Assassin’s Creed Unity has had its trophy list revealed. The next-gen exclusive has a total of 51 trophies including 1 Platinum, 1 Gold, 13 Silver and 36 Bronze. Since there is no online competitive multiplayer the latest iteration of the Assassin’s Creed franchise should be a lot easier to platinum than previous entries.
The full trophy list can be seen below: (WARNING!!! POSSIBLE SPOILERS!!!)
Master Assassin Earn every Trophy.
A Long Time Ago Complete the Prologue.
Youth In Versailles Complete Memory Sequence 1.
Rebirth Complete Memory Sequence 2.
First Blood Complete Memory Sequence 3.
La Cour des Miracles Complete Memory Sequence 4.
The Root Of Evil Complete Memory Sequence 5.
Secret Meeting Complete Memory Sequence 6.
Mystery Solved Complete Memory Sequence 7.
Bloody Trail Complete Memory Sequence 8.
Road To Starvation Complete Memory Sequence 9.
Love And Duty Complete Memory Sequence 10.
Down But Not Out Complete Memory Sequence 11.
Curtain Call Complete Memory Sequence 12.
No Man’s Land Complete all Rift missions.
Needs More Data Earn Data Bonuses in 3 different Helix Rifts.
Thawed Free a total of 10 trapped Assassins.
Blade In The Crowd Assassinate 100 enemies.
I Want It All Complete all Single Player mission challenges.
Networking Renovate your first Social Club.
An Old Internet Meme Renovate all the Social Clubs and complete all the Social Club missions.
Falling From The Sky Perform 10 air assassinations.
From the Past Unlock the Medieval Armor in the Café Théâtre.
The Baguette Boyband Complete a Co-op mission.
Know-It-All Complete all training missions.
Gentleman Cambrioleur Lockpick 20 chests.
Curiosity Open every chest in the game.
Visited Once Complete all Co-op and Heist missions at least once.
Business and Pleasure Earn a total of 50,000 livres.
And Stay Down! Perform a ground execution.
Panoramic View Synchronize all Viewpoints.
Help Me! Complete 10 Crowd Events.
Hand of Justice Solve a Murder Mystery.
Ransacking Versailles Earn 100% completion of Versailles.
Accurate Prediction Complete a Nostradamus Enigma.
Tricolore Collect all Cockades
Don’t Need It Drop 20 Money Pouches in the streets.
Patron of the Arts Watch a play in the Café Théâtre.
Share the Wealth Get all the rewards in a Co-op mission.
Safe and Secure Perform all Social Club missions in a district.
Room With A View Enjoy the view of Paris from Arno’s balcony.
Poked! Kill 20 enemies with a Long Weapon.
Chopped! Kill 20 enemies with a heavy weapon.
Master Architect Complete all the renovations of the Café Théâtre.
Guillotined Kill an enemy with a lift counterweight.
Never Say Die Revive a partner in Co-op.
Merciful Killer Perform 10 non-lethal takedowns in a Co-op mission.
Trying to be too clever too early will cost you your job, and that's something you'd do well to understand before starting your managerial career in Football Manager 2015.
It started a month ago, myself and others suffering London's public transport for nearly two hours to visit Victoria Road, the home ground of English Football League 2 strugglers Dagenham and Redbridge. The match was against York City, an equally incapable outfit favouring physicality over finesse. Standing in the terrace, flanked by the supporters group's inexhaustible drummer, we witnessed the 'Daggers' beat York 2-0 in a game characterised by long punts forward and blue language from the dugout.
Somehow inspired by this, I decided to kick off my Football Manager 2015 career as the boss of Dagenham, with grand ambitions to one day get them to the Santiago Bernabeu to take on Real Madrid in a Champions League clash. It didn't quite happen. 17 games, 11 defeats and fewer goals later, I was sacked. I should have done what I usually do: take a job at an elite club with a view to learning the year's new quirks before getting smart and overseeing a minnow.
