Platinum #141 - Alan Wake : Remastered

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 4/10

"Psychological Action Thriller" is what Alan Wake bills itself as. I didn't have any other clues at to what this may entail before I began the game, but I'm glad my curiosity got the better of me. It didn't exactly blow me away, but it's an honest, solid game.

Admittedly, the story is hard to understand, but it doesn't outstay it's welcome and with a couple of episodic pieces of DLC waiting in the wings, there's always the faint hope things become a bit clearer.

Alan Wake himself is an apparently famous crime fiction author, and when his wife mysteriously disappears during a cabin getaway in the small town of Bright Falls, his sole motivation is to understand how she went missing and find her.

The clues to her whereabouts are contained within the manuscripts of a book littered across the ground throughout the game that Alan has apparently been working on, and the theory is that the developing situation around his wife is being manifested from his own creative writing. Without giving too much away (not that I can be confident in saying that), this theory is directly hypothesised by Alan Wake himself during the game, though posed more as a question, as if he himself is ambiguous about what's actually going on. So who knows.

The game draws on heavy influences from horror writer Stephen King, and it makes no efforts to disguise these. In fact, they're really blatant at times. The man himself is name-dropped on numerous occasions, and there are plenty of references to his novels baked into the gameplay features, including inanimate objects being possessed by mysterious forces and shadowy figures out to kill you.

I'm not overly keen on the cast of characters. Alan Wake himself is a fairly dull and bland main character, which is ironic given the fact he's a creative writer by trade. The cast around him isn't much better though, and I thought the lack of memorable characters was a big downside to the game. It's a nice touch that the narration of the story comes from the main character himself, and the running commentary does a nice job of providing an authentic feel to the script, even if it is prone to sounding a bit too cheesy at times.

Despite this being a Remastered version of the game, the graphics are a bit hit and miss. I felt like the character models still looked dated, and the voice acting/lip syncing during cutscenes is poor. This is a Remaster of a game that was originally released in 2010, so maybe I should be a bit more forgiving, but I've definitely played sharper remasters recently in the graphical department and Alan Wake doesn't feel up to par in comparison.

The environments are captured well though, and do a good job at providing the tension of a psychological horror. Dense fog, unnerving darkness and an eerie chorus of music every time enemies are nearby. All contribute to nailing the atmosphere. I wish there was a bit more variety though. You seem to spend 80% of the game trekking through a forest and the enemy variation is very limited.

In terms of trophies, this is a standard sized list with 51 trophies available, including the Platinum trophy, spread across an entirely Single Player driven experience.

Firstly, a casual playthrough of the game's story for two primary reasons. As always, to enjoy the story at a leisurely pace, but also conscious to the fact that we'd need to unlock Nightmare difficulty, which is achieved through beating the game just once on either Easy or Normal difficulty first.

The game is broken down into 6 Episodes, and contains 16 trophies related to either natural story progression or beating the game on a specific difficulty level, which is roughly a third of the entire list. Apart from this being about a mysterious missing persons case, I found the story difficult to understand. Maybe it's purposely convoluted. There are constant interactions with Doctor Emil Hartman, who believes Alan is potentially psychologically unstable, and the random Manuscript pages lying around at times seem to foretell the future. A completely different angle to the one presented above which theorises that Alan is responsible for manifesting the dark energy through his own writing. Either way, if there is a story to grasp, I didn't really grasp it.

The gameplay itself is very simplistic. It's quickly determined that the biggest weakness to the darkness is light. You get access to a torch in order to shine beams of light directly at an enemy and weaken them. Once they're vulnerable enough, you'll have the choice from around 5/6 weapons to finish them off. There is a clear running theme of combatting the darkness through the salvation of light, and the variance on this theme is strong. You can use different sources of light against enemies. Headlight beams on vehicles, spotlights and there are even multiple variations of the handheld torch you carry around with you. It's a new concept to me and I liked the depth it adds to the gameplay.

Outside of the direct combat, you can only perform 3 other actions. Dodge, Jump and Run - and don't underestimate any of these, especially when it comes to your Nightmare playthrough. The latter in particular will prove to come in very useful.

Alan Wake doesn't have an expansive skill tree, there isn't a levelling system and you can't upgrade any weapons or equipment. It's about as minimalist of a combat experience money can buy. Is the game worse off for it? Not really. I think the game does a good job of balancing the atmospheric pacing. There are some hairy moments and combat-centric set pieces, but they're few and far between as the game has you trawling through eerie environments and the balls to the wall action moments mostly remains on the shelf. The depth of the combat is ultimately proportionate to what the game throws at you, so you never feel like you're held back by the lack of character development options.

The challenge on Normal difficulty really isn't that great and there are alot of miscellaneous and chapter-specific trophies to collect as you go through the game too. Aside the odd bit of side-tracking, Alan Wake is also a very linear game with clearly defined paths from point A to B. You're even led by distanced light and encouraged by the game to follow the light source if you ever feel like you're lost or not moving in the right direction.

After a casual playthrough of the game, I'd unlocked 37 trophies from the list, and this was without any real specific focus on anything other than just beating the game. This would unlock Nightmare difficulty, where the challenge of the list would peak.

The "Alan, Wake Up" trophy, awarded for Completing the game on Nightmare difficulty, comes with it's challenges, and these are notable in comparison to lower difficulty levels of the game.

The most notable difference is the fact that you die much easier. Most enemies only need to hit you a couple of times to kill you, and I actually found that the best strategy for tackling Nightmare difficulty in most instances was to run away. This is what I meant by earlier when I referenced the importance of not underestimating your options outside of combat. This isn't completely fool proof though and there are 2 small nuances to be aware of when choosing this strategy.

Firstly, there's this mechanic in place which only allows Alan Wake to run for a limited amount of time before running out of breath and slowing down, so it can be difficult to get away sometimes. I'm not necessarily against this feature, but enemies don't seem to suffer from the same sort of fatigue, so they can catch and kill you way too easily at times and it feels like a cheap handicap that purely exists to force you into combat. It should be considered a viable strategy to look to escape in games like Alan Wake that bill themselves as psychological thrillers. Secondly, you can sometimes be hit with projectile weapons whilst attempting to escape from a fight. Enemies have annoyingly pinpoint accuracy, and there are plenty of times you'll be felled whilst fleeing courtesy of a flying knife to the back from 50 yards away.

However, the overly generous checkpoint system will come to your rescue, and whilst you may end up accumulating your fair share of deaths throughout a Nightmare playthrough, you'll never have to make up too much lost ground. Checkpoints are thrown at you with a level of frequency that makes you feel like the game feels sorry for you. It's hard to be angry at the cheap tactics the game deploys to earn a death out of you when the most it'll ever seem to set you back is 30 seconds. It's a big redeeming feature.

Enemies do also take a few more bullets to go down on Nightmare difficulty too, but another thing the game is also overly generous with is supplying you with ammunition to offset this. I never once really found myself in a perilous position at any point in the game, especially when it comes to the segments where you're forced to fight larger groups of enemies because your path to progression is blocked until you clear out what's in front of you. There are 30 hidden chests that you'll need to collect as part of the collectibles element of this list, but these contain generous stashes of ammo that I would absolutely recommend going out of your way to find and open. Once you get hold of flares and flashbangs, the game may aswell roll out a red carpet straight to the end. They're incredibly powerful and can take out groups of enemies in one go if you ever feel overwhelmed or close to death.

You'll still die a reasonable amount. The game loves a cheap death, and some of the tougher fight segments where you need to rely on some really wonky AI to help you deal with crowds of enemies are frustrating. It's worth at least an extra point on the difficulty scale as a whole experience, but to say there are tougher offerings out there would be an understatement.

The other distraction of Nightmare mode was gathering the array of collectibles on offer, and does Alan Wake love a collectible. There are a whopping 298 collectibles in total, including 100 Coffee thermos flasks, 106 Manuscript pages, 11 Radio shows to listen to, 14 TV shows to watch, 30 Hidden chests, 12 Pyramid cans to shoot and 25 Signs to read. Each of these comes with it's own trophy once they've all been collected too.

For a game the length of Alan Wake, it is completely overloaded with collectibles, and you feel like you need to stop to turn your attention to something every 5 steps. It's intrusive to the flow of gameplay and breaks up the immersion way too much. It's almost as if they had so many ideas, they felt the best way to approach it was to just cram them all in and hope nobody really noticed. I did decide to collect everything I could as soon as I saw it on my Normal difficulty playthrough of the game, and actually managed to find the majority of the collectibles without really looking too hard, which is also a good testament to the linear nature of the game. You may have to go off the beaten path sometimes, but most of it is literally looking back at you.

