DLC #165 - Call of Duty : Black Ops 2 - Vengeance Map Pack

One of the few things I do actually like about Zombies is the level of creativity that goes into some of these maps.

Buried is a Wild West themed map that is located deep underground a processing unit. You begin the game by sliding in via a hole in the floor, exposing a huge underground utopia complete with tons of Wild Western authenticity. A saloon, bank and Sherriff's jail are all present set-pieces.

I was a little bit critical of Die Rise, for it's lack of key features that made the map a little bit too vanilla, but there's much more going on with Buried.

A new free-roaming NPC called Leroy, similar to Romero in the Blacks Op 1 pack, Call of the Dead, can be plied with alcohol and candy, and will assist you with killing zombies, as well as breaking down barriers without having to spend the points to unlock them. Witches can be found within the Haunted Mansion and Maze areas - They'll free you up of your points if they get too close to you. Weapons can be drawn onto walls with chalk, which allows you to freely distribute their availability around the map, and speaking of weapons, I personally love the addition of the Ray gun MK2.

The injection of variety in game mechanics makes it an interesting and fun map, and the trophies do have a heavy focus on these things, such as acquiring a perk for free, which is awarded for killing all the witches and accessing all areas with the help of your new friend, which is awarded for plying Leroy with enough alcohol to break through every possible barrier and make the entire map accessible.

The pack includes another 10 trophies, with the usual expectations applied. There's an Easter Egg to go after again, as well as a variety of different miscellaneous tasks of varying challenge, and the easier ones are generally not too bad with the ability to earn them as a solo player.

As was the case with Die Rise, the Easter Egg will require 4 players to complete which is also down to the final step of this process. This involves shooting a collective total of 84 targets within a strict time limit, and these pop up in specific areas of the map, designed in such a way that each person is responsible for overseeing an individual area, making it practically impossible for anyone to run this as a solo or smaller group player. I didn't find it to be hard at all, as long as everyone does their bit, but you just need to keep trying and you'll get it eventually. However there was something that did standout here;

Mazed and Confused - In Buried, survive an entire round within the maze on round 20 or higher.

The "Mazed and Confused" trophy, awarded for surviving an entire round within the maze on round 20 or higher, caused me some trouble. I originally attempted this solo a couple of times and I generally don't like tackling zombies on a solo basis, especially when the requirements are as demanding as reaching rounds as high as the 20's.

It's mainly a confidence issue - I get paranoid about suddenly being overwhelmed around every corner or just getting blindsided by a zombie and watching my attempt suddenly go up in smoke, with the realisation I have to start over and work my way back up. I'm way more comfortable in groups where I have the reassurance of other players to assist and/or bail me out within those previously aforementioned situations.

The group I did the Easter Egg with were kind enough to stick around and help me surpass round 20 within the maze area within the same game. The maze adds an extra level of complication due to the fact zombies can spawn out of nowhere from within the hedges, and there are alot of blind corners that can catch you out with an unexpected horde. When I ran this trophy solo a few times, I was caught out by both eventualities, causing me to have to start over - On the one attempt, I got to round 18, turned a corner in the maze to see a horde coming at me, and panicked straight into a dead end, which meant I'd unintentionally cornered myself with nowhere to escape, and lost me the game.

I'm sure I would have gotten it eventually, but those runs take alot of time to reach round 20, and as a solo player, it's disheartening to have to start from the beginning every time, so I was thankful for supportive teammates.

Some of the sub-challenges within these trophies are creative and provide alot of fun to go after, but the solitary trophy above did make for a reasonable challenge, albeit made significantly easier once run with a competent group. The peak of these packs is yet to come though.

DLC #164 - Call of Duty : Black Ops 2 - Revolution Map Pack

The Call of Duty games were a massive hit during their era, and for me, this was mainly because of the Multiplayer.

Truth be told, it's the reason I also stopped buying them after Black Ops 2, and whilst Zombies was a freshener the series needed, the DLC trophies quickly became the onion topping on a vanilla ice cream.

At this point, they're hard work for multiple reasons. Black Ops 2 is now almost 11 years old and sits 2 generations behind the current era. Half the battle is just finding people who either need the trophies too, or are just at least willing to help out others.

The Easter Egg concept carried over from Black Ops 1 is an interesting one, but doesn't stand the test of time very well. It doesn't help that the developers, in some instances, made these Easter Eggs almost impossible for smaller parties and solo players. This first DLC is a good example of that.

Revolution sees the release of the Die Rise Zombies map, a Skyscraper building spread over multiple floors, which leads to alot of tight, close quarters gameplay. In comparison to previous Zombies mode maps, as well as some of the ideas presented with other DLC packs in Black Ops 2, it's actually a fairly basic map with little in the way of unqiue level mechanics and standout features. I think that's the nice way of suggesting it's just a little bit dull.

The DLC also adds the "Turned" game mode, which gets a little bit of focus from the trophy list too. This game mode for 4 players see 1 person assume the role of the human, and the 3 others spawn in as zombies. The human has to fight the zombies off, whilst the zombies have to kill the human, and in doing so, will take their turn as the human player. Whoever racks up the most points within a specified time limit is the winner. It's a fun little party-esque mode, with fast and frenetic gameplay, but certainly lacks depth and feels like a little bit of a tack-on.

The pack also adds 10 new trophies, which follow the standard format carried over from Black Ops 1. The new Die Rise map gets 7 dedicated trophies, and the Turned game mode gets the remaining 3.

The "High Maintenance" trophy, awarded for being the architect of their instruction, is the Easter Egg reward for this particular map. It's not a challenging Easter Egg at all. In fact, I think it's one of the simplest out of any I've attempted across both Black Ops 1 and 2, containing as little as 7 steps and, in my case at least, completed within just 5 rounds of zombies.

The only thing worth noting about it is the fact that it does require 4 players to complete, and there isn't a compromise on that. One of the steps within the Easter Egg process requires all 4 players to simultaneously step onto a panel, so the requirement for a full party is mandatory to progression on this.

Otherwise, this can be done within less than an hour, and even the other trophies for additional tasks aren't really that challenging. Unlike the Easter Egg, these can all be done solo too.

The 3 Turned trophies do have the potential to cause some issues, especially the "Polyarmory" trophy, awarded for getting a kill with each primary weapon in a Public Match. You scale through a list of weapons each time you obtain a kill, very much like Gun Game, and the final weapon is a pistol, which requires about 13 bullets to kill a zombie. This is far too many to do easily in such a fast paced mode where possession of the human character changes very frequently, but I somehow had this trophy already prior to finishing off the pack, so I can't really testify to it's true difficulty.

Just like Die Rise, you also need to have 4 players to start a game of Turned, which is also going to provide challenges at this stage in the game's life cycle. There aren't many people playing this anymore, and of that select group, they certainly aren't playing Turned.