The major problems at Dagenham revolved around scouting and coaching, two key pillars of any club not lucky enough to be backed by a member of the Middle East's ruling elite. Unlike in past editions of Sports Interactive's data-heavy management sim, player recruitment is more tightly aligned with the accumulated knowledge of your scouts, making their expertise more crucial than ever before. Putting together a dream team of 12 or more experienced scouts is easy for the big clubs, but the tighter purse-strings of smaller outfits makes such an act less simple.
Such recruitment constraints limit the number of players known to you and your club. Yes, you can still search for any specific player within the game's vast database--whether your scouts know of their existence or not--but this requires substantial prior knowledge on your part and removes the joy that comes from uncovering new talent.
To further complicate things, scouting a player no longer guarantees full knowledge of his strengths and weaknesses. Sending a scout to go check out a potential transfer target results in a range of numbers (from 1 to 20) being applied to individual attributes, with their true ability found somewhere amongst the ambiguity. Sending your scouts to watch him again narrows the range and gives you a better idea of their true ability, but by that time the transfer window might have shut or another team may have poached him away.
When recruiting scouts, then, it's now essential that you look at their existing knowledge, rather than only their future potential in finding players. The more players you already know about, the more chance you have of instantly filling holes in your squad without taking financial risks on unknown individuals.
If that all sounds rather complicated, that's because it is. However, as series aficionados know, it's this very complexity that results in the complete engagement and frequent obsession with the franchise. FIFA and PES is like watching football; Football Manager is like living it.
This year, you've got more options as to how you want to engage in that realism by defining what kind of manager you want to be. Before you begin you're asked to choose between being a tracksuit or tactical manager; the former excels in coaching, while the latter has skills in mental and tactical areas. It's possible to be a mixture of both, but this puts you into that awful position of being a jack of all trades and a master of none.
As someone that watches Dagenham at weekends, I smugly lay my roots firmly on the tactical side of the coin--more of a Jose Mourinho character than a Sean Dyche. With your man management, adaptability, and motivational stats at the higher end of the scale, your players are better placed to employ the tactical information you feed them, and react better to learning multiple systems and styles of play.
What this approach lacks, however, is much expertise when it comes to leading training sessions and passing on the core foundation that every good player must have to succeed. Therefore, you have to make up for your deficiencies by hiring coaches that are capable of doing what you can't, delegating to them when necessary, and working in unison with their skill set rather than trying to do everything yourself.
As with scouting, it's important to take great care in selecting which coaches to hire and how closely you work with them. The degree to which this affects your career as a manager, especially after a season or two of building relationships with staff and understanding their abilities, is surprisingly high.
Predictably, tweaks, and changes have been made to the layout of the game's multitude of menus in a bid to further improve functionality and streamline the interface. Your most important links are now hosted in a vertical bar on the left side of the screen, displaced from its long-term home along the top. This change is awkward at first, but it ultimately proves useful, reducing the number of sub-screens you have to navigate in order to get to commonly used areas of the managerial desk.
Technical upgrades have been applied to the 3D match engine, with players looking smoother and having a greater range of animations to work with. It's a nice addition, but many players will continue to simply let their matches play out exclusively in text form, reducing the amount of time it takes to get through games.
Other than these changes, Football Manager 2015 is more evolutionary than revolutionary. New player movement systems and roles are included for you to come up with more elaborate match day strategies, and media interaction has been updated to include interviews before and after matches.
Sometimes things feel too familiar, though. The Challenges game mode, which tests your skills across a number of crushingly difficult scenarios, features the same objectives as previous games. There are also still too few options for customizing the core colour scheme of the game, which is disappointing given the hundreds of hours that people spend sat in front of it.
However, Football Manager is about progress, not revolution, which is arguably what its audience wants, and exactly what this year's game provides. Sports Interactive has crafted a game as predictably exhaustive as Andre Villas-Boas's gameplan, but as brutally effective as one masterminded by Mourinho. Football Manager has long since attained cult status and this release serves only to further stimulate that dedicated subculture.
