challenging some of the time trial requirements for a gold relic were, where I didn't have any real issues with this during Warped. The trilogy peaks at Crash Bandicoot 1, and if you can get the Platinum trophy for that, you'll be absolutely fine the rest of the way, though that's not exactly suggesting that Crash 1 is challenging and the difficulty just drops off a cliff for the subsequent games, but more the suggestion that if you find Crash 1 manageable, it's all downhill from there and should get easier.

However, the trophy list is so similar to the previous games, and the game itself still does not have set difficulty levels to voluntarily increase the challenge on offer, which is by default very casual. This Platinum trophy also took me somewhere within the region of 20-25 hours in total, which also fits in line with the standard completion time based on the previous titles.

With all of these similarities considered, it just makes the most sense to be consistent with the rating and complete a full house for the trilogy by giving Warped a 5/10 too.

Notable Trophies -

Cortex N. Carcerated - Defeat N. Cortex.
Bringing Down the House - Earn 42 Gems.
Boo-yah, Grandma! Boo-Yah! - Earn 30 Relics (gold or better).

Hardest Trophy -

Boo-yah, Grandma! Boo-Yah!

Earn 30 Relics (gold or better)

DLC #136 - Bioshock Infinite - Burial at Sea - Episode 2

Upon conclusion of Burial at Sea - Episode 1, it quickly becomes obvious why this DLC content was split into 2 parts, and although both these episodic DLC packs do lead on directly from one another, they take on very contrasting gameplay scenarios.

Burial at Sea - Episode 1 ends with the version of Booker DeWitt you play as dying to the hands of a Big Daddy, which does make you question how Burial at Sea - Episode 2 picks this up.

The events of Burial at Sea part 2 are a direct follow up from the end of Burial at Sea 1, and the goal is still the same. To retrieve "Sally", though within this second part of the story, you play as Elizabeth for the first time in the whole of the Bioshock Infinite package. She is apprehended by Atlas who steals Sally, and threatens to kill her until she reveals she can help him and his gang escape from the sunken part of Rapture they're still inhabiting, at which point Atlas agrees to let her free to execute this plan and will give Sally in part exchange for holding up this end of the deal.

You will then take control of Elizabeth properly and go through the remainder of this mini-story to finally provide closure to the Bioshock Infinite experience, and will instantly notice the stark contrast compared to playing as Booker DeWitt.

Elizabeth is built for stealth. Her main weapon is a non-lethal crossbow that is supplied with tranquiliser ammunition and her lockpicking skill is developed to allow the user to pick the locks themselves and bypass doors/turrets with successful picks. She can also access areas via air vents and small tunnels underneath floorboards in order to bypass enemies without conflict and this episode also introduces the Peeping Tom plasmid, which allows you to become invisible in order to either sneak up on enemies to knock them out undetected, or just bypass them altogether.

She also does not have access to a shield like Booker, and her damage threshold is very low, meaning her character isn't built for run and gun, full force combat in the same ways that Booker DeWitt is, and since this is such a big and sudden shift in playstyles, it does feel strange at first. You will still get access to offensive weapons, but Elizabeth's skillset forces you into situations where stealth is the best way to get past most segments in this game, and is also compulsory to full completion of this trophy list anyway.

As before, Burial at Sea 2 adds 10 new trophies, with a similar assortment to that of Burial at Sea 1 on offer, containing an even mix of trophies based towards both progression and actions involving some of the new additions to the DLC.

It's important to note straight away, the "Taffer's Delight" trophy, awarded for Completing Burial at Sea - Episode 2 in 1998 mode, will be the difference between whether you have to play this episode through multiple times or not.

If you're sharp enough, you'll notice 1998 mode is exclusive to Burial at Sea - Episode 2, and requires you to beat the episode by non-lethal means. You'll only have access to the Crossbow and the Air Grabber, and whilst it doesn't really make the episode any more challenging, it is easy to overlook the importance of it to the trophy list when selecting your mode option at the very beginning.

I played through Burial at Sea - Episode 1 on 1999 mode under the assumption that one of the secret trophies would be awarded for such, but this was not to be the case. It would be easy to assume this here too, but Burial at Sea 2 flips this rationale over and now awards a secret trophy for completion of 1998 mode, so this would be a forgivable mistake to make if you ended up having to go through the episode more than once in order to complete the list based on prior experience.

Episode 2 is a slightly longer offering than Episode 1 too, clocking in at around 8 hours, so you'd probably prefer to dodge any sort of necessity to replay.

As for the remainder of the list, there are 3 progression-based trophies awarded at various plot points, including the conclusion of the Episode, and the rest awarded for menial actions with the new tools provided as part of Elizabeth's arsenal, including the new plasmids, differing types of crossbow ammunition and lockpicking. As previously, anything you manage to miss by the end of the episode can be collected within the chapter select option via the main menu, which has been a God-send throughout the entire Bioshock Infinite experience.

This package is very similar to the first installment, at least trophy-wise anyway, and despite being around double the length, shouldn't cause too many issues.

DLC #135 - Bioshock Infinite - Burial at Sea - Episode 1

After Clash in the Clouds, it was hard to believe they could make Bioshock Infinite any more challenging by going back to something more story-driven, and this turns out to be a fairly solid statement.

Burial at Sea - Episode 1 sees you return to Rapture, the underwater city setting from Bioshock 1 and 2. You're still playing as Booker DeWitt and you're tasked with saving an abducted girl called "Sally" on behalf of an older verison of Elizabeth who still accompanies you along the way. The details of her relevance and why you need to find her are kept purposely vague, and do become clearer by the end of the Episode.

The package blends Infinite and Bioshock vibes together. You have the same Plasmids and weapons from Infinite, but enemies are splicers, NPC's you see and hear within Audio Logs are all from Rapture, and you'll encounter a Big Daddy, all of which are synonymous with the Bioshock world.

The package contains 10 trophies in total, and is a much easier list than Clash in the Clouds.

There are 3 progression-based trophies awarded for reaching certain plot points in the very short episode, which clocks in at around 3-4 hours with maximum exploration.

The rest of the trophies can be obtained through various forms of combat. There are 2 new additions to the game via this Episode of DLC, in the form of Old Man Winter and Radar Range, and a further 5 of the trophies within this list are awarded for executing specific actions whilst using these 2 new combat methods.

