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Lego Lord of the Rings (360): COMPLETED!

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I’ve said before that I’m a big fan of Lego games. I buy all of them, and for the last few years have enjoyed them even more as I’ve played them in co-op with my daughter. For some reason, I’d never got round to picking up Lego Lord of the Rings (even though it’s pretty old now) until around New Year, when it was on sale on the 360 shop for about £3. I’d have preferred a Wii U or PS4 version, but neither exist. I’d also have preferred an actual physical version, but for £3 I can cope.

Coming to this after Lego The Hobbit, I can see it’s very similar. The overworld is almost the same, and some of the locations are – at least without a side by side comparison – identical. It’s fun, as all Lego games are, but it’s pretty far down the list when it comes to which is best. Although not unusual for a Lego title to be bug-ridden, Lego Lord of the Rings crashed completely several times, and on at least four occasions one of the characters got trapped in scenery and we had to restart the level. Twice, blocks that had to be pushed off cliffs froze in mid air, so we had to restart the level, and once we were unable to even start a level as it wouldn’t trigger. Pretty disappointing.

The quality of the levels themselves were not of a great standard either. Some were great, of course, but a few were truly terrible. The swamp level, with Gollum setting fire to things and you having to navigate through safe paths and put the fires out was an exercise in extreme patience as it just went on forever. The hiding from black riders and dragons (again this happened in the swamp, but also elsewhere) caused tedious stop-start gameplay, not conducive to enjoying the levels. In fact, we had to do the swamp level twice due to a bug mentioned above.

There were also too many fights of the form “Kill three of these” then “Kill five more” then “Kill seven more”. Repetitive and dull. Sorry, Traveller’s Tales. At least you’ve not done a Lego game as bad as this since!

All that said, it was still – on balance – actually pretty good. As always, it shines in two player and the source material and gags add to the enjoyment. We’re not going to 100% it this time though. Too many bugs and annoying sections have put paid to that.

The post Lego Lord of the Rings (360): COMPLETED! appeared first on deKay's Gaming Diary.

Forza Horizon 2 Presents Fast & Furious (360): COMPLETED!

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Just trips off the tongue, that title, doesn’t it? It does exactly what it says on the tin, though – a Fast & Furious (tenuously) themed Forza Horizon game. Oh, and it’s free.

Yes, actually free. Presumably to tie in with the next The Fast and the Furious film, but aside from “the man in your ear” being Taj from the films, and a short montage of clips from the series, there’s not a lot of The Fast and the Furious here. Instead, loading screens encourage you to buy Forza Horizon and Forza Horizon 2, menu screens have links to buy them, and the end of game screen is literally “BUY THESE GAMES!!!!111!”, so it’s more a free advert for those than the films.

I’ve not played either Horizon game, aside from demos of one or the other (or possibly both), but FH2PF&F (or as some of the cool kids are calling it, fuhtwopuffandff) feels like I’d expect. It’s a little bit Forza Motorsport, and a little bit Need For Speed Most Wanted. In the three or so hours the game takes to complete, you have to round up ten cars buy beating the owners of them in the usual win-it-to-win-it races, with a few other events thrown in, such as drifting and having to reach a point unscathed.

It’s not especially hard, as very few events required more than one attempt, and I’ve nailed all bar one of the achievements (I can’t get a high enough combo for the last one) simply by playing the game. It looks great, and the cars are fun enough to drive. The map is pretty small when compared to the likes of Burnout Paradise and Need For Speed Most Wanted, but then this is pretty much just a stand-alone DLC pack for Horizon 2.

Will I return to play it some more? Yeah, I think so. I’ve a few more boards to find and smash, one road to drive (out of 134) which is eluding me, and I need to sort that last achievement out. After that, I can’t imagine picking it up again, but for several hours of free fun, I can’t recommend it enough.

Apparently, it’s only free for a few more days, so best nab it now.

Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (360): COMPLETED!

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Oh 360. It’s been a while. Certainly since I completed anything on you, anyway. How unloved you are these days. But, since Ubisoft failed to release Rogue on the Wii U, I was left with little choice.

And it’s a shame, because much as I hate the recent boating bits in recent Assassin’s Creed games, they’re made much more bearable (especially in the ludicrous “boat stealth” sections) by being able to use the Wii U gamepad’s massive map. In fact, on Black Flag, I would usually steer the boat entirely by looking at the map. It made it much easier and – most importantly – made the boat bits shorter as a result. Anyway.

In the latter half of the game, Shay starts to wonder if his turncoatedness was actually wise, as he started systematically wiping out his former chums (and chumette) in the Brotherhood. As a result, it was pretty obvious how things were going to turn out, but the trip to get there was enjoyable enough.

Although, in terms of the story at least, Rogue was definitely the shortest “main” Assassin’s Creed game. There’s plenty of optional filler, of course, but the end of the plot seemed to come around rather too quickly. I like what Ubi did to tie it in with Unity though, bumping off Arno’s dad (after briefly meeting Arno himself, as a child) in the final epilogue mission.

It has faults, like all Assassin’s Creed games, and it has bugs (again, like all Assassin’s Creed games), but Rogue is the best one since at least Revelations. I do really want to play Unity now. Only I’ve nothing to play it on. Hmm.

Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (360)

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While my 360 was on, I thought I might as well make a start on this. I wasn’t sure how much I was going to enjoy it, as I knew there was a lot more boating, like there was in Black Flag, and I’m not keen on the idea of being a Templar who used to be an Assassin either – although I do have a theory about that, which I’ll mention in a minute.

I’m only half way through Sequence 2, but I’ve heard Rogue is substantially shorter than Black Flag so I’m not sure how far that actually is storywise. Shay, the man with the worst Irish accent ever, is still an Assassin, and has killed George Washington’s brother and a fat man called Smith, but has started to question whether he should or not as Washington was sick and Smith was harmless. So far, there has been a lot of tedious boating, not much proper assassining, The actual assassining has, however, been great as always, especially Washington’s garden party.

You can see that the game is stitched together from other games. There’s asset reuse in the boats, the Homestead (straight from Assassin’s Creed III), and the Abstergo offices (from Black Flag). The “modern day” plot involves a virus hitting the Abstergo network, causing glitches and corruption in the Animus. It’s this which I think (and hope) may explain Shay’s Templar conversion. From some of the files I’ve found in the offices, it would appear that things are not as they seem. It wouldn’t be the first time either – in Liberation, Citizen E shows what “really” happened in various bits of the game – and I expect something similar to be happening here. We’ll see.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (360): COMPLETED!

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Wow. It’s been a while since I’ve completed an Xbox 360 game. In fact, bar the odd bit of Minecraft, I’ve barely touched it in ages. Today my daughter wanted to play a Turtles game, so I picked this.

It’s the original arcade game from 1989, although I did complete it almost eight years ago. Blimey. Was the 360 even around that long ago?

This time was in co-op, obviously, and I found it easier than I remember. Sure, a billion credits were used (for some reason the game only gives you one life each credit? Pretty sure I must have missed a setting somewhere), but the bosses didn’t seem as indestructible as I recall.

Anywho, done. There was some technical issue aftermath, though. After playing, the game reverted to the trial version, and so to fix it I deleted it and went to redownload it. Of course, it’s not on XBLA any more. Nor was it in my download history. In fact, NOTHING was in my download history aside from Minecraft. Twice. Not on my 360 nor on the Xbox website. All very odd. Sorted it a few hours later when the Xbox Support Twitter account provided me with a link to my download history, which appeared to be the same URL as the one I’d visited previously, but this time it listed everything. Phew.