What Games Have You Completed? (2021 Edition)

Tomb Raider Definitive Edition.


Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood Remastered (The Ezio Collection). Completed and platinumed.

Another safe bet to get the New Year off to a positive start. This is my favourite Assassin’s Creed game on some days and on others it’s the second one or even Odyssey. Whereas the aforementioned Assassin’s Creed II is more story and character focused, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is more systems-lead. The general plot and character development may not be as strong as its predecessor but each story beat coupled with the amazing architecture of Rome provides a fantastic backdrop for perhaps the most consistently strong campaign in the series.

The main assassinations are all so unique and elaborate. Even the infamous escort and tailing missions (which only become annoying in later games like Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag) actually encourage you to take your time planning your route and utilising the social stealth opportunities around you creatively. The side missions are also great and are actually some of the best in the game. The Romulus lairs, for instance, in which you navigate secret underground temples for keys to the best armour, are fantastic. They are a test of your parkour skills, your ability to memorise mazes, to manage time limits and be decisive while under pressure. In fact, treating the side missions as “optional” content would be doing yourself a disservice. Everything in this beautiful open world feels handcrafted and fluff-free so go for it.

Brotherhood is also the beginning of many tropes for the series e.g. scaling towers to reveal a region of the map, undermining enemy influence in districts by assassinating the leaders etc. The difference is back then these ideas were fresh and therefore remains the best incarnation of the “Ubisoft model”.

As well as containing the series’ first multiplayer (which thankfully is not in the EzIo collection), it also introduces the animus’ own version of optional challenges where you have to meet the bare minimum requirements for 50% sync and complete the optional objectives in addition for 100% sync. (The animus, for those who don’t know, is a machine that allows you to relive an ancestor’s past via their descendant or DNA and you need to perform each memory exactly as it was to “sync” with the ancestor, otherwise you’ll “desync” and have to restart the memory.)

These optional constraints are the game’s best asset - the difficulty in these challenges almost feel so alien to the series now which has become increasingly easier and pandering with each instalment. I am not one of those people who think a game being difficult makes it objectively better because that’s such a personal taste thing that is almost impossible to quantify or dictate to anyone. That said… for me personally, to bypass these challenges would have done me a disservice because they really highlight how clever some of the level design is. Ideally the best way for a newcomer to experience the missions is to just play them how you want to the first time and then replay all the missions again for 100% (provided that you enjoyed them the first time) because by then you will be more familiar with the mechanics and have more tools at your disposal.

The checkpoint system is unforgiving meaning that a failed optional challenge voids 100% sync for the entire mission and so will need to be restarted from the beginning - and they aren’t short either. Missions like the one where you have to infiltrate the Castel Sant'angelo (which is like the big landmark of Rome other than the Colosseum) without being detected while not dropping to your death making those jumps on the big-ass castle itself is both exhilarating and nerve-wracking.

There are only 2 missions that I would say cross the line from being a fun challenge to just being downright mean-spirited. They both occur in the Leonardo da Vinci side quests where you have to destroy his blueprints and war machines (because they’ve fallen into the hands of the Borgia family, our primary antagonists). This is because the actual challenge to not take a single hit to your tank / flying fire-spitting bird machine thingy doesn’t kick in until like 10 or 15 minutes in. Therefore, if you fail these objectives - which is very easy to do - you’re gonna be replaying potentially 10 minutes worth of the easy stuff multiple times just to get to the actual part you need. I breezed through it this time but that’s only because I had my fair share of fails back on my 360 so I know the missions inside out by now. Back in the day this was controller-breaking though and I suspect for first timers it will be the same.

As previously mentioned, Brotherhood is all about “systems” – one of which actually inspired its title. If AC II is about Ezio’s journey to becoming an assassin, Brotherhood is about becoming a master assassin, a leader of…the Brotherhood. So it’s like playing a staff management simulator at times where it often comes down to making decisions as to whether you want to send your recruits on missions of their own in other parts of the world so they can get stronger (the harder the missions the more apprentices that are needed), and knowing when to keep them in Rome so you can use them in your own missions. When your recruits complete their assignments successfully they earn XP which you use to upgrade their skills. Ezio also earns money and valuable resources that can be sold from each successful assignment.

Scouring the map to recruit can be tedious/repetitive at first but it would be a mistake to sleep on it. Your trainees make some of the mission constraints a little easier if you’re struggling and they provide alternative ways for approaching objectives in general. If you get in trouble with the guards and don’t feel like getting into a scrap you can just call in an arrow storm that kills them all in one hit (this obviously has a big cooldown), or have the recruits tackle them head-on earning them XP in the process.