Old Man Winter is a new plasmid that allows the player to freeze enemies and kill them by shattering their frozen body. It also acts as an environmental dynamic, allowing you to freeze water which can enable you to bridge gaps to both story areas and hidden areas. Radar Range is a new weapon which emits a beam of light that causes enemies to explode and can also cause splash damage to any enemies nearby. The requirements of all 5 trophies related to these new mechanics are very simple to achieve.

There is also the seemingly Bioshock token nod to Audio Logs, with a silver trophy accounted for, for collecting all 17 of these along the way. Some of them are locked within areas that you'll need lockpicks for, so that is something to be aware of, but you should find plenty if you scour the environment well enough, and failing that, Chapter Select is also back to save the day for any you might have missed to prevent you replaying the episode in it's entirety. 

There is also not a requirement to play though this DLC on any specific difficulty. I did choose to play on 1999 Mode, purely for the reason that, when I scoured the trophy list for the first time to scope it out, I made the assumption that 1 of the 3 hidden trophies was for beating the episode on 1999 Mode, and I'm not really in a position with this game to want to playthrough anything twice. This wasn't the case though, but the secret trophies are disjointed in the way they appear on the trophy list, which also threw my intuition off a bit, and gave me the impression that the isolated hidden trophy at the very bottom was not progression based, and was for beating the episode in 1999 mode.

It meant that I ran into a few complications with certain trophies, because I died a few times on some of the more hectic areas, and the price to revive as part of 1999 mode, just like it was the main game, meant that I didn't have enough money to upgrade Old Man Winter twice for the "Fully Equipped" trophy, awarded for Purchasing any two upgrades for Old Man Winter or Radar Range in Burial at Sea - Episode 1. I was able to load an earlier chapter via Chapter Select and continue my progress whilst accumulating enough money to just unlock it for the trophy though.

Even with this slight hiccup, this was still all wrapped up within 3-4 hours. It's a very casual experience in comparison to Clash in the Clouds, and that was even going through it in 1999 Mode, which you don't even need to do to earn all 10 trophies.

Platinum #103 - Grand Theft Auto V

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 9/10

This review was never meant to exist. The game was condemned to be forever "unachievable" as the first ever in my entire collection that became impossible to obtain 100% of all trophies.

I had come to terms with the fact this just wasn't meant to be, and for someone who has always aspired to trophy hunting as a completionist, it was a tough one to accept. However, there were still ways, and I had to just cling onto that hope knowing if luck played it's part, things could align.

That it did and here we are. Talking about Grand Theft Auto V, physically represented by a Platinum trophy, rather than talking about it as a "What if?". It's an even sweeter feeling when you consider how roller-coaster this journey is from start to finish, so let's begin. There's much to talk about.

Grand Theft Auto V, for the first time, sees you take control of 3 different characters. Franklin Clinton, Michael De Santa and Trevor Phillips. The plot revolves around a previously botched Heist job where Michael and Trevor are initially acquainted. Michael is alleged to have been killed at the scene by police and Trevor escapes, only for it be revealed that Michael actually also escaped and is placed under an unofficial witness protection scheme, relocated under a new identity with his family and allowed to live as a free man, for reasons which become apparent later, but won't be revealed here in the name of keeping things spoiler free. 

Michael starts life anew in Los Santos, and ends up getting acquainted with Franklin when he catches him trying to steal his car, but when they accidentally destroy the house of wealthy gangster, Martin Madrazo, they have to find a way to pay him back. This gets Michael back into his old line of business, pulling heists, to raise the funds and appease Madrazo. This starts the slippery slope, and as with any classic Grand Theft Auto plot, you end up working for a large selection of different and crooked characters looking to take advantage of some increasingly dire straits, which become even more dire as a consequence, and this in turn becomes cyclical as more plot twists develop along the way.

Trevor is introduced into the story part way through when he makes the discovery that Michael is not dead, and tracks him down within Los Santos. Franklin, by this point, has become somewhat an understudy to Michael and his criminal tendencies.

The game lends to this Multi-character angle really well, with a variety of different missions bounced between the 3 characters, along with a handful of missions where you switch between all of them to play out the various roles required to complete the job, which really comes to the fore when you go through the story heists and other big set piece missions.

The trophy list is large, clocking in at a total of 51 trophies, and is split between Single Player and Multiplayer. It follows the same sort of blueprint as Grand Theft Auto 4, with a lot of obvious similarities between both games, but this list does create some fresh challenges which do end up being significant differences.

We'll start with the Single Player side of this list first, and the main focus will be going through the game's 69 main story missions following the previously outlined plot above through to the very end, whilst undertaking a broad range of side activities which will also contribute towards 100% completion of the game.

The "To Live or Die in Los Santos" trophy, awarded for Completing the final mission, caps the main story off and is awarded upon finishing the 69th mission. The standard requirements of merely beating the game are not really that challenging though. You can respawn within missions an infinite amount of times until you beat them, and checkpoints are also quite generous. There also isn't a difficulty preset, though I did personally opt to change the controls from the traditional GTA headshot aim-assist to free-aim mode, in order to add some balance to the difficulty element, but still found it a relatively casual experience.

There are 11 progression based trophies including this one, and these are split fairly evenly between the game's 2 main focal points, which include both traditional story missions and Heists, which frequently pop up as a way of integrating Michael and Trevor's past into the current story.

The "Career Criminal" trophy, awarded for Attaining 100% Game Completion, is where one of the obvious similarities to GTA 4 can be drawn. Thankfully, there were no dramas with the journey towards 100% this time round, unlike GTA4, but there is alot of additional effort required for getting this extra mileage out of the game.

Aside from the 69 main story missions, you'll need to beat a series of other requirements, including races, parachute jumps, stunt jumps, Stranger and Freak side missions and a whole host of collectibles, aswell as various other activities. So there's a good mixture of new and old, and the trophy list covers many of these requirements with their own individual trophies to spur you along.

Some of these activities can be challenging, but mostly exist to prolong the game, and going for 100% will do exactly this, mainly in thanks to some very collectible-heavy requirements, which are worth mentioning collectively purely for their sheer volume, and even though the 100% checklist doesn't require you to collect all of them in some instances, there are individual trophies awarded for that instead, so you'll still need all of them regardless of what the 100% requirement asks of you. The collectibles include 50 Letter Scraps, 50 Spaceship Parts, 30 Submarine Parts and 30 Nuclear Waste Barrels. There are also vehicular-based collectibles, including 50 Stunt Jumps, 50 Under the Bridge and 15 Knife Flights, and expect all of this to contribute heavily towards the overall completion time of the list.

