Horizon Forbidden West Platinum

 Hello Everyone. I recently got the platinum in Horizon Forbidden West and would like to talk about it.

Overall, it was easier than I expected to get the platinum. It was about par with the platinum in Horizon Zero Dawn. The biggest change I noticed was that there were fewer "collect 100% of a collectible" type trophies. Only some activities like Tallnecks, Rebel Camps, Hunting Grounds, Fight Pits and Cauldrons ask you to complete 100% of their specific activities. Many of the other collectibles only have a "collect just x of them".

So it is possible to get the platinum without having to do 100% of the game. Which I appreciate. Many open world game trophies often drag as they ask you to spend a long time looking for collectibles (I remember God of War 2018 in particular was really tedious towards the end). HFW seems to try and keep the 100% collectibles to activities that significantly reward the player like Tallnecks or Cauldrons, or have a story component like Rebel Camps. Granted, it still takes about as long as Horizon Zero Dawn's trophies though.

 In addition, there's only really one sorta missable trophy "All Machine Types Scanned - Encountered and Focus scanned every type of machine". (Horizon doesn't have the most the creative trophy names) Because of the 43 machines in the game, 2 of them, The Specter and Specter Prime, only appear in certain missions so if you forget to scan them, you miss out. But apparently, in one of the patches, they no longer count since they automatically scanned. I haven't tested this out as my final Machine left to scan was a simple Grazer, one of the first docile machines you encounter. I missed this one because they don't spawn outside the starting areas of the map and there's no quests tied to them. So a little embarrassing there. But at least the trophy doesn't require you scan or even kill every variant of a machine as some machines can have like 3-7 variants.

There are 4 rather annoying trophies to get: "All Acquisition Machines Killed, All Recon Machines Killed, All Combat Machines Killed and All Transport Machines Killed". That's because the game doesn't track which of machines from the categories you've killed. You'll have to cross reference between a machine's entry in the notebook and how many machines you've killed on the statistics page to cross reference.

As for the rest of the trophies, they aren't very notable. They're either "do this story quest", or "do this optional side questline", or "craft/upgrade x things y times". Which are ok. Personally, I think it would have been better if the game swapped out some of the less interesting trophies that you'd get anyway (like "reach level 20/30/40/50") for more gameplay related ones as way of pushing the player towards trying out different tactics and ideas. The game has stuff like "Used all Elemental States- Inflicted every elemental state on an enemy at least once" and "Unlocked 3 Weapon Techniques- Unlocked a Weapon Technique for 3 different weapon classes". I like these types of trophies because they encourage the player to try out stuff in the gameplay which they could use in regular play. If I could suggest some replacement trophies, I'd have one for "Shock a machine's battery pack so they explode" and "Use Purgewater to inflict a status on a machine that it's normally resistant against" and "Inflict maximum damage to an enemy in the Plasma State". Stuff like that as a way to teach players more tricks.

So yeah, if you want a pretty simple platinum, Horizon Forbidden West is a good pick.

As for the game itself, it's good. I feel it's about par with the first game. HFW does have a lot of improvements like the new weapons and enemy types, and more customization. But also feels more bloated in places which drags down the experience. 

Let's start with the story. I had a really odd sinusoidal time with the story. The opening was great and really hooked me. I loved the idea of Aloy being under pressure and trying to live up to Sobeck and her interactions with Varl. But then the story sorta puts that on hold to deal with Embassy stuff which feels a lot like filler. Even Aloy herself is bored and unhappy at having to do that. Then my excitement picked up with the introduction of the rebels and how they use machines as well as what Sylens is up to. But then it dropped that while Aloy seemed to forget about that and instead helps out the local tribes with their problems. Then it picked up with Far Zenith etc.

Compare this to HZD. In that game, I found the story a lot more consistently engaging from start to finish. I think part of that is due to the premise of HZD. You were learning more about the world, and Aloy and the mystery of what is going on is introduced quite early on and involves a lot of these threads. This meant any new revealtion or plot point carried more weight and felt more special. Plus the main story was a lot shorter than HFW so it had a greater concentration of interesting missions.

HFW starts off at a disadvantage because the mystery of the world and Aloy's character is already known. The blight doesn't feel new or threatening enough to be interesting. Sylens and his time with HADES is interesting but that gets resolved surprisingly quickly. The story does pick up considerably when Aloy first encounters Far Zenith. They present the story with the mystery and intrigue it had been lacking but it comes around 1/3 into the story and even then, doesn't really get going until much later.

 I think one issue Horizon's world faces is that much of the backstory and lore for what the old World was like was already revealed in the first game and HFW only continues it rather than twists it or shows new sides to it.  Compare this to Fallout Games. Since much of the pre-war world wasn't shown as much nor was the pre-war culture and entities so homogenous, it allows for stuff like Vaults and other areas which reveal new stories about pre-war stuff and if any later survivors interact with it. So reading scraps of documents in Fallout often feels more engaging than in HFW. Which is a shame. I think it would have been more interesting if there were more wacky elements of Horizon's 2060's played more of a role in its present. HFW does have some things like the Embers and how it intersects with 2060's Las Vegas that I wish were more present. Like, how about some tribes take notes from the fictional Superheroes and movies of the time and use their theme song as their own? Horizon's world already has groups like Tenakth, Quen and Nora whose names and beliefs are based on misinterpretations of some past entity like Joint Force 10 and Norad but those tend to only be localized to the main quests rather than side stuff.

 

 Anyway, back to the main story.  Once Aloy encounters Far Zenith for the first time, things are a lot more engaging as they provide a more tangible threat as well as introduce more stakes and intrigue. They also make the interactions with the other side characters in the game more interesting. It's great talking to characters like Erend, Kotallo or Alva and getting their takes on the situation. These side characters also have their own optional questlines which are great and really expand on the cast and even Aloy at times in engaging ways.

 

The way the story juggles and frames many of its threads is handled quite odd though. For example, Regalla and her army are a persistent part in the first half of the story. But are then completely forgotten about until near the end of the game where Aloy decides to make her own plan to save the Tenakth and end the Civil War where that thread is resolved surprisingly fast. Or how Far Zenith feel really important in the latter half but get demoted in the final mission in favour of Tilda and later Nemiesis. It feels quite sudden. Like, it's not bad. I was certainly invested and enjoyed it but it didn't land as well as it could.

I am also mixed on the cliffhanger ending. Generally, I am not fond of cliffhangers in games because games have certain requirements that cliffhangers could hamstring. For one, games take years to develop so any continuation or resolution is a long time away. Even assuming the sequel does get made. The nature of game development is also quite flexible which means ideas that seemed good before may not work as well. A cliffhanger now means a sequel has to address what was set in the past. In addition, there's gameplay to consider. A cliffhanger dicates what the next game's opening would be like which may make it harder to make an interesting tutorial and build on the story at the same time.

But in HFW's case, there are some smart things done to help alleviate some of the issues. For one, nothing specific about Nemesis is known. The story doesn't say much about how exactly Nemesis works or what it looks like or how it plans to destroy Earth. Only basically, what it is in a broad sense, Nemesis is and its broad goals. This gives Horizon 3 a lot more wiggle room in how they want to address this premise without locking them into something specific.

 

But one challenge with the way Horizon handles its continuity is that even with recaps, I imagine it may be confusing for new players going forward. Horizon Forbidden West has quite a few main and side quests that rely on players being familiar with events of main and side quests from the last game. For example, the game makes the big revelation that Nil is the mysterious Red Rider if you complete all the gauntlet runs. I remember being confused for a sec on who Nil was until I remembered "oh yeah, this was the guy Aloy worked with to complete bandit camps with in the last game. And that I chose to kill". And given how many side characters and quests Aloy completes across the 2 games, if Horizon 3 continues this approach, I wonder if even people who've played the games may start having a hard time remembering what's happening?

As for the gameplay, it's good. It's mostly more of the same from HZD but there are a few complaints I have which I feel weaken the positives the game has.

For one, the game feels quite bloated in its design. Like, in HZD, once you completed a cauldron, you got the overrides and could use them right there and then. But HFW requires you go and kill machines to get specific parts so you can actually use the overrides you got from cauldrons. Which makes cauldrons feel less special. In fact, a lot of HFW involves a lot of crafting and looting to upgrade weapons and armour which I feel kills the pace and makes rewards a lot less interesting. Completing a quest and recieving a cool Hunter bow loses some of its appeal if it's worse than the upgraded Hunter bow I already have. I could spend the resources to upgrade said bow to make it better but I feel that kills the pace. Plus, I don't know if the Hunter Bow is better or more useful until I upgrade it and I may find something even better later which discourages really experimenting or trying out different weapons.

To compare it to other games, in Borderlands, loot is technically disposable. As you level up and progress through the game, you naturally gain higher level loot that replaces your older loot which can help the game feel fresh as you may alternate what kind of weapons you use as you play. In Assassin's Creed Odyessy, it's a somewhat similar system, but if you really like a particular peace of gear, you can pay a something expensive fee to bring that piece of gear up to your current level. In Call of Duty Multiplayer, you can customize certain weapons with attatchments which can change how a weapon operates. All of these games make it more fun to go around and find new gear.

I feel Horizon Forbidden West's arsenal would be more fun if instead of upgrading individual weapons and armour, the focus instead is placed on mods and coils. The game already has coils but they seem quite minor. This way, it feels more fun to instantly try out different weapons since mods are easily transferable between gear and you don't need to upgrade a weapon for it to be viable.

Another issue I have is towards navigation and interacting with the world. HFW has a climbing system similar to that of Assassin's Creed where Aloy can easily climb sheer rock faces and buildings with no issue. But unlike AC, HFW is quite arbitary with where Aloy can climb. There are plenty of cliffs and buildings that Aloy cannot climb that look exactly like cliffs and buildings that Aloy can climb. It can feel quite annoying and really break the flow to be climbing a mountain and have to stop because the yellow handholds don't extend any more for no reason. It's worse inside buildings, cauldrons and ruins since many of them turn off Aloy's ability to climb basic walls and railings that Aloy can normally climb right outside for the sake of the puzzle. In addition, many of the solutions to these puzzles are quite obtuse because instead of being able to use Aloy's default abilities to solve them, you need to figure out what obtuse set of actions are required. I remember looking up a few guides on Youtube when I got stuck and a lot of the comments on them echoed how unusual and obtuse the solutions were. For example, one of the ruins in Las Vegas requires you to move a crate across an area after you flood the area. The offical solution appears to be to lower the water again so you can push the crate in position. But the player can use the grapple hook the move the crate over water. Except in this location, the railings seem to block the grapple hook. I found a way to get Aloy to stand in a particular spot to the side to be able to pull the crate but it seemed that wasn't the intended solution despite being a mechanic in other parts of the game. 

Another example was in one of the ruins, you have to stack 2 crates to be able to reach a ledge. Except yo can sequence break it by performing a wall eject. But a similar puzzle later on seemigly disables Aloy's ability to do ejects at all.