In addition, the renovation system in AC II has been expanded from Ezio’s villa to all of Rome. The Borgia has sealed off places like doctor surgeries, art dealers and weapon and armour merchants and you have to liberate the area before they become purchasable anyway (which ties in with the Borgia Tower system). Additionally, some buildings that are otherwise climbable are inaccessible until you invest your hard earned cash into rebuilding them and the surrounding areas. Each time Rome’s value increases so does your profits which generate automatically every 20 minutes, so it’s very much a thing of the more you put into your city the more you get out of it.

The economy is also well balanced so you’ll never feel like you’re investing way more than you earn; by the end of the game I had far more coin than I actually needed. It’s worth noting that the renovation system, like a lot of stuff in Brotherhood, is entirely optional but super convenient if you don’t want to travel to the other side of the map to buy goods. It’s also a solid reminder of Ezio’s banker roots, seeing as he was the son of one and an apprentice to another before fate steered his path to the Brotherhood.

I haven’t even spoken about the modern day story line – back when it actually felt like it was heading somewhere before the lead director had a nasty falling out with Ubisoft. Listening to Ezio trying to decipher who brought a smile to my face - and that's just the beginning of the game. Additionally, Brotherhood is not embarrassed to have you play as an assassin – the entire concept of Brotherhood, after all, is centred on Ezio climbing the ranks to Master Assassin. Not a pirate or a Viking or a local sheriff. An assassin. The game thinks that being an assassin is badass and so, IMO, is deserving of the title "Assassin’s Creed".

Brotherhood picks up literally where the second game left off with Ezio returning to his family villa – which won’t mean much to those who haven’t played it so I’ll spare the details. My point is, this level of cohesion between instalments is never really seen again. You could argue for AC III/Black Flag/Rogue but the connections were minimal at best. You’re not missing out on one by not playing another whereas the story of Brotherhood works better when played after AC II.

It was also nice to be reminded of a time when the animus wasn’t just an excuse for illogical gameplay nonsense (like being able to play memories from DNA so damaged that it can’t determine the sex of the ancestor). The emails between the modern day characters are just banter that shows their relationships with one another as opposed to exposition dumps to pacify the old school fans that miss the modern day sections. The emails don’t need to do all the heavy lifting for the lore because the cut scenes and gameplay do that for you. It really does feel like a sci-fi TV series at times.

Brotherhood is not perfect though. The open combat isn’t great and unlike AC II you can’t bypass most of it. The chain kills never quite worked the way I think the devs wanted them to until AC III. The most nagging and persistent flaw of the game though is that it introduces so many cool systems and ideas…but then walls off entire sections of the map behind later memories. Assassin’s Creed I and Assassin’s Creed II are more linear so the memory walls in those games were far less intrusive. Whereas the world of Rome is tempting you to explore and interact with every inch of it…but then locks half of it behind late game memory sequences for no good reason. Consequently, you end up finishing off what feel like very early-game activities in the late game, like the Borgia tower liberations and the aforementioned staff recruitment. Just an odd choice.

And it has to be said: this “remaster” sucks. It’s funny because I recall being told prior to playing the Ezio Collection that the remasters were not as bad as the YouTube comparisons made them out to be. Guys, they’re bad. I’m a fan of the series and these remasters are bad. I don’t mean in terms of graphical improvements either as I couldn’t give a toss about textures in a 2010 game. My issue is simply the colour palette. What makes the different regions of Rome so distinctive in the original (other than the architecture and ambient music) is the mood/tone the colour set for them. Here, everything is just sepia toned and one note. It’s just not as atmospheric.

None of these issues break the game or anything, and my personal gripe with the colour palette will go unnoticed by anyone playing Brotherhood for the first time via the Ezio Collection.

To wrap up, I’ve now platinumed every Assassin’s Creed game apart from Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (some other time) and Assassin’s Creed I (has no platinum). Brotherhood is definitely the most difficult of the lot. While there are no multiplayer trophies in the Ezio Collection, the DLC trophies take their place and one of them requires you to get 100% sync in all missions, including the DLC ones, which was not required for the original platinum. Personally, I love this ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’ approach that both AC III and Brotherhood took to their respective platinums for the remastered versions because it means I get to avoid multiplayer. I’d rather do something harder that’s fun than do something easy that isn’t. Aaaaand on that related note, replaying Brotherhood was a breath of fresh air after Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla…

TLDR: All in all, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, both original and remastered, is quintessential Assassin’s Creed and a must-play for fans of open world action adventures.

Tomb Raider Definitive Edition.
Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood Remastered (The Ezio Collection).


Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Completed and platinumed.

So this is my first “new” game of the year. I chose it because it had been on my hit list for a while, and upon seeing some discussion of it in the “general” thread I decided to finally give it a go. It’s…good. Not great, just good.