I also found some slight irritation within some of these collectibles, notably Stunt Jumps, that don't always seem to register properly, causing you to unjustly retry them, and Under the Bridge, which includes a few bridges that need a specifically small chopper to navigate underneath, and cannot be done with just any standard sized chopper. Some of the other collectibles are also positioned within awkward places and, as a general observation, require you to trawl across every single corner of the map.

The "Close Shave" trophy, awarded for Completing all Under the Bridge and Knife Flight challenges, is one of those aforementioned instances where there are part-requirements for 100%, but full completion required for the trophy, and these are the hardest tasks within the Single Player game. This is mainly down to the certain level of mastery required with air-based vehicles, which needs to be of a fairly high standard for the required tasks here, especially the Knife Flights.

The Under the Bridge part of this trophy isn't too bad, though, as just touched upon above, you will need a specific helicopter to fit under certain bridge gaps that are too narrow for a traditional helicopter to fit between, but the Knife Flights are a different beast. These require you to glide a plane sideways between a gap, usually consisting of 2 buildings, and make it through the other side unscathed. 

You can get some practice executing Knife Flights through the training school, completion of which is a 100% requirement under Hobbies and Pastimes, but these don't really prepare you for the eventuality of having to guide a plane through some very tight gaps. The general recommendation is to use the fighter jet, due to it's compact size, but I actually found Trevor's seaplane to be a sound option. It's slow and easier to handle as a consequence, but I used up a good chunk of time on this trophy, most of which is spent watching loading screens after you've clipped a skyscraper and wasted yourself. It's the hardest individual trophy contained within this series of mini-tasks that make up the 100% checklist, and does require some genuine skill, even though there are only 15 Knife Flights.

The "Solid Gold, Baby!" trophy, awarded for Earning any 70 Gold Medals on Missions, Strangers and Freaks, adds yet another layer on top of the Single Player experience, requiring the player to score a Gold medal on any 70 missions across the game. This is one of the new elements introduced to the trophy list that did not exist within GTA 4 (nor Red Dead Redemption for that matter), but would go on to feature within the Red Dead Redemption 2 trophy list.

Every Story mission will rate the players performance based on certain objectives, which are only originally revealed upon beating the mission for the first time. You'll get either a Bronze, Silver or Gold medal depending on how many of the extra objectives you manage to fulfill, and these do add the extra element of challenge the regular game lacks. When you include the Stranger and Freaks missions as part of this trophy, you do have some flexibility to pick and choose, and I would also recommend some of the Stranger and Freaks missions that do NOT contribute to 100% completion, but will still provide additional options for this trophy. It would be tempting to miss some of these out because they won't fulfill your 100% obligations, but Stranger and Freaks missions are good ways to pad this total of 70 because they are generally shorter and easier to get Gold medals on in comparison to main story missions.

If you were to Gold medal every single Story mission, you would still be 1 short of this requirement anyway, and some of the main Story missions can take anywhere between 20-30 minutes, and that's potentially alot of rework, especially if you still don't manage to meet the Gold requirements after playing through them again, something which is only known upon clearing the mission, and therefore certainly something to consider when you're tactfully making your choices.

I managed to get through most missions without too much struggle, but as the field of scope gets more narrow, I did have to bite the bullet and tackle a handful of challenging missions within the last 10-15 in order to get this trophy, so it did create a slight uplift in difficulty, as well as a greater investment of time on top of this. It is frustrating to go through a lengthy mission and still miss an objective or two, though it is important to mention that you don't need to fulfill any objective you have already achieved, so you can go into some missions where you maybe only need 1 or 2 objectives. I only had 14 Gold medals across both Story and Strangers and Freaks missions by the time I had finished everything once, so there was a lot of extra time required post-game to oblige to the requirements of this trophy too, which has to be taken into account also.

The statistics screen within the 100% checklist breaks down your play time between all 3 characters, and this reads a collective total of 79 hours for me, which is probably about standard for a Rockstar open world game, but still a pretty hefty portion of time for any Single Player experience that doesn't insist on multiple playthroughs or tons of repetition.

However, the Multiplayer portion of this list is a completely different beast and I just want to caveat this with a couple of general notes before I touch on specific trophies.

Firstly, the Playstation 3 version of this game is plagued with cheaters and modded lobbies, which can seriously impact your progress, both positively and negatively, all of which is completely out of your control and depends on who you run into. Trophies aside, it makes for a bad gaming experience, compounded further by the level of dedication required to earn all of the trophies. Ironically enough though, it was an integral part to me achieving a particular trophy which would otherwise be unobtainable, so it seems strange to be critical, though still wholly warranted.

Secondly, the Multiplayer design choices leave a lot to be desired. You have to navigate though too many pre-game menus, lobbies have far too much dead time between matches and the general feel is one that is clunky, does not flow well at all and constantly under-performs with bad stability issues. It leads to a seriously heavy grind, and ultimately is not really an enjoyable experience, and there is a reasonable amount of dedication towards the online portion of this game within the trophy list.

The "Above the Law" trophy, awarded for Reaching Rank 100, is the fairly typical level-based venture Rockstar trophy lists are known for, and this is a toughly chosen winner for the most difficult trophy in this list.

It requires 1,500,000 experience points to achieve level 100. If this seems like a lot, then that's because it is. I would generally target myself to achieve 1-2 levels per day playing the game for anywhere between 2-6 hours, which would be dependent on various factors such as activity levels of other players to play against, server stability and individual performance. Some days would go quite smoothly with a nice flow of games played with a reasonable amount of players, and other days would just be broken up by unstable lobbies and would feel unproductive, especially if my performance was bad. It was a real mixed bag.

Experience is earned by winning matches and completing in-game challenges, though one of the logistic challenges is the fact that experience gain is based mostly on the number of players you're competing against. For example, if you win a race in a lobby of 8 players, you'll pick up much greater rewards than if you were to win a race in a lobby of 3 players, and having played through much of this journey at a time where this game had a version available on Playstation 4 that isn't plagued by hackers, this seriously impacted the community volumes and it was rare to even get half-full lobbies the majority of the time, so experience gains always felt slower.

