Platinum #56 - L.A. Noire

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 7/10

Despite having a practically non-existent learning curve, and the simple nature of the game, it still springs up a relatively solid challenge in it's trophy list, with a handful of trophies that will make you work hard for the Platinum.

The list packs a generous amount of progression based trophies, with the "Moth to a Flame" trophy, awarded for completing all cases on the Arson desk, being the final port of call for finishing the game's story, which includes just over 20 cases across 5 different police desks, and you're probably looking at a good 15-20 hours to beat the main game first time through.

There are also a small selection of trophies awarded for completing certain chapter specific actions, all based around choosing the correct decisions during interrogations or hunting for clues, but most of these are hidden, due to their spoiler-ish nature. You can go back through each case using chapter select at any point, so they're easy to unlock if you miss them at all, and you'll need to replay cases at the end in order to achieve a 5 star valour rating anyway, so missing them first time around is irrelevant. 

On the subject of case ratings, they're actually the centre of the toughest trophy in the whole list. The "Shamus to the Stars" trophy, awarded for completing all story cases with a 5 star rating, requires you achieve almost near perfection in each case, by discovering all clues, answering every interrogation question correctly and causing minimal damage to cars and property during the case.

Achieving a 5 star rating without any aid or assistance is a difficult task, not to mention time consuming, since you'll most likely need to replay the majority of cases again. You can use intuition points to find harder to see clues or remove answer options during interrogations, and if you've already beaten the game and you're replaying cases to 5 star them, you'll start with 5 intuition points per case, which is extremely helpful in cases that contain alot of clues and questions to answer. In most cases, it's the interrogation questions that will prevent you from earning a 5 star rating, and the leeway for error is extremely small, with the game allowing you no more than 2 incorrect questions or missed clues for a 5 star rating. 

It's also important to drive carefully and minimise damage to your surroundings, especially for cases that contain car chases and shoot-outs, which are fairly frequent. Assuming you're relatively intelligent, and as long as you're careful and use intuition points sensibly, you shouldn't have too many problems, though it's still the hardest trophy in the game by a mile.

The "Auto Fanatic" trophy, awarded for driving every vehicle in the city, requires you to discover all of the game's 95 vehicles scattered around the city, and is an extremely time consuming, and in some respects, frustrating task. The main issue with this trophy is the fact that the majority of the vehicles in the game have no concrete locations, and aside from the obvious (service vehicles being located next to hospitals, police stations, etc.) and "special" vehicles that pop up in garages at marked locations, you'll have to drive around, most of the time aimlessly, in order to find exactly what you need.

It isn't a problem at first, but when you get down to the nitty-gritty of needing only a handful of vehicles, then you can literally spend hours searching for them, and the game gives you no assistance at all regarding their whereabouts. Many of the vehicles can look extremely similar too, which throws you off horribly sometimes, and even though the game does record which vehicles you've collected, and the ones you still need, you have to quit your game and go to the car showroom in the man menu in order to view them, and even then all you see is a silhouette of the car that's missing. Not exactly a great help when most of them look similar.

It turns out to be a pretty frustrating trophy, and it adds unnecessary hours onto the Platinum timescale. Of course, it does all depend on how lucky you are with stumbling across the remaining vehicles you need to unlock the trophy, but chances are, you'll be slogging away at this one for a good few hours by the time it boils down to those last few cars you still need for the trophy.

On the collectibles angle, the "Hollywoodland" trophy, awarded for finding and inspecting all gold film reels, requires you to locate all 50 gold reels scattered around the city, and just like the "Auto Fanatic" trophy, it can be just as annoying too. The film reels aren't marked on your map, and there's nothing that will allow you to display them, so you'll have to have a physical guide at the ready, and since the map is incredibly expansive, and the reels are scattered around heavily, you'll be trekking the surroundings for a good few hours if you want to find them all, resulting in a bit of a grind.

The "Public Menace" trophy, awarded for racking up $47,000 dollars of penalties during a single story case, requires you to wreck as many cars as you can before finishing any case. Even though this is simply matter of causing as much destruction possible, the majority of the vehicles in the game aren't worth that much, and if you don't approach the trophy in the correct way, it just turns into another unnecessarily long grind.