There is an exception to be aware of for the Manuscript pages. Some of these are only collectible on Nightmare difficulty, but these are clearly marked out on the segment within the pause menu that lists all the manuscripts and those you may be missing. All of the other collectibles can be gathered up on any difficulty you wish, but given the fact you'll need to beat the game on Nightmare difficulty anyway, it's a wise tactic to sweep through whatever you see on your initial run, and use a guide to mop up the remainder on a second run.

Outside of this, there are a small bunch of chapter-specific trophies, which can easily be obtained through the chapter select option on the main menu, should you miss them through any of your playthroughs. The chapters are even further divided into sub-sections, so you don't even need to replay entire episodes of the game to get to the specific part you need to get to in order to unlock any of these trophies. The game is very user-friendly and gives the player loads of leeway into the accessibility of trophies. Even collectibles can be scooped up via the chapter select feature for any strays you may have missed. Some games still require you to collect everything in a single playthrough and will punish you for anything you miss by making you play the entire game again. Big thumbs up for the sort of flexibility on display here, and this level of accessibility is a big influencer on the overall difficulty rating.

Ultimately, Alan Wake is an easy game to pinpoint on the difficulty scale. There's no doubt you'll die often on Nightmare difficulty, but the checkpoint system is so generous, death feels almost inconsequential, and you rarely have to re-tread old ground. It almost negates the sense of challenge entirely because you never have to worry about scrambling around for survival to prevent an imminent loss of progress. Die, reload and get straight back into the fight you just lost. The story is also a modest length, at roughly 10-12 hours, and doesn't insist on being prolonged or stretched out. It sometimes feels like there's pressure for Single Player games, that don't offer any additional games modes, to max out their story offerings to extend beyond 20 hours in order to achieve public satisfaction, but Alan Wake doesn't choose to be a victim of this and that's refreshing.

The game is far too collectible heavy though. There just isn't a necessity for any game to contain as many as almost 300 collectibles and attach individual trophies to all of them. They're not my favourite kind of trophy as it is, and they seem to be as common as they ever have. Despite my disdain for them, there's ways to do them right and the sheer volume of unnecessary collectibles is a thumbs down. The Manuscripts might provide some added value to the lore of the game, but the rest of it just feels like clutter with little added value. They're easily worth an additional point on their own merits.

A short-ish story, necessity for just 2 playthroughs and an accommodating chapter select feature. Nightmare difficulty feels like it deploys some cheap tactics sometimes and the collectibles feel like a chore, but Alan Wake is a great example of less is more, and that includes the requirements of the Platinum trophy.

Notable Trophies -

Alan, Wake Up - You completed the game on Nightmare difficulty.

Hardest Trophy -

Alan, Wake Up

You completed the game on Nightmare difficulty

DLC #200 - Prey - Mooncrash

Even as little as a couple of a months ago, I'd never even heard of the term "Roguelike" - Then I began playing Balatro. It also turns out you have a variation of Roguelike, commonly referred to as "Roguelite" which is effectively a variant of Roguelike games with more forgiving elements pertaining to things such as permadeath, progression and upgrades. 

Mooncrash is exactly that. A Roguelite spin-off to Prey's main game. You begin within a habitation pod that overwatches the Moon, which TranStar has a base on called the Pytheas facility. You've been sent by KASMA - a rival to TranStar - to investigate a sudden stoppage in communications coming from the facility.

In order to find out what happened, you plug into a simulation and replay the possible consequences via 5 different playable characters. The goal of the game is to escape the simulation with each of the characters consecutively without any of them dying, using the 5 different variations of escape methods within the moonbase. Death doesn't necessarily signify that the game is over, and if you lose a character, you'll just progress onto the next until each character has either died or escaped - A classic Roguelike feature. It's an experience I can't really liken to anything else I've previously played, which makes sense given my novice levels of experience with Roguelike games.

There are 10 new trophies within this package, and the only way to tackle them was to just dive in blind and get to grips with the game.

Only one character is available from the beginning and the others will need to be unlocked through varying means, which will also subsequently unlock you a trophy. Once you have access to each character, you'll notice they have different traits and abilities that are pulled straight from the main game and are exclusive to that particular character. The hacking skill can only be performed by one specific character, so if you want to hack any computer terminals on the moonbase, you'll need to make sure you do it whilst you're using this character. The clever thing is, once you hack a terminal, this will remain hacked for any future characters that go through the simulation within the same run, and this is essential in progression towards certain goals.

For example, one of the escape methods is via opening a Mimic Portal to teleport out of the moonbase, however the Portal will need to be repaired, and the connecting terminal will then need to be hacked, before it can be used by any other subsequent character. This cannot all be done by the same person and this adds a strategic angle to how you tackle the simulation and the order in which you send your 5 characters into it, and these examples exist in a handful of different scenarios where progression is determined by utilising characters skillsets in a specific order.

But how does overall progression actually work? The moonbase has four distinctly split areas - The Crater, which acts as the centrepiece, and the Crew Annex, Pytheas Labs and Moonworks which all branch off from the central crater. These are always in the same locations and contain the exact same internal layouts each time. Nothing in this regard changes from run to run, so learning the map and your muscle memory will play a key part in making sure you fully understand where you'll need to go for efficiency and speed purposes - both of which become crucial later on.

Things that do change from run to run are as follows; Items that become available to loot - and this is fairly dynamic in multiple ways. Sometimes they'll be there, and sometimes they won't. In other instances, the item you find may be an Elite-standard weapon with all attachments, other times it may just be a recycling material for fabrication purposes. I had a strange sense of intrigue over seeing what random loot I would discover from run to run, and a big part of progression within Mooncrash is discovering better loot that you can take forward with you permanently. I waited for what seemed like forever to finally stumble upon a fabrication plan for an Elite Shotgun which would allow me to use it in future runs going forward, but someone else could find one on their very first run. This is the beauty of Roguelikes - The heavy RNG element ensures that you won't play out the same experience as the next player.

Enemy types you run into will also change constantly, as will environmental hazards that can occur within the moonbase that change the dynamic of how you approach your goals.

For example, power outages will prevent you from using powered systems such as doors, grav shafts and terminals. Radioactive barrels will give you radiation poisoning if you get too close. Your character can also incur status effects. Concussion will reduce Psi abilities and prevent you from installing Neuromods. Bleeding will gradually see your health decrease over time. Fractures to bones will prevent you moving at reasonable pace. 

The game has so many different layers that add constantly changing dynamics to the way you play, which give it a varied and interesting experience. It feels like it should fall foul of being too repetitive in nature, but the Roguelike elements add freshness to the game that also feels like you're always doing something new.

It's initially a little bit frustrating when you start out and your characters are weak due to either not having found enough Neuromods to improve abilities yet, nor having any of the better weapons, equipment and chipsets available, and you can still fall foul of some really cheap deaths due to the sometimes overdone environmental hazards that eventually swarm the base thanks to the ever increasing corruption levels. The corruption levels make this a timed mode, which is a very important detail to mention.

Starting at level 1, the corruption meter will gradually fill right up to level 5. With each new corruption level comes more powerful enemies that also pop up with greater frequency, and more hazards around the moonbase. Once the meter hits the top of level 5, the simulation will just end, and any remaining survivors who have not escaped will die. This is where the importance of knowing the layout of the moonbase really matters, as you'll need to ensure you're moving with efficiency and speed to ensure all 5 survivors can make it out - Not just on time, but also quick enough before you reach the higher stages of corruption, which can be perilous and challenging.

You will unlock a variety of the trophies from just natural exploration of the mode. Killing the new Moon Shark enemy, unlocking all 5 playable characters and chaining together a successful run where you manage to escape the simulation with all 5 characters award trophies. However, despite it's Roguelike elements, there is still an actual endgame to strive for here within Mooncrash, and there are a couple of trophies you'll end up working towards from the start;

Contract Fulfilled - In Mooncrash, Complete all KASMA Orders.
Galaxy Brain - In Mooncrash, install every neuromod power for every character.