Maximum party requirements aside, it's not a bad opener to Black Ops 2. These packs definitely get more challenging, that's for sure, but it's least a starting point to build on.

Platinum #121 - Borderlands 2

 Platinum Difficulty Rating - 7/10

It's hard to believe that it's been over 10 years since I earned my first trophy in this game. Since then, Borderlands : The Pre-Sequel, Tales of the Borderlands and Borderlands 3 have landed, and we've seen 2 subsequent generations of console hit within the same time period.

That seems like a long time for a game that ultimately falls within the middle of the difficulty spectrum, but it'll make sense why in due course. It hasn't been a journey without it's bumps in the road, and this is ultimately a titled I re-visited multiple times.

Borderlands 2, a direct sequel from Borderlands 1, follows 4 new vault hunters, as they attempt to prevent main protagonist, Handsome Jack, from taking over Pandora and it's inhabitants. It turns out that Handsome Jack has a plan to farm Eridium in order to forcefully open another vault, which will only open without intervention every 200 years, meaning the Eridium is being used to immorally accelerate this process. Your goal is to stop him, and naturally, as a vault hunter, claim the vault as your own instead.

The game looks and feels fairly similar to the original Borderlands title. It still has a unique cell-shading art design, heavy RPG mechanics such as looting for weapons/equipment, levelling up and spending skill points on character development and tons of quests/side content.

There are some small tweaks here and there, but for the most part, it's more of the same, and I think it's a formula that works. The graphics are great and the variety keeps the game fresh - From enemies, environments and weaponry - everything feels like it changes regularly enough to keep things feeling dynamic and more like you're part of a big, vast open world game. The trump card for Borderlands has always been it's characters, and they're still vibrant and full of personality here, right from the cast of playable characters through to the enemies you'll encounter at ground level as you progress through the game. The dialogue is funny and the main characters throughout the story are fleshed out with great care and attention from how they look to what they say. It's the game's biggest strength by far and contributes to a enjoyable ride, even if the trophy list doesn't.

Speaking of which, the main game contains 51 trophies across the main list, all of which are related to the main Borderlands 2 story experience. The only variation you get within this entire package is to what extent you play through the story with others, allowing for up to 4 players to complete the game together in co-op mode. Outside of this, it is purely a Single Player experience and does not contain any other added game modes - Just how it was in Borderlands 1.

There isn't any sort of mandatory requirement to play any part of this game in Co-op mode, and you can achieve the Platinum trophy purely as a solo player, despite some of these trophies being designed for Co-operative play. The condition to this is that you will need a second controller to be able to play in split-screen to achieve some of these said trophies, as well as using it as an aide in other ways, which will be explained in further detail soon.

The "Cool Story, Bro" trophy, awarded for Defeating Jack, is the main trophy within this list, and will be awarded upon completion of the main questline. There are no options for selecting a difficulty level and I didn't run into any real challenges on my way towards the end of the game. Enemy levels will scale in accordance to your own for most of the way and you always seem to find generously distributed loot that continuously makes you stronger, meaning you're always ahead of the curve. The challenges from this list definitely come from outside the main story.

Just as a side note to the story, I did originally start this game in a Co-operative party with a group of mates, and shelved the game half-way through when they got bored. I came back to it at a later date in an attempt to finish it, got side-tracked by some additional trophies which proved too frustrating to persevere with at the time, and shelved the game for a second time without still having beaten the story. I finished it eventually on my third re-visit. The list contains a further 15 trophies related to natural progression within the main story via beating certain quests, which is ultimately a large chunk of this list.

The "Challenge Accepted" trophy, awarded for Completing level 1 of all non-level specific challenges with a single character, is one of the aforementioned trophies which were the source of frustration whilst attempting to complete this list.

The challenges feature provides the player with a huge list of in-game challenges, related to a variety of different things within the game. Each individual challenge is stacked into and up to 5 different levels, increasing the cumulative total for every level. For the most part, they're fairly simple, and naturally achievable as you progress through the game, and the trophy only requires you to fulfil the first level of each challenge. On paper, it doesn't sound too bad.

However, this is also where most people have come unstuck with this Platinum, specifically over 1 challenge. The JEEEEEENKINSSSSS!!! challenge requires you to kill Jimmy Jenkins, a Jet Loader who randomly appears when opening certain types of crates. There are various methods plastered around testifying to their success rate, but this just ultimately comes down to aimless grinding and luck.

When I said above that I stopped playing the game on my second visit to Borderlands 2 because of frustrations with certain trophies - This is exactly what I meant. I settled on a method which involved taking a route around Opportunity and opening around 14 of the crate types he can usually be found in, quitting and reloading in order to start the route again after every unsuccessful run. I did this for 3/4 hours, on 3 separate sessions before getting completely bored of it and quitting. The worst thing was, I knew this was purely a case of sweeping the mess under the carpet, and it would still be there to clean up later, and even when I came back to the game for the final time, it still took me a handful of hours until I eventually managed to find him.

It's also important to note, you have to reach the highest level of some challenges, in order to unlock level 1 of different challenges that aren't accessible from the beginning. Amongst this, you'll be required to kill 750 enemies from point blank range with a shotgun and 200 enemies with rocket launcher splash damage. They're really tedious requirements and I'm not sure why every challenge isn't instantly accessible from the beginning, for no other reason than to annoy the player.

The "Capped Out...For Now" trophy, awarded for Reaching level 50, requires you to achieve the highest possible character level in the game. This is exactly the same as Borderlands 1, which also contained a trophy for reaching the maximum possible level.

As was also the same in Borderlands 1, it doesn't look like you can achieve this in a full entire playthrough of the game. Even after beating the main questline and every single side quest, I only managed to reach level 34. The amount of experience required to reach the top is just shy of 3.5M, which is obviously alot. In Borderlands 1, this would have extended into around halfway through a second run of the game, but I used the DLC content to help me grind the remainder of the way. There's a recurring side quest in the Mr. Torque's Campaign of Carnage DLC which awards almost 10,000 experience per run for a 1:45 race, which is the most effective grinding method.

This seemed like a much more viable option than running through the game on New Game+ to continue levelling up, even though the car handling mechanics are truly awful in this game. I get they're not a core focus, but as someone who ending up taking advantage of the racing side quests to level my characters, it needs to be mentioned how bad they are.

The "Thresher Thrashed" trophy, awarded for Defeating Terramorphous the Invincible, mirrors vibes of Crawmerax the Invincible from Borderlands 1. Crawmerax was added later in as part of the Secret Armoury of General Knoxx DLC, but was a raid boss designed to be tackled by a full Co-operative party at the highest level with the best equipment available.

Terramorphous is the exact Borderlands 2 equivalent to this, except contained within the main game. Once you beat the main story, you'll gain access to this raid boss as part of separate side quest called "You. Will. Die. Seriously". How would you expect someone 10 years down the line to beat a raid boss specifically designed to be beaten by a party of 4 players maxed out to the highest level?