Despite there being a whole host of game modes available, I mostly stuck to Deathmatch and races. Deathmatches because custom made levels can net you some very good experience if you play 15-20 minute variants, and races because you can finish them relatively quickly and get into a nice flow if you can keep an active lobby going, but these are both best case scenarios. The additional experience awarded for killing opponents in Deathmatch mode separate to the end-game experience is also an important touch to mention, and although I won't address it on it's own merits, there is also a trophy for earning 30 Platinum medals, and these are also an effective way to accrue experience points on the way towards level 100.

Each category is tiered from Bronze, Silver, Gold and Platinum and awards a new amount of experience for each tier. When you include the Heists DLC, which comes with it's own new set of medals, you have many to go after and it's worth keeping tabs and working on them because they will give you those incremental step gains that are good for motivational reasons, as well as general progress. 

My overall completion time to reach level 100 was a whopping 8 days and 17 hours, which converts into a grand total of 209 hours, and the predominant reason as to why this is the greatest challenge of this whole list. It is a shame that many of these challenges that exist, and have been mentioned here, were born through negligence of care to the game, and could have been addressed if the desire was there for the developers to do so. It makes for a tough online leveling journey, and one of the most challenging I've ever completed.

The "Run Like The Wind" trophy, awarded for Surviving with a Bounty on your head, is the sole trophy that effectively made this Platinum make or break.

Just for the purpose of background, I was always fully aware of the fact that, if I ever wanted to resume with Grand Theft Auto 5, there was a distinct possibility I could never have the Platinum, and it was specifically down to this trophy. In my mind, I had 2 options. 

One of those options was to accept that I could just be wasting my time, effectively give up, and move on. The other option was to commit to just keep plugging away, knowing that there was a way for me to fortunately stumble upon a chance to still achieve this trophy, long after it had officially become technically unachievable. If there was never a chance, I would never have carried on.

The bounty feature within Grand Theft Auto Online allows any player to place a bounty on another players head within a public lobby, which would then allow others players to earn that bounty by killing the player in question. When hackers grew to prominence within this community, one of the ways they'd transfer large sums of cash among themselves, was via the bounty system, which prompted Rockstar to permanently disabled this feature, for it to never return. The catch is, hackers can still access this feature and place bounties on other players anyway, which is where the slim hope I was clinging onto came from.

I knew the leveling journey was a long one ahead of time, and methodically, I also knew that, due to the amount of time I was anticipating to spend with this game, this would potentially be long enough to luck out and get this trophy before I managed to hit level 100, and it eventually happened. A hacker in a random public lobby planted a bounty on me and I knew exactly what to do to earn the trophy, which was to just flee and hide in my safe house without dying for the required 40 minutes until achievement.

It's a very innocuous trophy, and has alot of notoriety attached to it within the trophy hunting community, but it ended up being the difference maker within the whole list.

The rest of the Multiplayer trophies can be earned either naturally, or just by slightly going out of your way within free-roam. There are 3 other trophies awarded every 25 levels up before you hit level 100, so there is a little bit of progressive motivation, and the rest are just smaller tasks that pale in comparison to the greater challenges ahead. You do need to be prepared to stick out a bad experience though, and I don't even think that's down to a matter of opinion.

When I look back, and realise that I gave Grand Theft Auto 4 a 10/10, I feel like I would be underselling the Grand Theft Auto 5 experience by not giving it a similar rating. Grand Theft Auto 4, whilst not too dissimilar in the nature of it's trophy list, contained heightened challenges that fully justified its rating at the time. I had to play through the entire Single Player game to 100% completion 3 separate times and it contained an online experience that required you to play well co-operatively with other players, which was also very grindy and ultimately born out a lot of complications that became frustrating factors.

I wouldn't say I had the same level of frustrations with this list but I have put almost 300 hours into it, and from my own memory, I don't recall ever having to mention that I had almost exceeded such a time-frame for any game I've previously finished. There isn't as big of a skill element required compared to Grand Theft Auto 4, and for the amount of time I spent with the game, it was mostly down to steadily progressing through to level 100 and picking up the other online trophies along the way.

The Single Player portion of the list is mostly an enjoyable experience, with a couple of good challenges, but mostly about playing through the main story and finishing up the side activities, with some added repeatability from the Gold medal requirements. The Multiplayer is a greater test of patience, and where it can be interesting in doses, the badly designed menus and lobbies, along with a diminishing online community full of hackers leaves a bitter taste. The Heists DLC pack was the highlight of this overall journey though, and contributed some added uplift to a dour leveling grind.

It's not quite a 10/10 though. If it had that added skill challenge that was present in some of the trophies Grand Theft Auto 4 had, then it would be, and there's no doubt that the state of the Multiplayer landscape creates a lot of extra difficulties that won't be present on the Playstation 4 version of the game. The amount of time it's taken me to achieve this Platinum can't be overlooked, and that is absolutely accounted for within the final rating. All of the games I've given 10/10 to have at least something in them that fronts up a strong element of skill, which isn't quite present here, but given the fact this review wasn't even meant to be exist, it's fair to say we've come a long way to reach this point.

Notable Trophies -

To Live or Die in Los Santos - Completed the final mission.
Career Criminal - Attain 100% Game Completion.
Close Shave - Complete all Under the Bridge and Knife Flight challenges.
Solid Gold, Baby! - Earn any 70 Gold Medals on Missions, Strangers and Freaks.
Above the Law - GTA Online : Reach Rank 100.
Run Like The Wind - GTA Online - Survive with a Bounty on your head.

Hardest Trophy -

Above the Law
GTA Online : Reach Rank 100

DLC #134 - Bioshock Infinite - Clash in the Clouds

From the moment I died for the first time within this DLC, and chose an option that read "Restart from the last checkpoint", believing this to mean from the start of the current wave I was on, only to actually be taken back to the very beginning lobby and lose all my progress within that arena, I knew this was going to be a bumpy ride. It felt like a decision that set the tone.

Clash in the Clouds is the first of three DLC packs for Bioshock Infinite, a wave-based combat mode that sees you battle through increasingly more difficult arenas, whilst earning money by completing waves, and being able to upgrade weapons, vigors and abilities in order to cope with the increasingly more demanding tasks ahead.

There are 4 arenas in total, with 15 specifically designed waves for each one, for a total of 60 different waves throughout the content. You start as if you're a new character playing a brand new game, and beating waves will earn you money which you can use to gradually upgrade weapons and vigors, which will strengthen your character and better equip you for the latter arenas, which scale in difficulty. You also get gifted infusions between waves in order to increase your shield, health and salt capacity.