The "Contract Fulfilled" trophy, awarded for completing all KASMA Orders, is the effective "End-game" for Mooncrash. Being a Roguelite, it is still a continuous game that you can infinitely loop, but there are a total of 27 KASMA orders that underpin a very loose story element to the game. These are just a varied list of objectives to tick off from within the simulation, but once you complete all 27 KASMA Orders, you'll see the end cinematic, and everything will reset from scratch. 

Most notably, this will include your Neuromod progress for each character, which directly impacts the "Galaxy Brain" trophy. If you earn this trophy without installing every possible Neuromod, you'll reset your entire progress, so it's vital that you make sure you attain these trophies in a specified order that prevents a conflict of interest.

Further to this, the completion of the game will also possibly impact the "Cryptomancer" trophy, awarded for finishing the game with a surplus of 50,000 sim points or more. Sim points are earned for actions within the simulation. Killing enemies, picking up fabrication plans and successfully escaping will total up sim points. They're usually required to purchase weaponry, ammunition, tools and neuromods to assist with your run, but if you don't have 50,000 points banked by the time you tick off the final KASMA order, you won't earn this trophy either and will have to start from scratch.

It's a little bit annoying that you have to earn 50,000 sim points that the trophy list will forbid you from spending. That's 12 additional neuromods, and would easily get you a couple of the higher value abilities for any of the 5 characters.

The trophy creates alot of additional peril that's important to be conscious to. The best course of action to prevent any complications is to leave a couple of orders outstanding until you have each of the other trophies in the list, ensuring that the "Cryptomancer" trophy is the final one you unlock by completing the last KASMA order whilst holding 50,000 points. This is a lengthy piece of DLC, and as fun as I found it, I wouldn't want to be in a position of having to start it all from scratch purely because I overlooked a couple of trophy requirements.

The "Galaxy Brain" trophy, awarded for installing every neuromod power for every character, is where the grind of Mooncrash rears it's head. Across each of the 5 playable characters, you'll need to install around 320 total neuromods to unlock every ability for all characters.

There are 3 primary methods for collecting neuromods; Finding them naturally around the Moonbase through exploration, crafting them through fabrication machines within the Moonbase and purchasing them for 4,000 sim points per piece on the loadout screen.

We mostly focused on the latter method - acquiring neuromods from earning enough sim points to purchase them. The best starting point here is to acquire the 3_ASIC MicroMiner+ Chipset, which increases the amount of sim points you earn per reward. Equipping this at each loadout screen will allow you to accumulate sim points at a higher rate than normal whilst you're navigating the simulation. You will need to find the chipset to unlock it permanently first, and it will also cost you 1,000 points in itself each time you want to run with it, but it will in turn allow you to maximise the number of sim points you earn for every action. This will increase the frequency at which you can purchase neuromods. It's a must for this trophy.

That will support with the purchasing method. On top of this, and once you become familiar with the map, there are a handful of certain places that will always spawn a collective volume of neuromods, and it's important to work out where these are, and ensure you're collecting them within each run as frequently as possible. The Crew Annex and Pytheas Labs can be very neuromod-rich, and Moonworks in comparison is fairly bare. I would personally ignore Moonworks as often as it makes sense to, though if you're desperate to upgrade an ability, and only need one or two, you can find the odd one lying around here. Nailing down a set, optimum path will allow you to efficiently gather enough neuromods to use them on your current character, or if not, store them safely somewhere to prevent losing them in the event of sudden or unexpected death.

It's important to safely store neuromods for subsequent characters to make sure you don't accidently escape without using them, which means you lose them (I foolishly did this a couple of a times) - Or if you have a surplus amount of neuromods for a particular character, and their next available skill is not achievable yet. These precautions will maximise the efficiency for an ultimately grindy trophy. One of the worst things you can do is lose your neuromods because you escaped without stashing them, so leave them behind whenever it makes sense to do so.

One of the earlier mistakes I made was being too liberal with my spending of sim points. Initially, I would load up on weapons and ammunition, for fear of not being powerful enough to cope with enemies. In reality, you can get through the earlier stages of corruption fairly easily, and don't actually need to spend many sim points, which turns out is a vital strategy when going for a trophy that requires a large accumulation of points to purchase neuromods.

Towards the latter stages of grinding this trophy out, the only piece of equipment I'd spend my money on was a Disrupter Stun Gun. This would allow me to bypass Typhon gates without having to worry about conflict. I could easily find the weapons I needed to defend myself in the various areas of the map. It's a waste of money to buy them in the majority of instances and I was guilty of overspending on them, which cut into my ability to spend on neuromods instead. Live and learn. The only drawback I experienced here was that it took me ages to obtain a Disrupter Stun Gun fabrication plan, so it wasn't something I could completely avoid early on. Roguelikes, eh.

 You can also increase the amount of sim points you earn each time you escape the simulation with a character, and this will continue to scale right through to the end, should you make it that far. It meant that this strategy effectively came down to running through the simulation on repeat, aiming to extract each character, accumulate sim points to buy neuromods, and ensure you were following the optimal path each time.

This does naturally become a bit tedious, and as much as I liked Mooncrash, my overall playtime when all was said and done was recorded by the game at 72 hours, and it certainly began to feel like I'd spent a long time with the game. There's only so many times you can loop the exact same strategy until a bit of stiffness kicks in, no matter how much you're enjoying the experience, and it does have it's learning curves along the way that will require adjustments.

Could you beat it quicker than I did? Sure. Infact, if you followed a guide that led you straight through the optimal routes for collecting neuromods, you could probably earn every trophy within a fraction of how long it took me, but I just think I got more from the experience from tackling the learning curve head on - As opposed to just following a set path on a rinse and repeat basis. One of the hooks of Mooncrash is the open exploration it promotes and I always seemed to make new discoveries or find hidden secrets, and following a path of least resistance approach would take away those small pleasures.

It does get easier as you progress, both through the ability to develop the strength of your characters and the familiarity of the understanding of game mechanics. There are some very easy pitfalls to completion, which is the most notable point to make of this list. If you can avoid them, and don't mind putting the hours in, this is a fairly steady road to full completion.

Platinum #140 - Prey

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 6/10

After the debacle of Fallout on the Playstation, Bethesda are lucky they're not on the shitlist.

Fortunately, I am a big fan of the Dishonoured series, and Arkane Studios were put in charge of the development of Prey, so that's enough justification to claw back a little bit of benefit of the doubt.

Unfortunately, it doesn't quite live up to the standards of Dishonoured (It is at least functional, unlike Fallout). That's not to say Prey is a bad game. The foundations of a good game with some nice ideas do exist here, but it's let down by some poor execution.

You control Morgan Yu, who joins the Research team aboard Talos I at the request of his much more senior brother, Alex - President and CEO of TranStar.

During a series of induction tests, one of the supervising doctors is attacked by a Typhon, and you're knocked out by a non-lethal gas. You reawaken three years later, and the Typhon outbreak has wreaked havoc onboard Talos I. It's claimed that, within this three year period, most of the crew have been killed by the outbreak and there was various research performed in order to find ways to contain the spread of the Typhon influence, to little avail.

It's not really clear as to why you were seemingly unconscious for three whole years, but an aspect of the research was the construction of Neuromods. These assist in the genetic modification that can give humans greater abilities, as well as adopt those of Typhons, as a way of overcoming the Typhon threat. However, a by-product of the use of these is memory loss. Has three years actually elapsed? Or have we just lost our memory about something that actually happened a few days ago?

You meet a couple of characters early that establish the end-goal. An operator called January - Allegedly a past-self of Morgan - guides you to the final ultimatum of how to deal with the outbreak and Alex will also frequently contact you throughout the game to offer further guidance. The plot is a little bit confusing, in all honesty. I ended up going through this game three times in full and still struggled to make sense of certain parts of the story.

Unfortunately, the game has a few other deficiencies too. The Typhon variety is really underwhelming. They're just differently moulded shapes of black matter, and lack a scary persona that makes you feel genuinely intimidated by them. It's bland and boring, and whilst the environments have slightly more character to them, they also ultimately suffer from similar issues, and you start to realise how samey everything looks the deeper you progress into the game and uncover more of Talos I.

In fact, it isn't just the enemies that suffer from this sort of negligence. The character cast is pretty devoid of personality too. Morgan and Alex Yu are both dull and uninteresting main protagonists, and the only other character of any real significance you meet is January - A robot - and he/she still has more personality than any human you ever run into.