I’m gonna start by getting a negative out of the way because this game has a quality-of-life flaw so major, so ridiculous and yet so easily fixable that, IMO, it’s make or break as to whether you will enjoy it or not: There’s no sprint button. It has a “not as slow” button (R2) but not an actual dedicated sprint input. This is a problem.

I’m a completionist and when I play any exploration based game I want to uncover as much as I can in a world I’m invested in, and I have no qualms about backtracking as many times as I need to in order to achieve this. The story premise and world-building of the game's fictional town is so interesting and begging to be uncovered, but I refused to let the developers waste my time. Consequently, I did the first two areas by myself and then got to the third chapter – which is set in a sprawling farm with not as many landmarks to get your bearings – when I said ‘enough is enough’ and just followed a platinum guide, restarting the game from scratch to do so. I have no regrets.

I still listened to the radio logs and watched all the story moments myself without interruption, and the guide never told me what the story beats were beforehand, but I was no longer taking the time to discover their locations naturally. I usually like to do entirely blind playthroughs on my first go and then if I enjoy the game enough I go for the plat afterwards but I just did not have the time for this. The worst part is that it’s fairly obvious that decision to not include a sprint button is more of a technical compromise than an artistic choice because the game can’t keep up with you even when you’re walking. It hitches constantly and the pop-in is very noticeable.

The save system is also idiotic, only providing checkpoints at the story moments that require motion control inputs which means you could potentially lose hours of progress if you’re not fortunate enough to find them in between all the other discoveries should your game crash or you encounter a bug.

It is easy to see why it would struggle at sprinting speeds – the graphics are beautiful and photo realistic for such a low budget. The weather, the lighting, the visual FX of the mysterious light entity that is engulfing the town are all lovely. Also, unlike a lot of walking simulators it feels huge due to the sense that you can literally go anywhere in any order without being halted by the critical story barriers. In fact, you can outright bypass pretty much everything and skip right to the end in 10 minutes if you simply follow the main road but you’re highly unlikely to do so on the first playthrough when you have no idea where that road leads. The fictional village of Yaughton (said to be in Shropshire) is also so distinctive with its landmarks and the significant story beats that take place around them that it’s a character in of itself.

The story takes place in the 1980s and is about the village's residents who are, unknowingly, dealing with an extraterrestrial entity that can only be described visually as ‘liquid light’. The entity infects its hosts and spreads like a plague, causing symptoms typical of tumours like headaches and haemorrhaging and then, eventually, death (and no, the similarities to our very real-life pandemic is not lost on me). The game expects you to form emotional attachments to the town’s former inhabitants and their relationships with one another as you piece together what happened to them. It’s that old cliché of, “maybe the true discovery was the friends we made along the way”.

By the way, the game never specifies who you are playing as or even suggests that you are playing as anybody. My theory is that we’re the entity, itself, or we’re playing as – the latter theory will only make sense if you reach the ending so I won’t spoil it.

Each chapter focuses on a singular character and their interactions with others. One of the later chapters centres on our main protagonist, Stephen, who is the big shot scientist returning from America with the woman he married there to his humble beginnings. He and his scientist wife, Kate, intended to decode numerical patterns in the stars at the village's observatory. Whilst doing this they happen upon a mysterious light entity, which they simply call ‘The Pattern’, and when they discover its hostile nature Stephen starts running around the town like a madman trying to contain its spread as the entity grows increasingly intelligent, aware and finds new ways to adapt so it can spread faster and easier.

Stephen is also caught in the middle of a love triangle between his childhood sweetheart and his hot new American wife who are just both waaaay too good for him to the point where it’s actually baffling. Because you don’t get to see what the characters look like – their visual “echoes”, as it were, are silhouetted in the form of the liquid light - I have to assume he’s either dashingly good-looking and a master in the bedroom because it can’t be his personality – which is sh*t. He is so deliberately unlikeable (most of the town hate him) that I cannot stand to listen to him which is a testament to both the writing and the incredible voice acting (all the voice actors are great). Typical of someone like Stephen, he thinks himself pragmatic whenever his heartlessness is called out, but in truth he’s selfish, hypocritical, arrogant and lacking in empathy. Without spoiling, that last flaw because if he was as compassionate as Kate things could have turned out differently...

And that leads to my favourite character, Kate. She is the second lead and perhaps the most important character, the final chapter being her story. Not only is her voice actress amazing but I like that the game initially sets Kate up to be, in some ways, the villain while also making her likeable, interesting and as mysterious as the entity itself. She’s barely in any of the liquid light echoes but her radio logs can be found throughout the town in every chapter and they’re all worth listening to, giving you insight about the entity whilst also motioning her character development. Her fascination with The Pattern could have easily bordered on clichéd crazy scientist in love with a discovery/invention that will be their undoing but, instead, her quest for knowledge coupled with her intelligence, compassion and understanding makes her endearing.