I find this design really annoying and it pulls me out of the moment. Why have such cool mechanics like wall jumping and such interesting locations if the level seems designed to disallow such moves? I feel it would be more fun to have multiple ways of solving puzzles using different mechanics.

Speaking of which, the game has 4 kinds of new tools you can use to access more parts of the world. In a bit of Metroidvania-esque design, there are many locations you can't fully explore until you get tools later on in the game. These tools are an explosive to blow up red Firegleam Walls which can open holes in certain walls, special software to cause green Metal Flower Vine's to disappear, and a grappling hook for being able to pull on certain blue objects. These sound cool except they don't really change how you interact with objects. You see a wall with Firegleam? You blow it up. You see Metal Vines? You turn them off. They often feel more like how HMs in Pokemon games work.  The Grapple hook is a little more interesting as you can pull certain objects a certain amount so there's more thought required. But many times, you see a blue object, you grapple it and pull it.

I feel it would be more interesting if these tools had more interesting applications. For example, you could activate Metal Flowers as well so they could grow vines in certain directions. So puzzles could involve arranging certain patterns of vines to either walk/climb on. Or you could use the Grapple Hook to swing across points. Maybe combine the different tools together. I feel that would be more interesting than just "use tool".

The strongest aspect of the game is, just like its predecessor, combat. Fighting large machines using the assortment of weapons is still really fun. HFW makes a lot of effort to expand and improve these parts by giving Aloy more weapons, an entire new melee system with combos and special moves, new enemy types, and new skills and abilities. It's a blast. But much of the stuff around the game still feels like it's a generation old. The stealth is quite basic so Rebel Camps feel less advanced and dynamic than Far Cry 3 in 2012. The climbing feels less intuitive and fun that Uncharted 1 in 2007.

In conclusion, Horizon Forbidden West is a good time thanks to its combat and interesting story, and is an easy platinum to get. But the rather dull navigation and exploration bring it down.

Next up for me is God of War 2. See you then

God of War 2 Platinum

 Hello everyone I recently platinummed the 2007 game God of War 2

The platinum itself wasn't too hard to get. Most trophies were straightforward with some individual challenges being rather tricky. My plan was to beat the game normally. Then complete the "Challenge of Titans". Then use NG+ to mop up anything I missed. Though, it is possible to skip most of the NG+ playthrough as you can complete the required trophies during the first playthrough.

I only missed the "You Know the Germans Make Good Stuff...- Collect all Uber Chests" trophy on my first playthrough despite it not being that hard because I missed the Health chest because I forgot where it was. I assumed it was further ahead than it actually was from my memory from the PS2 version I played as a kid. When I got the Magic Uber chest, I suddenly realized my mistake. Oh well, at least speedrunning NG+ with the "Cod of War" only required around 3 hours to get back to where it actually was.

The one trophy that requires you to go out of your way to grind a collectible is "Eye Sore - Collect 20 Cyclops Eyes". There are only like 5 cyclops berserkers in the entire story mode. Fortunately, once you complete the story mode, you unlock the "Challenge of the Titans". A series of 7 rather difficult challenges. The first challenge requires you to remove the eye from a Cyclops which can you can repeat though I found it didn't increase my count for some reason. But once you complete all 7 challenges (and get the "Bleeding Thumbs" trophy in the process), you unlock the "Arena of the Fates". A mode that allows you to spawn whatever enemies you want and set their AI as well as whatever buffs you want. I used this to spawn endless Cyclops berserkers and get the remaining 16 eyes I had left.

The Challenge of the Titans is a really cool addition. In addition to being a way to farm for specific trophies if you haven't gotten them yet like "Stoner- Stone and Shatter 30 Enemies", they provide some really cool and fun challenges that twist many of the rules. Stuff like "collect 500 orbs before time runs out" or "Defend the Translator" are quite fun. Plus, unlike GOW1, you don't need to beat this in one sitting to get the trophy. My one criticism is that it seems harder on VITA than it does on PS3. I noticed that in Challenge 2: "kill 10 enemies in the air", PS3 videos were able to get multiple hits in with the L1+square attack in the air. While in the VITA version, the technique resulted in fewer hits. Perhaps because the PS3 version is running at a higher framerate, your attacks which deal damage on every frame get more chances to deal damage?

There is one glitched trophy. "Boss Batch 3- Kill the Kraken and all three Sisters of Fate". Now, GOW2 has 3 of these Boss Batch trophies for killing a certain set of bosses. I assumed that the trophy essentially just pops for killing the latest boss of the batch since GOW2 is a linear game. It's not like you can do the bosses out of order. But apparently, for Boss Batch 3, if you save and quit at any point between the Kraken and the final sister of fate, the trophy might not pop. So you have to defeat these 3 bosses in one sitting. Which I found took a long time. Good thing the VITA can enter rest mode at least but it's weird the trophy seems to actually check if you've defeated all 3 bosses. My guess is that there's a flag in the game's code for when you defeat one of these bosses and once it hits a certain number (i.e when you defeat all the bosses), the trophy pops. But turning off the game resets that flag back to the default?

 

Also, one of the Bronze Trophies is  "Swinger - Cross the collapsing Grapple Bridge". I hated that section. I died 40 times on it. That trophy should be Gold 

 

As for the game itself, I really love it. GOW2, in terms of combat and general gameplay, is a huge improvement over GOW1. The new L1 + Square, O and Triangle moves give you a lot to work with. Later Enemies are pretty nimble so you can't "Square, Square Triangle" your way through the game as much as you progress through the game so all your other options are more useful. All 3 sub weapons fulfill different niches and are fun to use (though, having to go the menu to swap them out does kill the flow. I recall reading that was because of hardware limitations because the PS2 couldn't load the assets for all the weapons simultaneously and the menu trick was a way of buying the PS2 enough time to load and de-load the assets). The different magic abilities are much more refined. For example, Typhon's Bane is a lot more useful than Zeus' lightning from GOW1 because you can move while aiming and have more kinds of attacks like rapid fire blasts and mini hurricanes. Cronus Rage allows you to spawn lightning orbs, making it a more active version of Poseidon's Rage from GOW1. The game also speeds up the animations for moving around crates and makes movement and platforming a lot smoother so it's a lot of fun to play through. I also really like how the game handles its NG+ with how it allows you to use bonus costumes and urns (special gameplay modfiers) that allow you to entirely break the game if you want. Really gives you a lot of variety.

I do wish the game had more animations for the QTEs as they do get repetitive after a while as there's only one per enemy.

I also love how GOW2 leans into Greek mythology with many of the characters you meet. Such as Theseus and how he's overconfident after his successes and has respect for Kratos. Or how Perseus is now much more villainous and desperate since he couldn't save Andromeda since he couldn't kill Medusa because Kratos killed her first in GOW1. In fact, many of the side characters and bosses in GOW2 have a lot more personality and are more memorable than bosses and side characters in GOW1 despite them having so little screentime. GOW2 really makes the most out of its interactions.

My one gripe with the gameplay is its pacing. Or rather, how it approaches puzzles. I remember as a kid always getting stuck on GOW2 more than any other GOW game because of how many puzzles the game has. I remember getting stuck in the bog of the forgotten as a kid for a few years because I never realized you could put the body into the stream and have it navigate around the area. Not having internet access at the time really made stuff like that annoying but I would just play the game until I got to that area, try for an hour to solve the problem and then restart the game from the start and play through until I got to the Bog again and repeat the cycle. I think I once accidentally dropped the body into the water and was so surprised that I could actually progress. Only to be stuck again on the statue after Perseus, I never found the statue you'd use to block the light for another few years. Once I did, I never realized you could put Perseus' shield on it.

Fortunately, as an adult and on this most recent playthrough, speedruns were kind enough to show me that you could do that. Though, I did get stumped on the Phoenix Puzzle were quite a while because I missed there were ice shards on the ceiling and on the 3rd sister because I missed where one of the blades were.

I fully embrace the possibility that I just missed the hints (probably didn't help that the smaller VITA screen probably made it harder to see the detail of the environments) so I won't complain the game was unfair. But even so, I do feel like the abundance of puzzles like this do make the experience drag a bit more than usual, especially if you happened to get stuck at any point. I don't recall any of the other classic GOW games being like that and being much more fun and fast paced.

 

A minor thing, but I dislike how GOW2 (and GOW3) remove the player's red orbs after the opening. I get the purpose of it. It's to give the player a taste of how strong they will be early on. But I feel resetting the player's red orbs to 0 sorta discourages playing the cool opening. I remember whenever I play GOW2 or 3 now, I rush through the cool opening since my performance doesn't matter until after the opening level. I feel it would be better if the player's health, magic and upgrades are all reset but the number of red orbs obtained during the opening remained the same.

As for the story of the game, I'm mixed on it. On the one hand, I like the moral ambiguity and set up it has for Kratos and Zeus' conflict. Like, the story of Kratos is designed such that in GOW1, he's this kinda sociopathic antihero but you end up sympathizing with him because you see how he's motivated by his guilt and self loathing. That all he wants is for the pain to end. And in GOW3 he's become the villain and monster he was always angry at. His personal vendetta against the Gods and how they hurt humans has become a more destructive version of what the Olympians have done. GOW2 acts as that transitional step between sorta sympathetic antihero GOW1 Kratos and full on monster GOW3 Kratos. GOW2 is cleverly set up so you root for Kratos to succeed but has plenty of hints to make you start to see that things aren't so black and white. For one, there's the obvious stuff that Zeus kills Kratos and later all Spartans. We also see how the Gods tortured Prometheus. This gives the audience plenty of reason to root for Kratos and root against the Gods. But at the same time, the game points out how Zeus kinda has a point and that Kratos isn't all innocent. Kratos did disobey the protocols of the Gods to destroy cities for his fellow Spartans which increase tensions on Olympus. Like, Kratos is doing the exact things that made Athena justify killing Ares back in GOW1. From Zeus' perspective, Athena skirted Olympian protocol to make this God killer a full on God. This God Killer shows no respect for the other Olympians, if not outright hates them, and destroys Greek cities. And Zeus knows that Kratos is his son and could attempt to kill him. Like, Kratos has the means and motive to want to kill Zeus and thus destroy Olympus and is inching closer to realizing that. It makes sense for Zeus to want to take some action (albeit extreme).

But at the same time, the game shows us how the Gods aren't entirely at fault. Kratos for example, disregards the well being of his fellow Spartans just to pursue his vengeance against Zeus which does result in nobody being there for Sparta. Kratos here has been both the mortal ignored by the Gods, and the God ignoring the Mortals for his revenge. We also see how Kratos brutalizes people like Perseus and Icarus who also have genuine reason for seeking the Sisters of Fate. This shows how even if Kratos were to succeed, it wouldn't mean things would get better for people. Plus, we see how the Titans are manipulating Kratos to keep going just for their sake. Like, During the times when Kratos was cool with dying and being done with his quest, Gaia tells him to keep going because "only cowards accept death" and "Zeus will torture your soul forever in the underworld. You will never know peace".