The quickest and most effective way to obtain this trophy is to grab one of the special cars, since most of them are worth well over $5,000, which is way more than what most of the cars in the game are worth, wreck it and then wait for it to respawn. It might take a few minutes to reappear, but it's alot faster than any other available method for this trophy.

To top it all off, and something that seems to be typical of Rockstar games, the "City of Angels" trophy, awarded for reaching 100% game completion, requires you to fulfil everything in the entire game, including beating all story cases, collecting all vehicles and gold film reels, completing all street crimes and finding all newspapers and landmarks.

There's alot to get through, but most of the items required to achieve 100% are included with their own trophies within the list, and the game does actually track what you have left to collect on it's own game completion list, so you shouldn't have any difficulties finding out what you still need to fulfil the criteria for the trophy to unlock.

When you account for 15-20 hour story, and then the repetition of cases that need to be 5 starred, it is a pretty time consuming list too. Add on top of that the collectibles and other tasks required for the 100% completion rating, and 40-50 hours is a realistic estimate for most people.

All in all, it's a solid Platinum trophy to achieve. The difficulty of the game itself mostly hinges on being able to obtain a 5 star rating in every single case, which is a tough little venture. However, some frustrating collectible based trophies and a hefty amount of work needed to attain a 100% game completion rating also contribute to the overall rating of the list.

Notable Trophies - 

Shamus to the Stars - Complete all story cases with a 5 Star rating
Auto Fanatic - Drive every vehicle in the city
Hollywoodland - Find and inspect all gold film reels
The City Of The Angels - Reach 100% Game Complete

Hardest Trophy -

Shamus to the Stars
Complete all story cases with a 5 Star rating

Platinum #55 - Dead Space 2

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 9/10

Following up on a solid offering from Dead Space, this list ups the difficulty and provides an even steeper challenge than before.

Despite the overall difficulty, the list does actually provide a large array of relatively easy trophies, including 15 progression based trophies awarded for hitting various key points throughout the story. There are also a mixture of cumulative kill-based trophies, weapon-specific trophies and other trophies awarded for performing very specific actions, most of which you can just unlock naturally as you play through the story mode.

The real toughness of the list shines through in a just a small selection of the whole lists trophies, but despite this, they prove to be a solid test of skill and patience.

The "Mission Impossible" trophy, awarded for completing the game on Zealot setting, requires you to beat the game on it's hardest true difficulty level, and as far as hard modes go, this is one of the tougher ones out there. Although you don't actually need to unlock Zealot difficulty setting, and can effectively jump straight into it, it's best advised to beat the game once on a lower difficulty in order to unlock New Game +, which will make Zealot difficulty alot easier to tackle.

New Game + allows you to carry forward all of your weapons, upgrades and items into a second playthrough, which is extremely useful for battling the game on it's toughest setting, and despite the fact the game will still present a steady challenge, it is much easier to manage when you have the benefit of upgraded weapons and armour from a previous playthrough. I'd almost go as far to say it is essential you beat the game once and unlock New Game + because the game would simply be too difficulty to beat under other circumstances.

Even with the benefit of being able to carry over weapons and upgrades, you can still expect a solid challenge. Enemies are alot tougher to take down and generally do more damage with attacks, which is only really problematic during ambushes or big set pieces, but the limited amount of health throughout the game still means you'll need to be aware, since it doesn't take much for any enemy to kill you and set you back.

The "Hard to the Core" trophy, awarded for completing the game on Hardcore setting, requires you to beat the game with just 3 saves at your disposal, and death at any point results to being pushed back to your last available save point. 

This is without doubt the stand out trophy in this entire list, and Hardcore mode not only limits your ammunition and health, but seriously tests your nerves and persistence. The key to beating the game on Hardcore mode essentially lies within great preparation and planning, and mistakes can be seriously punished at any moment.

I still maintain that the biggest problem with Hardcore mode is psychologically knowing that you really can't afford to die, in fear of losing hours of progress, or having repeat large portions of the game all over again. It can lead to silly mistakes that cause unnecessary deaths, or panicking at vital moments that can also cause similar demise. However, it is still true that Hardcore mode does bump up the toughness of enemies, and that ammunition and health is much scarcer. You also do not get the benefit of being able to play in New Game +, meaning you're forced to start the game from scratch without any weapons or upgrades.