Thankfully, there's a method that still allows a solo player to do this. If you invite a second player into the game via split screen, you can occupy a certain space on the battlefield where Terramorphous cannot reach and subsequently harm the player. This is crucial because, for as long as at least 1 player is within the boundary of the arena at any one time, Terramorphous health will not regenerate, which is the key to defeating him. It allows you to idly sit the second player here for the entirety of the fight, whilst my main character kept going back in and chipping away at his health bar.

The downside to this approach was it still took me around 5 uninterrupted hours to do this solo, using the weaponry I had to keep gradually taking away his enormous levels of health, succumbing very frequently to his overly powerful attacks. Dying alot doesn't matter as long as the idle player is sitting safely in the right spot and the fight becomes a matter of perseverance. He did drop some exceptionally good loot that allowed me to take down some of the DLC raid bosses which were giving me trouble, and there's no way I would have been able to get a full party of players this far down the game's life cycle, so it's a big stroke of luck that this method works.

Just one final thing to note, in Borderlands 1, the trophy list encouraged you to dabble with each of the 4 playable characters by making you earn a certain amount of kills with each of their relevant action skills. This was a fairly easy task, which returns in Borderlands 2, but on a much greater scale.

The "So Much Blood!" trophy, awarded for Gunzerking continuously for 90 seconds, will require you to reach level 25 with the Gunzerker in order to spend enough skill points on the skill tree in order to Gunzerk for 90 seconds.

You'll also need to do the same thing for the Assassin, reaching level 25 in order to acquire enough skill points, which will allow you to stay in Zero's deception mode for 10 seconds straight. Zero was my main character, so I didn't need to worry about doing this, but if your main character is the Siren or Commando, who only require you to reach level 5 to unlock their action skill and earn their character-specific trophy, then you'll need to playthrough the game twice to level 25 with the other 2 characters, which will be painful to do.

After the amount of time I'd already spent on both this main list, and the DLC amongst it all, it just about summed up my experience with this game to realise I still had one final obstacle ahead of me - To get another character to level 25 to earn his action skill trophy, though I was thankful I had already picked the Assassin as my main, and therefore did not have to do this twice. I used the same method of race grinding outlined above to level up, which meant the journey wasn't too bad, but probably still tacked on an extra 10-12 hours.

Upon overall reflection, I think there are alot of parallels to draw between Borderlands 1 and 2. Incidentally, I gave Borderlands 1 a 6/10 difficulty rating and anyone who wanted to make a case for this being slightly tougher than Borderlands 1 wouldn't get much pushback from me. The horrendous RNG around finding Jimmy Jenkins, as well as the Terramorphous raid boss, would easily be enough justification to suggest this as a slightly tougher Platinum, despite much of the remainder of the list being very similar. I'd also love to be able to put a time estimation on this, but the multiple re-visits over an extended length of time and the consistent blending of DLC makes it impractical for me to commit any sort of timescale with conviction. It wasn't a short journey though, that's for sure.

For those reasons, I think a 7/10 is justifiable. It's a soft 7, but the amount of time I wasted on finding Jimmy Jenkins can't be understated, and whilst it's important to note that this won't apply to everyone, I felt like I got the rougher end of the stick with the amount of dead time I had to put into this trophy in the end, and that's just what luck can do to you sometimes. It was also extremely annoying having to put in an extra 10-12 hours on another playthrough just to get one of the character-specific trophies by reaching level 25 with the Gunzerker, and if it wasn't for the fact you can cheese Terramorphous using a split-screen, second controller method, then there's a distinct possibility we might not even be discussing this Platinum at all.

Notable Trophies -

Cool Story, Bro -Defeated Jack.
Challenge Accepted - Completed level 1 of all non-specific challenges with a single character.
Capped Out...For Now - Reached Level 50.
Thresher Thrashed - Defeated Terramorphous the Invincible.
So Much Blood! - Gunzerked continuously for 90 seconds.

Hardest Trophy -

Challenge Accepted

Completed level 1 of all non-specific challenges with a single character

DLC #163 - Borderlands 2 - Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt

Borderlands 2 is the game that's kept on punching back. Every time you feel like you've finally dealt that knockout blow, it arises off the canvas begging for more.

However, even the toughest fighters eventually run out of steam, and despite a final flurry here, we're finally done with the Borderlands 2 DLC content, and all that remains is to dip back into the Main list one final time to wrap up the lot.

Sir Hammerlock's Big Game Hunt takes you to the swamps of Pandora, where you link up with Sir Hammerlock for a "weekend of Big Game Hunting".

It also turns out that Professor Nakayama, a self-obsessed protagonist of Handsome Jack, resides here and wants you dead after hearing that you were responsible for his death. He is alleged to be secretly farming a cloning formula to bring Handsome Jack back to life, and must be prevented from doing so.

This pack adds a brand new main story questline, a handful of optional side missions, as well as new environments and enemies - It's very standard for Borderlands by this point, though is probably the lightest out of all the DLC packs in terms of overall content. It also still closely follows the general Borderlands 2 formula for trophies, adding 3 further trophies into the total list.

There is again 1 trophy associated to concluding the main questline, awarded for stopping Professor Nakayama, though this story is extremely short and only spans across a total of 4 missions, taking no longer than a couple of hours to beat from start to finish. There is also a trophy awarded for discovering every location. Standard.

However, despite this pack being the lightest on content - with only 13 side quests to complete for the remaining trophy - there was, yet again, another obstacle standing in the way;

Done That - Completed all Hammerlock's Hunt side missions.

The "Done That" trophy, awarded for completing all Hammerlock's Hunt side missions, produces another one of those moments that has occurred consistently within this journey - A challenge that spikes the difficulty of the game beyond logical reasoning.

In this particular instance, it comes from the quest "Voracidious the Invincible", another raid boss that joins Terramorphous the Invincible and Hyperious the Invincible on the "How on earth do I beat this?" wall of fame.

I had previously attempted to defeat Voracidious during the same period of time I was understanding just how challenging some elements of this game actually were, and attempted to take the same approach of returning with better equipment and weaponry later down the line in order to beat him with greater ease.

Except, that's not exactly how it went. I'd managed to beat everything else the game had thrown at me - Somehow - and yet, I couldn't beat Voracidious with my now maxed out level 50 character, and the weapons that had served me so well up to this point. I was suddenly stuck for ideas and had no idea where to turn. What do you do when you've beaten almost everything, yet are still struggling on Raid bosses??

For greater context, Voracidious is a giant Stalker accompanied by Chief Ngwatu, a savage warrior who will transfer a protective shield between himself and Voracidious at regular intervals. Chief Ngwatu is very vulnerable when he doesn't have the shield, and will die quickly if he takes damage without it. This sends Voracidious into his second form - a form whereby he becomes enraged and his attacks are not just way more frequent, but also way more deadly.