All this is kinda why I dislike that in GOW3, it's revealed that the Evils of Pandora's box are what infected the Gods. I prefer it without that since it better communities this moral ambiguity.

But as much as I like all this going on in GOW2's story, I can't help but feel it is a lot less consistently engaging compared to GOW1. In GOW1, Kratos' progression through Athens and his flashbacks peppered through the game allowed the story and character to develop throughout the game. In GOW2, Kratos himself doesn't really change or grow. He does arguably become more brutal and sociopathic in subtle ways but much of his interactions with other characters feel more disconnected. Like, it feels that you could rearrange in which order Kratos encounters characters and which challenges he does in GOW2 and little would change. Wheras, that was less apparent in GOW1.

Plus, much of the game is getting to the Sisters of Fate, but the story spends more time building up to fighting Zeus and treats the Sisters are more of a Stepping Stone which makes progression feel a bit unsatisfying at times. Wheras in GOW1, the game builds to getting to Ares, and before that, Pandora's Temple and how that would lead to Ares.

Still, I enjoy the individual interactions in GOW2's story but the overall story of GOW1.

Also, even though I really love the cool time travel scenarios in GOW2, I have to do some small nitpicks and point out the time travel is a bit inconsistent.

For starters, when Kratos is fighting the second sister of Fate, she takes him to the events of GOW1 just before past Kratos grabs the giant statue's sword to be able to fight Ares. Her plan is to destroy the sword so past Kratos couldn't use it to kill Ares so that means present Kratos wouldn't be here. So the time travel seems to work on Back to the Future rules since Present Kratos has to stop her from destroying the sword to keep himself alive.

But later on when Present Kratos time travels to before Zeus kills past Kratos, he tackles Zeus and takes the Blade of Olympus before Zeus can deliver the killing blow to both his timeline's Kratos and Spartans. But shouldn't this create a paradox? If Past Kratos doesn't die here and get motivated to go reach the Sisters of Fate, then present Kratos can't be here because his Past Self didn't take the same steps he did. So now the Time Travel seems to switch to Avengers Endgame Rules where you can interact with the past without it affecting the time traveller. Especially later on when Present Kratos Time Travels further back into the past to bring the Titans to "his time" (or rather the timeline he was in earlier). Which should affect the events of GOW1, Chains of Olympus and Ghost of Sparta and 2.

So does that mean there's now a timeline where Kratos dissapears after using the Loom so the Zeus and co of that time are disposed of him, and a timeline where there are no Titans after the Great War, in addition to the timeline where there's 2 Kratos and an injured Zeus that the Titans make their attack on?

Hey, that could be an interesting point for the next GOW game. Imagine Kratos and Boy ending up in Kratos' original timeline where the Greek Gods are still alive and thought Kratos was dead the whole time.

So in conclusion, GOW2 was a really fun time and I enjoyed my time with it and getting the platinum. Next up for me on the VITA is probably Sly 4: Thieves in Time. See you then. On the PS4/5 end, I've been trying out this cool indie game called Elden Ring. It's pretty fun.

Welcome Park Review

 Hello Everyone. I recently 100%ed the game Welcome Park and would like to talk about the game,

The best way to describe Welcome Park is that it is to the PS VITA what Astro's Playroom was to the PS5. A short game included with the system to introduce you to its features. Though unlike Astro, Welcome Park is just a collection of gimmick minigames/tutorials. No Easter Eggs or anything like that. The game doesn't even use any of the buttons of the VITA except the start button to pause the minigame. So it's all touch, motion and camera control.

The minigames themselves were quite fun to play and 100%ing them was both quick and enjoyable (too bad the game doesn't give you a platinum for 100%. Only a Gold Trophy 😤) . The game also has a really nice and beautiful aesthetic that feels like a "kiddy version of Apple". It was honestly quite relaxing at times.

So the game has 5 sets of minigames: Digit Chase, Snap + Slide Puzzle, Skate Axis, Sound Loop and Hello Face. Let's start with Digit Chase

Digit Chase is subdivided into 3 sub minigames you have to play in order though you can restart an individual minigame without it affecting your progress in the others so you don't have to get a good time 3 times in a row. There's a trophy for each of the individual sub minigames where you have to get a good time on each of them but also one where you have to get a cumulative time of less than 1 minute on all 3 of them together.

One of the 3 sub minigames is Tap Stage. Here you have to tap on number tiles ranging from 1-5 appearing on the screen in the correct order. However, some tiles have specific properties. Some titles (indicated by having 2 circles) require you to tap them twice. Some tiles have 2 copies on the screen so you have to press them both at the same time. So if there's one 1 tile, two 2 tiles and a double bound 3 tile, you'd tap the single 1 tile once, tap the two 2 tiles at the same time and double tap the double bound 3 tile.

This one was quite fun. The "order" of the tiles is the same but the position changes every run which means you can only memorize part of the process. You get a trophy for completing this under 30 seconds, but for the Digit Chase cumulative time trophy, I recommend getting at least under 26 seconds for this one. My best time was around 25.031 seconds. I recommend setting the Vita down on a table and using both hands for this.

The second sub minigame is "Flick and Drag". Here you have to spin a carousel of pages containing numbers from 1 to 10 in random order and flick them in the correct order. Each number has a different colour. This one can take some time at first because the position of the numbers is random and spinning the carousel is inconsistent. But it's still fun. The game helps a bit by having the next page curl whenever you flick the previous one. So instead of needing to spin through and find the next number or memorize the pattern, you can just look to see which paper curls in the background. You get a trophy for completing this under 20 seconds, but for the Digit Chase cumulative time trophy, I recommend getting at least under 16 seconds for this one. My best time was around 14 seconds.

 

The 3rd sub minigame is "Rear Touch Panel". Here, Your aim is to shoot a ball either on the left or the right side of the screen through numbers 1-5. You have to touch the left or right side of the touch pad to launch the ball. I like the idea of this minigame but it's too easy to cheese by just alternating left and right since many of the puzzles only ask you do that. I suppose just doing Tap Stage again but with the Rear Touch Pad might be too imprecise. How about there's a pizza and you have to slice it by swiping on the Rear Touch Pad and the game tells you which direction to swipe? I feel that might be a more interesting minigame.

Anyway, You get a trophy for completing this under 20 seconds, but for the Digit Chase cumulative time trophy, I recommend getting at least under 18 seconds for this one. My best time was around 17 seconds.

 

But yeah, these sub minigames aren't too bad (minus the Rear Touch Pad one). I could see myself maybe returning to the first 2 at some point in the future for a nostalgic trip. But then again, I could find mobile games like Piano Tap which scratch the same itch but have more content and songs to try out.

The next minigame is "Snap and Slide". The way this works is that you use the VITA's 0.3 megapixel camera to take a photo. The minigame then turns that photo into a sliding block puzzle. You then have to solve the puzzle. You can choose between a 7, 8, 14 and 15 block version of the puzzle. And each of these have a trophy for completing the puzzle in under 20, 30, 40 and 50 seconds respectively.

I am terrible at sliding block puzzles. So my trick was to take a picture of a 4x4 grid of numbered squares I drew to help me out a bit. One catch I noticed was that unlike other Sliding Puzzle games, after a couple seconds, the game lets you rotate an entire row or column. Allowing you to solve even impossible arrangements and save time on possible ones. It took me around 45 minutes to solve each set of puzzles under their allotted times. I eventually reached a point where I would reset the puzzle until I got starting boards where the 1, 2, 3 and 4 squares were close enough to be lined up so I'd only have to solve the remaining ones.

This is a fun minigame and I do enjoy this. But the VITA's camera is a bit too low resolution so actual pictures are made harder by default.

The next minigame is Skate Axis. Here you control a skateboarder. You move him left or right by tilting the VITA and you make him jump by quickly rotating the VITA. You earn points by dodging bouncing balls and collecting stars. There's a trophy for getting 500 points. You earn 10 points by dodging under a ball, 50 points for jumping over a ball, and 10 and 20 points for collecting bronze and silver stars.

I know many people dread such motion based minigames but this one was actually quite decent. I found I had great contol when tilting. I never missed or accidentally did a jump when I didn't intend to. I found it quite easy to get to 500 points. I honestly wouldn't mind an expanded version of this. This was quite fun. I guess all that time I spent using Gyro Controls on Switch really helped me out here.

The next minigame is "Sound Loop". And this isn't really a game. Here, you record segments of audio using the VITA's mic and they show up as these coloured balls orbiting around. You start a recording by holding down on the touch screen. You can tap icons to vary the pitch and tap the rear touch pad to add effects and music. To be honest, I didn't spend much time on this so I can't review how easy it is to create sick beats using your VITA. There's a trophy for recording 20 balls worth of audio.

The final minigame is "Hello Face". And this isn't really a minigame either. Here, you once again use the camera but you have to take pictures of things that resemble faces. These photos then come to life and emote which is quite cute. So basically it's a tool for Pareidolia. There's a trophy for bringing 3 faces to life. I took a photo of my electrical socket 3 times since it looks like a face.

So yeah, that's Welcome Park. Overall, it's not a bad way to introduce the VITA. The minigames are short and don't overstay their welcome. The aesthetic is quite relaxing. It uses the features of the VITA well. I'd say I wouldn't mind a WarioWare style game on the VITA but I've already played Frobisher Says which is that style of game and it was fun and free so it's not like there weren't minigames for the VITA to show off its features. I do wish there was platinum for 100%ing it though

But as I played this nostalgic game I first tried out in 2012, I felt oddly melancholic. Welcome Park was supposed to introduce people to this brand new futuristic system with all these bells and whistles. But the VITA is long since dead and been abandoned by Sony. It feels like playing a multiplayer game nobody plays anymore. All these mechanics and potential, never to be seen again. Even Welcome Park itself is no longer novel. All of its minigames can be replicated on my iPhone. Future handhelds like Switch dropped most additional features in favour of a more traditional control scheme.

Though sadly, I feel no matter what Sony did, it would have been an uphill battle for the VITA. Like yes, Sony didn't help themselves with the memory cards but even if Sony made the VITA use microSD cards and lower the price by removing the touch pad and camera, the VITA likely still would have struggled. The VITA's biggest issue were the economics behind developing for it. It is expensive making AAA level games back in 2012. The 3DS got away with weaker specs since that meant it didn't the best graphics to succeed so developers could afford to make cheaper games for that which had a better return on investment. The VITA's biggest selling point was being able to play console quality games on the go, but it was too weak to run most PS3/PS4 games well but making games for the level the VITA could run was too expensive and risky given the few sales and limit the scope of the game even if it was released on PS3/PS4 as well. That meant there wasn't many games for the system which started killing it. Of course, Indie games and Sony's Cross Buy system was arguably the thing the VITA needed but that happened years too late.

 

 Still, At least Welcome Park was a fun time.