There are 10 new trophies added as part of this package, with 4 of these corresponding to just merely finishing each individual arena. You have unlimited lives to reach the end, so this is just an exercise that comes down to how long it takes you to progress, and the bare minimum of just passing through each arena shouldn't take longer than 3-4 hours. This is the easy bit.

Overall though, as a wider piece, this is a challenging package, with a difficulty set to a default of "Hard" which cannot be changed, and every type of enemy you've already seen throughout the main Bioshock story is accounted for and thrown at you. There is a noticeable spike in difficulty after the first arena where your upgrades just suddenly don't seem to be relative to the challenge, and you will find yourself farming the earlier stages of this DLC for money in order to improve your weapons and vigors to be able to stand up for yourself in the tougher arenas. However, once you've maxed out all the upgrades for weapons and vigors, it does become more manageable, but still not exactly a trouble-free experience.

It also doesn't help that you'll need to spend a considerable amount of money on unlocking all of the additional gallery content contained for another trophy within the list, and in hindsight, I should have saved this until the end when it turned out I had loads of surplus cash, rather than spending it early when I needed it more, so perhaps some ill-judgement on my part too which made the earlier progress somewhat slower.

The other trophies are awarded for smaller tasks that you should get naturally as you move through these arenas, and there will be plenty of chances to go back through as you drive towards the main goal in this list;

Blue Ribbon Champ - In CitC, completed all Blue Ribbons Challenges.

The "Blue Ribbon Champ" trophy, awarded for completing all Blue Ribbon Challenges, is what makes this package come to the fore, and is both a genuinely challenging, but also frustrating experience at the same time.

To start with the challenging part, there are 60 Blue Ribbons in total to earn, and a Blue Ribbon is achieved through fulfillment of a specific task provided to the player at the start of each of the 60 waves. This corresponds to 1 Blue Ribbon for every wave across all 4 arenas, and the range of tasks is very varied.

My approach was to just casually play-through the arenas and unlock the prior trophies awarded for simply beating them, and seeing how many Blue Ribbons I could unlock along the way without trying to be conscious to their requirements. Most of these seemed to tick over relatively nicely at first, and this was a trend that continued right up until around the 45 Blue Ribbon mark, and whilst there was always that expectation I would reach a point where some of these tasks would begin to stand out and halt my progress, some of the tougher ones were either hard to execute, or either seemed to be driven by circumstantial luck, or by discovering ways to fulfill these requirements differently to what was actually stated.

For example, I discovered the objective to "defeat every enemy with the weapon they're using" still registered when you used the Undertow vigor just to knock them off the map instead, but not until I had spent hours attempting to frantically run around and find a specific weapon to kill an enemy with as per the objective only to die and have to go through the whole arena again. It didn't make sense, but it thankfully still worked, even though I had to spend a lot of time to discover an alternate method.

This wasn't always the case though, and the following objectives are the ones I ended up seriously struggling on;

• Duke and Dimwit Theater (Arena 2) - Wave 13 - Defeat 5 enemies with a single Devil's Kiss blast.
• Raven's Dome (Arena 3) - Wave 13 - Defeat all enemies while they are distracted with a Booker decoy tear.
• Emporia Arcade (Arena 4) - Wave 2 - Defeat 2 enemies who are riding Sky-lines with traps.
• Emporia Arcade (Arena 4) - Wave 5 - Defeat both Handymen while they are electrocuting a Sky-line.
• Emporia Arcade (Arena 4) - Wave 7 - Defeat two enemies with the Fireman's suicide attack.
• Emporia Arcade (Arena 4) - Wave 10 - Defeat all enemies only using the sniper rifle.
• Emporia Arcade (Arena 4) - Waves 11 - Defeat all enemies while they are distracted with a Booker decoy tear.

This doesn't quite paint the full picture though, and as previously mentioned, there are some big frustrations with the game design that also make this more difficult than it should be.

The biggest one is the fact that, every time you pass a wave, but you don't fulfill the requirements for the Blue Ribbon challenge (dying will also instantly fail the challenge too), you will have to go through the entire arena in order to reach the wave you still require the challenge for, just to have another attempt. This is a seriously big oversight and causes alot of unnecessary rework in the instances where the Blue Ribbon required is situated within the latter waves of any given arena.

Some of the challenges listed above I struggled on occur within later waves, and there is always that psychological edge that brings some pressure knowing you don't have any leniency from the game when you work up towards a certain wave. For a game that uses the chapter select feature so well within the main trophy list to mop up any excess trophies, to see them completely abandon the ability to replay a wave, just for the benefit of not having to slug through an entire arena just to get another shot at an outstanding challenge, is disappointing. It eventually makes it feel like you're spending a lot of dead time with the DLC, and even the incentive for money runs out eventually, so you really do feel like you're just going through the motions when you get down to the nitty gritty of those 2 or 3 Blue Ribbons left, which isn't fun after the 6th, 7th or 8th failed attempt at a challenge, which seemed to be a regular occurence.

The other big frustration is the fact that the game will register actions of enemies and count them against you for certain challenges, prematurely voiding them.

For example, in a wave where the challenge states "Defeat the enemies using only Vigor traps", enemies falling off the landscape via their own accord, or enemies wielding heavy weapons, such as RPG's, and causing friendly fire splash damage, will go against you and provide you with the failed challenge prompt. I wouldn't say it makes less sense than having to play through an entire arena again, but it is frustrating to know you're being penalised by the actions of questionable AI.

This is a rocky road for numerous and varied reasons, and will take you somewhere within the region of 12-20 hours in total to beat, hugely dependent on the above factors. It is an experience blended up of challenge and annoyance, and completion is met with relief more so than satisfaction, though it is a good feeling to eventually knock off an increasingly elusive Blue Ribbon challenge, even if the incredibly tedious repeatability does wear you down. I actually had a lot of fun pursuing this list, but the nuances do leave a bittersweet aftertaste.

I haven't had an experience with Burial at Sea yet, which is next up, but I would be suprised if Clash in the Clouds somehow wasn't the peak for Bioshock Infinite's DLC offering.

Platinum #102 - Crash Bandicoot 2 : Cortex Strikes Back - (Part of the Crash Bandicoot N'Sane Trilogy for the Playstation 4)

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 5/10

Originally released on the Playstation 1 in 1997, came Crash Bandicoot 2, the second title remade within in the 2018 N'Sane Trilogy.