The general tactic is to keep Chief Ngwatu alive for as long as possible, chipping away at the shield throughout this time. Voracidious will become enraged once he hits around 25% health regardless, so his enraged form is unavoidable to an extent, but you want to have the shield depleted as much as possible when this happens, to increase your chances of killing him quicker.

The reality for me was, I just didn't have powerful enough guns to outlast Voracidious. The approach was sound, but as soon as he hit his enraged form, we always seemed to be in 1-hit territory, compounded by the fact I was generally extremely low on ammunition by this stage too, as the protective shield harbours an insane amount of hit points.

I was getting into a vicious cycle of dying, respawning for a certain cost, having to spend even more money to restock ammunition and then repeating the process. There were a couple of times where I got close and knew with a bit of luck I would have done it, but there were also times I was just getting slapped around so badly, it seemed it was there purely to remind me of how this game can have it's way with me at the drop of a hat, just because it wants to.

I found myself jumping back into farming the Pyro Pete Bar Brawl side quest to accumulate money for the sole purpose of buying ammunition to have more attempts at beating Voracidous, but it was also here where I got the stroke of luck I needed.

One of the enemies I downed within a run of the Bar Brawl dropped a rocket launcher that dealt 227,000 damage per rocket. This was an upgrade on my best rocket launcher by over 200,000 points and ended up being the difference maker in this fight for me.

I headed back in, equipped the launcher, and decided to use it from the point right where Voracidious became enraged, taking down the final 25% of health quick enough to the point where his enraged form didn't have enough time to influence the outcome of this fight.

Was it lucky? I suppose it was - Nothing else was working for me, and whilst I was farming more money, I was also trying to work on what I was going to do to in order to defeat him. My reserve option was to run the Terramorphous raid boss again, which is absolutely something I wanted to avoid, and I'm so glad it never came down to having to resort to this.

This is the culmination of some pretty challenging DLC packs, and somewhat unforeseen. I knew all about the challenges that awaited me within the main list, but was never aware of how tough this additional content was going to be. I still feel like there's a possibility that I just wasn't prepared well enough for it, and hadn't focused enough on my gear throughout the game, but the random difficulty spikes are extremely frustrating. You can coast past large portions of the content across all 4 of these DLC packs, and suddenly run into a brick wall - and how exactly do you prepare for that sort of erratic nature?

Anyway, we're almost there, and I'm certain in saying at this point, that there are no longer any nasty surprises lying ahead.

DLC #162 - Borderlands 2 - Mr Torque's Campaign of Carnage

Fingers firmly crossed still, but I think we're almost there. The burnout is real and I'm at the stage now where, as much as I've enjoyed the Borderlands 2 experience, I'm glad it's almost over.

We've had to do certain things the long way round, and this DLC pack was a big testament to this, as this is where we've had to farm the previously aforementioned Torque tokens to originally upgrade our equipment, and help us beat some of the side quest bosses within other DLC packs that were causing us issues.

Mr Torque's Campaign of Carnage takes you to the Badass Crater of Badassitude, where an open invitation awaits. Mr Torque is running an open deathmatch tournament to "find Pandora's Number 1 Badass", where the winner will be granted access to a new vault full of loot.

The tournament is structured like a leaderboard, where you'll start in 5th place, and have to progressively climb to the top in order to emerge victorious. This will involve completing quests in order to earn the right to call out and fight your next opponent directly above you, repeating this process until you reach the top, where you'll eventually fight the current Number 1 Badass - revealed very early on to be a protagonist called Piston.

The typical formula remains. A brand new main story questline, loads of extra side content, new environments to explore and unique enemies to face off against - Some of the characters you fight on the tournament leaderboard are especially stand-out. There are also 3 additional trophies that follow the exact same trend as the Captain Scarlett and her Pirate's Booty pack.

Completing all 15 main story quests, and reaching the top of the leaderboard, will award 1 of these trophies, and is still fairly easy to progress through, as per the standard level of enemies still being around the 30 mark. There are also an additional 25 side quests, which will grant another trophy, but by this point, nothing had given me any trouble thanks to some proper forecasting on the back of the experience with the previous DLC packs.

The final tier of Bar Brawl side quests, where you have to clean out Pyro Pete's bar within a set time limit, does set the enemy level to 50, for whatever reason, and whilst this meant I did have to come back to this and tackle it later, I knew this would just be simply a case of reaching a much higher level and returning once I had matched this. I don't categorise this into the same grouping as boss fights which felt insurmountable and may need to have been revisited much further down the line from the point at which you first encounter them.

This DLC mostly served great purpose for the following things;

• Grinding out to Level 50, via the ability to replay the Death Race side quest, which in turn allowed me to obtain the "Capped Out... For Now" trophy from the main list - As well as finally equip some of the more powerful weapons I'd stored in my inventory.
• Earning Torque Tokens through various means, which are introduced via this DLC pack, in order to purchase stronger weapons that allowed me to tackle certain side quest bosses I was previously struggling to defeat.
• Accumulating much more money by selling Torque weapons, which have excellent re-sale value. I had previously struggled to fund boss fights by replenishing ammunition, and this alleviated this nicely.

As a consequence, I didn't struggle with any challenge contained within this pack. Every boss fight on the Badass leaderboard was easy enough to take down, including Piston, the final boss, and the big side quest boss, Pyro Pete the Invincible, was also plain sailing, despite being a bit of a bullet-sponge.

This could have been just as difficult as what I've experienced had I gone down a different route, but the Torque weapons and those I'd also farmed from Terramorphous the Invincible, helped make light work of these. Even the Level 50 enemies in the Tier 3 Bar Brawl were simple enough to deal with when I eventually came back round after hitting level 50 to give myself a reasonable chance. Incredible what learning and a bit of forward planning can do.

The final trophy is awarded for collecting 10 pictures of Moxxi, which are purely random drops from downed enemies, and will naturally come as you go. Shock, horror to see some classic RNG find it's way into this list somehow.

A larger total quest volume than both previously completed DLC packs, but much harder to nail an estimated completion time to, purely because I spent alot of extra time replaying certain quests to grind out for level 50, as well as Torque Tokens, which is where I probably spent the majority of my time here. Would it be fair to consider this as a factor? It was a purely strategic move, but also a necessary evil to progression for me, albeit mostly for the benefit of elsewhere with other DLC packs.

One last pack remaining before digging into the remainder of the main list for the final time.

DLC #161 - Borderlands 2 - Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep

Unravelling Borderlands 2 has been hard work, but there is definitely light beginning to emerge at the end of the tunnel.

There have been unexpected hold ups along the way, which is the main reason we've had to fast-forward across a couple of DLC packs to the final offering, jumping into the fantasy world of Tiny Tina's table-top RPG.

Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon Keep puts you into the thick of a fantasy world, playing as a pawn in Tiny Tina's imaginative Role-Playing Game, Bunkers and Badasses.

