DLC #184 - Metal Gear Rising : Revengeance - Wolf's Side Story

I have to be careful that I don't sound too ungrateful here.

After all, Metal Gear Rising : Revengenace has kicked me around to it's own contempt at times, and I could very easily be here bemoaning this last hurrah for a game that has had it's way with me numerous times throughout this journey.

That isn't the case here though, and Wolf's Side Story is a soft landing at the end of a very bumpy ride.

This final chapter focuses on IF Prototype LQ-84i - Otherwise known as Blade Wolf, where you get to play out the backstory to Raiden's companion within the main game.

Wolf's story tells of how he is initially under the command of Mystral, and his desire to align to the values of freedom she is allegedly also fighting for. They're both also loosely associated to another character called Khamsin, and I say loosely purely because the game does a terrible job of filling out Khamsin's character. We all know about Mystral. She's the first major boss in the main game, but Khamsin seems to just exist for the sake of filling out the end of the chapter boss fight role. No proper introduction or fleshed out character development along the way. He briefly appears at the start, says a few lines of nothingness and the next time you see him is when you're fighting him at the end - Presumably to stop Blade Wolf from escaping and finding his freedom.

The biggest difference to Raiden and Jetstream Sam, of course, is the fact that Blade Wolf does not handle like either of the human characters you will have experienced in Metal Gear Rising. He's actually a bit more clunky, definitely more unorthodox and has a much more limited move-set. This made him slightly less enjoyable to play as for me personally, but I respect the desire to offer something a bit different to the norm.

The 4 trophies are an exact carbon copy of Sam's Side Story - It's just a much easier all round completion for this particular set. Run through the chapter once on any difficulty to unlock the trophy for simply beating the episode, and you'll also be able to unlock the trophy for 30 Hunt Kills along the way - Which are just the Blade Wolf equivalent of stealth kills.

I opted to run through the episode the second time aiming to beat it on Revengeance difficulty in less than hour. Same rules apply as before - the "restart from checkpoint" feature is key, as every time you die, the amount of time you took to reach that point will accumulate towards your total one hour time limit, and restarting from checkpoint prior to death will cancel this out, which helps keep the timer down.

Luckily, this is a much easier and shorter experience than the Jetstream Sam DLC, so you're nowhere near as precious for time. It's also possible to surpass every fight with pure stealth, and avoiding combat is a great way to progress steadily without burning up too much of the clock. If you get detected, just restart from checkpoint and go again - It's much more time-efficient than fighting the waves of enemies off.

To add to this, Khamsin is also a much easier final boss than Senator Armstrong too. He will kill you in one hit, which can be detrimental to time if you've been fighting him for a while, but there is a trick. If you constantly bait him into fighting you from a distance, this will trigger a sliding charge attack which you can parry for around 10% of his HP each time, and will also only minimally damage you. Chaining these attacks together will see a significantly easier boss fight than anything else previously experienced, and you can beat him within a couple of minutes. 

It's a night and day comparison to the days it took me to beat Senator Armstrong with Jetstream Sam.

This technique won't work with the final trophy, to beat Khamsin on Hard difficulty without taking any damage, but he has a very limited move-set which is much quicker to understand and fight against. It'll take a slight learning curve as you study the attack patterns, but it's one of the easiest bosses in the game to no damage.

Is Wolf's Side Story shallow on content, fairly uninspired and ultimately left feeling a little bit light? Yes. Am I also thankful for it? Yes. So we'll just draw a line under this one and call it a day.

DLC #183 - Dead Space 3 - Awakened

If you've beaten Dead Space 3, but there was still any doubt in your mind about what it truly wants to be, the small handful of hours you'll spend blasting your through Awakened should completely re-affirm any stance in your head that this is a game with an obvious bias towards Action elements.

A splash of Survival Horror is still there courtesy of a few jump scares, but the core objective is driven by heavy portions of gameplay that will see you slogging through hordes that come at you in their masses as you attempt to progress, and it's arguably more prominent in this stretch of 3 chapters than it was at any point during the main game.

Awakened picks up from the immediate ending point of Dead Space 3. Isaac Clarke and John Carver are allegedly still alive, and their goal is to simply escape from Tau Volantis for good. They settle on a plan to locate a shuttle in order to find their way off the planet. A simple concept for a story, but complex in the sense that it just completely throws out even more ambiguity over the actual fate of Isaac Clarke. 

The story expansion taps into the mental instability of Isaac Clarke that you see sporadically across the series, and you play out a handful of segments where you're physically fighting demons that only seem to exist in Isaac's mind. It makes you wonder - Is he actually dead and you're just living out a nightmare within a parallel universe, or is he actually still alive and these demons are being manifested through the power of his mind?