I died on numerous occasions on Hardcore mode, and the amount of time lost made it tougher each time. It's difficult to understate the importance of forward planning too, which is the key to succeeding in Hardcore mode. Knowing where to spend your credits and what weapons/upgrades to spend them on makes pivotal areas of the games easier to manage, and increases your chances of getting past them without dying. It's also essential to plot your save points carefully too, as saving too early could leave you with more work to do later on, just in the same way trying to save too late could cause an untimely death and undo hours of hard work instantly.

It is also important to note that, due to the fact you're permitted just 3 saves, you'll need to find the time to commit yourself to 3 individual sessions of play, playing in blocks of anywhere up to 5 hours, depending on planned save points, so the endurance factor is also a key component to Hardcore mode.

In reality, there are numerous ways to approach the mode, and it's a certainty that there are many tactics that will help people to succeed in various ways, but the demands and sheer magnitude of the challenge never changes, and it remains one of the toughest Gold trophies available in any game to date.

Aside from those trophies, the game doesn't really present much else in the way of a direct challenge, though the "Librarian" trophy, awarded for collecting 100 audio logs fulfils the collectibles criteria nicely. As with the original game, you have some nice leeway on the amount of audio logs that are actually available throughout the game, and due to it's very linear nature, you should naturally run into most of them without having to go out of your way too much.

The "Fully Loaded" trophy, awarded for simultaneously having four fully upgraded weapons, takes a ton of power nodes to achieve, and can actually only be achieved across 2 playthroughs through New Game+, since you won't be able to gather enough power nodes across a solitary playthrough in order to fully max out 4 weapons. Yet another good reason why it's advisable to take a relaxed playthrough of the game before tackling the Zealot difficulty setting.

In total, you're looking at a recommended 3 playthroughs of the game to unlock everything, but given how massively variant the times for beating Hardcore mode could be, it's difficult to nail a solid time estimation on the Platinum trophy. The story itself takes around 10-12 hours to get through, but the amount of hours you could very easily lose on Hardcore mode is harder to judge.

There's no denying the true challenge of this list lies in beating the game on it's 2 toughest modes. Zealot difficulty presents a solid offering, but pales in comparison to Hardcore mode, which definitely lives up to it's billing, and provides one of the sternest tests available in any game.

The ease amongst the list is just to lure you into what turns out to be a pretty prestigious Platinum trophy for any collection.

Notable Trophies - 

Mission Impossible - Complete the game on Zealot setting
Hard to the Core - Complete the game on Hard Core setting
Fully Loaded - Simultaneously have four completely upgraded weapons

Hardest Trophy -

Hard to the Core
Complete the game on Hardcore setting

Platinum #54 - FIFA Street

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 8/10

This list is split into 2 distinct areas of focus, including the FIFA Street World Tour and the Multi-Player online mode.

The World Tour trophies cover most of this games list, with a host of progression based trophies for marching through and winning games at all 4 stages in the tour.

You get awarded trophies for "beating" each of the 4 stages (Regional, National, European and Global) culminating in the "World Grand Champion" trophy, awarded for winning stage 4 of the World Tour. 

Winning a stage just means you have to unlock the final tournament of the stage, by earning enough ranking points (through placing high in tournaments), to reach the top 8 of the team standings, and even though the World Tour mode is large and expansive, you don't need to compete in every single event in order to take on the final tournament. This lessens the overall completion time of the World Tour significantly, since beating every single event isn't a necessity to unlock all of the trophies on offer, however for trophies such as "Mighty Heroes", awarded for having a team of 8 created players that are level 50 or higher, you'll need to slog through a fair amount of events/tournaments anyway in order to hit level 50 with 8 players, so even though it isn't compulsory to compete in every event, it's encouraged to compete in as many as possible, in order to unlock the trophies that require a certain amount of accumulation. 

Even with the minimum amount of events/tournaments played, you can still probably expect to sink 15-20 hours into the World Tour mode. The hardest difficulty setting, which isn't influenced by the trophies, is actually quite a solid test, and getting all the way through to stage 4 of the World Tour will still require you beat a handful of tournaments and events along the way. Couple that with some of the longer winded trophies on the side, and it's a pretty extensive game mode that requires a solid chunk of time to complete.