Pokemon: Kanto Black

Hello everyone. I recently played the Pokemon Kanto Black Rom Hack and would like to give my quick thoughts on it.

 

Pokemon Kanto Black is a rom hack of Pokemon FireRed. The main feature of this rom hack is that it's Kanto from FireRed but all of the Gen 1 Pokemon have been replaced with Gen 5 mons instead. Plus some Gen 6 mons in addition to a lot of quality of life and other interesting features.

So this novelty of Gen 5 and 6 pokemon in Kanto does shake up the experience significantly as there are both new ways to tackle some challenges and also new challenges to face. For example, the first gym leader, Brock, is now easily doable with any of the 3 starters since the fire starter: Tepig, evolves into a fire/fighting mon. It also goes the other way as many enemy trainers have much more powerful teams and combinations that take advantage of both Gen 5/6 mechanics and Pokemon. For example, Giovanni has a strudy Petaya Berry Bisharp with Sucker Punch, Swords Dance and Iron Head which can really catch you by surprise. It was able to one shot my overlevelled Dragon Dance Tyrantrum easily which I thought would destroy his entire team. As a result, it was really fun teambuilding and deciding which new strats and Pokemon to use for what I assumed to be familiar challenges only to have some pretty surprising responses from enemy trainers. 

In addition, the hack makes quite an effort to try and integrate these new Pokemon in ways that feel natural to the story and setting. For example, instead of Snorlax sleeping and blocking off routes, it's Musharna. Instead of Mewtwo being the Pokemon created by science, it's Genesect. Instead of Diglett Cave, you have Drillbur cave. And these add so much so the world that at it almost feels like it was made for these Pokemon initially. There are also other changes like Blaine being a Normal Type Gym Leader, Loreili specializing in Water rather than Ice, Agatha specializing in Fire etc. There is one case where I was expecting things to be changed but weren't. In FireRed, we learn that in Saffron City, there was originally a fighting type Gym. When Sabrina came, she opened her Psychic Gym. As the town was supposed to have only 1 gym, the 2 gyms fought to see who'd get to be the official Gym. And obviously Kanto Psychic types beat the Fighting Types. There's no Dark types or even good Dark moves they could have used so they never stood a chance. But in Kanto Black, there are Pokemon like Scrafty and Pangoro which are Dark/Fighting types which are immune to Psychic type moves. They also have moves like Crunch and Sucker Punch as well as competitve items. I'm surprised this wasn't brought up in Kanto Black with a "well actually, the Fighting Type Gym beat the Psychic gym because Sabrina thought her team of fast but frail Psychic types would easily win but lost to the Fighting Type Gym that had ways of countering that". Seems like a missed opportunity there.

In addition, there's quite a few more changes from base FireRed. You have the usual expected features from Rom hacks like reusable TMs, the physical/special split, the fairy type and its moves. But you also have some other cool stuff. For one, the Sevii Islands, the postgame content for the original FireRed, is now mostly accessible once you beat the 4th gym in Kanto Black. And these islands contain a lot of Gen 6 Pokemon you can't obtain in Kanto (which mostly houses Gen 5 mons) as well as allowing access to a good chunk of postgame story you can do right there. You have lots of items from later gens present like the Choice Scarf and Specs, Weakness Policy and Life Orb. And also items like Seeds which can help increase a Pokemon's IVs by a couple points. You have an entirely new island housing a Battle Facility for Rental Battles and 3v3 Battles in a Battle Tower which award both BP and Money. I love this aspect because it means instead of going out and having to do stuff like farm for heart scales/shards/berries or breed the perfect Pokemon, I can just do Rental Pokemon Battles to build up the currencies to do that faster in a more fun way.

This island also contains a new Trick House with what seems to be entirely new puzzles I've never seen before in a Pokemon game. And they can get quite intense, mixing ideas and requiring a fair amount of thought (some of the later ones do drag though).

In addition, the other battle facility, Rush Tower, has been updated with battles against gym leaders. There's an island that gives you random eggs for rare Pokemon allowing for more variety.

Like, all these alone made it a very fun Rom Hack to play through and strategize through. I'd love to one day even come back and try a nuzelocke of this game in the future once it's out of beta and polished up more. I recommend it that much.

But I do have some significant criticisms. As this game is in beta, I hope they can be addressed at some point.

Firstly, the game is quite buggy in places. Moves like Moonblast softlock the game which can make it difficult to progress. For example, there's a Team Rocket Admin who uses a sturdy Carbink with moonblast. This Pokemon always uses Moonblast for whatever reason. Even against my Excadrill who resists the move. And since it has sturdy, it cannot be knocked out in 1 hit meaning it can always get off a moonblast and soft lock the game. I ended up getting through it by switching to my Greninja and using save states to spam Dark Pulse until I got a run where it flinched several times in a row so I could then finish it off with a torrent boosted surf. As a result, I often ended up really getting afraid whenever I ran into a fairy type. Other stuff like the new postgame Battle facility doesn't seem to have the Boss Trainers spawn.

Secondly, the EXP share works like it did in Gen 5 rather than Gen 6 and onwards. Meaning you cannot level up your entire team per battle. I played the game on Challenge Mode which meant I only had 1-3 Pokemon at a reasonable level at a time while the others really lagged behind even wild Pokemon. Had to spend a fair bit of time grinding as a result. There are also doesn't seem to be Gen 5's "proportional EXP system" to help level up faster. Which does kill the pacing at times. I often found myself replacing team members by finding stronger versions in the wild. In one case, I swapped my level 13 Adamant Drillbur for a level 30 modest one just because I didn't want to grind.

Thirdly, the game doesn't seem to have unlimited item storage, either on your bag or in the PC. This wasn't that much of an issue in base FireRed because there weren't that many interesting items. But since Kanto Black has a lot of competitive items and medicines from later games present, I found my PC Item storage filling up quite fast. I had to resort to placing many of my individual items as Held Items onto Pokemon in storage. Other Rom Hacks don't have this issue and have implemented larger bag sizes or at the very least, a larger PC Item size.

Platinumming Astro's Playroom

Hello Everyone, I recently platinummed Astro's Playroom and wanted to comment on the experience.

I would classify the game has having basically 4 sets of trophies:

-Mandatory "Story" Ones you get by completing major levels. e.g "Greatness Awaits! -Cleared GPU Jungle." Nothing much to say about these ones.

 

-Find the Collectibles. e.g "Such a Big Fan!- Got all artefacts in Cooling Springs". Even without a guide, most of these were pretty straightforward to find if you played a lot of collect-a-thons. A lot of "hidden corners" and spots house the artifacts and puzzle pieces for the trophy. These were pretty fun because there were only a couple collectibles per level, levels themselves weren't too long and it was quick to access previously completed levels.

 -"Easter Eggs/Interactables" is the 3rd kind. These include trophies like "Disc Swap!- Opened the lid of The PlayStation console in PlayStation Labo",   " Jason! - Sheltered from the heavy rain in Memory Meadow. ". These operate a lot like the collectibles where you need to find the specific thing or reference and figure out how to interact with them. Normally, the last part is easy as you often just have to hit or stand by them but finding them without the trophy menu itself can be a bit tricky.

Finally we have the challenge trophies. These ones require you to complete a particular gameplay challenge. These include stuff like "Adequate, Boy…Hit all rabbits with arrows at the mountain peak of GPU Jungle.", "Keepy Uppies - Juggled a ball 5 times with the Frog Suit", and "No No No Noooooo!
Fell 30 meters and caught yourself in the monkey suit in GPU Jungle." These aren't very hard to do and at most, require a few retries. The challenges themselves were quite reasonable. My favourite was the one for completing all the speedrunning levels with a total time under 7 minutes because the mechanics and movements were surprisingly fun.

 

Overall, I enjoyed my time trophy hunting in this game. Because of how brief the game is, it wasn't tedious searching every nook and cranny. If anything it was always enjoyable because every Easter Egg/Reference to other PlayStation games always brought a smile to my face. If you wanted to introduce someone to the world of trophy hunting, Astro's Playroom is a good if not the best starting point.

While I'm here I might as well do a review on the game itself.

Astro's Playroom is a 2020 Game that comes bundled with PlayStation 5 consoles with the intention of showing off the features of the new platform. When I first booted up the game, I was expecting it to be like Welcome Park on the PS VITA. A series of short quick minigames/mechanics you can get through in an afternoon designed to show off the system's features. A distraction in between the "real games". But to my surprise, Astro's Playroom was one of those Real Games.

The game plays like that of a standard 3D platformer. You play as an Astro Bot. One of PlayStation's new Mascots since 2013. This Astro Bot is pretty fun and responsive to move around. The little guy can run, jump, glide with lasers for a short while that also damage enemies, punch and do a charged spinning attack. The mechanics themselves are pretty solid and levels often build on concepts introduced earlier so there's some progression. I especially liked the bonus speedrun stages as they highlight this with how you can skip certain sections and move Astro in interesting ways. Granted, it's not a very difficult game but pretty short and sweet during its runtime.

The game is divided into 4 main level areas each based on an "aspect" of the PS5 such as the "SSD Speedway (represented as this futuristic neon light highway)", The Cooling Springs (represented as this beach and icy area), GPU Jungle (based on this tropical jungle area) etc. The designs of each of these areas are quite distinct and fun to traverse. Every area also has 2 levels based on a "gimmick" that uses some of the Dualsense's features. For example, GPU Jungle has areas where Astro needs to put on a monkey suit and climb up a wall. You need to tilt the controller left and right to control where Monkey Astro will move and aim, swing the controller to make Astro swing, and press R2 with varying amounts of pressure to grab certain handholds, and release R2 while swinging to make Monkey Astro go soaring. SSD Speedway has 2 gimmicks. One where you use the motion control to aim Astro in a giant Slingshot and the touchpad to launch him. This makes him use a paraglider to glide for a while. And another one where you have to control this little space ship by tilting your controller and pressing L2 or R2 for thrust in specific directions. You can press both L2 and R2 for extra speed. Cooling Springs has a Sping Suit where you have to tilt the controller and vary the amount of pressure on R2 to launch said spring. And finally, Memory Meadows has a ball suit you control by swiping on the touchpad.

 

I wouldn't be surprised if most people either disliked or tolerated these sections. After all, they are pretty rare forms of gameplay on PlayStation systems. Unless you played Tearaway Unfolded, or owned a PSVITA, 3DS or Wii, you likely haven't had to play many motion based games. But I kinda enjoyed these sections in Astro's Playroom. I found the motion controls to be quite responsive so performing tricky jumps or movements was quite feasible. Plus, since these sections are quite brief, they never went on long enough to become annoying. To me, they functioned as decent minigames to vary the experience.

Anyway, beating the 4 major levels unlocks a bonus level where you fight the T-Rex from the PS1 demo as the final boss. I'm really upset that The T-Rex was chosen as the final boss instead of Polygon Man 😤. Imagine getting roasted by a floating spikey purple head whenever you die to him!