I also initially thought it was bold for the writers to suggest that this insular, mostly white little community in Shropshire shunned her because she is black but then I remembered this story takes place in the 80s and racism is easier to talk about when it’s thought of as being in the past. Her b*stard husband’s refusal to see the town’s obvious contempt for her for simply being different drives a wedge in their relationship making her sympathetic even when it appears she is being demonised.

Admittedly, another one of my favourite characters is Wendy whose story begins and concludes in chapter 2. Despite being a nosy old bat, judgemental and racist to boot there's an authenticity to her; she reminded me of old dears I’ve known in my life


TLDR: It’s difficult to know whether to recommend Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture. Not having a sprint button was so game-breaking for me personally that I had to approach it entirely differently to how the developers intended. What I do know is that before I lost my patience I really did love exploring those first two chapters on my own, in terms of the narrative discoveries I was making and the way my relationship grew with the town itself. I would say if you like walking simulators then give it a go, it’s super cheap at the moment, but set your expectations accordingly. There are definitely better ones out there.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Super easy Platinum as well considering it's my only platinum trophy and I've absolutely no interest in getting trophies but still got it!

Congrats on your first. May this be the beginning of something beautiful.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

I've no interest at all in achievements but Sony's trophies are an awful system. They're shoehorned into the operating system and there's still issues with them loading. It's just a horrible system to use, whereas you can check achievements instantaneously on XBox. So I've even less interest in Sony's half arsed version

Fair enough, Sony's trophy system may suck from a technical perspective but X Box achievements is worse as a concept (despite being the first of the two to implement it). It's designed to get completionists and trophy hunters to purchase DLCs since it uses 'gamerscore' as opposed to 'platinums'. Therefore you can never truly 100% the achievements with games that are constantly pumping out DLCs. No thanks.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Not true. The Xbox version of a platinum is a 1000 score from the game and each additional dlc adds 200 I think. Same thing really. And it was deisgned well before trophy hunters and completionists took things to extremes. To be honest, nobody is forcing them to buy dlc

mmm that's not strictly true. IIRC the first COD has about a 700ish total GS. I'll have to boot up my 360 and check. Either way, no nerd is going around bragging that they have "1000 GS" because it's difficult to quantify what a "good" gamer score actually is whereas the number of platinum trophies serves as a sort of rank. Additionally not getting all the GS in a game affects your overall GS. People can see how much GS you have out of the total games you earn so the fact that you've got incomplete achievements is right at the top of the page. I love X Box but the GS system does not feel anywhere near as satisfying as the trophy system.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

I only respect people with a high gamerscore and don't when they talk about trophies.

However will I live...

Retr0gamer wrote: »

It's weird that during the 360 everyone was all about gamerscore and nobody cared about trophies and now with the complete belly flop that was the Xbox One Trophies are all I hear about.

And that's fair. Also, if you do the math, someone with over 100 platinums would have the equivalent of someone with a "high" GS as the trophies are the same (by "high" I mean the score out of the total they could have because what we consider high is subjective and relative). You'd then be looking at someone with S and A ranks for most games they play. The only difference is you can't see on the Playstation account how much they have left to obtain unless you peak into their trophy list.

Seems like you prefer the GS just because it's a relic system rather than because it's genuinely better. Gamerscore is not fair because if you buy a game you don't like enough to finish or enough to get the DLCs then you're being penalised for not spending the extra cash. It's not consumer friendly.

Gamer Bhoy 89 wrote: »

My trophy level means nothing to me now, since they changed the numbering system on it. It's now three-hundred-and-something - I've no idea. :

One of the worst decisions Sony has made. They devalued the star rank by making it so easy to level up. Before it used to be a true milestone when you reached the next level. I hope they go back.

Retr0gamer wrote: »

Well I don't care about either but I prefer Gamerscore because it actually works on a technical level.

On XBox if I want to check achievements and check what achievements my friends have and so a comparison is super quick with instantaneous loading and near instantaneous when looking at a friends.

Trophies on the other hand have always been a disaster technically. They take ages to load up if you just want to check. I noticed when I got my platinum they also take forever to update as I went to check if I did actually get a platinum but my trophies were at 60% for a good two minutes before updating.

And then checking a friends trophies? Forget about it unless you can wait until the heat death of the sun before they load.

So even though I don't care about either I'd sometimes check achievements as it's so quick and easy whereas I've to put on the kettle to check trophies while they load so never bother.

Xbox was so much better than PS back on the 360 era.(I never owned a PS4 or 5 so can't compare them to now) On the 360 back then you could look at what games your friends owned as well as compare achievements that you may have got that friends didn't and vise versa.

edit: Just thinking PS may have implemented them features eventually but at launch and good while after they couldn't do that.