There are alot of parallels to draw from based on previously reviewing Crash Bandicoot here, both in terms of game design and the trophy lists, so there may be some echoes along the way, and the aspects present within this list that are different don't really do much to influence a massively dissimilar experience to the first game on the route towards the Platinum trophy.

As always, I like to pad these out for the benefit of doing the review justice, but don't want the danger of feeling like I'm treading alot of old ground because of the fact the previous list in the series was so similar. I might have to officially coin such circumstances. I'll call it something like "Uncharted-Syndrome", perhaps.

Just like Crash Bandicoot, Crash Bandicoot 2 is a moderately sized list, clocking in with the same total of 25 trophies, along with exactly the same process map towards full completion.

The "Cortex N' Adequate" trophy, awarded for Defeating Neo Cortex, will cap off the end-game as you progress through the very loose story which involves Crash being manipulated into collecting crystals on behalf of Dr Neo Cortex for his plan with ulterior motives, which was stifled in the first game.

The story actually specifies that 25 crystals are required in order to garnish enough power for Dr Neo Cortex and his assistant, Dr N Gin, to reach maximum capacity with the Vortex they're creating for their grand plan, which, incidentally, is also the number of levels within the game, and one short of the amount of levels contained with the original Crash Bandicoot.

As you go through each warp zone within the game, you'll earn a host of progression related trophies for defeating each boss within that particular warp zone in the build up to the final boss fight, located in warp zone 5, where you defeat Dr Neo Cortex and unlock the final story-based Gold trophy. Each of these individual warp zones contains 5 levels, and there are 5 warp zones in total, which is where our nicely rounded figure of 25 crystals comes from. Each zone also culminates with a respective boss fight, which gives us 30 levels when you add them all together. The way you progress through the game is a carbon copy of Crash Bandicoot, both in terms of game design and how the trophies are awarded as you move through the story.

Earning a crystal merely requires completion of the level, which is the easiest part of the game because speed and death are irrelevant (for now, at least), so giving the story the once over achieving what you can is a good starting point, and will naturally progress you along towards the other aspects of this list. If you're conscious of attempting to collect Gems too, you will minimise the required amount of rework when you go back through the game, so this approach is also advised.

It is important to note one big difference from Crash Bandicoot. There are actually an additional 5 hidden alternate levels, and discovering each of these will unlock a further 5 secret trophies. They are very well hidden as secret exits within the main 25 story levels and are placed within a sixth zone. They do also have crystals attached to them, though they do not influence progression within the main story, but you will be required to grab the gems and relics from them if you want the Platinum trophy, so they are still very relevant in the bigger picture.

Once you manage to get through the story for the first time, which is a very leisurely task, the end-game process is also exactly the same, where the attention then shifts focus onto collecting Gems and Relics in a bid to finish off the rest of the trophy list.

The "Laser Powered Vengence" trophy, awarded for Earning 42 gems, holds the exact same concept from Crash Bandicoot, though this is a noticeable step up in quantity from 26 Gems in the first game. This is due to another big difference within Crash Bandicoot 2 where certain levels have seen the introduction of a "Death Route", which is effectively a checkpoint you must reach at some point within the level without dying, to then access the Death Route and reach an alternative conclusion to the level that awards another gem. This duplicates the amount of gems you can earn from certain levels, hence the uplift in quantity, and is therefore not the same as the 1 gem, 1 level approach from the first game.

The requirements for the other Gems are still the same. Break all boxes within a level and complete it in order to obtain the Gem. Coloured gems are also back, and these still require you to beat 5 specific levels without dying whilst obtaining all boxes within a single attempt, just to slightly elevate the challenge in the same way the original game did. Obtaining coloured Gems also still unlocks previously sealed off areas within other levels that can only be accessed after having obtained the corresponding coloured Gem, so you'll be going back and forth to work these puzzles out again too.

Multiple Gems exist within 12 levels (not including levels with coloured Gems), so the Death Routes are used to a greater extent here. A few of them are responsible for some of the more challenging parts within the game too, whereby you have to advance past the Death Route checkpoint in some instances, to clear more of the level ahead, and then eventually backtrack to activate the Death Route and finish the level. This is a new concept that does elevate the challenge a touch compared to the original Crash Bandicoot, but still not the main challenge within this trophy list at the same time.

The "Wumpa-Burner Engaged!" trophy, awarded for Earning 27 Relics (gold or better), is still the toughest aspect of this game, providing further evidence of the continuity shown between both Crash Bandicoot lists thus far.

Unlike the Gems though, there haven't been any changes to the way Relics work. You are still awarded a Sapphire, Gold and Platinum relic depending on times posted for each level, and the requirements for earning one are exactly the same. You must beat the level as fast as possible in a single attempt without incurring death, and you can pick up boxes along the way to stop the clock and improve your time. Times are set and performance is rewarded a Relic depending on speed.

I mentioned in the Crash Bandicoot review that there didn't seem to be much consistency in the target times between the levels, and where some of these levels were much more lenient in terms of timescales chosen to qualify for at least a Gold relic, some are much less forgiving and don't allow any sort of margin for error. Crash Bandicoot 2 is exactly the same in this regard.

It's not so much of a problem, but you can find yourself in a good flow and then suddenly hit a brick wall out of nowhere, and the tough speedruns will have you spending a reasonable amount of time perfecting your run in order to find a route that works best and eventually get you that Gold relic. The good news is, there wasn't anything massively over the top that had me stuck for hours on end, but the challenge has translated over from the original game in the exact same way where the majority of this is fairly straight forward, with a small smattering of genuine challenge, which again makes it the hardest trophy within the list.

I also mentioned in the Crash Bandicoot review that, despite the odd difficulty spike, the trophy requirements do still significantly assist the player, due to the fact you aren't required to earn a Platinum relic for every level, and if this was the case here as well, and this trophy was somehow different to the original game, then this would also make this list a significantly more challenging one. I only ended up with 3 Platinum Relics, which was a worse performance than the 5 Platinum Relics I scored on Crash Bandicoot, so the perspective is still an important thing to point out.

The remainder of the list should pose no greater problems, and most of it will come naturally along the way as you focus on the main tasks outlined above. It's another good list to pad out the Gold trophy count too.