To become serious again, now to talk about one of Astro's Playroom's biggest appeals, its nostalgia and celebration of the history of PlayStation. This was one of the things that made exploration so cool in this game. Levels have so many references, either in the form of other Astros tucked away in corners or out in the open re-enacting sequences from PlayStation games, or collectibles in the form of old controllers, systems and attachments.

To the discuss the former, it brought a smile to my face seeing stuff like these cute little robots cosplaying as Cole McGreath sliding on electrical wire, or one with pointy ears and a little Rabbit, or one playing with a Spyro doll that breaths fire when you punch it, or 2 of then hiding from a bot with mushrooms on its head, or cave paintings of bots fighting a giant monster in a rhythm. It seems like almost every franchise from PlayStation's past, no matter how small gets some representation here. It really enticed me to keep looking and trying to guess the reference. Add in that some of them even award a trophy for interacting with them and it was quite fun.

Levels also contain collectibles in the form of PlayStation artifacts. You can find all kinds of things from alternate versions of prior consoles like the 2 different PS3 Slims. To obscure stuff like the PS3 Buzz Controller, the PSP GPS and Camera and more. It's a shame that the game doesn't include wires. I would have liked to see more stuff like the PSP to AV adapter. It was fun collecting these because they show up in your PlayStation Labo museum and seeing these massive recreations of these objects was quite cool. It was fascinating to see this history. The game really feels like a massive tribute to and celebration of PlayStation's history. Even its design as a 3D Platformer feels like a throwback since such kinds of games have only recently made a bit of a comeback after being quite popular around the time of the PS1.

Finally, I want to talk about another major selling point/appeal of the game: the Haptic Feedback. I was quite skeptical when this was announced. Like, Was this just "fancy rumble? The Switch had this for years earlier". But I feel quite won over by Astro's Playroom's implementation. Almost every floor, move and scenario has a "vibration profile" associated with. Walking on a wooden bridge causes the controller to vibrate in a specific way that corresponds with how Astro's moving on it. Him taking a step with his left foot causes the controller's left side to vibrate in such a way to mimic walking on wooden bridge. And it's a different profile for walking on metal surfaces. When it's raining, the controller provides feedback of all those little rain droplets.

I really like this feature. Aside from being immersive, it also helps with accessibility and providing additional information. I remember a section when I muted my TV but with just the visuals and haptic feedback, was able to "experience" the section just fine.  As I often play with the sound of my games muted so I can listen to podcasts, I like that haptic feedback can somewhat "compensate" for the lack of sound. I'd love to see a Splinter Cell Chaos Theory port use this feature. Imagine actually sneaking across surfaces and "feeling" the sound you're making. You probably wouldn't even need to keep a constant eye on your sound meter to be able to tell how much noise you're making and that's cool.

But to be more cynical for a second, I don't think the DualSense's features are going to get much attention in the future, even from Sony. I expect we might see the adaptive Triggers and some Haptic Feedback used here and there in major Sony Exclusives, but the Touchpad is likely going to get almost 0 use. And Third Parties will make minimal use of the adaptive triggers and haptic feedback. Because that's kinda been the story with the PS4's DualShock 4. That thing has both a touchpad and some decent Gyro Controls. But those barely get any use. Hell, you'll find PC games using Steam Input allow you to use Gyro Aiming using the DualShock 4 than games Sony themselves made for the DualShock 4.

And I can see why. To most 3rd parties, it doesn't make much sense spending valuable time and resources adding super specific features to one platform when platform parity is pretty important. Plus, unlike Switch owners, PlayStation owners haven't been very vocal about these features so they're unlikely to even get Gyro Aiming. So it's going to lead to some odd situations. I remember in Watch Dogs 2, in order to switch radio stations on PS4, you had to hold down the Touch Pad and move the Right Stick left or right. Instead of what GTA V did and let you switch radio stations by just swiping on the touchpad. I feel that unless Sony releases some kind of equivalent to Steam Input on the PS5 where players could create custom and share custom profiles for games where you can bind specific inputs to touchpad swipes or Gyro Motion,  I don't see many 3rd Party games being any different on a PS5 controller compared to if you could play them on a PS1 controller.

 

In addition games like Call of Duty, which rely on super fast reflexes and reactions, would be discouraged from using some of these features because the vibration and triggers may put some players at a disadvantage. Taking a second longer to press R2 could mean death. I can relate. I played Borderlands 2 on PS4 with the controls swapped so R1 is to shoot so I could actually rapid fire.

Which means I wouldn't be surprised if in 5-9 years when we look back at the PS5's history, Astro's Playroom remains the only game to make the most out of the DualSense. And in a sad way, it's oddly fitting that a game about PlayStation's odd history, itself becomes a historical showcase for features that never were.

The Lord of The Rings Tactics: The best LOTR Game on PSP

 Well, it is the only LOTR game on PSP.

Lord of the Rings Tactics is a PSP Exclusive Tactics game released on late 2005 and acted as something close to a launch title for the PSP as well as a movie licensed game of the Peter Jackson LOTR Movies.

When you boot up a new game, you're offered the choice of 2 campaigns, The Fellowship, which plays from the perspective of the titular Fellowship through major battles/sequences from the movies, and The Host of Mordor which has you controlling the forces of Mordor. While each campaign shares the same levels in the same order, the configuration of units on both sides varies. For example, in the Mines of Moria level, the Fellowship campaign has you controlling Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Frodo and Gandalf and taking on the Balrog, A cave troll and 2 goblins. Whereas on the Mordor Campaign, you get to use the Witch King, Lurtz, 2 Goblins and the Balrog to take on Aragorn, Gandalf, Boromir and 2 Rangers. Each Campaign also has different cutscenes (which are just clips from the movies).

The Gameplay:

LOTR Tactics plays like a typical tactics game. You have 2 sides, Fellowship and Mordor, on a grid based map with specific objectives that may be asymmetrical. For example, for one side to win, they may have to kill all enemy units while the other has to kill certain units. Other objectives may include capturing or reaching certain points. Each turn has 2 phases, movement and combat. In the movement phase, you issue orders where a unit may move on a grid and once both sides have issued orders, all units will move simultaneously. Different units will move and take up a different amount of squares on the grid. Elevation and terrain will hinder or help movement or later combat such as ranged units benefiting from high ground. One interesting mechanic is that if 2 enemy units move onto adjacent squares, they will cancel the rest of their orders and be locked into facing their enemy. This means any unit can block any other unit regardless of if they are passing through or trying to flee. The game refers to this as "the Zone of Control (ZoC) which sounds cool. Once the movement phase has been completed, the game moves onto combat phase. Here, a unit may attack another unit in range or use an item/skill. Note that adjacent opposing units can only melee each other (unless they have a separate ranged skill). In addition to attacks, some units can inflict status conditions like Stun (makes you skip a turn), Fear (you lose control of a unit for a turn and they try to move away), Rooted (cannot move but can attack), Bleed and Poison (take damage over multiple turns), Stealth (become invisible to the enemy).

You also have 2 kinds of Units, regular units and Hero Units. Regular units are like generic soldiers or goblins. They cannot use skills or be upgraded. Hero Units are major characters from the movies and can use skills at the cost of AP (basically Magic Points that recharge a little every turn) and be upgraded. For example, of the heroes on the Fellowship side is Legolas. He has access to skills like "Fire a more powerful arrow against a single target", "make 2 powerful melee attacks against a target" and "buff the dexterity of nearby allies". Heroes and Skills are very important. To the point where it's a huge blow to whichever side loses a hero. Different Heroes have different kits. Frodo and Sam have access to stealth based skills, Aragorn has melee and heals. Sauron and Witch King can inflict opponents with Fear and drain their health and AP etc which are all quite fun to play around with. It is odd why Regular Units have like, 5 AP max when they can't use skills anyway. Perhaps since Sauron can drain AP as a skill it lets it work there? Though it is hilarious when Regular Units controlled by the AI occasionally use AP restoring items in battle.

On the Fellowship side, you have the following heroes: Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Gandalf, Frodo and Sam. And on the Mordor side, you have Sauron, the Witch King, Lurtz, Gothmog, Sauraman and Grima Wormtongue. Heroes automatically level up and earn more powerful weapons after completing missions. In between missions, you can buy specific skills and items in the menu.

This set up works pretty well and allows for long and intense tactical matches and can be especially challenging on the harder difficulties. The maps and scenarios can be quite different and add to a playthrough feeling engaging. It will take around 6-10 hours per campaign. There are some issues though. For one, movement can be a little inconsistent. Sometimes, when pursuing an enemy, your unit will just stand there and not complete his movement. Allowing the enemy unit to flee. Some larger 3 square units like Mumakil will not move at all unless their destination is sufficiently far away from their current position. In both cases, the game's UI tells you can move but the character will not so you have to learn when the UI will not be accurate. You also earn very little money per battle which can make the game much grindier on the harder difficulties as you have to buy a lot more items and skills to stand a chance.

The game also cheats a little with certain objectives and units. For example, the following units: Spearmen, Wildmen, Cave Trolls, Eomer don't have ranged attacks when you control them. But in opposing campaigns, they have ranged attacks even when they don't have any animations for it. So Wildmen and Cave Trolls will telekinetically damage your units from afar. Another example, in the Amon Hen level, the objectives were "kill all enemies" for the Fellowship to Win and "Kill Frodo" for Mordor to win. On the last turn, I killed every Uruk enemy but Frodo went down as well. The game gave the victory to Mordor even if there was nobody around from Mordor to celebrate.

Honestly, my biggest issue with the game is the lack of any NG+ or challenge mode upon beating the game. Some Heroes like Grima, Lurtz and Gimli barely get screentime. And many maps are pretty fun but if you replay them in the same save file, they lack the challenge since you carry over your levelled up and improved Heroes while the enemy side doesn't and are at the same level they were when you completed the level the first time. Meaning if you want a challenge again, you have to start a new game or play very specific later levels. I feel the game would have been even better if when you beat the game, you get access to a challenge mode where you can replay the campaign but now enemy units are max level. Hell, you could even have a wildcard option where you can use Units from both campaigns like in the Multiplayer Mode.

The Multiplayer:

Up to 4 players can play short battles against each other and can use Units from both sides. There's also a points system where you can either buy a few high powered heroes or more low powered minions or any combination of the prior. I haven't played the multiplayer but it sounds quite neat and I'd love to see a singleplayer version of this.

The Presentation:

The game pulls many assets like models and animations from the Return of the King video game that releases a few years prior. As well as sound and music from the movies. So it looks and sounds quite good. Environments and models are quite detailed and even atmospheric at times despite being on the PSP. Though, there are some oddities. For one, Sam and Aragorn have an overly detailed blocking and Special Attack animation that no other character has and it looks out of place....until you recognize them from the Return of the King video game as special takedown animations that required 2 people. I'm not complaining. It adds to the charm of the game.