The game also suffers from crippling loading screen times. Every time you transcend beyond a door into a new section of the ship, or die and have to reload a save file, you can expect to be waiting. The absence of cutscenes is a typical feature of games like Fallout and Dishonoured, but when you witness how long you end up being stuck on some of these loading screens in Prey, it begins to have a negative impact on the flow of the game.

I did say the foundations of a good game were present though, so there are a few redeeming qualities too. The weapon variety is good, with each weapon serving a different purpose and opening up more ways to tackle combat. 

The Gloo Gun can be used to temporarily freeze enemies in place, but also allow you to create bridges up to previously unreachable areas. Typhon Lures attract Typhon towards them, allowing you to deal with groups of enemies more efficiently, but alternatively, can also allow you to distract them long enough to make an escape. Even old classics, like the Shotgun, are punchy and feel like they're carrying a lot of weight behind them.

Progression is also heavily driven by the player. Talos I becomes fully available to explore very quickly, so you're not restricted on your movements. Can't access a room because you don't have the keycard for the door? You'll have the option to hack it. Don't have enough Neuromods installed to reach the required hacking skill level? There's a vent hidden around the corner you can gain access to the room via if you find it. This level of flexibility is the strongest suit of the game, and gives it a genuine sense that the player has full control.

In terms of trophies, this is a large list, containing 49 trophies in total, including the Platinum trophy. The biggest thing that stands out here is the fact that Prey makes no secret that it wants you to play it multiple times, and these hints are all over the trophy list.

You'll need to beat the game in at least 4 different manners, as well as juggle an absolute boat-load of missable trophies. By my counting, there are a whopping 44 trophies in this list that can be considered missable, and unrelated to beating the game in a specific manner. That is by far the most amount of missable trophies I've encountered in a single trophy list.

As a consequence, there are only 2 trophies awarded for reaching specific plot points in the story, so there is going to be a requirement for some meticulous planning within this trophy list. This is purely because there's a lot of synergy within these trophies, and some of them tie directly into one another. This is either because they're directly linked, or could become missable due to certain conflicting actions you take within the story.

Firstly though, a regular playthrough of the game, just to beat it and see where our progress takes us. There are no difficulty related trophies in this list, so you can cruise through on the easiest difficulty without repercussion, which might not be the worst idea if you're possibly overwhelmed by the volume of missable trophies. Anything that reduces the pressure is advisable. I went for a mixture between Normal and Hard difficulty levels across all playthroughs of the game and didn't really run into too many issues until the end, but we'll get to that.

The "I and Thou" trophy, awarded for Completing the game in the most empathetic manner possible, requires you to fulfil a certain number of requirements that mean you effectively earn the "good" ending. This is a hidden Gold trophy, so I wasn't even aware of the fact I was about to earn this on my first playthrough.

Apparently, there is a karma-esque points system operating at all times in the background of the game that'll track the decisions you make and actions you take towards others as you progress the story, culminating in a final score that determines whether you meet the threshold for this trophy.

The "Do No Harm" trophy, awarded for Completing the game without killing any Humans, was a trophy I was conscious to whilst going through my first playthrough, and achieving this at the same time is probably what led me to unlocking the previous trophy. It would make sense that I finished the game in the most empathic manner if I'd also beaten the game without killing anybody along the way, and that's a great example of how some of the trophies in the list work in synergy, as mentioned above.

There are also a generous amount of collectible-related trophies in this list too, which was another thing I was conscious to within my first playthrough. You'll need to read 190 employee emails, find 268 crew members of Talos I (both dead and alive), consume 30 different types of food and drink and listen to 88 TranScribe recordings.

This seems daunting, but there is something that may work in your favour. All of these trophies unlocked prematurely for me, which does seem to be a common occurrence, based on reports from others, so you may not even need to reach 100% collection rate for most of these requirements. I didn't need to use guides to find most of these things, and staff terminals will track the status of the employees for you, as well as tell you where exactly within Talos I you can find them, which essentially acts as an in-game checklist.

Finally, for this playthrough, it was important to pledge a commitment to only using human abilities, as a part one requirement for the "Split Affinity" trophy, awarded for Completing the game once only acquiring Typhon Abilities and again acquiring Human Abilities. Naturally, this would require a second playthrough.

I'd already beaten the game acquiring Human abilities, so being able to switch to Typhon abilities was an easy transition, and in all honesty, aside from the access to different powers, there isn't really much difference in the way you play the game between both playthroughs.

The Typhon abilities are a bit more useful in direct combat. Many of the Human abilities revolve around hacking terminals/keypads, improving the effectiveness of healing items/food and strengthening your character to be able to pick up heavier objects. Typhon abilities allow you to lift and throw enemies, spawn Phantoms to assist you in battle and deal shock damage via mind control.

Aside from this, the "I and It" trophy, awarded for killing every human on or around Talos I, was the primary focus within the second playthrough, and this was a little bit of a nuisance for a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it's important to note, the majority of the crew aboard Talos I are already dead. However, this can cause confusion, because you'll need to carefully track everyone and make sure those who should be alive when you encounter them, are actually still alive when you do so. Any human character who dies to anything other than your hands will negate this trophy, and this can very easily happen in a number of scenarios.

Humans can easily succumb to environmental disasters, such as gas canister explosions or fire from a burst pipe. This happened to me a handful of times. I'd sometimes find the human in question already dead and something had occurred off-screen that I didn't even see happen. Sometimes it would happen amidst the chaos of battle and was purely accidental. Either way, the remedy is to reload and hope it didn't happen again. 

You'll also encounter plenty of mind-controlled humans, who roam around as living people, but are possessed by a Typhon mind-trap. If they spot you, they'll chase you down, their heads explode and they'll die, and this won't be credited to you either. They are also identified by turrets and other security measures as a Typhon threat, so if they wander into the firing line, they'll be gunned down on the spot. Reload and start the section over in any of these instances too.

Finally, there are a few set pieces at certain points in the game involving humans where you need to make sure they're protected in battle, specifically so they can remain alive for the sole purpose of you making sure that you're the one that kills them. If anyone succumbs in battle? Yep, reload your last save and try again. It's an interesting concept for a trophy, but it bought on much frustration and added an unnecessary element of trial and error that disrupts the flow of the game.

On the theme of how these trophies work in synergy with one another, it is also worth noting that when going for this trophy, it will lock you out of various other trophies that naturally become unachievable as a by-product of the death of every human character in the game. These include side missions tied to making life and death decisions and the achievement of the empathetic ending, so it's really important to track your list meticulously as often as you can. You don't really want to be playing through this game any more than you have to.

After a brief pitstop to grab the "Abandon Ship" trophy, awarded for Fleeing Talos I aboard Alex's escape pod before completing your mission, which can be earned just a couple of hours into the game if you follow the correct steps, we restarted the game one final time;

The "No Needles" trophy, awarded for Completing the game without ever acquiring any Typhon power or Human ability, is the most challenging trophy in the list, as you may expect from a trophy that essentially asks you to beat the whole game without ever having access to any character upgrades.

Without the ability to upgrade your character, this means your closest ally is your arsenal. Firearms are the key to negotiating this task, and it's purely by default, but even this has complications that become very apparent fairly quickly.

You'll get the ability to upgrade various aspects of firearms, including damage, reload speed, range etc. The first upgrade level for each upgrade aspect is readily available, providing you have a weapon upgrade kit, which are easy enough to find. However, any upgrades beyond this point will require a human ability, such as Gunsmith or Engineer, upgraded to a certain level in order to access further weapon upgrades. Due to the fact these abilities are gained through the use of Neuromods, we don't have that option, which means your weapons will only ever be able to reach a certain level of power throughout the entire run.

This is fine to begin with, but once you start to run into Technopaths, Thermal and Voltaic Phantoms, this does become an issue. The game will introduce these enemies at stages where you will have normally had a chance to match the strength of your guns to them, or even possibly have accessed a couple of Neuromod-based abilities to handle them. As a consequence of not having any of this, I just found myself running for my life a lot more often than actually sticking around to fight. I felt like the requirements of this trophy had put me into a situation where the most viable option was to flee. 

I was pumping all my ammunition into bullet sponge enemies because every weapon in my armoury now felt like a peashooter - So I just deployed a strategy to start running between my objectives. Even then, it was still easy to die from a ranged attack or an enemy that would teleport directly into my path, and whilst running was a sound enough strategy overall, I almost felt like I was speed-running the game. There's a fine line between running for your life because you genuinely feel like you're in a tense survival horror scenario, and running for your life out of frustration at the fact you know you're probably about to get cheaply killed and you don't want to stare at another 45 second loading screen. Prey falls into the latter.