In terms of overall difficulty, I feel as though there are so many similarities between both Crash Bandicoot and Crash Bandicoot 2, it's hard to justify rating them any differently from one another. There isn't anything within this list that blatantly makes it stand out in comparison to the first game.

Despite the fact the "Death Routes" do add an extra dimension of challenge, and also subsequently way more Gems to unlock, this doesn't necessarily equate to a more challenging experience because, regardless of the difference in quantity of Gems, both lists still boil down to a small selection of stand-out levels, so they're effectively equal in that respect anyway.

The same sort of logic applies to the Relics. Though the quantity is of a much similar amount between both lists, it does just come down to the odd few levels that provide that "practice makes perfect" approach compared to the rest of the game, and a small dose of trial and error will eventually see you through anyway. The fact there was also no change in the lenient requirements of Relic collection is also a big deciding factor on the overall difficulty rating again.

Completion time for Crash Bandicoot 2 is slightly higher, clocking in at around 20-25 hours, and this is something that the additional amount of Gems to collect does influence, but regardless of the challenges that lie in wait, it's hard to vouch for a higher rating for a list that can still be completed with such a modest timeframe. If I rated games in increments of .5, there may just be enough of a case to sway a slightly higher rating here, but not quite enough to be adding whole points on.

Notable Trophies -

Cortex N. Adequate - Defeat N. Cortex.
Laser Powered Vengence - Earn 42 Gems.
Wumpa-Burner Engaged! - Earn 27 Relics (gold or better).

Hardest Trophy -

Wumpa-Burner Engaged!
Earn 27 Relics (gold or better).

DLC #133 - LittleBigPlanet 2 - The Muppets Premium Level Pack

It's been a while since I've revisited LittleBigPlanet 2, and whilst there are good reasons for that, they're becoming harder to ignore, and the final 2 packs left beyond this will be finished the moment I can bring myself to acquire the extra peripherals needed to complete the respective lists.

In the meantime, the Muppets Premium Level Pack does not require such acquisition, and follows the same mould as the DC Comics Premium Level Pack (For the most part, at least).

The DC Comics theme is now replaced by The Muppets theme, along with a cast of authentic characters in full costume and a host of new creation options to gather via prize bubbles scattered around within each stage. The levels make use of the new Attract-O-Gel feature too, which allows your Sackboy to walk on ceilings and walls, adding a new element of gameplay that is creatively integrated into the new handful of Story levels.

The pack adds 7 new levels to the sub-stories section of LittleBigPlanet 2, broken up into 5 main levels and 2 additional survival challenges, accompanied by 7 new trophies to unlock along the way.

LittleBigPlanet DLC trophy packs have never been overly challenging, and this one is no different. The primary focus will be the Gold "Standing Ovation!" trophy, awarded for Acing all 5 Muppet Story Levels, which are fairly easy to go through without dying, as long as you take your time to analyse your next steps before your proceed. The final stage, where you fight the Phantom boss, is a little tricky, but once you learn the attack patterns, it shouldn't take too long to nail down. You will also unlock an additional trophy for simply beating all 5 levels, acing not required.

The other trophies will require you to meet a minimum score threshold within the 2 new survival challenges, both of which are very easy to achieve the required score from, and there is also an Online requirement to beat 5 user-created levels that feature Attract-O-Gel.

One key difference between this pack and the DC Comics Premium Level Pack worth noting though, is the fact that there isn't a trophy requirement to unlock all prize bubbles within the DLC this time round, which removes the necessity to have to go through all those secret areas contained within levels which require 2-4 players to unlock the additional Multiplayer dependent prize bubbles. This makes this journey much more straight-forward and means your pure focus can be on just beating each stage without dying. It also means that full completion of this pack can be achieved on a solo basis.

This meant I could unlock all 7 trophies within a single sitting, clocking in at a total of just under 2 and a half hours. A very quick and easy list.

Platinum #101 - Bioshock Infinite

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 6/10

It's a been a while since a Bioshock game graced these pages. Bioshock 1 and 2 were some of my earliest Platinum trophies, as the 3rd and 26th respectively. That's a big gap when you consider the fact all 3 Bioshock games to date were originally released on the same platform, and there was only a 3 year gap between Bioshock 2 and Bioshock Infinite.

Bioshock Infinite takes on a different flavour to the previously underwater themed Bioshock games, where you play as Booker DeWitt, who is tasked with rescuing a little girl called Elizabeth from a sky-themed metropolis called Columbia, from the hands of the game's main protagonist, Zachary Hale Comstock.

This is a large list, totalling 51 trophies, and switches the series back to being a purely Single Player experience, as you go through the Infinite story with no other game modes accounted for. The list for Bioshock titles has remained fairly varied as the series has progressed, and Infinite presents a host of differences not previously seen within other Bioshock games.

There are a large portion of progression based trophies as you work through the story, which is a fairly modest 10-12 hours in length, difficulty dependent.

Most of the other, non-progression trophies, can be earned naturally along the way, and there are vast opportunities to earn the majority of them without requiring much thought and given the fact you'll need to play the game through twice in order to unlock the Platinum, it's better to see what you manage to unlock naturally first time round and take in the story, then work on everything else on your second run.

The "Scavenger Hunt" trophy, awarded for Completing the Main Campaign in 1999 Mode without purchasing anything from a Dollar Bill machine, is the hardest trophy in this list. The player must first beat the game once on any difficulty in order to unlock it though, which is why it is a necessity to play through the game twice if you want the Platinum trophy.

1999 Mode is a step up from the game's most challenging difficulty, where enemies deal significantly more damage and are tougher to kill. The main distinguishing factor of 1999 Mode is the fact that every death comes at a cost of $100 for the player to be revived, and if you don't have the spare cash, then you'll be returned to the main menu and have to reload from the start of the last chapter. Not being able to use a Dollar Bill machine on top of this means you cannot purchase ammuntion, health packs or salt (which is used to charge up vigors, which are effectively like tonics from the previousy Bioshock games).

It labels itself as a "hardcore" experience, but in all honesty, the worst thing that can happen is, you may have to redo small portions of the game when restarting a chapter. It's a bit of a stretch to call itself a "hardcore" version of the game I've come to know from experiences with games like Dead Space, which will show no mercy on the player and end your game if you die at any point. Even not being able to use a Dollar Bill machine is more of a challenge of making sure you don't accidentally purchase an item from them, rather than actually being stuck for ammunition, health and salts, all of which are provided in abundance throughout. You are allowed to use other vending machines like Vigor and Weapon upgrade stations, which is something to be careful of, but generally, shouldn't be much of a problem.