I also love that the mission select screen is a Map of Middle Earth and shows where the battles are happening, though the map does feel a bit inaccurate.

Other: 

With the Fellowship Campaign, each mission is a major sequence from the movies and you get a small cutscene in the form of clips from the films to provide context. They function as something akin to a cliffnotes version of the story. So if you're like me and played this game for the first time as a kid and as your first introduction to Tolkien's works, it is somewhat functional if confusing since specific details are not really present. For example, the game's story shows how Sauron made the One Ring, how Isildur took and then lost it and how it was later found by Smeagol but not how it ended up with Frodo or why it took Smeagol so long to find it again. Of course, I now know the full context but as a kid, it was confusing.

I can't fault the game too much for this. I imagine everyone buying this game at the time was already familiar with LOTR and I was the odd one out being introduced to it through licensed games. Still, I'm glad these games did exist in introducing me to LOTR even if what they portrayed was pretty different. The movies and books are much less action packed and much more sombre and quiet than the games had me believe.

 I will criticize the Mordor Campaign's version of the story a little bit. Its cutscenes don't really show the enemy's side of the story often, especially after the Two Towers portion of the story. Mostly it's just voiceovers from Saraman talking about something tangentially related to the mission or present a more ominous tone compared to the Fellowship's version. I wish it did do at least the more ominous tone more often instead. Though, in the game's defence, LOTR is mostly told from the Fellowship's POV and there aren't a lot of consistent antagonists we spend much time with. Like, Saraman dies in Return of the King so there goes a lot of the material for a Mordor Campaign. The Mordor Campaign is also odd if you take it face value. In the Fellowship campaigns, the events make more sense. You defeat the forces of Mordor and progress through the events of the movie. But in the Mordor versions, you will complete missions by killing Aragorn, Frodo and Gandalf early and the story would proceed as normal. I am not complaining. Obviously if the Mordor Campaign did account for that, it would be only 1 mission long. I do wonder if a better approach would have been to try making an original story or presenting a "What if" story by showing how the heroes would have lost at specific battles? The game does do that last one in the final mission on Mt Doom by showing how the heroes get overwhelmed by Mordor's forces, Frodo was unable to get up after getting his finger bitten off by Gollum and that Sauron gets the Ring and takes over Middle Earth. I recall the Transformers Movie Licenced game had the entire Decepticon campaign based on that approach.

Also, the choice of heroes on the Mordor side is certainly odd. You have Sauron, in his physical form as he was at the start of LOTR's prologue, ready and rocking despite only being a flaming eye and trapped fighting Celebrimbor at this point (wink wink). You have the Witch King and Gothmog who only really shows up in Return of The King and dies. You have Lurtz, who dies in Fellowship of the Ring. Sarauman, who is mostly a "behind the scenes" guy and dies in Return of the King. And Grima, who as far as I recall, was barely even in the movies. I understand why this is the case, it provides a symmetry to the Fellowship and are pretty fun to play as. And it probably helps in the Multiplayer and I imagine the game's development likely had tight deadlines. But I feel a better approach in making the Mordor campaign more distinct from the Fellowship would have been to not have dedicated and consistent Heroes. Instead, each level has its own generic units and a couple captains that have unique skills you could use as is or provide a bit extra money to make more effective. I feel this would be more fitting. In the movies, Mordor doesn't have a consistent cast of antagonists as an analogue to the Fellowship. It just has whatever specific antagonist happens to be present at that particular battle like Shelob, The Balrog, The Witch King, Lurtz etc. Maybe if this game gets a remake or someone makes another LOTR tactics game, this idea could show up there.

In conclusion, LOTR Tactics is a decent tactics game. It doesn't do anything too novel that would make it a must play. I imagine Tactics fans have their hands full with options. Even the PSP has the highly regarded Final Fantasy Tactics. Plus, this game is likely very hard to find now given that EA no longer has the LOTR licence so you can't officially get the game anymore. But I still enjoyed my time with this game and would recommend it.

Platinumming Assassin's Creed Unity - The Best and most Underrated AC Game

 For the most part, there aren't too many difficult trophies. There aren't any "do this cool challenging act". Most are just complete missions and side content which I enjoyed since the gameplay is really fun. You may need a walkthrough to do some of the Nostradamus Riddles if you don't have a PHD in French History and Architecture and 100 hours to spare.

For the co-op, despite having several trophies listed under co-op, only 2 require you to party up with another person as the rest can be done solo.  "Choreography-Perform 10 Co-op sync kills. " and "Never Say Die-Revive a partner in Co-op.". The latter is easy enough but the former requires a fair amount of co-ordination since you need to stealth kill at least 2 guards at the same time 10 times. My solution was to play a co-op mission where 2 guards were guarding each entrance to a fort, tell my partner that after I throw a smoke bomb, kill the guard on the right as soon as I killed the one of the left. It had a 70% success rate but worked reasonably well. If all those guards died, just restart the mission by jumping off to our deaths and repeat the process.

As far as online trophies go, it's not too bad but I'd rather there be offline versions or alternatives, especially as there's only 2. Perhaps something for using your co-op abilities like Disguise or Cache in certain ways. Or getting x amount of "legendary kills" where you chain 5+ stealth kills at once on your own.

Shout out to shaven_pinny2 for helping with the trophies. I don't know who you are but thanks for responding to my PSN messages and helping me out.

 

 

While I'm here, here is a review of the game:

 

Assassin's Creed Unity was released in 2014 as the 8th mainline AC game and first mainline AC game on the 8th generation of consoles (Rogue released at the same time as the 7th mainline AC game and the last one on 7th gen). Unity did have a very disastrous launch, to the point where Ubisoft made its DLC free and gave away a free extra game to people who pre-ordered plus made future AC games begin to stop being annual releases and thus had more time in development.

 

I was quite hyped for this game regardless, I bought it on my birthday on December, hoping it had been mostly patched. And it sorta was. I finished most of the story and some of the side content and reember liking the improved world and gameplay but being miffed on the story and historical aspects. I have recently revised the game. If you asked me back in 2014 how I felt about the game, I'd have said it was decent but probably the worst AC game. If you asked me a few months ago when I started playing this game again, I'd have said it was really good, definitely in the top 3 AC games. And if you asked now that I 100%ed this game, I'd say it's the best AC game and shame it was received the way it was.

Let's begin with the core mechanics of every AC Game, combat, stealth and parkour/navigation. Unity overhauled a lot of AC's mechanics for the better.

Combat

Prior AC games had plenty of issues with their combat system. Being able to counter kill entire armies very easily and quickly meant it got boring quickly since there was no challenge or penalty in combat. At least in AC1 the timing was kinda strict and it took a while for enemies to attack but from Brotherhood onwards, chain kills made the player an absolute monster. It made every other attack or move redundant or useless since in order to have any chance of being useful, they'd also have to oneshot enemies as well. Additional armour and health potions made it impossible to die when enemies could only do like 1-2 damage max every 30 seconds and you could get 15+ health with potions to heal you on the spot that were dirt common and cheap. This also made stealth less useful since any time spent sneaking through an area could be done at a fraction of the time if you stealthed.

Unity fixes almost all of these issues.

Counters don't instakill enemies anymore. Instead if you parry somewhat early, you'll just block the attack. And if you parry at the correct time, you'll stun the enemy without damaging them leaving them open to attack. Mistimes result in you taking damage. Meaning you have to actually attack to damage enemies instead of automatically killing them with no effort. But other enemies can now attack you in close succession if they're using melee attacks, requiring you to do multiple parries at times, and at the same time if they're using ranged or a mix of ranged and melee. And you can't dodge or evade ranged attacks when in a counter animation. Enemies can swap between melee and ranged attacks. All this means is that for the first time in a mainline AC game, it is possible (and common) to get overwhelmed by a large group of enemies as the overlapping melee and ranged attacks can get too much to handle. This is great because it means the player actually has to be smart about fighting enemies. Doing stuff like crowd control and managing threats to ensure enemies don't start shooting the player while not leaving themselves vulnerable while parrying to other enemies. It's often necessary to pick off enemies before getting into a fight or even running away, something never required in prior titles. 

There are other additions like some enemy types require parrying several attacks in a row before they can be stunned, or some being immune to being stunned or being able to dodge your own point blank gunshots. Medicine/Potions are pretty expensive and rare in the early game and during certain missions so you can't just tank damage and heal it off later. The armour and gear system now become more necessary as higher levelled enemies will do a lot more damage so getting money to get kitted out is more useful.

 

 

All this means you have a combat system where combat is genuinely difficult but faster if you can pull it off. Leaving stealth as the slower but safer option. Striking a good balance between the 2 playstyles for the first time in the series.

There are some issues sadly. You can only attack or defend when Arno is in a combat stance, but the game decides when he enters it and isn't always accurate with it. So it's possible to have sections where enemies attack you for a while and you're unable to defend yourself. You can't even dodge roll when a far away sniper is aiming at you since you're not in combat mode. Though in a roundabout way, this does suit the game since it means you need to make sure you're ready for a fight since your performance isn't reliable so stealth may be more useful more often.

 

The different weapon types feel somewhat interchangeable or lacking and don't really offer significant differences in speed, defence and combo potential. For example, Rifles don't have any more range, accuracy or power than pistols aside from being slightly slower to shoot so there's no real reason to invest in them. Swords are quite well balanced in speed, attack and parrying. They have a strong attack that's quite fast and can break through blocks. Meaning they're great weapons. Spears have a wider range and their strong attack is a knockdown that doesn't deal damage but can then be used to follow up with a ground kill but it doesn't work on anyone other basic enemies. Axes have a more powerful charged attack that does a lot of damage but needs to be manually triggered unlike swords. The point is that Swords and pistols are the best equipment set in the game and the other weapons don't really offer anything better then them. Some improvements could have been like rifles have greater range and power compared to pistols. Spears can hit multiple opponents at once and axes can't be blocked ever. Odyssey did that and it improved the different weapon types significantly.

 

Smoke Bombs take away much of the challenge as enemies become completely vulnerable and passive in them. I wish there was more of a restriction on them as they can get quite easy to cheese. Perhaps some kind of cooldown after using them? Once you do get really good gear, much of the difficulty is gone for lower levelled missions and areas. I wish there was some sort of difficulty or challenge modifiers you could put on the game when doing lower levelled content for extra money and EXP and even synch points.

 

Future games like Odyssey did improve the mechanical nature of combat by letting you dodge whenever, giving different weapon types different animations and roles, further adding more gear builds and tying stuff like smoke bombs and their equivalent to an adrenaline meter to prevent easy abuse. You also had a scaling option to prevent lower levelled enemies from getting too low a level.

I also feel a few more additions could have been made to make Unity's combat more fleshed out. Especially as now some of the moves in prior AC games can actually have a niche now. For example, in AC2, you could grab enemies and use them as human shields and either kill them on the spot or throw them. It wasn't ever useful because you could just counter kill them. But with Unity's system, it could work better. Imagine after you stun an enemy, you could grab them to absorb the shot of a nearby ranged enemy. It could be balanced by requiring some strict timing to pull off and making sure enemies don't attack you from behind while you're doing it. It would be much more satisfying pulling off a move like that on your own instead of it either being useless or automatic.