By the end, it actually made me start to really dislike the game. The final run had just developed into a frantic mess. Seriously underpowered due to the fact I could neither install Neuromods nor upgrade my weapons to even a modest level. Running through entire areas of the game as a counter-solution to avoiding combat. The story began to actually feel like it was dragging - A final playtime total of just over 22 hours for a run that I felt like I was speed-running for the majority of confirms that.

It's a sour ending, and it felt like a good time to draw this game to a close. Prey isn't a bad game, but it's also not the sort of game that should be welcoming you to beat it 3/4 times to earn the Platinum trophy in the circumstances it does. Attempting to beat it for a final time without using any abilities, and watching myself running through entire areas of the game just because I didn't feel like I had a chance in combat, sucked the remaining enthusiasm I had for it right out of me.

The amount of missable trophies is a little bit too much, too. It didn't really impact my game personally, but I've never gone into any trophy list like this before having to meticulously plan which trophies I need to make sure I get on a certain run of the game, and then also having to cross-check every one of them to make sure they're not going to cancel each other out along the way. Trophy lists don't need to be this high maintenance. 

Managing to beat the game without using any abilities is worth a couple of points on it's own, and when you account for at least 3 full playthroughs of the game, with a dedication to collectibles, juggling a missable-heavy list and a lot of side questing in-between, this Platinum easily pushes the 60-70 hour mark. It's not a journey I'd really like to go through again - "TranStar Employee of the Year" has a nice ring to it though.

Notable Trophies -

I and It -You killed every Human or or around Talos I.
No Needles - You completed the game without ever acquiring any Typhon power or Human ability.

Hardest Trophy -

No Needles

You completed the game without ever acquiring any Typhon power of Human ability

DLC #199 - LittleBigPlanet 3 - The Journey Home

It's fitting that the premise of The Journey Home revolves around somebody dropping the ball.

I was willing to go into this final foray with an open mind, despite some reservations about the workmanship of LittleBigPlanet 3 that were well documented in my Platinum Difficulty Review. Underneath this brief, post-game exterior remains an unpolished game plagued by technical issues. Blue screen crashes, corrupted save files and loss of progress. It's clear that there was an abandonment of this game that has hurt the reputation of the series.

The Journey Home begins where the main story ends. After saving Bunkem, Sackboy and friends are teleported back into Craftworld, ready to be welcomed home by a surprise party. However, the teleporter beam malfunctions and the force of the beam whips the unsent invitations to the remaining party guests out into the world, and it's now your job to find and retrieve them.

This will require progression through a series of new levels where the reward of an invitation sits at the end of each one, and once all 6 have been gathered, the party will finally be able to go ahead.

The pack contains 6 new trophies, all of which are obtained via the new selection of Story levels on offer. This is broken down into 3 main Adventure levels and 3 Multiplayer side missions. There are trophies awarded for both completing and Acing each of the 3 Adventure levels, which are both fairly easy tasks and should take no longer than an hour or so. There is a level dedicated to each of the new heroes - OddSock, Toggle and Swoop. Their lack of usage within the main game was something I was slightly critical of within the Platinum Difficulty review, so it's good to see at least a little bit more advocacy for these characters.

Toggle gains access to the Springinator within his level, which also comes attached with it's own trophy after using it 100 times. The Springinator is a new device that allows him to bounce up to harder to reach places. It's nice to see a neat little gameplay addition, but the variety in content with a game like LBP has always stemmed from it's unique level designs, which are all refreshingly charming in their own way in The Journey Home. It's just a shame that there are only 3 main Adventure levels.

However, the package does heavily lean towards a Multiplayer emphasis that may cause a few struggles along the way;

Two's Company, Four's a Party - Complete any Adventure level with 4 players.

The original intention of this trophy was to encourage community play, and this would have been easy enough to achieve at the height of the game. However, the only way to unlock this trophy now is to have 4 different controllers and finish a level in local co-operative play instead, so if you want this trophy and don't have the required amount of peripherals, you'll need to find a way to acquire them. 

Under normal circumstances, I would usually cut a bit slack for this. After all, the server closure wasn't the fault of the development team, and the action was necessarily drastic to prevent further harm to the LBP community. However, when you've got previous form for this, I feel like you relinquish the benefit of doubt. Two of the LittleBigPlanet 2 DLC packs have become permanently unobtainable to 100% for me purely because they required me to invest in peripherals and that was something I'd refused to do until it was too late. The only reason I grabbed this trophy was because I have 4 controllers anyway, but it's a tough cost to justify for anyone who doesn't and would only be purchasing them for the sake of this trophy.

Loosely linking into this, the 3 Multiplayer side missions also require at least 2 players to complete, and they're both directly linked to a further 2 trophies requiring all Prize Bubbles and obtaining all 6 Invitations to the party. They're all used as rewards for reaching a certain points threshold (30,000 points) within each mini-game. The first one can easily be beaten solo using 2 controllers, but the other 2 will need an actual second player to support well enough to obtain the threshold score. Not only are there multiple pieces of hardware standing in your way of full completion, but you'll also need the services of another person sitting next to you to help out anyway. If you're solo player, these are big barriers to completion.

On a final note, I began to have issues towards the end of this package when attempting to complete the side levels with a second person using another controller. The game would begin to blue screen error at the post-level loading page and upon rebooting the game, the Prize Bubbles would remain uncollected. There were also a couple of notifications that the save had been corrupted and we had to restore via a prompt. 

I had to remedy this by just making sure I collected the Prize Bubbles only and didn't trigger the end of the level via the finishing screen. If you've collected the Prize Bubbles, you can just exit the level without actually officially finishing it. It took a handful of attempts to work this out as a viable workaround, but it's a real shame some awful technical issues reared their head once again.

When it's working, The Journey Home is at least a serviceable offering. It doesn't break any new ground, but it's still good, hearty fun and the levels of creativity maintain a high standard. It's a little bit on the shallow side with just 3 main Adventure levels and 3 mini-game side missions, and the complications of requiring multiple controllers, another person to combat the mini-games with and eventually having to juggle some unexpected technical errors near the end had me questioning whether the balance had actually tipped towards the downside of the scale.

Platinum #139 - LittleBigPlanet 3

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 4/10

When LittleBigPlanet first hit the Playstation 3 in 2008, it genuinely seemed like it was destined for great things, but a series of decisions over the years has put the series in an tough place.

The most significant of these changes was seeing Media Molecule step away from development to make way for Sumo Digital, who would be in charge of development of a LittleBigPlanet game for the first time.

More recently, an unexpected external attack on the servers led to the decision to indefinitely bring them down for the first 3 main LittleBigPlanet games on all platforms.

This was a somewhat forced decision, but there have been some choices made that have raised questions. Other, less forgivable decisions include; LittleBigPlanet Karting servers being closed within just 6 years of the game's launch and LittleBigPlanet 2 DLC packs requiring you to purchase expensive peripherals to earn some of it's trophies, in an undoubtedly advantageous cash-in ploy on Sony's hardware. Even the DLC for this game, The Journey Home, was suddenly delisted and cannot be acquired unless you'd already purchased it.

When you think about it, it's been a tumultuous period that not many franchises would survive.

However, losing the servers was the real killing blow. It's always going to be a big problem when the premise of your game is based around user-generated content, and you suddenly lose half your product because that element becomes instantly inaccessible to everyone with no alternate solution to keep it alive. It wasn't just losing the ability to play through story levels with others co-operatively online. What use is still having offline access to this massive level creation tool full of possibilities without being able to actually share your creations with the masses? It effectively became redundant.

These were ultimately big issues with the game and I personally felt the series regressed with LittleBigPlanet 3.

The main showpiece is the Adventure Mode. The tutorial is interrupted by a character called Newton, who creates a black hole, sending Sackboy into a world called Bunkem. It's explained to Sackboy that Nana Pud is about to open a tin containing 3 Titans, that were locked away to protect Bunkem many years ago, and this needs to be prevented. Stopping Nana Pud allows Newton access to the tin, and upon opening it himself, he garners the power of the 3 Titans and this turns out to have been his ulterior motive all along. It's now Sackboys job to stop him and restore order to Bunkem.