Slightly tied into the World Tour is the "Globetrotter" trophy, awarded for winning a match/event in every venue, and although you'll be able to fulfil most of the criteria through the various venues you visit in World Tour mode, there are a small selection of venues that are only available in Hit the Streets mode or Online, which is definitely something to look out for, especially if you're still missing the trophy when you think you may have won a game in every venue.

There's also no in-game checklist or tracker relating to which venues you've won a game at already, and with just over 40 venues in total, it is alot to keep track of, so a physical checklist of some sort is the only way to keep score on which venues you've managed to win at and which ones you have remaining. It's also important to note you do need to win a game at every venue, and not just merely play a match there, a small but very significant detail that definitely shouldn't be overlooked.

The Multi-Player portion of this list is where the true challenge of the game comes out, with the "Online Dominance" trophy, awarded for winning all 9 Online cups, being, by far, the hardest trophy in this entire list.

The cups consist of 4 knock-out rounds, and are rotated in selection on a weekly basis, spanning a 9 week period for just the weekend, meaning you have roughly a 3 day period where you can win a tournament and unlock the cup for progress towards the trophy. This means missing out on a cup for just 1 week makes this Platinum completion time a minimum of 9 weeks, since you'll have to wait for the cycle to come round full circle and allow you to enter the tournament again. 

Thankfully, it never happened to me, but with this sort of set-up, it makes it much more difficult and adds alot of pressure on players to win the cups so they don't miss the small window of opportunity each week. Some of the cups are incredibly difficult to win aswell, with score-fests of 5 and 6 a-side meaning games can go either way, and the naturally low scoring Futsal tournaments could see you concede just 1 goal and lose a game. Every tournament is straight knock-out format too, meaning you'll also need to be prepared to repeat tournaments multiple times before you win them, and even accept that you might not even win them within the allotted time window. 

Not only do you need to be very good at the game, as you're bound to come across some decent players, but you'll also need to make up the time consistently each week to devote yourself to this trophy, which, in many respects, is probably harder than actually winning the cups themselves. It is easily one of the toughest Gold trophies I've ever earned.

The Multi-Player mode does offer a handful of other trophies too, but these are mostly just around community/sharing based trophies, which are very easy to achieve in contrast.

Quick mention to the "Who bought the snacks?" trophy, awarded for winning a tournament with a local Co-op player. Another one of those awkward trophies that requires you to own 2 controllers to unlock.

All in all, despite being a medium sized list, this is a tough Platinum to obtain. The World Tour is lengthy, and if played on the hardest difficulty setting, a pretty challenging venture, despite the fact you don't even need to compete in every single event to unlock all the trophies on offer.

However, the Multi-Player is where this game's difficulty truly excels, with the "Online Dominance" trophy providing one of the toughest challenges of any game to date. In total, you're looking at around 30-35 hours to unlock everything, though because of the "Online Dominance" trophy, the game still requires a minimum commitment of 9 weeks, providing you don't miss out on any cup windows at any point.

The Gold trophies are the ones that do the real damage here, and it definitely keeps up the standard of FIFA games and difficult trophy lists.

Notable Trophies - 

World Grand Champion - Win Stage 4 of World Tour
Globetrotter - In any game mode win a match/event in every venue
Online Dominance - Win all 9 online cups
Who bought the snacks? - Win a tournament with a local Co-Op player

Hardest Trophy -

Online Dominance
Win all 9 Online Cups

Platinum #53 - Sleeping Dogs

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 5/10

There isn't really much about this game that makes it difficult, and with a fairly modest completion time too, it's quite a relaxed list.

The trophy list is widely distributed across various elements of the open world, and such an even spread ensures that the list doesn't have too much of an imbalanced focus on certain areas.

The story arc is the main attraction, carrying 30 missions which contribute just 4 natural progression based trophies to the list. As you'd expect from an open world game, there are no difficulty settings either, meaning you don't have any trophies on offer relating to varying difficulty levels. 