However, the game does start to throw you around a little bit towards the end, and this is where 1999 mode's difficulties start to shine through. I was coasting through this game right up until about 3/4 of the way through, and had it set in my head that this was somewhere in the region of a 4 or 5 out of 10 Platinum, and I was suddenly halted in my tracks by a couple of standout segments in the game. There is a series of fights with Lady Comstock, whose ghost haunts you and her special ability is being able to revive the dead, which means you have to fight off hordes and also try to kill her at the same time. It's very overwhelming and you have to fight her on 3 separate occasions. The final fight provides more of the same, where you have to defend the Zeppelin, and is also about fending off hordes long enough to make your escape. The true difficulties of 1999 mode are apparent when you're fighting against large groups of enemies, because your health depletes quickly and it takes much longer to reduce their numbers.

It isn't exactly a "hardcore" experience though. The consequences to death aren't punishing enough for that, but it will test your skills to at least make sure you don't have an easy ride to completion. It also cannot be left unstated the importance of having access to Elizabeth's support either. Once you have access to her, and she is fighting alongside you, her tendency to generously support you is a game changer. She'll find money, health, ammunition and salts at very regular, and often dire times of need and it alleviates alot of bad situations.

Despite Bioshock lists being very varied throughout the course of the series, one of the constants that has remained is their fondness for collectible related trophies, and Infinite is loaded to the brim with collectibles in the form of Voxophones, Infusions and Telescopes/Kinetescopes.

The "Infused with Greatness" trophy, awarded for Collecting every Infusion upgrade in a single game, is the most notable of these collectibles, for a number of reasons.

Firstly, and this is more of a general note, for a game that has so many collectibles (147 in total), it doesn't do a great job of tracking them for the player. Voxophones are recorded in the in-game menu, yet Infusions are not, and these are the most well hidden collectibles in the game. Infusions are used to upgrade your health, shield and salt capacity, so these are not just optional, but very critical to progression as you hit some of the more challenging parts of the story.

Infusions are also easy to miss because they're either contained behind optional side quests that require you to find an item that corresponds to a secret code/message, which will then unlock an area of the game you would not have been able to access previously. In some instances, you'll see the code/secret message before you pick up the item to decipher it, and therefore have to backtrack to a previous area. Infusions are also very commonly found behind locked doors that need to be picked by Elizabeth, and if you don't have enough lockpicks to unlock a certain door, you cannot grab the Infusion you need, and because of the games very linear nature, you won't be able to revisit certain parts once you move onto a new area of the game.

Despite the game having a chapter select feature, which can help you go back and grab alot of the collectibles, the trophy description eludes to a very important difference, which is the fact this has to be done "in a single game". With Voxophones and Telescopes/Kinetiscopes, chapter select will bail you out if you miss any of them, which is something the previous Bioshock games did not offer. All collectibles in both previous Bioshock games had to be collected in one Playthrough, which is exactly what this trophy mirrors, and which is why Infusions are the standout collectible. This also ties into another trophy called "Raising the Bar", which requires you to max out either health, shield or salts when distributing infusion upgrades, and it is realistically possible to collect every infusion in the game, yet not max out any particular attribute. If this happens, you'll be running through the game again as per the same condition of having to fulfill it in a single game, and Infusions not being available through chapter select.

All other collectibles also carry over across playthroughs, though there is no way to tell which ones you have and which you need, and even though Voxophones are tracked in the pause menu under their own heading as you progress through a single playthrough, previously acquired Voxophones do not appear, so you'll start with a blank list regardless. Telescopes/Kinetiscopes, just like Infusions, are not tracked either, which almost makes chapter select pointless because you'll more than likely not know which ones you need. The collectible tracking is not handled very well by the game at all, and you're better off collecting everything within a single playthrough and sparing yourself the inconvenience of trying to work out what you may have missed.

Chapter select is very good for the clean up operation though, and the list contains alot of trophies where there is potential for chapter select farming, with cumulative kill totals for the games various weapons, environmental novelties such as tears and Sky-lines and use of vigors, though 2 full Playthroughs of the game will be more than enough to take care of these. 

There are also stacklable trophies for easy, normal and hard difficulty, and even if you choose not to play through on hard first time round, 1999 Mode will unlock everything else upon completion (including another trophy for just beating the game in 1999 Mode without any additional parameters), so your first Playthrough doesn't really matter difficulty wise, which may be something to bear in mind if you wanted a more relaxed journey to focus on as many of these trophies as possible before running with 1999 Mode and leaving yourself as little to do as possible. I found it bearable enough to run collectibles in my 1999 run and grab most of the outstanding trophies I had left with very minimal need for chapter select.

1999 Mode is the main challenge here, and even though the game is very collectible heavy like it's predecessors, it's only really the Infusions that should give you problems. The addition of chapter select negates the previous necessity in Bioshock titles where you had to collect everything in 1 Playthrough, which was a headache to manage, and is subsequently alleviated here as a consequence.

It doesn't really lay a glove on the difficulty of Bioshock 1, and is more akin to that of Bioshock 2, scoring the same mark out of 10. Bioshock 2 had an easier Single Player offering, but more of the difficulty within that game lent towards the Multiplayer portion of the list, which is absent within Bioshock Infinite due to the exclusion of an online mode. 1999 Mode does lure you into a false sense of security with sudden peaks in difficulty towards the end of the game, and the Infusion collectibles could prove to be problematic for a couple of trophies without the advantage of being able to gather them via Chapter Select post-game. However, everything else in between can be naturally picked up within 2 Playthroughs, and you shouldn't need to rely too heavily on chapter select to finish the list.

The game ranges somewhere within the 25-30 hour mark for completion, and although 1999 Mode will eventually stand up for itself a bit, there are tougher Single player games out there, and as long as you can keep on top of the collectible management, this should find it's way into your collection relatively trouble-free.

Notable Trophies -

Scavenger Hunt - Completed the Main Campaign in 1999 Mode without purchasing anything from a Dollar Bill machine.
Infused with Greatness - In the Main Campaign, collected every Infusion upgrade in a single game.

Hardest Trophy -



Scavenger Hunt
Completed the Main Campaign in 1999 Mode without purchasing anything from a Doller Bill machine