The game retains it's warm charm, simple controls and pick up and play nature that has made it accessible to anyone and everyone over the years. The biggest new addition is the fact you can now play as different types of Sackboy. Throughout the Adventure Mode, you'll play as Swoop, who harnesses the ability of flight, Oddsock, who can sprint and bounce off surfaces, and Toggle, who can shapeshift into becoming a smaller or larger version of himself.

Sadly, it's a criminally underused element of the game. They each get their own introductory levels to showcase their uniqueness in comparison to the regular Sackboy, but are then only used in brief capacity thereafter. Their unique properties add some great variety to the way some levels play out and it would have been nice to see how far this creativity could be stretched. It's a genuine missed opportunity.

Other new gameplay mechanics include the Blink Ball, a gun that fires an orb that can instantly teleport you, and the Boost Boots, which can propel you to higher, previously unreachable, parts of the landscape. The Velociporters, also a new addition, can quickly send you through different layers of the level, and are used creatively in puzzles. Naturally, all of these new toys are available within the creation tool.

I've always taken an apathetic stance towards the creation elements of LBP. That's not the game, that's me. I've just never had the patience to learn how to be good at making levels, and without the ability to share them with anybody due to the lack of any online service, it almost feels like barely worth giving a mention to.

The creativity on display in the Adventure mode levels is still great and the mini-games are inventive and fun. It's a bit buggy at times though. I've been stuck on infinite loading screens, lost Prize Bubbles off the edge of a level and the framerate is still choppy when there's a lot going on at once on screen. These may seem like small niggles, but when you fall through the landscape for no reason half-way through an attempt to ace a level, they become much more viable complaints. I did also manage to play the game in online co-op before the servers were axed, and it was always laggy when another player was in the level with me, even when connected to different people.

In terms of the trophies, this is a medium sized list, containing 32 trophies, including the Platinum, all of which are evenly distributed amongst 3 main areas of the game, starting with the Adventure Mode.

Most of the trophies within the list are earned here. To be precise, 14 of the 32 trophies are achieved through Adventure Mode, which is almost half the list, and these are mainly progression-based.

The Adventure Mode feels shorter than it has in previous titles. There are 20 main levels to complete, and although there are a generous number of additional mini-game levels, the majority of these do not factor into the trophy list, with only a couple required to be beaten for separate trophies. If you want to spend time discovering all the secrets in a level, where you can often find Prize Bubbles and Multiplayer segments, you can easily squeeze around 7-8 hours from the story. 

However, one of the main reasons the Adventure Mode seems shorter, is due to the absence of a trophy relating to the collection of all the Prize Bubbles, which had featured in both previous trophy lists in the series. Without this, there isn't a necessity to explore the entire level, where Prize Bubbles would usually be hidden in harder to reach places. These were also sometimes unavailable first time round, and you'd need a sticker or a tool that you only obtain later, and would therefore have to come back and replay the level. Prize Bubbles also used to be annoying for the fact they were often provided as rewards for beating the Multiplayer aspects of story levels, usually requiring 3 or 4 players locally using the same number of controllers or online with the required amount of people, both of which caused challenges for different reasons.

Not having to worry about collecting all the Prize Bubbles means you can just go through the main path of the level, and can also therefore complete it much faster. There is still a trophy awarded for Acing each level, and this also seemed much easier than before. I remember some tough levels in previous LBP games, yet there's nothing here that gave me a challenge when it came to beating it without dying. 

The "Don't go alone..." trophy, awarded for Completing all the Adventure levels with another Sack Thing is where the path became rocky. I'd originally attempted this trophy when the online element was still accessible, just using the "Dive in" feature to quickly matchmake with another player and beat the level with them. This seemed to be going fairly well, aside the horrendously laggy connection that was a constant throughout, but it seemed like the most viable way to Ace levels and beat them with another player simultaneously.

However, the trophy didn't pop. All 20 levels beaten with different online players, and no trophy. I'd read it was buggy and that the only real solution was to just replay it all over again. So that's exactly what I did, except this time, in local co-op with another controller. I'd beaten all 20 levels with another Sackboy idle throughout and still didn't get my trophy. That's 2 full playthroughs of the Adventure Mode with nothing to show for it.

My next step was to delete the save game data and go for a third run. Ironically, the shortest Adventure Mode in any LBP game was quickly becoming the longest and this summed up my thoughts on the buggy nature of the game. Thankfully though, I didn't need to resort to restarting a new save file. After playing through each level twice I'd noticed that a small handful of them had not recorded a leaderboard score, which was also something I'd read about. Before committing to deletion of my save file, I jumped back into a couple of these levels, and the trophy popped upon completion of one of them and we finally had it.

This was clearly just a little bit buggy, but just to further add to the frustrations, one of the most useful tools for trophy hunters within LBP, has always been the Pins. These would show you tracked progress for certain trophies, and where there were numeric requirements attached to them, you'd also see how much you'd need for a particular trophy. This trophy is tracked here, but for whatever reason, it won't show you how many levels you've beaten with another Sack Thing, so effectively may aswell not be here. Just about summed it all up.

The "A guy called Quest" trophy, awarded for Completing all the Quests in LittleBigPlanet 3 Adventure Mode, requires you to complete a listed set of individual tasks. These are simple requirements, often related to Story levels or Mini-Games, and do not require you to do anything too taxing. In fact, they're fairly easy and some of them are actually just awarded for progression-related milestones tied to reaching certain points in the story.

Unfortunately, the reason they're notable in this particular instance is because 3 of the 15 quests require multiple players to complete, with one of them requiring the maximum total of 4. Whilst it is a positive that you can still complete the quest solo, you will still need 4 separate controllers, and given the lack of online access restricts the route of grouping up with others, you'll need to have 4 controllers specifically for this part only. It's frustrating that it's literally only a single quest that requires this, and this classic LBP stunt has made me somewhat resentful towards the game. I really don't want to dislike you LBP, but you're putting me in a tough spot.

Just when you think you've gotten through the main parts of the game, and realised that any additional peripherals may have been excluded from thought upon realisation that the Prize Bubbles areas are excluded from trophy list requirements, they still somehow find a way to make sure you're forking out for some extra hardware to keep Sony happy. Keep hold of those controllers too if you intend to dive into the DLC - Spoiler, but you're going to need them.

To shake the sour taste that leaves behind, the Popit Puzzles are a refreshing addition - Effectively tutorials on how to use basic and advanced versions of the toolkit, but rather than just show you how to use them, they task you with beating levels by demonstrating that you have a reasonable understanding of them. Slightly more engaging than the typical tutorial, and you can earn trophies for beating and acing both term 1 and term 2 of the Academy, as well as another trophy for "graduating" - Which is effectively just earning the prior 4 trophies related to the Popit Puzzle mode.

The final mode you'll need to explore is the creation mode. This is where the heart and soul of any LBP game is meant to exist, and whilst I've already said it's just not the sort of thing that's ever really interested me, I have always appreciated the levels that other people have spent their time and effort into putting out for others to enjoy.

There are 8 trophies you can earn within the create tool here, and they're all incredibly effortless, to the point where you can achieve them all in less than 10 minutes. This is a far cry from LBP 1, where possibly the most infamous LBP trophy ever existed - To spend 24 active hours in create mode. The significant dilution of the create feature in the trophy list is very welcome, and it's the easiest step within this whole process. Place a few specific items down on the canvas, play around with a couple of level effects and then max out the thermometer with some mass copy and pasting. Job done.

Finally, there are 3 online trophies within the list too, which require access to community levels. They are also incredibly seamless tasks, but do now unfortunately make this Platinum unobtainable if you didn't grab them prior to the closure of the servers. 

LittleBigPlanet 3 is undoubtedly the easiest Platinum in the series thus far. It actually almost drops below the baseline standard for difficulty of 3/10. If it wasn't for the buggy "Don't go it alone..." trophy causing me the frustration that it did, along with some of the general frustrations that make the game a bit of an unenjoyable slog at times then you could very well argue the case for it being one of the easiest in the collection. It can have an entire additional point on the rating for the forced peripherals.

No necessity to collect the Prize Bubbles, a create mode that only requires around 10 minutes of your time and in worst case scenario, you can navigate your way through the required Multiplayer elements, specifically the Adventure Mode, as a solo player controlling more than one Sackboy at once, unlike previous titles that have required 3 or 4 players due to the way these segments were built. It's annoying that the necessity for extra hardware has become a habit for an LBP title though, and realising you'll need 4 controllers is a real "urgh" feeling. A step backwards for the series in every way, including the difficulty of the trophy list.