Way more questions than answers though, and even the ending of Awakened is shrouded in mystery just as much as the end of Dead Space 3 was. It makes you question what the actual point of Awakened was given the fact we didn't get any closure to anything. If you enjoyed the heavy action portions of the main game, you'll have a solid experience at your hands. However, you'll spend your time traipsing across the same environments, fighting the same enemies with the same weapons you had before. The addition of the Circle and their Cult Leader adds a bit of variety, but everything else is exactly the same. If you're looking for a bit more flesh to the bones from a story perspective, you'll also be left wanting. It's a very passable experience.

The package also adds 8 new trophies, and will require that you run through the episode at least twice. You'll need to beat it once under any circumstances, and again in Pure Survival mode, though there's no reason why you couldn't go straight into a Pure Survival playthrough and grab both trophies at once.

There is a key decision to make towards the end of the story that awards 2 trophies for each possible choice though - Which is the sole reason you'll need to play through the episode twice over, regardless of whether you choose to play Pure Survival from the off or not.

Pure Survival mode isn't really that tough here. The game still throws resources at you pretty generously, and your inventory carries over from the main game too, so if you were already stockpiling ammunition and health at the end of the main game, you'll start Awakened with a stocked inventory. It defeats the purpose of Pure Survival, and you should have no problems here at all. It is a hectic experience, and the segment throws alot at you, but you'll respawn from the last checkpoint in worst case scenario, which is never too far back anyway. Hardcore mode would have been a much tougher challenge.

There are collectibles present within the 3 chapters that span Awakened, but perhaps surprisingly, these are not accounted for in any of the trophies within this list. Nor is any requirement to beat the content on Classic or Hardcore modes.

Annoyingly, there is a single Co-Op trophy tucked into the list, requiring you to slow down the bleed out process of your Co-Op partner with statis - A really minor task, but one you're going to need to find a partner for. I had already forecasted this and grabbed it whilst I was going through the main game to save having to come back for it and tackle it at a much later date.

Even beating this twice should take no longer than 5-6 hours. Pure Survival mode might beat you up a little bit, but the consequences for death are nowhere near as severe as they are in Hardcore mode. It might be a good idea to tackle a playthrough in Co-Op, purely for the single Co-Op trophy - Just make sure you're making the right key decision at the end each time to effectively manage playthrough expectations.

Platinum #133 - Dead Space 3

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 6/10

The end of an era. After 91 Platinum trophies, we finally close the catalogue on the Playstation 3. It's where trophy hunting all began, and it's provided me with tons of moments over the years. For all the good, bad and ugly, it will be sorely missed.

It's perhaps fitting that we close this particular chapter with one of my favourite series of games whose all 3 instalments up to this point featured on the Playstation 3 console.

Dead Space 3 isn't my favourite game in the series. In context of how it stacks up against the first two titles, I actually think it's the weakest instalment of the three, but as a stand alone title, it's still a solid, enjoyable game. It takes a few gambles that don't quite pay off, but it still keeps providing just about enough of what made Dead Space great through the years it graced the Playstation 3 era.

Isaac Clarke is still the main character, which has been the case across all 3 Dead Space titles. You're amidst yet another Necromorph outbreak, triggered by main protagonist, Danik and the Circle, whose goal is to use this outbreak to wipe out mankind. Isaac is recruited by Norton and Carver, in order to discover the secret to stopping Danik and the Necromorph invasion from spreading beyond space. This is based on their intel linking Isaac to both the creation and destruction of markers across both previous Dead Space stories, suggesting Isaac is the best person to assist them in stopping the outbreak.

What follows is a solid survival horror/action offering, that only occasionally gets bogged down by a couple of differences that I felt weakened the overall experience compared to the previously stronger titles in the series.

There is a much greater action-orientated focus within Dead Space 3 than there has been previously. Bigger emphasis on gunfights and larger scale shootouts in wide open environments are seen aplenty. For me, what always made Dead Space great from a survival horror perspective was the fact that every environment you walked through was tight, close and gave off a real sense of claustrophobia. The feeling you could be cornered and die at any second gave off that true sense or terror. That's not to say that doesn't exist in Dead Space 3 too, just to a lesser extent - walks through tight corridors and spaces are sacrificed to have you fighting human enemies from behind cover across a snowy plain, which is where you lose the survival horror elements for those moments you're engaging in those action-packed shootouts.

On the subject of human behaviour, the game also loses it's survival horror immersion during those segments where you're battling through Danik's troops. The reason the Necromorphs are scary are because they can charge at you quickly, leap out of vents unexpectedly or jump up to attack you after pretending to be dead, and you lose all of that whenever you engage human enemies. The love triangle between Isaac, Ellie and Norton is a great immersion killer too. It's made to be the focal point of the story way too often, and therefore feels forced. Nothing kills survival horror immersion more than the dulcet undertones of a bad love story playing out and stinking everything up, and Dead Space 3 most certainly has that. These things combine to dull the edges of the survival horror elements a bit too much and that's my biggest criticism of the game.