This contains all the elements expected of a typical Borderlands DLC journey. A main questline, which sees you rescue the Queen from the clutches of the Handsome Sorcerer, a ton of additional side quests and plenty of opportunity to earn some loot. The fantasy element also allows for some fun new dynamics. Enemies and obstacles are conjured up right in front of you on Tina's demand, the plot is constantly altered when the other players start to complain about certain rules and you're given options to bypass parts of quests with alternate solutions based upon the attributes of the other characters involved in the game.

It's great fun, extremely charming and also my favourite pick out of all 4 Borderlands 2 DLC packages.

The trophy list takes a completely different direction to the other 3 available though, with 10 trophies on offer, and no requirement to complete every quest like the other packages.

You'll still need to beat the main questline, as normally expected, which contains 4 quests in total, awarding 3 trophies along the way for progressing towards the end of the story, defeating the Handsome Sorcerer and rescuing the Queen. This should take somewhere in the region of 4-6 hours. The quest volume is low, but they are fairly lengthy, and some of the environments you move through are actually quite vast and easy to get lost in.

Outside of the main quest, this is the only DLC package out of the 4 that does not require you to complete every side quest on offer, so you can actually leave a generous amount of content on the table if you're purely looking to fulfil the requirements of the trophies alone.

One thing I'd carried forward and learnt from my experience with Captain Scarlett and Her Pirate's Booty was that I may have needed stronger weaponry in order to tackle whatever challenges may be waiting for me within these other array of DLC packages.

I had to move into the Mr. Torque's Campaign of Carnage DLC in order to find some better weapons that would allow me to revisit and beat a particular boss within a side quest that I couldn't defeat with my existing gear, and I forecasted potentially similar issues going forward, so I needed a solution that would pre-empt this - Not just for this package, but the others I still had to beat.

As I scoured through the trophy list for inspiration, I realised that I still had to beat Terramorphous the Invicible within the main game, and felt this may be an appropriate time to briefly part ways with this content, to defeat him in the hope that he dropped some seriously good loot that would significantly support me within these remaining DLC packages. Terramorphous himself comes with his own challenges, but because that technically comes within the main trophy list, we'll save the detail on that for another time, but I managed to beat him and pick up a handful of interesting items. A shield with 53,000 capacity, a sniper rifle that dealt 25,000 damage per shot and a pistol that dealt 8,000 damage per shot.

The only drawback at this point was the fact I had to be level 50 in order to equip them, so I had to grind out around 3 more levels by just replaying the racing side mission from Mr. Torque's Campaign of Carnage DLC over and over. A bit tedious, but I did manage to unlock the "Capped Out... For Now" trophy from the main list, awarded for Reaching level 50, along with the motivation of knowing how far this would get me in terms of overcoming the handful of boss fights that remained outstanding within these DLC packages.

I eventually carried these items into some of these remaining 7 trophies within this DLC, and made complete light work of the remainder.

Most of these trophies are associated to specific side quests - The "Dang Girl You Ace At This Game" trophy, will require you to beat another version of the Circle of Slaughter within Murderlin's Temple, which I breezed through with my new weapons, and the "Make It Raaaaaid" trophy requires you to Vanquish the Ancient Dragons of Destruction, which again, was made light work by the new weapons I'd acquired from beating Terramorphous. This particular side quest concludes in a battle against 4 different types of dragon which will attack you all at once, and there's no way I would have beaten this without farming for some new and improved loot, so I'm happy my strategy to delve back into the main game paid off.

In theory, this should also allow me to go back over the other DLC packages with the same logic and finish them in the same way, but this is a game full of surprises, so we'll see how that pans out.

By the way, the "Hmmmmm" trophy, awarded for Wielding the Mysterious Amulet, can potentially create 2 problems. Firstly, it's a missable trophy, because when you accept the associated quest, it simply gives you a choice to either punch the merchant or buy the amulet. If you punch the merchant, you'll conclude the quest with no option to purchase the amulet anymore, which means you'll have to start the entire DLC over again. Secondly, it'll cost you around £126,000 to buy, which you probably won't have unless you have some valuable loot to sell off.

DLC #160 - Borderlands 2 - Captain Scarlett and her Pirate's Booty

Maximum disclosure; The Borderlands 2 trophy journey been a hot mess.

I started this game with a couple of mates in co-operative mode back at the start of 2013. They got bored, I shelved it, and eventually went back on my own at the end of 2016 and tried to beat the story solo. I then got bored playing alone, shelved it again, and eventually went back for a third time at the start of 2020 to finally beat the story.

I quickly realised that this wasn't just going to be a simple clean-up journey though, and there are a number of reasons as to why this game has been shelved multiple times. Initially, after beating the story, it was realising the grind behind a certain trophy within the main list that requires the player to complete the first level of every non-specific, in-game challenge. Within this, you have find and kill Jimmy J3NKN5, a Jet Loader who spawns randomly in certain boxes. After hours of reloading checkpoints and opening these boxes to find nothing, I quit again. However, having realised this game is now officially 10 years old in my collection, and as a hardened trophy hunter who knows exactly all about the perils that come with territory, you just sometimes have to face the music. We're back in Borderlands 2 for what I'm vowing is going to be the final time.

To support these complications, we're starting with the array of DLC content attached to Borderlands 2. This does come with it's own logical thought process though, as the main list contains a trophy for reaching level 50, and I currently sit at level 38 at the time of writing, so rather than play New Game+, it makes sense to go through the fresh content and attempt to unlock these trophies simultaneously. It's about the only thing that has made sense thus far.

This DLC pack takes you into Oasis, a town over-run by Pirates attempting to track and find Captain Blade's Lost Treasure of the Sands. Captain Scarlett, leader of the pirates, enlists your help to assist her in finding 4 compass pieces which will combine to reveal the exact location of the treasure at the promise of splitting the reward. It's a fairly basic plot, and there aren't really any major gameplay changes here - It's mostly more of the same with a bunch of new quests, some new environments and a handful of new enemies to fight against. It also comes with an equally basic trophy list to accompany it, with just 3 trophies added within.

Completion of the new main questline, containing a total of 9 quests, awards 1 of the 3 trophies on offer here. The level of the enemies is scaled to around level 30, which meant large portions of these quests left me completely untroubled coming into this at level 38. Enemies would die in a couple of hits, it was easy to absorb large amounts of damage from bigger groups and none of the loot was any better than what I was already carrying. This made the content feel like a simple matter of just mere progression.

There are just 2 other trophies to go after here, and 1 of these, awarded for discovering all named locations in Oasis and the surrounding areas, actually unlocked very prematurely, way before I'd discovered all areas anyway. However, the final outstanding trophy wasn't as straight forward;

Completionist - Completed all Pirate's Booty side missions.

The "Completionist" trophy, awarded for Completing all Pirate's Booty side missions, requires the player to beat 23 additional missions aside from the Pirate's Booty main questline.