Notable Trophies -

Don't go alone... - Complete all the Adventure levels with another Sack Thing.
A guy called Quest - Complete all the Quests in LittleBigPlanet 3 Adventure Mode.

Hardest Trophy -

Don't go alone...

Complete all the Adventure levels with another Sack Thing

DLC #198 - Assassin's Creed Origins - The Curse of the Pharaohs

"Would you like to Boost your character to level 45 before you start this DLC?"

Erm - OK? I was already level 44 anyway, but if you insist. After all, there's a trophy contained within this content to reach level 55, so why not?

I would guess the benefit to this offering is to allow much lower levelled players to enjoy the DLC content without having to put the hours into levelling their character up to reach it. 

I personally wouldn't categorise The Curse of the Pharaohs as "must see" content to the point where you absolutely have to make it instantly accessible to all, but it is an improvement on The Hidden Ones, albeit just very slightly.

Desecrated tombs, Spirits rising from the dead and back and forth ventures into the Afterlife. This time, Bayek is called to the city of Thebes, overrun by evil spirits, angered by the theft of artefacts contained within their burial tombs. The city is being terrorised by Pharaohs of the past whose spirits have been resurrected via a curse in order to seek death upon those who have pillaged their tombs of it's riches.

Naturally, Bayek's role is to prevent the curse from spreading, and ultimately do what needs to be done to bring peace upon Egypt again. Also naturally, this will involve a lot of killing. It seems to be the common progression tree for Assassin's Creed story arcs.

Each of the Pharaohs you encounter terrorising Egypt are significant historical figures of the past, and each of them will need to be banished into the Afterlife in order to lift the curse for good. These new environments are welcome for you to explore in great depth, and each of them reflects on the Pharoah they're attached too. Both the Pharaohs and their relevant Afterlife are the best parts of this DLC package and these new parts of the map finally look like you're exploring completely new areas of the game, and don't feel like they've just been subject to bland copy and paste work, which was my biggest disappointment of The Hidden Ones DLC.

New enemy types await. Aside the Pharoah's themselves, new enemies include Cultists, Giant Scorpions and Mummies. The addition of Star Shards as a crafting material now also allow you to further upgrade your equipment to new strengths once enough of them have been collected and there are some shiny new Legendary weapons to get your hands on too.

It's a better package than The Hidden Ones, but it's still far from perfect, and the main faults I encountered with this content reared their head when I was pursing the trophies.

The package comes with 6 trophies in total. There is a secret trophy awarded upon completion of the Main Quest arc, which contains 5 quests. There's nothing really outside of the ordinary here and the primary focus of the story is stopping the curse sweeping across Thebes by taking down the identified Pharaohs whose spirits walk the land. Each of them put up a tough fight, but if you're well versed with the combat system, they shouldn't take too long to dispatch. Most of my deaths were my own fault, mainly attempting to over-extend attacks in order to finish fights quicker and leaving myself exposed to devastatingly powerful combos which will instantly kill you.

However, the pacing of the game is off here. This content was going absolutely fine. It was nicely paced, fights felt fair and there wasn't a feeling that I was ever behind the curve. Then suddenly, I hit a brick wall with the difficulty scaling. Enemies suddenly became overpowered very quickly as they scale faster than you in terms of levelling, making fights unnecessarily challenging. I understand that the intention in this is to make the player take a break from the main quests and invest some time into levelling Bayek further via side content, but I just felt aggreged about having to do that given how dull the side content in this game is. This is my biggest criticism of the package.

There's a lot of exploration and fetch-questing too. Probably a bit too much for my personal liking. You seem to be scouring a building for clues every other objective, and I think it slows the pace of the game down way too much in it's frequency.

The other trophies outside of this are at least fairly straight-forward. There is a Gold trophy awarded for completing the 5 Serqet locations, which you more than likely won't be able to do until you're close to level 55 anyway. The Scorpions present at these locations that you'll need to kill are all level 58, and will make light work of you anywhere south of level 55, but they're easy enough to take down once you're of a strong enough level.

The importance of levelling has been mentioned a handful of times already, and it's mainly down to one trophy;

Higher Power - Reach level 55 (The Curse of the Pharaohs)

First issue. For what reason do you need to raise the level cap a whole 10 levels from 45 to 55 when this clearly exceeds the amount of experience the main questline gives you? I'd only just reached level 51 once I'd beaten every story mission and had to turn to alternative solutions in order to earn the remaining amount of required experience to hit level 55. Why are you pushing me to complete loads of mundane side missions and locations. Again. 

Second issue. It just takes far too long to reach level 55. As stated, I was at the beginning of level 51 once I'd beaten the main questline, and from this point, you need to accumulate roughly 140k of experience points to reach level 55.

If you visit the Bureau of the Hidden Ones in Memphis in the main game, there is a vendor who sells Tablets of Knowledge. These objects cost 1,000 coins, and in return, will grant you 1,000 experience points. A great way to easily boost your level. Providing you have the money. Which I didn't really have. After selling all the surplus in my inventory, I barely had enough to purchase myself an entire level. What's my option from here?

Grinding out the remaining 100k experience points on side quests and conquering locations. It was the onion topping on the ice cream sundae. I have somehow found myself in a position where I've ended the Origins DLC experience in the exact same way I had ended the Platinum experience - With an element of post-game grinding necessary to achieve my end goal. I didn't like it then, and I don't like it now.

Granted, it wasn't anywhere near as laborious as the "Old Habits" trophy in the main game, but it just felt like an extension of the same activities and quests, and here I was repeating them all over again. This process took roughly an additional 5/6 hours to finally reach level 55. It made me wish I'd kept more items back in my inventory to take advantage of the Tablets of Knowledge.

The DLC doesn't change my overall opinion on Origins. The refresh is exactly what the series needed, and it's still exciting to see what this looks like moving forward, but the DLC is very average when you balance the pros and cons. This package is slightly better than The Hidden Ones, if only for the fact you actually see some different environments that don't look like direct extracts from the main game's map, but is soured by poor scaling and an unnecessary grind to the finish line.

Platinum #138 - Worms W.M.D

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 8/10

As far as strategy games go, Worms will never be the biggest dog in the fight. After all, it's an old, tried and tested formula that Team 17 has stuck to for decades, and why not? 

No matter what form it's ever been presented in, it's consistently good, hearty fun built around a very simple turn-based concept. I was actually surprised to discover that this is the fourth Worms Platinum to grace the collection - A testament to everything I've just said. I've been coming back for more over the years and barely realised it.

Worms W.M.D doesn't exactly re-invent the wheel. I've played Worms Ultimate Mayhem, which was a 3D dosage of Worms. However, W.M.D takes us back to the roots of 2D canvassing.

Each game begins with each player placing their team of Worms strategically across the landscape, and then you have 20 minutes to eliminate the other players worms before they eliminate yours. The winner is the one who fulfils this task first. I told you it was simple, but you knew that anyway because you've surely played Worms before, right?

There are different modes to the game that add interesting twists to the core gameplay, and these are wrapped up within the trophy list, and we'll visit these one by one, but Worms has always been such a charming offering. It benefits from such a simple concept to the point that it doesn't feel the need to do anything drastic in the fear of becoming stale. Team 17 know full well that Worms is loved for what it is.

Combat is intuitive and easy to learn. The plethora of weapons on offer are diverse, fun and at times, just a little bit batshit crazy. Even just cycling through the huge armoury, just to see what they all do, is a hell of a lot of fun in itself, and the game will give you ample opportunities to experiment with it's impressive arsenal.

However, it's not just about brute force. The tactical element of the game is just as important to master. From the positioning of your worms on the landscape, navigating terrain and understanding how to reach advantageous positions to both attack and defend is just as important. Amongst all the dynamite, bullets and exploding sheep, this is still a strategy game at heart, and your success will be determined by outthinking your opponent and your ability to always be two steps ahead.

A shout out to the design team too. Graphics which have maintained their cartoony charm that has been a crown in the jewel of the series over the years and voice lines that are witty and charming. The customisation options on offer for your worms is vast and really draws out some personality to the in-game character models - Right down to selecting the tombstone displayed on-screen when one of your worms faces is shotgunned into the ground.

Worms is exactly how I remember it and it's a prime example of a game that doesn't need wholesale changes to still present an engaging package to it's audience - and that is a rare occurrence. It feels like games are constantly under more and more pressure to adapt and implement change, but Worms pivots on that and sticks to it's guns to serve up more of the same turn-based, 2D death.