The game also becomes very heavily action-orientated towards the end. The final 5/6 chapters just feel like you jump from fight to fight and barely have a chance to catch your breath. It's not bad, but it's almost as if Dead Space 3 spends the first 13 chapters completely unsure of what it wants to be between Survival Horror and Action, then just caves in to it's own intrusive thoughts as you spend the remainder of the game blasting your way through hordes of enemies right up to the end.

However, everything that made Dead Space great is still alive and well. The gun catalogue is still full of punchy favourites, from the classic Plasma Cutter to the Ripper. The sense of satisfaction in lopping off a Necromorph's limbs in calculated fashion will never get old, and whilst I'm not crazy on the new gun customisation system, the game doesn't force this upon you and it isn't critical to maximise weapon upgrades to progress through the game, which is a subtle but vital touch. I don't think giving the player a range of customisation options is a bad idea for those that wish to indulge and experiment, but for those like me, who just found the wealth of combinations overwhelming and complicated, then it's good to just be able to fall back on the vanilla options in comfort that it isn't going to impact your progress. I much preferred the mechanic of previous games where you simply gathered nodes to develop a skill tree for each weapon until you maxed it out.

There are still an interesting and varied range of enemies, both new and old, and their diverse range of traits are always making sure you adapt the way you tackle them to keep the upper hand in combat. Avoid shooting the pregnant Necromorph's in the stomach, keep the explosive Necromorph's at a safe distance. It keeps the combat refreshing, but most importantly, reminds me how terrifying Dead Space can be when it nails the Survival Horror element, and the variance in design in it's enemies are a big part of the reason why.

On top of this, Kinesis and Statis are still fun to combine in battle and add to the range of options you have at your disposal during fights. Movement is a bit clunky and will get you killed more often than it probably should, but on the whole, it's fine.

In terms of trophies, this is a standard sized list, with 51 trophies in total, including the Platinum. For the most part, it follows the routine formula for Dead Space titles, with a mixture of varying tasks.

The "Shoot for the Moon" trophy, awarded for Defeating the Moon, concludes the story across it's 19 chapters, and on a standard playthrough, this probably takes somewhere within the region of 12-15 hours. There are 9 trophies in the list dedicated towards natural progression and triggered at specific points on your way towards the conclusion of the game. Dead Space 3 is not a difficult game in it's default version of itself. Weapons are powerful and can be upgraded easily, ammunition/health is never scarce and once you obtain access to RIG upgrades, you'll be able to increase you health, armour and strengthen statis effects which will significantly support you in battle.

There are no difficulty-based trophies like there have been in former Dead Space titles, which have previously required you to beat the game on Zealot setting. However, the trophy list will require you to explore alot of additional modes that have been added to the game this time round.

If you're familiar with Dead Space, you should be accustomed to beating the game multiple times under different conditions, but Dead Space 3 takes that up a couple of notches. From my experience, there were at least 4 full playthroughs of this game, and that's mainly down to a specific group of trophies awarded for beating the game in it's various modes. We're not going to talk about them all in detail, but when you combine the amount of additional time and effort they require you to sink into the trophy list, then are worth mentioning as a collective.

We'll go into the detail around Hardcore mode, but my first time beating the game was actually in co-op, which we'll also go through later, and there were specific reasons behind that. You'll also need to beat the game in Classic mode, where you play without the ability to upgrade or customise any guns. Pure Survival mode, where all health items and ammo have to be crafted with resources and cannot be purchased, and then there's Hardcore mode...

The "Aren't You Thankful?" trophy, awarded for Completing the game on Hardcore Mode, returns from Dead Space 2, but comes with some big adjustments. The previous iteration of Hardcore mode allowed you infinite deaths, but the catch was, you could only make 3 saves in the entire game, so you'd effectively need to beat the game in 3 segments. The challenge was committing hours of play in a single sitting, and if you died, you'd lose all that progress. It was challenging in it's own right, but it wasn't quite a perma-death mode.

This trophy IS a perma-death mode. You can save as many times as you wish, but the moment you die, the save file is wiped and you have to start over from the very beginning. Maximum disclosure; I used a save file trick to help me achieve this feat, and I will comfortably argue that this trophy pushes this Platinum to the upper realms of the difficulty scale if done completely legitimately.

I actually played through up until Chapter 6 without any major problems, but the reality of the task started to go through my head. This is a 10-12 hour game if you ignore all the side content. Was I really prepared to potentially die half-way through, or even further on, and expect myself to have the motivation to start from the beginning? The simple answer was no, so I would periodically back up my save file to the console, and reload it whenever I died.