These, for the most part, fit in line with the same characteristics of the main quests, with the simple requirement to just play through them and tick them off at a very leisurely pace with little resistance. However, every now and again, Borderlands loves throwing in a massive curveball, with a challenge so demanding, it suddenly requires you to rethink your approach and work out the best way to deal with it.

Of these 23 side quests required to unlock this trophy, there is a quest called "Hyperius the Invincible", which is offered to you by Shade towards the end of the content package. Hyperius the Invincible was ultimately too tough for me to defeat at the time I wanted to defeat him.

The DLC had lured me into a false sense of security. All these easy quests treated as standard procedure ultimately led to a boss I simply wasn't powerful enough to beat in that exact moment. My stubbornness shone through as I attempted to beat him multiple times, knowing in reality I probably couldn't with my current weapons. I also needed to level up and acquire more health points, as I was dying too quickly regardless. I eventually ran out of money refilling on ammo for the next attempt, and was ultimately forced to move on as a consequence.

My only option from here was to begin the next bit of DLC content, which was Torque's Campaign of Carnage, in order to further level up and take advantage of earning Torque Tokens - A currency exclusive to this DLC - which would allow me to buy stronger weapons that can only be purchased with this unique currency, to then go back and finally defeat Hyperius.

Once I'd acquired a couple of stronger Torque Guns through grinding activities allowing me to earn enough tokens to buy them, I returned to beat Hyperius fairly comfortably. It was just frustrating to suddenly hit a brick wall seemingly out of nowhere, where the challenge forced me to have to come back to complete it at a later date. If it wasn't for this sole quest, this would be a very straight forward package to complete, and it still is for 95% of the way.

You may be in a better position to fight Hyperius than I was, depending on individual circumstances, but I just happened to not be in that place at that time. I probably spent too much time attempting to beat him, and should have been smarter by moving on much sooner, but that's my own fault.

32 total quests, most of which are very straight-forward to complete, should take no longer than 6-8 hours, providing you don't run into the same struggles I did. Many wasted attempts notched up a couple of hours for me unnecessarily, so I spent a little longer than the estimate on this, but if you've already progressed well within the main game, you should be well over the level 30 threshold this DLC is set to, and this mostly becomes a checklist exercise. Just make sure you come back to Hyperius if you need to.

DLC #159 - Assassin's Creed Syndicate - Jack The Ripper

The scope for content during the London Victorian Era is full of intriguing ideas, so it's a little bit disappointing that Assassin's Creed Syndicate only bought out a single piece of DLC content. 

The good news is, they probably picked the strongest and most befitting idea of them all, focusing on the iconic serial killer, Jack the Ripper.

The succession of murders, that took place in Whitechapel, England in 1888 ultimately ended up unresolved, and this level of mystery made these crimes notorious in English folklore. The ambiguity also lends perfectly for the developers to run with their own narratives, characters and conclusion to the tale.

The story begins with Jack the Ripper having already committed the murders of 5 prostitutes, true to the real life crimes the Ripper was allegedly guilty of. However, in an added twist to lay the foundations of the plot, it also seems that Jack the Ripper is responsible for the death of Jacob Frye. This leaves you to play through the DLC as Evie Frye, with the main motivation being to stop the Ripper and understand what exactly happened to Jacob - His case is treated as a mysterious disappearance, but it's made quite clear to the player that Jacob is possibly killed during a very early confrontation with the Ripper. As part of the story, you will also control the Ripper during certain segments, which is a nice touch, as the game retains the angle of playing from the perspective of 2 different characters in the absence of Jacob Frye.

The DLC retains much of the main games approach, though it does implement a few fresh ideas. There is now a Fear mechanic in place, whereby you can disperse groups of enemies by pulling off specific attacks which will cause them to flee in terror, rather than relying on killing everyone in sight. This comes with the addition of some toys, including fear spikes and fear bombs. It's a neat little tweak, and makes combat much easier than killing seemingly endless waves of enemies.

There are also new associates you'll meet throughout the 10 memory sequence, who will provide a range of new side activities to complete. These are all required to achieve every trophy in the list, so to see some fresh injection of ideas into this, rather than just rinse and repeats from the main game, is also a good touch.

The 7 trophies are easy to achieve, and do lean into the fear mechanic quite heavily. You should unlock all of these progressing towards 100% completion, including a final trophy for concluding the story and unveiling the mystery behind Jack the Ripper, but there is a bit of additional legwork required here;

Ripperologist - Achieve 100% synchronisation in Jack the Ripper.

 

The "Ripperologist" trophy, requires the player to complete all content within the Jack the Ripper DLC. This wasn't a requirement for the Platinum trophy, so this is a sudden change in expectations, and full completion will require the following;

Beating 10 main story memories, including all optional mission constraints, completing 21 Associate Activities, including all optional mission constraints and collecting a total of 98 collectible items, spread across Chests, Posters and Helix Glitches.

Everything you do within this DLC works towards this trophy. The Story is great and full of intrigue, and as long as you follow the logic of completing the optional missions constraints as you play through, this will minimise the necessity to replay any memories. With that considered, it's around a 6-7 hour experience.

You'll meet 3 new Associates throughout the plot too, which will unlock a host of new side activities to complete. Most of these are fresh experiences, and a couple of them are carried over from within the main game. These also come with optional mission constraints which need to be completed in order to reach 100% synchronisation, so it's important to make sure these are fulfilled in the same method as per the main story missions. These 21 additional activities, assuming no replay required, should be another 2-3 hours on top.

Finally, and it wouldn't be Assassin's Creed without some arbitrary collectibles, you'll need to jump around the city and find 98 collectibles. This is a fairly standard map-hopping exercise, but it is important to note that you will venture into 3 unique locations as part of the main plotline, where some of these collectibles are housed, so if you're missing any, they're probably there. You'll need to replay the relevant memory where you visit these areas if you missed any collectibles the first time round. As before, you'll be able to purchase treasure maps at £5,000 each, which will reveal the locations of all collectibles. Add another 1-2 hours for this.

All in all, it amounts to the thick end of around 10-12 hours, with all focus on this trophy to cap the DLC off. It's a very casual experience, but a decent amount of time to put into a single trophy, where you effectively unlock the rest along the way. Exactly what was needed after being punished by The Division Survival DLC.

Platinum #120 - Assassin's Creed Syndicate

Platinum Difficulty Rating - 3/10

Continuing a tradition of games in a series that seems to be great at consistently producing fairly easy trophy lists, Assassin's Creed Syndicate makes a strong case for being one of the easiest Assassin's Creed Platinum trophies to date.

Set in good 'ole England, in the midst of the second industrial revolution at some time in the 1800's, and for the first time in any Assassin's Creed game I've played, you take control of two protagonists - Twins Jacob and Evie Frye - with the goal to prevent London being overtaken by Templar rule.