Regarding the trophies, this is a medium-sized list, coming in at 30 trophies in total, including the Platinum trophy.

These span across a variety of different modes within the game, including the Training Academy, Single Player Campaign, Challenge mode and finally, the online Multiplayer.

As you'd expect, the Training Academy is a breeze, and you'll learn the ropes of most of the basic, and some of the more advanced gameplay strategies, but as a mode intended to help you cut your teeth, it's very straight-forward. The overall list is very Gold-heavy, and you can collect 4 Gold trophies purely through obtaining Gold medals on each of the 20 Training exercises, so this particular mode is heavily incentivised within the trophy list.

As a more seasoned Worms player, I jumped straight into the online Multiplayer component of the game, rather than continue forth with the rest of the Single Player aspects. This contains the most challenging trophy in the list, and there's a lot to say about the online element of W.M.D.

The "Bleating Ranker" trophy, awarded for Reaching Sheep Rank, is a tough battle to the top, driven by a regressive levelling system where you'll be rewarded with points for wins, and punished with deductions for losses. This isn't a standard levelling journey, which usually just allows you to level up via experience points, and losing rarely matters. Every win counts, and so does every defeat, and the amount of points you gain or lose is relative to your oppositions ranking.

Sheep Rank isn't the highest rank in the game though, which is something worth noting, though it isn't that far from the top. You'll begin in Prod, and then advance through Girder, Fire Punch, Uzi, Shotgun and Bazooka - Before eventually reaching Sheep, which is the beginning of Gold tier. The amount of points you earn for a win is determined by your opponents rank relative to your own. If they're at the bottom in Prod, you'll earn significantly less points for beating them than if they were in say, Bazooka, which is higher and will earn you more points. 

The catch is, if you lose to players of a lower rank than you, your points deductions will be heavier, and you can easily lose 20-30 points after being beaten by lower ranking players, and this is where you'll really see the detrimental impact of the regressive levelling system. You ultimately need to achieve consistency, and there are direct parallels to that of Motorstorm : Pacific Rift, which also adopted the same method for it's competitive online mode. This was the last game I played where I experienced a regressive levelling system, and whilst it makes things fiercely competitive, it also comes with a lot more pressure when you know that the stakes are higher.

You can earn bonus points, which massively help you cover losses. Your first win of any given day will net you 5 bonus points, and every time you achieve a winning streak of 3 or more games, you'll earn an additional 10 bonus points per win, which can significantly scale your levelling progression. Sheep Rank will require a net total of 600 points, so you'll need to polish up your skills to a reasonably good standard.

There's also no skill-based matchmaking either. This can either be a blessing or a curse. At this point in the game's cycle, you tend to run into either new players at Prod rank or experienced professionals at Armageddon rank. I'd rate my ability fairly modestly, and what I mean by that is, I'd generally be fairly comfortable against new players, but have my ass handed to me by Armageddon players. The Armageddon players are good. Really good. It was rare to run into people that sat anywhere between this scale, which made for a very feast or famine experience. The positive thing about running into Armageddon players is the fact that you don't lose many points, because you're significantly lower ranked in comparison, and by contrast, you can really reap the rewards for knocking them off with some big points.

These little boosts are not only good for points progression, but confidence too. However, it can be a slippery slope if you're constantly matched up against stronger players. Some sessions would actually leave me down on points, and I had to give up early in order to prevent myself getting into a heavy slump of losses. It's important to know when to fold them sometimes.

Just a few more things to call out; The progress tracking is a bit glitchy. For some strange reason, you have to manually save your levelling progress by hitting a "Save" button after each game, otherwise you'll reset back down to the very start of Prod rank when you next log on. On one occasion, I just randomly lost an entire rank, despite saving my progress. Frustrating.

Finally, there is a restricted weapon set in Ranked play, meaning you cannot access around half of the entire arsenal in the game. It's important to know which weapons and tools are worth crafting, and when to craft them. Using resources effectively is imperative in Ranked, and the best players will know exactly how to manage their resources effectively. Jet Packs, Bunker Busters, Demon Strikes, Poison Grenades and Girth Girders were all personal favourites, depending on the situation.

According to the in-game stats screen, I played 314 ranked games with a 41.72% win ratio. This equates to around 131 wins and 183 defeats. It's painful to realise that I played 183 games online and not a single one of them ever counted for anything. I always felt like I learned from every defeat, but in reality, they just took me further away from my end goal.

The good news is, it's mostly all downhill from this point onwards. The worst that this list has to throw at you is behind you if you've finally reached Sheep Rank. Just two more modes to beat, starting with the Single Player Campaign.

The "That Camp was no Pain" trophy, awarded for Completing the Campaign, requires you to beat all 30 Campaign missions, with a main target requirement needed to pass each mission. This isn't quite the tough part though. The main objective is fairly easy to fulfil, if you purely just want to advance beyond the mission.

The "Billy No Mates" trophy, awarded for Completing all the Sub Goals, is where the Campaign actually gets a little bit tricky. On top of the primary objective for each mission, there are 3 additional sub goals for fulfilling some smaller tasks within the mission. These range from defeating all enemy worms on the map, collecting a certain number of crates, defeating worms using specific weaponry and finishing the mission with a certain level of health - Among other things.

All of these requirements need to be completed in a single mission, including the primary objective, and cannot be spread across multiple attempts. My biggest issue here is the Worms AI. They have a frustrating variance of unpredictability in their behaviour, which can directly scupper your progress towards Sub Goals.

To give a specific example, there's a mission that requires you to complete it with at least one worm having 180 health. You only have 2 worms on the map, and there are 2 health crates in positions that cannot make them collectible in one turn. After working out how to access the crate with the required number of turns to reach it, the enemy worm standing next to it would just decide to fire off a Bazooka 2 yards away from itself and destroy the health crate. Mission over, 15 minutes of work undone and a pending restart.

On the opposite end of the scale, another mission required me to make sure I ended the mission with at least 50 health to the vital worm. Believing it was well protected in a building, and witnessing the enemy team consistently use the "Skip Go" utility, I didn't think there was any imminent danger. Until one worm randomly decided to turn around, fire a bazooka upwards, and use the wind direction to land a rocket with pinpoint precision onto a barrel above the building that triggered a chain reaction of explosions that devasted the worm I was specifically protecting as per the requirements of the Sub Goal. Mission over, 15 minutes of work undone and a pending restart.

You can literally go from seeing pure suicide to the wildest trickshot accuracy from turn to turn, and it just feels like it's only that way purely to add a guaranteed blocker to the achievement of simple side goals. It's some of the wonkiest AI I've ever seen in a game, and these specific examples occurred on at least a dozen occasions and made the Campaign longer and more frustrating to complete than it perhaps should have been.

Finally, there is also the Challenge mode. Within the Campaign levels, there are 10 wanted posters to collect which unlock the challenges available in this mode.

Within these scenarios, you have a find a specific way to defeat a boss worm, and only have a couple of weapons at your disposal. It's designed to be a mode of logic. The route to success isn't always immediately obvious, and may require you to think slightly outside of the box. It's a neat little addition to the game, but they're not overly demanding and don't require too much elaborate thinking, though you will unlock another Gold trophy for your efforts.

Outside of this, there are trophies awarded for a handful of kill related tasks, mostly focused on the range of vehicles available within W.M.D. These include earning a certain number of kills with the Mech, Helicopter and Tank, and can just be farmed within local Multiplayer with a single controller. I had actually made really good progress towards the 80 kills for each during the Multiplayer journey, so it didn't take me long to finish the rest off with some casual custom matches.

If you removed the Multiplayer requirements from this list, it probably barely pushes the mid-way point of the difficulty scale. The Campaign is generally fine to handle, minus some frustrating rubber-banding AI that has a habit of unfairly handicapping you, but the regressive levelling system is the true star of the show. It's brutally unforgiving towards anybody that's unable to show progressive improvement. Armageddon players are merciless, and have been playing this game way longer than the average player just trying to reach Sheep Rank. 

If you've seen anybody with this list on their profile, and they're missing the Platinum trophy, this'll be the reason why. A solid Platinum that'll sort the men from the worms.

Notable Trophies -

Bleating Ranker - Reach Sheep Rank.
That Camp was no Pain - Complete the Campaign.
Billy No Mates - Complete all the Sub Goals.

Hardest Trophy -

Bleating Ranker

Reach Sheep Rank