Stealth

Past AC games had the issue where stealth was seldom used because it was much faster and easier to just fight everyone. And even if you did choose to stealth, it wasn't much fun. Movement was stilted as you could only walk or run with no dedicated crouch.

Unity improves on these flaws. Since as I explained earlier that combat is finally dangerous, there can be good reasons to avoid getting spotted in areas with lots of enemies.

You can also crouch to sneak more effectively through areas. The "disguise" skill is quite useful as well here. You get a Splinter Cell Conviction style outline of Arno when you break line of sight. Level design is fantastic as many environments feel great with many different approaches and ways to navigate offering a lot of replayability even when the areas are reused in other missions. This in particular makes the game so much fun. One criticism I had of subsequent ACs is that many stealth environments felt copy and pasted as the games wanted to have as much content as possible at the expense of making individual forts less interesting and interchangeable. Unity mostly avoids that. Large Crowds are common in many areas and function great as cover, hiding spots and aid that Assassin Fantasy (I do wish there were more ways to manipulate the crowd).

 

The animations are also great. Arno only has 1 hidden blade instead of the usual 2 so his kill animations are far more creative and stunning, especially is double assassinations.

There are sadly some issues. The biggest is that stealth is still buggy. Enemies will sometimes see, hear and track you through walls when they shouldn't. The outline that normally triggers when you break line of sight that indicates this won't trigger confirming this.

In one situation, I played a particular co-op mission twice. In this mission, there's a 3 story building with 7 guards on its 3 floors and outside and 2 snipers on the roof. When I dropped on the roof and killed one sniper, the other detected me and started attacking me. I killed him quickly. Because this encounter happened on the roof. None of the enemies below heard me so I could easily drop to the street below when I was done and enter through the side door. On the replay, I did the some strat but somehow after killing the snipers, the enemies on the lower floors could still "see" me through the walls. The line of sight outline didn't trigger. . Turning on Eagle Pulse showed me they were trying to run around looking for a way to the roof even though there wasn't one. When I dropped on the street, I was ambushed by several soldiers who saw me get to street level despite there being a building in the way.

Normally this shouldn't happen. The enemies inside the building shouldn't have been able to detect me fighting enemies on the roof. And even if happened, at most, the enemies inside of the building shouldn't have been able to track me since they didn't have line of sight on me.

About 70% of the time, Stealthing and its AI works as you expect. But 30% of the time, they'll see you through walls, or fail to hear you kill their friends right beside them.

Later games like Odyssey did improve on this. I never encountered such errors when I was sneaking around in that game. Odyssey also has a lot cooler stealth moves like chain assassinate and smoother movement when crouching and moving around. Though the environments were lacking there.

I think the bigger issue is that the game never really explains its stealth mechanics in detail. Stuff like Cherry Bombs only working if an enemy has line of sight with the device despite being presented as a sound based tool. How you can use High Profile to exit cover, the extent of Smoke Bombs' influence etc. I suspect this limited many people's appreciation of Unity's stealth mechanics since people dealt with its issues rather ways to work around them.

Parkour

 Past ACs had the issue where the parkour system would sometimes misinterpret your actions. Causing you to jump or climb or drop when you didn't intend to. You also didn't really have any challenge when climbing around. It wasn't like Mirror's Edge or something where parkour was a deep mechanic that required pressing and timing buttons to succeed.

 Unity.....kinda improves it somewhat.

The big new feature are the "parkour up" and "parkour down" commands done by holding R2+X and R2+O respectively. This means you can normally run with R2 and not usually automatically climb or jump too much. R2+X will make Arno start climbing walls and making more jumps. R2+O will make Arno automatically start climbing down walls quickly and slide over or under objects when running into them.

This does help with unintended actions somewhat as you can specify what generally you want Arno to do. But it's not perfect. Arno will still sometimes drop down or jump when holding just R2. Or sometimes jump onto a table and refuse to drop down even when you're holding R2+O the entire time. But overall it is an improvement over past games as it gives players more control while retaining momentum.

But the main thing is that, from a casual perspective, the parkour is kinda mindless most of the time. While yes you do have lots of cool animations and some movement techs and can style and show off some of those, there's almost never a need to nor does the game ever encourage it.

This is apparently an unpopular opinion as Unity's parkour is generally regarded as the peak of the series with future games downgrading it. And I don't really agree. Like, calling it the peak can be accurate but it's not mechanically that much further ahead. And when people complain that Odyssey took away fall damage which removed any challenge or risk from climbing, I point to how Unity made it so you could automatically climb down buildings quickly with no challenge just by holding 2 buttons.

But from a more experienced perspective,  Unity has a surprising amount of depth in its parkour. I recommend watching LeoK's videos on it but between angling your camera, using side hops by tapping high profile + direction, managing when to use High Profile, Unity gives you a lot of depth and control to parkour like a master by climbing faster or skipping certain animations. An inexperienced player who just uses the bare minimum the game teaches and an experienced player using all these tricks results in a chasm of difference. And it's really fun to use these tricks as the new animations can make traversal a joy to do. The problem is that it's more automated than past games. In AC1-Rev, you could manually side eject and use grasp to have way more control. Unity makes it more dependent on the camera and the game itself so you have less control even if you could still do many of the same things. Meaning there are times when you may not side hop or grab a thing even if you before with no clear indication why. Which is a shame seeing as if you had the manual control of AC1-Rev, the commands of Unity and like, the responsiveness of Origins, you'd have the perfect parkour system for AC. Though, another issue is that the games never teach or test you on these mechanics. Even the regular races in Brotherhood could be beaten without using too many advanced tricks. I wish the AC games had an online race editor with ghosts as that would provide cool extra content using the open world for free but also show people that this depth exists.

Sandbox Assassinations:

One of Unity's biggest new features are Sandbox Assassinations feeling like an attempt to modernize AC1's interesting approach to mission design. Taking cues from Hitman, you're dropped next to a large fort and told to go Assassinate the target. You're presented with different "opportunities", activities that can help you either by getting closer to your goals or distracting enemies. These missions can be quite big, have lots of different ways to be played, can be quite challenging and are very fun. Arranging a kill by knowing your target will be in a confession booth by killing his confident outside, sneaking into the Notre Dam through an open window and hiding in a booth to Assassinate your target mid confession is an amazing experience. It's odd to be that it took AC 7 years to try attempting again something the first game had.

There are sadly some issues. For one, the Opportunities themselves are either stupidly good or useless with little indication of this until you try it. One Mission requires you to Assassinate a target at a party. You can either poison their wine, which brings them to a side room allowing you to easily kill them. This is incredibly easy to do as the steps are simple. The same mission also has an opportunity where you can pay 4000 Livres to open a window to get closer to your target. Except not really because the room you enter doesn't have an easier route to the target as it's still guarded as well as the "normal" route. You paid 4000 Livres to accomplish nothing.

Hitman pioneered the Opportunities system but at least there, opportunities usually took a fair amount of effort to set up and were almost always rewarding. High Amount of risk now for low risk later. Plus, AC1's system still had the player gathering information prior to Assassinating a target which revealed stuff like a target's plans, guard positions, secret pathways etc.

If Unity's systems ever get a sequel or follow up, I'd love to see Sandbox Assassinations take place in the open world itself rather than needing to enter a missions. The player is just told "here's your target. Go find and kill them". And if you know where they are, you can go Assassinate them right there and then. Or you can go do side missions and other activities to either get more information on the target and set up some opportunities to later exploit. Then you may try to Assassinate them. If you mess up, the target gets permanently aware and may even move to another part of the map. This would fully combine what AC1 started all those years ago with Unity's approach.

 Co-op

 

Unlike prior ACs, Unity drops the unique PVP Social Stealth Multiplayer in Favour of co-op. Allowing players to explore together in the open world and do certain Co-op missions and heists together.

 

Co-op is a blast. Even with Randoms (except on heists). Co-ordinating kills, dividing and conquering, splitting the work load and helping each other out is great fun and something I wish was more present. The co-op missions themselves can be done solo, feeling like the ultimate endgame activity in that case. I even like that some co-op missions change depending on your prior actions. Like The Tournament having more enemies by the end if you kill guards beforehand.

 

There are some issues. Co-op is quite buggy. Feeling like all the bugs of Unity's original launch are preserved there. Heists are a pain to play with randoms since detection loses part of the score. Arno also doesn't ever talk during these which limit his characterization. Also, the way they are presented from a narrative perspective is odd. Co-op missions are framed by Bishop from the Modern Day as "happening now" as you and other Initiates team up. The mission with Danton has Bishop describe what's going on with Danton, why it's so important he doesn't get killed and tasks the players to go find him now before he gets executed. Which is odd given these are events of the past and the Animus only lets users see the past. It doesn't matter what you want the initiates to do. If Danton runs away or isn't freed by the Assassins, then there's nothing the Initiates can do since they can only replicate Arno's memories. And once you free Danton, Bishop tells you "oh by the way, he ended up joining the Assassins". This jump from talking about these missions as if they are happening in the present and acknowledging them as past events is strange.

The Map:

Paris is the best map in an AC game. It's massive while still being dense with buildings and details that feel like Ubisoft had a time machine when making  this game. Everything from Aristocratic interiors, to major landmarks, to slums feel immaculately constructed. What's more is that the map does a great job in facilitating parkour and social stealth as the dense streets allow more ways to climb and parkour away and have it actually be faster than just running around. The dense streets also allow dense crowds to be present, allowing for blending and social stealth elements to be more useful. 

This is a rare feat. Past and later AC games often had long stretches of wilderness or rural areas that lacked ways to facilitate parkour and social stealth. Like, in AC4, you're not going to find crowds on random islands. And Trees can only really be climbed from one directions so you lack that freedom of movement that urban environments have.

 

The Story:

Unity's story is widely criticized even by people that like it. I... mostly agree.

Let's start with the Modern Day.

The story here is that you the player are a player playing Abstergo's new Helix Video Game exploring their takes on history when the Assassins hijack your system and recruit you as a new Initiate of the Brotherhood. Then have you explore the memories of Assassin Arno Dorian since it's suspected he came into contact with a Sage (a Dr. Who style reincarnation of an Isu individual whose new body contains a higher amount of Isu DNA than normal). Abstergo want to find Sages to collect this Isu DNA and the Assassins want to stop them by finding this Sage first. Along the way, you can enter Helix simulations to snoop around Abstergo data servers and rescue any other initiates trapped there.

By the end of the game, it's revealed that the Sage Arno came in contact with had his DNA degraded and lost in the Catacombs under France. Having the Assassins give a sigh of relief that at least Abstergo can't get their hands on it.