You flick between each of the two main characters, both with their own play-styles and motives. Jacob is an action-based brawler who wants to build a gang empire and takeover London, and Evie is a stealth-based spy who wants to unravel the mystery of Eden. It's a good change of pace to effectively play out the story from two different perspectives, and the way these stories feel different, but still closely linked to an overall main story arc is executed well.

As always in Assassin's Creed games, the supporting cast is full of well known characters befitting of the era in time. I especially enjoyed this particular one, as an Englishman watching the introductions of some very influential British figures come and go throughout the plot, with an excellent homage to the First World War added in for good measure.

Despite the split motives between both characters, the ultimate conclusion is to stop Crawford Starrick, a powerful figure who controls London via a massive criminal network. The plot takes a typical shape as you go through memories and sequences murdering your way through a host of other different people with criminal ties to Starrick. It's another great entry into the Asssassin's Creed series, with a proven formula that doesn't stray too far from it's predecessors.

The aforementioned change in perspective, where you now control two main protagonists is the biggest gameplay change, but there are some new mechanics that are also solid additions. Missions where you ultimately end up assassinating a key figure play out as big set pieces with multiple ways to kill your target, down to the discretion of the player, with the variety providing a very Hitman-esque feeling.

The large scale gang fights are a cool addition too, and London is excellently recreated in all of it's Victorian glory, with a host of key landmarks across London bought to life, and instantly recognisable to their real counterparts.

On the trophy list front, it's much more of the same, with the now extremely familiar formula for Assassin's Creeds games being closely replicated here yet again.

The 50 trophies apply a focus on progression throughout the main story, delving into a wide array of the open world side activities, conquering the map and gathering collectibles. It also happens to be the easiest Assassin's Creed game yet.

The "Shall We Dance?" trophy, awarded for completing Memory Sequence 9, concludes the main story of the game, with normal rules in full application. You'll be awarded a trophy upon completion of every memory leading up to the end of the game, as well as another trophy for achieving 100% synchronisation, which involves beating every mission and their relevant additional mission constraints.

By this point, I'm always consciously aware of this because it seems to be a standard requirement of every Assassin's Creed list to contain a trophy for 100% synchronisation of the Main Story. Completing the additional requirements as I go along is a great method of reducing needless replayability, and when I went back over the small handful of mission constraints I'd missed, they were incredibly easy to tick off and gave me absolutely no issues. In previous titles, there have always been a couple of additional tasks that have been somewhat challenging, but no such issue existed here, and I cruised through the story unfazed.

There's no inclination to play through the game on any specific difficulty level - In fact, I don't even think the option is ever presented - and the combat system is still incredibly easy to grasp. There are a few tweaks to the combat - Enemies will now adopt a defensive stance to attacks, and will require you to break their block by pressing X before you can unleash a flurry of attacks yourself, but the game's combat still ultimately comes down to button-mashing using whatever weapon of your choice, and chaining these attacks together to deal with multiple enemies at once.

Outside of the main story, the game offers up a ton of side content, but the trophy list is very selective in it's requirements on how much of this you actually need to fulfil towards completing the entire list.

The "Street Sweeping" trophy, awarded for Conquering all the boroughs in London, is as extensive as the requirement goes, and conquering a borough does require a fair amount of work. There are 7 London boroughs to conquer in total, and in order to conquer a borough, you'll need to complete a variety of different tasks which gradually remove Blighter control of that particular area. These include clearing all gang strongholds, completing all gang member bounties, hunting all templars and completing every child liberation mission. Once you've beaten all these activities, you'll unlock the gang war activity for that particular borough, and winning the gang war will finally move it into conquered status.

The gang wars are the best part of this trophy - Most of the other preliminary activities become tedious and boring once you realise they're copied and pasted across all 7 London boroughs, and this sort of content padding is something Assassin's Creed games are notorious for. Even though the boroughs scale in difficulty of enemy presented to the player, there never seemed to be any serious challenge in clearing any of them as you progress through the game. It just becomes a fairly standard tick-box exercise.

Collectibles are still fairly rife, but nowhere near as tedious as they have been in some previous Assassin's Creed titles. You can still purchase maps that will reveal the location of all collectibles necessary to achieve a corresponding trophy in the list, which naturally makes them easier to gather. Further to this, each of the London boroughs will give a breakdown of all collectibles that lie within that area, all sorted by type, so the game does everything it can to support you with maximum clarity on the collectibles you might need, and exactly where you can get them. 

I count a total of 6 collectible-related trophies here, with the overall collective amount of items to obtain sitting at 164. It's not exactly light work, but to add some context, Assassin's Creed Unity had you collecting 422 treasure chests and Cockades towards the Platinum trophy, so it's a very welcome change in direction to see a fairly drastic drop in these requirements. Collectibles in Assassin's Creed games have never really been an interesting exercise, and they're really no different here in Syndicate. Some of them offer up some cool backstory, such as consuming the 20 different brands of beer, all of which provide interesting commentary to them, but their primary reason to exist is to act as a time filler with little intrinsic reward apart from the trophies related to them.

The rest of the list is made up of lots of miscellaneous tasks, some of which will come naturally as you play through the game, and others less so. The list also harbours a handful of really annoying trophies. Who deemed it was necessary to include a trophy that involved destroying 5000 destructible objects with your carriage, where the strategy is to just literally blast around the city for hours carelessly running into anything and everything until you reached a total of 5000?? 

Kicking 50 enemies off trains, shooting 50 enemies before they shoot you and performing 50 multi-finishers will more than likely all require post-game work, as these situations just don't simply pop up that frequently in an organic nature as you go through the game. They are all but a minor inconvenience, but still add tedious legwork onto the end of the journey.

However, this is the easiest Assassin's Creed game I've ever played by virtue of the following;

The additional mission constraints to achieve 100% synchronisation are easy, it's nowhere near as heavy on collectibles as some previous Assassin's Creed games have been - plus you still get the visual guidance from the game through the option of purchasing maps that reveal their whereabouts - and even with the some of the more grindy miscellaneous trophies, you can still come in on under 35 hours for this Platinum if you're efficient and complete additional mission requirements for 100% sync as you go along to minimise replay time.

Once I was finished, I only had a 74% completion rate for everything the game had to offer, which is a good indication of the fact that there's alot of side content you don't need to go through if you're playing the game purely for the purpose of achieving the Platinum trophy. The average benchmark seems to be around 4/10 for an Assassin's Creed, but I do believe this comes in slightly lower for those reasons.

Notable Trophies -

Shall We Dance? - Complete Memory sequence 9
Street Sweeping - Conquer all the boroughs in London

Hardest Trophy -

Street Sweeping

Conquer all the boroughs in London

DLC#158 - Tom Clancy's The Division - Expansion II - Survival

The Division DLC experience has been some journey. It's been time-consuming, grindy, challenging and, in this case especially, brutal in it's conclusion.