I died. Alot. Dead Space 3 will generally kill you in a couple of ways. Firstly, there are cheap deaths lying around every corner. Getting turned into mince by an environmental hazard, failing to navigate an obstacle during the free-flying segments or getting crushed by a falling piece of rock on the wall climbing sections. These all occurred at least once during my Hardcore playthrough.

Secondly, the game's action-heavy segments. These are extremely high-risk, because they mostly occur towards the end of the game where there's a much higher level of jeopardy towards the trophy. It's very easy to become overwhelmed by large groups of enemies if you struggle to keep the numbers down, and the clunky movement and roll mechanic make it tough to survive in some of these instances. I lost many battles to the volume game, and combined with the previous point, I just didn't feel like Hardcore mode was a justifiable challenge for a game I was simply looking to just complete after 13 years of first starting it. This is fairly reflected within the official difficulty rating.

The "Ghosts of the Past" trophy, awarded for Facing all of Carver's demons by completing all Co-Op only optional missions, is where the trophy list really allows the game to lean into the Co-Op aspect.

As you progress through the story, you'll come across certain areas which contain Co-Operative only missions, and you won't be able to complete these unless you have a Co-Op partner. I mentioned above that there was a reason I beat the game for the first time with a Co-Op partner, and this is it.

There are only 3 Co-Op missions in the entire game, and you can approach this trophy in one of two different ways. You can choose to just go through the entire game from start to finish with a Co-Op partner like I did. As long as you're aware of when the optional missions occur and don't accidentally bypass them, this is a fairly foolproof method, and this is exactly how I did it.

The second option is to just jump straight into the relevant chapters via the chapter select screen and hope you can find a Co-Op partner to complete the optional missions with on an adhoc basis. However, this requires another player to be at that exact point of the story at that exact time, so it's a very specific requirement that massively restricts your choices. If you don't have someone willing to play through the game with you though, this will be your only option.

Further to this, and this is something Co-Op caused me further challenges with, the game has a handful of trophies for the various collectibles scattered around the game. Dead Space loves collectibles, and they're very much alive and well here again, coming in the form of 40 Artifacts, 71 Circuit Upgrades, 71 Audio and Text logs and 73 Weapon Parts - That's 257 in total.

The reason I'm mentioning these here is because a handful of these collectibles can only be obtained within optional Co-Op missions, and this is something that I completely overlooked during my Co-Op playthrough of the game. This meant I had to indulge in the second method later on via chapter select, when it became much harder to find players to go through the game with and collect these missing items for the remaining collectible trophies. The Co-Op mode is also purely online, and cannot be done locally via split-screen.

The Co-Op mode is implemented well, and the player who controls Carver will play out specific fight segments that the player playing as Isaac won't see as Carver's demons in his head manifest in front of him. The game's action-based vibes peak during Co-Op, and it pretty much zaps the Survival Horror immersion fully away from the game when you know you're being accompanied by another player at all times, but I didn't hate it as much as others perhaps did.

Everything else in the trophy list is familiar. There are some chapter-specific trophies, kill accumulation trophies and some Co-Op exclusive trophies to be conscious of grabbing when you're playing online with a partner. The game adds a chapter select feature for the first time too, which is a game-changer. It makes tracking all the collectibles and the completion requirements of optional missions easy, as they're all outlined on a checklist for each chapter. It also adds extra convenience by allowing you to just freely jump into certain parts of the game for the purpose of easy kill-farming or fulfilling those previously mentioned chapter-specific tasks.

This could easily be a 9/10 Platinum trophy. The Hardcore mode, on paper, is a much tougher prospect than that of the Dead Space 2 Hardcore mode, due to this being a true Perma-death concept. The ability to save your progress locally, and re-write your save file nullifies the challenge. It's frustrating to have to constantly fiddle around with game saves and transporting them back and forth across the system, especially once the deaths start to accumulate, but it's a small price to pay in comparison to the legitimate method of starting from scratch every single time, which I simply wasn't willing to entertain at this point.

You will need to beat the game at least 4 times, accounting for an initial playthrough, Classic mode, Pure Survival mode and then Hardcore mode. I would strongly recommend a Co-Op playthrough as your initial run if you can. This will accumulate the completion time healthily, and with the clean-up process on top, you're looking at around 50-60 hours for the Platinum trophy.

For me, the final one on the Playstation 3. What a ride it's been.

Notable Trophies -

Shoot for the Moon - Defeat the Moon.
Aren't You Thankful? - Complete the game on Hardcore Mode.
Ghosts of the Past - Face all of Carver's demons by completing all Co-Op only optional missions.

Hardest Trophy -

Aren't You Thankful?

Complete the game on Hardcore Mode.