As you can expect, this Modern Day is quite disliked since almost nothing of importance happens. The ending is a Shaggy Dog Story. There's nothing to care about. Nothing to take away. Not even some development or points to follow up on.

I imagine that even if the Assassins were like "great job. We know where the DNA is so we can go and destroy it thanks to your help" or "Oh no, Abstergo was spying on you and learned where the DNA is. We messed up" would probably have been something.

On the other hand, even if those ideas I presented earlier happened, or the Modern Day story was more substantial, it wouldn't have been very interesting either. If the Assassins got to and destroyed the Sage DNA, then like, yeah, you did something but you had no real involvement in nor does it really progress the overall story forward. And if Abstergo got their hands on it first, well nothing would happen since it would have been dropped like how Syndicate dropped the storyline regarding the new blanket. There's no wider plot or stakes happening at this point aside from maybe Juno (which never got resolved in a game) and any Modern Day Storyline that is created won't ever be payed off or amount to much.

 Even if the Modern Day storyline had potential as a way to see the progression of the Assassin/Templar War and as a way to provide commentary and satire of our current world, The AC games at this point onwards seemed very uninterested in actually exploring that. Leading to Modern Day Stories that might as well not exist. To that end, at least the games at this point are mericifully short with their Modern Day Stories. Better to "do it right or not do it at all".

Though the thing is that there's still ways of using this premise despite its limited nature. For example, you could pull a Liberation and use your current Helix product to explore Abstergo's other products through a backdoor. Something Unity already attempts with Helix Rifts that provide you extra tidbits of lore and information. Something 2 and Brotherhood already did better with the Subject 16 Puzzles. You could use what Republique and Watch Dogs did and allow the player to control drones and camera to help other characters do stuff in the present using your knowledge from the Animus. I'd love if stuff like this was expanded and made fun and engaging because it is a shame to see such a rather unique premise be so neglected and only sticking around out of obligation rather than because it provides value.

Onto the story in the Animus:

Here's the Wiki to Summarize it:

https://assassinscreed.fandom.com/wiki/Assassin%27s_Creed:_Unity

I'm mixed on this story.

 

I love the premise. A story of an Assassin and Templar in love and having to use each other's resources and knowledge as they navigate the French Revolution and opposition from both Orders is Gold. Arno as a character is interesting and I like that he's more of an ordinary dude rather than a prophet or superhero like past protagonists. Elise works as a focused Templar that Arno is torn between due to her new occupation but also her personality. Elise is obsessed with getting revenge on Germaine no matter what. Arno worships Elise more than anything else which causes friction. And it ends in the most appropriate way for such a toxic relationship, Elise dying as a result of pursuing her revenge and Arno being heartbroken afterwards. Left with nothing.

 

 

But Unity suffers in the execution. For one, Sequence 3-8 have Arno dealing with side Templars close to Germaine. So there's no real story progression here. Characters like Bellic and Elise don't show up until like Sequence 8 so almost half the game has its plot stand still. At least in AC1, Altair had character development after every target killed as they talked and Altair came to see his flaws in his targets. AC3 had the targets already introduced to us as Haytham so seeing how they interacted with the Revolution and Connor was engaging. Revelations had more of a mystery as killing the targets got Ezio closer to his goals and there were stuff like Altair's memories. Unity doesn't really have anything going on here.

 I still enjoyed playing through these parts because the gameplay in these sequence was great. I wonder if this could have been addressed by having Arno interact with Bellic and/or Elise more earlier and throughout these sequences. Maybe by like Sequence 5, Arno runs into Elise and the 2 start working together to get information from the Templars? You could have more scenes of Bellic and the Council getting frustrated with his.

Even more odd is the ending. After Elise is dead, the story jumps forward several years where Arno is back in good graces with the Brotherhood, even having Master Assassin Armour, giving a speech about how fanaticism leads to extremism and how the Creed helps its followers rise above that and how Arno is more wise now. But, that's not what Unity's story is about. I mean, sure, it fits given the extreme turn of the French Revolution, but most of Arno's story in Unity is this Shakespearean Tragedy with Elise rather the exploration of the extreme turn. It's out of place. It's like if after AC2, when Ezio refuses to kill Rodrigo Borgia, the game jumps forward to Revelations' ending where Ezio realizes his purpose is to be a messenger for Desmond and is tired after his fight with Templars. It would feel out of place because Ezio's story in 2, a story of a young man seeking revenge and growing wiser in the journey, and Revelations, a story of Ezio realizing his purpose as a messenger and being tired, are different.

Compare this to AC3. Connor's story there is the result of his naive belief in how the American Revolution would save his people. So when it doesn't, his ending speech makes sense since his story was intertwined with that of the Revolution. It's a similar case with AC4. Edward's story of growing beyond a selfish pirate is intertwined with the historical story of consequences of Selfish Pirates and their "Utopia". So his speech on his self reflection works much better. Unity doesn't really have that. It's story is mostly disconnected from the French Revolution which is mostly treated as a backdrop. To say nothing of how having Arno suddenly get in good graces with the Assassins in like, a time skip isn't satisfying.

Like, I think a better ending would have just been Arno mourning Elise, or entering a depressive state and being found by the Assassins who discuss if he could be considered a traitor at this point. That would have been a much better way to summarize this plot of the game.

As always, Mirror and Image's fan novelization addresses all my issues and makes the story amazing by giving Arno more of an arc as he learns critical thinking. And leans more into these themes that the base game already has going. I totally recommend it.

The DLC, Dead Kings, isn't much of an improvement. The story of Leon helping a more cynical Arno is fine but quite rushed with not much punch. It still retains the issue of Arno being friendly with the Assassins again so soon.

Stuff like collectibles aren't very interesting to get. I wish stuff like Cockades had more of a challenge to get them, like the papers in AC3-Rogue. Chests are fine since they're guarded by enemies which facilitate the fun gameplay

 

Paris Stories are odd. They are fun to play but their stories lack context and don't involve any characters from the main story. Arno also never speaks during them. So seeing these characters who you never met before, order Arno around to do all kinds of things and Arno just goes along without a single word is a surreal experience. I feel these would have been great times to get more characterization out of Arno. It's a similar case for Murder Mysteries. Arno never questions his suspects directly in the main game. He does in Francide's which improve the characterization immensely.

Speaking of which, Unity isn't afraid of not holding your hand. Murder Mysteries are these complex puzzles where you go from area to area finding clues and investigating suspects. The harder ones have conflicting evidence and even secret areas the game never points to as places for more clues. Nostradamus Riddles task you with finding the location described in the Riddle and require you to cross reference the in-game database and have a degree in French history and archecture if you want to do it legit. Stuff like this is incredible and I'd love to see more games have this. The riddles are less interesting in Francide seeing as the stuff they refer to like rats and crypts are everywhere and the in-game database is much more sparse. Helix Rifts are great parkour challenge maps that push your skills to the limit if you want to 100% them all. I only wish there was a race editor for Paris as that would be amazing.

Dead Kings:

Dead Kings is Unity's free DLC campaign. It adds the town of Francide, which is quite atmospheric. I dislike the amount of tunnel environments as I feel they limit parkour and stealth gameplay. The gameplay here is more of the same. Though the final puzzle parkour room is quite neat. The big new gimmick is a lanturn which can scare away insects and bats with light and needs to be dipped in oil after a while or when it gets wet. Honestly, I found this underwhelming as the Lanturn is incredibly situational. I wish the concept was taken further like those torch puzzles in Uncharted 3 where you could throw your torch as part of solving puzzles.

 

 

Other Stuff

The game thankfully isn't as buggy as it was on launch. Though, I still suffered 3 crashes and somewhat common framerate dips on large crowds. Worse, sometimes whenever I restarted a mission or checkpoint, Arno would freeze when jumping and would be softlocked. Co-op with others is significantly more buggy. As if it was never patched.

The game isn't very historically accurate.

 https://www.reddit.com/r/badhistory/comments/9d9ra2/assassins_creed_unity_a_near_complete_list_of/

 

 

Bit of an aside, but the game presents all its characters speaking with British accents instead of French ones. Despite being made by a French and Quebec company. The reasoning given by Ubisoft include "French Accents are harder to understand without subtitles, making it harder to understand ambient voice barks", and "The game is already set in France. Everyone already knows what a French Accent sounds like so it's not necessary".

I'd argue this is a mistake. For one, the AC games go through a huge amount of effort to be as authentic as possible for the sake of immersiveness. AC2 had its characters give Italian Accents, even going so far as to get voice coaches for non Italian Actors, even if it sounded cheesy at times and people already being familiar with Italian Accents. AC3 went out of its way to have Native American actors, language and performances. Origins had people trying their best to recreate what the accent and music of the time would be. So why stop for the French portion? 

Even from a narrative perspective, this causes issues. For example, Napoleon spoke French with a thick Corsican Accent, not a posh British one. This was significant because Napoleon was considered an outsider to the French People. People mocked him for his accent. Tsar Alexander even joked that he spoke French better than Napoleon. Which makes it all the more surprising when Napoleon did rise which was only now possible for him as a result of Revolution. Giving him a Corsican accent and other people French would have been a great way to highlight this aspect. It also makes that one co-op mission where his wife Josephine comments on his "exotic accent" make sense.

 

 

Money

The game's economy is really expensive. But stuff like Social Club and its passive revenue are great ways to have the player earn money as they mark progression, encourage playing side quests and offer lots of money rewarding you for your continued play.

 

Conclusion

Unity's biggest issue wasn't its bugs or its story. It was its circumstance. It was rushed out at a time when it was popular to hate on Ubisoft due to the launches of games like Watch Dogs and their cliches in open world games, as a game that took away aspects considered cool with AC games like ship combat and flashy gameplay in favour of a more challenging and traditional AC experience that was more polished and fleshed out. And it was treated as the worst crime ever committed. This meant the game's more interesting and positive aspects were never seen by many people. Ubisoft has distanced itself from Unity and later AC games take more cues from games like the Witcher 3 than they do Hitman or AC in a bid to rejuvenate the franchise in a different direction. Not to say the new AC games aren't bad but it's a shame to see this more generic direction being the focus instead of the unique aspects of AC that Unity had

 

It's only recently that people have gone back to it and discovered this. It's silently made a bit of a comeback but it's shame how it was received initially because it means many still haven't experienced its positives, nor have Ubisoft been encouraged to expand and improve on its gameplay in sequels. The sad part is that even if Unity wasn't rushed out, that it released without any bugs, I still believe it would likely have had lukewarm reception at best given the landscape of the time.

I recommend this game to anyone who is a fan of open world games, of stealth and action and those that like AC. It still has its flaws. Some bugs are still present which can hurt the stealth, combat and parkour that can break so easily as a result. The story lacks impact and needs a fan novelization to get most of its value. Other AC games do specific elements better. 3 and 4 have the better narrative. Odyessy has way better combat, RPG systems and abilities to play around with. But Unity's core gameplay, world and aspects are a fantastic mix even 7 years later and are worth experiencing.