The concept of Survival is good, something different, but ultimately very frustrating because it's intent on showing absolutely no mercy and kicking you all over the place.

You're sent into Manhattan in order to extract some Anti-Viral agents, when your helicopter crashes into the middle of map. It's extremely cold, you only have a hazmat suit on, and you've contracted Sepsis, which will kill you within a matter of 1 hour. No bargaining on that.

The goal is to survive, and ultimately escape, but the disease flowing through you takes hold and will eventually kill you if you don't manage to escape within the 1 hour time limit, so something's got to give - And that's if the various other perils within the game mode don't get to you first. These include large groups of NPC's that patrol Manhattan's streets, booby traps and even the plummeting weather conditions.

You start out in a Safehouse with just a pistol and the aim centres around crafting warmer clothes, better weapons and the other necessary tools required in order to extract and escape. The game has a steep learning curve as you go through the process of understanding the map, and the best methods for success. This leads to some brutal difficulty, especially early on when you're running around with flimsy clothing and weak weapons - All it takes is to run into a group of enemies or find yourself caught short in the cold and it could be all over. If you have medkits, you'll be able to revive yourself, unless you die to the cold, which is always an instant death. If you don't possess any medkits, and die through either NPC's or a booby trap, you'll bleed out within 5 minutes unless there's another player willing to revive you. It's a fairly unforgiving experience for the solo player, which is how I mostly played through this DLC, and I failed time and time again.

You can play with other players, and the map is shared, so you'll see them running around alongside you, but, at least from my own experience, you'll be going alone if you're just looking to jump in and play. If you're feeling extra sadistic, you can play against other players too, something I was almost certainly looking to avoid.

The list contains 5 trophies, with a couple of these awarded to whet the appetite, including one for your first successful extraction, as well as crafting the Virus Filter and Flare Gun, both critical extraction components. Achieving a Master Rank will potentially cause a few issues for some, as this requires 10,000 points from a successful extraction, but I got this without even trying for it, so cannot really testify to any challenges.

The completion of this set runs through one trophy;

For The Hoarder... - Successfully extract 100 items from the Survival Dark Zone.

The " For The Hoarder..." trophy, requires the player to successfully extract with 100 caches from the Dark Zone. Once you reach the Dark Zone area, you'll be able to find sealed caches containing weapons and equipment, which you can then open to reveal your prizes. They're effectively the loot element of this game mode, and are either dropped by enemy NPC's, or found in gear containers. You can only hold up to 6 of these caches per extraction, which means, in order to extract 100 of these, you'll need a minimum of 17 successful extractions. You'll spend alot of time working towards this trophy and I ended up extracting 18 times to reach 100, dying many times throughout the process along the way.

I found the best way to tackle this trophy was to identify a solid approach, and stick to it, which I broke down into 2 parts;

Stage 1 - Crafting the Virus Filter to enter the Dark Zone - This is the first mandatory step, but I also made sure I did the following before entering the Dark Zone;

• Gathered Fabric materials in order to craft more sustainable clothing to cope with the cold weather
• Gathered 2 Green Weapons Parts in order to build the Green M44 Marksman Rifle, which takes down enemies at this stage in a couple of shots.
• Gathered Fabric and Tools in order to craft the Virus Filter and reach the Dark Zone

Once I'd fulfilled these steps, I'd move into the next stage...

Stage 2 - Extracting from the Dark Zone, along with the following;

• Gathered Gold Weapons Parts and Division Tech in order to build the Gold M44 Marksman Rifle, which is much better suited to take down the now stronger enemies within the Dark Zone.
• Gathered Tools and Division Tech in order to craft the Flare Gun and Extract - if there are other players around, you may not need to do this, as you can always have the option of backing onto another players Extraction, but this isn't always guaranteed to happen before you die of infection.
• Collected at least 5 Loot Caches in order to fulfil the total towards the trophy requirement - The Hunter you fight at the Extraction Zone will always drop a Loot Cache, which is your 6th drop.

Settling on this method took some trial and error to reach, and there were many failed attempts along the way, some of which would come as agonisingly close as almost extracting, but either running out of time and succumbing to infection, or getting killed by NPC's near the end of the session. The Dark Zone is full of Purple and Yellow-graded enemies, and they will cause you problems in groups, which is probably the most noticeably unforgiving thing as a solo-player, and also why it's essential to craft the Gold M44 Marksman Rifle. It's a necessary equaliser to not always having the support of another player in gun fights. I know some people like crafting the turret, but I never did this personally, as my general tactic was to choose the path of least resistance, and this generally involved ignoring fighting.

Also, as soon as you call in an Extraction via shooting the Flare Gun, a Hunter will spawn in, which you'll have to beat before the chopper lands. They're powerful and if they down you, they'll execute you before you can revive, so this is a horrible knife-edge at the final step of any Survival Session. I came unstuck here multiple times, even during my latter parts of this trophy when I'd gained more experience. They're just tough foes that can get the better of you if you're not careful, which adds to the difficulty levels.

I did generally try to avoid conflict when I reached the Dark Zone. It's better to try and go about your business quietly, and only fight in situations of absolute necessity, if all you're attempting to do is achieve this trophy. It is discouraging to see so much time and effort go to waste when you die, and there were some times I'd play multiple Survival games in a row and come away empty handed every time, which is a big test of perseverance.

One thing I do need to shout out is how helpful other players are. If you get downed by enemy NPC's, and you don't have any medkits left, you'll get a 5 minute timer before you bleed out and your session ends. Your only hope at this point is if another player comes and revives you. This will cost them one of their own medkits, and if you die, they could scavenge all your loot off your corpse, so it was extremely refreshing to see alot of people choose the former option and help you up. This saved numerous sessions for me where I ended up getting extractions off after being on the brink of death, so this supportive environment is absolutely worth mentioning. It was my favourite part of a pretty rocky experience.

Once I'd gotten used to the game mode, and put in place a clearly defined plan of attack, I did start to find a much better flow. There were still some horrible endings to sessions where I'd get blown up by a bomb I didn't see around a corner, or not managing my time well enough to extract before death, or being sandwiched by groups of enemies coming at me from 2 different directions, but that's all part of the game. It's an aptly named piece of DLC that will always keep you on your toes, and the sense of relief upon achieving this final trophy was huge. I'm probably going to need to play something more casual next, that's for sure.

In terms of a time estimation, it's hard to gauge. 18 extractions totalling the full time limit of 1 hour in most instances would be around the 18 hour mark, but the number of failed extractions isn't accounted for anywhere. I would say I comfortably failed more than 18 times, but these wouldn't always amount to an hour lost each time, depending on at which stage of the run I died at.

However, one statistic that is tracked - I've ended up spending 9 days, 22 hours and 56 minutes beating the Division. That's 238 hours in total, the vast majority of this being on these 3 punishing DLC packs, which makes it one of the most time-consuming 100% games in my entire collection. It's definitely been a journey to remember.