What Games Have You Completed? (2020 Edition)

Life is Strange season 2.
The Outer Worlds
Far Cry New Dawn
Goat Simulator
A Plague Tale: Innocence
Until Dawn

Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. Completed and platinumed. It’s still good but it hasn’t aged as gracefully as other AC games. When I played AC III remastered I enjoyed it way more the second time round. Despite the bugs and laughable graphics “upgrade”, the story and pacing felt fresh, the gameplay innovative.

I think the problem is partly because of the way I chose to play Black Flag this time. The first time I did whatever activity suited me but I was ignorant as to how to play the game efficiently. This time I played with one goal in mind: to upgrade the Jackdaw, so everything I did was in service to that. Consequently, it made the tougher activities like legendary ships and fort takedowns a cakewalk but it also made me realise how this is perhaps the first game in the franchise to be built entirely around microtransactions.

The entire progression system is designed to exhaust the player into purchasing “time saver” packages (it’s literally called that) by being as grindy as possible with max effort and little reward. Other than the legendary ships, the missions that earn you the most money are the most boring, like the Assassin and naval contracts which condense all story into the paper contract the protagonist picks up. There are no actual side characters in them like in other AC games. Completely soulless. Treasure boxes never felt more useless as there’s very little money in them, unlike in previous titles.

It's great when it’s a pirate game i.e. plundering tough ships, singing sea shanties, whaling etc but the moment it tries to be an Assassin’s Creed game it falls apart and you’re witnessing what is the final bow of a stale gameplay that Ubisoft had no choice but to freshen up for the new generation of consoles. The stealth is so annoying, you can’t go five seconds in a restricted area without a guard’s alert meter chirping away and guards are watching each other’s sixes all the time. Combat is the series’ worst – a combination of mashing square with the occasional circle counter. There’s no challenge or depth to it, makes you wonder why they even bothered. The parkour has always been problematic but the environment here really exposes it - terrible predictive tracking with Edward climbing things when he shouldn’t. The run button being the same as the climb button may look seamless but makes for plenty of clumsiness.

I will say I related more to Edward, the protagonist, now than I did when I was younger. Whilst I don’t agree with how he goes about his goals, I understand the motivation to not accept the role society has given to you and to strive for a better life or die trying. The story is more thoughtful than I remember even though the Assassins are largely relegated to the background. The modern day is also very good even though Desmond’s goodbye is confined to audio tapes and the writers overcomplicate the story line with this age/reincarnation nonsense.

The multiplayer feels great when you outsmart another player but it gets old quickly. My favourite mode was perhaps ‘Wolfpack’, a 4 player co-op where you have to complete 25 rounds by earning the required score under a time limit. It rewards you for the quality of your kills (i.e. Not being detected, acrobatic finishes etc) rather than how many kills you get but there are few players that know that. It was hilarious witnessing players who got way more kills than me end up at the bottom of the leaderboard because they kept running in like ADHD idiots netting 100 score kills when I’m walking slowly and getting scores in the thousands. I could only imagine the confusion on their faces.

Like I said, when you’re not trying to upgrade your ship Black Flag is still fun in most areas but it’s not the pirate game masterpiece that I think many remember it as.

Life is Strange season 2.
The Outer Worlds
Far Cry New Dawn
Goat Simulator
A Plague Tale: Innocence
Until Dawn
Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag

Assassin’s Creed 4: Freedom Cry DLC. Completed and got 100% of the trophy list. It was nice playing as an actual assassin again, just a shame that Assassin’s Creed Rogue goes on to completely disrespect Adewale and all the work he did, but I digress…

The onshore stealth is so much better than the main game because the guards are placed more sparingly and the stakes are higher. The overseers, fearing a rebellion, will kill slaves if you get caught so each death is on your hands. Black slavery is somewhat romanticised with a ridiculous black madam character that made me laugh and cringe simultaneously but I’m going to give that a pass because this is a video game and an Assassin’s Creed one at that. Some liberties have to be taken for the sake of the tone established in the main game and for the sake of being a power fantasy.

Music is awesome as well. For instance, the slaves will sing as they’re working and then when you get caught the combat arrangement is an erratic string version of whatever they were singing, which only adds to the guilt of detection.

Ubisoft Quebec developed this DLC and, much like what they did with Odyssey, they ensure the effort/reward balance is fair. Cargo dropped in the sea has a healthy amount of resources and there are multiple fun ways to obtain resources for your ship. Of course, it is a DLC so I’m aware that’s likely due to time constraints but the pacing is good.

Like Odyssey again, all of the various systems compliment one another so you’re often killing two birds with one stone. For instance, liberating a slave ship adds to your slave liberation meter, which means more rewards while simultaneously giving you reales and resources for your ship. This reduces the number of activities you have to grind to achieve your upgrade goals.

The only thing I did not like – and this is a problem all Assassin’s Creed DLCs have – is that it turns into a Far Cry game with all ill-paced enemy spawning. You defeat an entire group of guards only for more to spawn right behind you and, even when traversing, enemies are packed too closely to one another so getting from point A to B can be annoying.

Other than that, a good DLC. Still got to get the ‘Blackbeard Wrath’ DLC trophies which came with the season pass, and then I can say goodbye to Black Flag for good.


Control. Completed and platinumed. Control is a game that I really wanted to love but merely found average. There’s just something “off” about it. It’s not nearly as clever as it thinks it is and over-reliance on combat proves that. You have some initially intriguing side quests that all disappointingly dissolve into either fighting a bunch of enemies or a boss fight.

The combat, itself, is good and you feel that sense of progression when you acquire more mods and abilities but there’s too much of it. The looter shooter –lite elements, such as the aforementioned mods, dictate that enemies you’ve just cleared spawn again the moment you turn your back which gets tedious. The final battle is especially terrible, comprised of a seemingly endless and escalating wave of enemies that sees you having to levitate from platform to platform to meet them.

But by far and away the worst thing about this game is the map. The signposting is not good enough for a map to be this bad. You’ll waste so much time backtracking, and this is compounded by the enemy spawn rate. Backtracking is not inherently a bad thing, it can even be useful in discovering locations you normally would not have, but Control is one of those games where you don’t want to tackle some side quests too early because you may not have the abilities to do so.

Frame rate is nasty in places due to the ambitious tech with all the breakables. The base PS4 simply can’t handle it but I hear there are problems on the Pro as well. It also freezes every time you come out of the pause menu. The game was released in August so it’s highly unlikely these issues will be fixed.

Control is best played in short bursts; too long exposure and you’ll get sick of it. I never cared for the story and towards the latter half I was ready for it to end. If it weren’t for the fact that the plat is super easy with most trophies being acquired simply for playing the game correctly I probably wouldn’t have bothered getting all of them. The game has a lot of potential for sequels and many will enjoy it due to some interesting ideas but for me it was a bit of slog.