The "Big Smiles All Round" trophy, awarded for completing the mission "Big Smile Lee", requires you to beat the final mission of the game, and is only a Silver trophy, which a touch dissapointing when you consider you'd expect to be awarded a Gold trophy for beating any game with a story element, but you'll need to beat practically everything the game has to offer to unlock the Platinum trophy anyway, so it's largely irrelevant regardless.

Speaking of which, the "Chief Inspector" trophy, awarded for completing 100% of missions, cases, events, favours, jobs and races, requires you to cover every element of the game, and beating all of it to 100% to unlock this trophy will take a solid amount of time and dedication. Collectively, there is alot of these to get through, but most of them, barring the story missions and police cases, take very little time to complete, are incredibly easy and you'll run into the vast majority of them whilst free-roaming the city and going between point to point during other events. Most of them are automatically marked on the map too, aswell as tracked in your statistics page, which gives you easy ways to keep on top of what you still need to complete in order to fulfil the requirements of the trophy.

The rest of the list is mostly focused around all the tasks needed to achieve a 100% in-game completion, and in truth, most of them just end up feeling like a bit of a checklist exercise, with the challenge presented at a bare minimum.

So, what are the tougher elements of this list? The "Ultimate Fighter" trophy, awarded for unlocking 10 Triad upgrades, is a bit of a grind that will require you to max out your Triad experience to level 10 by replaying story missions in order to better your previous Triad scores and net enough experience to tip into level 10. You'll hit the end-game at anywhere up to half-way through level 9, and replaying your lower scoring missions in regards to Triad experience, is the only way to increase your overall level. 

The issue comes from the fact that, most of the missions will already be close to maxed out on experience, which means you'll struggle for improvement in most places and the meter will only very slowly fill up when you better your previous scores, which makes it a fairly tedious and longer than necessary process to find those last snippets of experience required to hit level 10 and unlock the 10th upgrade that will unlock the trophy. It's a bit strange, given the fact your Cop experience will max out well before the conclusion of the story, and although there are case files available that exclusively offer Cop experience, there is still a noticeable imbalance between both Triad and Cop levelling. It's also important to note that equipping the mountaineering clothing set grants you an additional 15% experience on missions where Triad exp is awarded, and although it still won't quite get you to level 10, it will definitely minimise the grind element.

The "Pure Gold" trophy, awarded for achieving 30 Gold stat awards, is the hardest trophy in the list and requires you to earn a Gold medal in every category listed under the Social Hub. This gives you no selection to pick and choose from, as there are bang on 30 categories, and some of them are alot trickier to earn a Gold medal in than others. The game will do it's best help you out, giving you ample opportunities throughout various main and side missions, by offering up situations that will help you fulfil some of the requirements for the majority of the stat awards, but you'll still need to go out of your way a fair amount to get the rest of them done, including gamling net profit, total money earned and total expenditure. This will most likely be the final trophy you unlock too, so it takes you well into the end-game as a result.

The list does also boast a pretty heavy emphasis on collectibles, with a slew of trophies awarded for finding all lockboxes in each district, all health shrines and hacking all security cameras. Despite there being a ton of them to gather, the game is generous in providing help to the player, marking every collectible on the map for completing certain favours for NPC's around the city. Although some of them are located in harder to reach places, particularly the lockboxes, the fact there isn't any need for a physical guide makes them instantly easier to track down than most standard collectible related fares, but the sheer volume of them can't make you help but feel it becomes a touch too grindy in the end.

The majoirty of this list is very straight-forward, and the game gives a massive influx of assistance to the player when it come to the tricky elements of the list. As long as you're aiming for the "Chief Inspector" trophy, you'll unlock practically everything else the game has to offer along the way, with only a small portion left where you actively have to go out of your way to earn. The difficulty of the game itself is very minimal, aside the odd main story mission, and some of the collectibles and accumulation of Triad experience can be a bit of a bore-fest. With that being said, you can still easily complete everything right down to the Platinum trophy in anywhere between 25-35 hours (though it clocked in at just under 36 for me).

Notable Trophies - 

Big Smiles All Round - Complete Big Smile Lee
Chief Inspector - Complete 100% of all missions, cases, favours, events, jobs and races
Ultimate Fighter - Unlock ten Triad Upgrades
Pure Gold - Achieve 30 Gold Stat awards

Hardest Trophy -

Pure Gold
Achieve 30 Gold Stat Awards