Total Annihilation goes intergalactic, and at hyperspeed. That, in a nutshell, describes Planetary Annihilation, Uber Entertainment's homage to one of the all-time greatest real-time strategy games. The game comes with some key enhancements, however, including a challenging pace and enemy artificial intelligence, along with full globes of cartoony planets and moons serving as battlegrounds. RTS newcomers will have a tough time with the sheer velocity of the combat and the lack of proper tutorials and manuals, as will tacticians who prefer to think before they click. But the speed, difficulty, and map innovations make Planetary Annihilation grow on you.
I wouldn't have said so in the early hours, though. Planetary Annihilation steamrolled me initially. The game comes with little in the way of documentation. There is no in-game tutorial; all the primers that you get before being dropped on a planet come from blurry videos that barely hint at what the game has to offer. To figure things out, you should watch an hour or three of YouTube videos and search the Internet for tips. Until you research, you are cannon fodder on map after map. Planetary Annihilation desperately needs a proper tutorial that lets players dip their toes into the deep waters; the "jump in head-first" approach doesn't work with a game this unforgiving.
The little planets and great big units are cute, in a mass murdery kind of way.
The underlying RTS formula is familiar, at least. As in Total Annihilation, you start off with a giant commander that has the power to construct various parts of your headquarters, including vehicle and robot builders, power plants (energy is one resource), metal extractors (metal is the other), laser turrets, and so forth. Every faction is led by one of these bosses, so victory comes when you blast these Transformer wannabes into rubble. There is a simple progression here. You start with your commander and then create a fabricator vehicle with access to even more facility blueprints and improved factories that can crank out bigger and better tanks, planes, bots, ships, and orbital weaponry and vessels. Then you create advanced versions of all this stuff that handle heavier duties that lead to even more formidable armies.
Planetary Annihilation sticks you into a quick-tempo arms race that rolls from planet to planet, from moon to moon. From the moment that your big robot commander hits the ground, you need to establish facilities and ensure that you have a production line running at maximum efficiency. Units need to be streaming out continuously, and knowledge of hotkeys is imperative, especially when the guns start going off. The enemy AI always gets its armies flowing quickly, so taking extra time to play with the mouse or contemplate what type of tank would be most useful in the current situation results in being besieged and obliterated. You don't even have any time to spare when the foe is a planet or two away, as the bad guys rapidly send a transport your way and then build the transporter needed to beam full armies to your front door.
Foes can attack from any direction. Unlike other RTS games with traditional flat maps, the battlegrounds here are full globes. Planets look rather cartoony, as they are extremely tiny, your units are spectacularly huge, or both. But they form effective theaters of war and feature various types of terrain ranging from ice balls, to desert worlds, to chunks of metal. It’s hard to get used to at first; RTS instinct might have you building defenses between your bases and the enemy, forgetting that all opponents must do to flank is to simply run around the globe. This strategic consideration caught me off guard in the early stages, and forced me to spend more time walling off bases and ensuring that I had proper turret protection all the way around against ground and aerial assaults.
Make sure to build defenses again orbital attacks, too. As you might expect from a game where you conquer planets and moons, space is a key dimension in addition to the traditional land, air, and sea units. Orbital constructors crank out spaceships like fighters and transport vessels necessary to launch interplanetary invasions (although transporters make it easy to teleport armies across the void instantaneously after you establish a beachhead). This whole concept is initially befuddling; AI makes full use of space attacks, so you might be convinced at first that some buildings are blowing up on their own. Once you surmount that learning curve and stage an invasion, however, the course of battle becomes easier to understand. There is also the ability to build Death Stars by fitting guns into metal worlds and crashing one planetary body into another, giving matches a suitably apocalyptic feel.
The AI is cunning and spectacularly aggressive. It builds quickly, creates a solid base infrastructure with loads of power plants and metal extractors, and immediately sets forth to crush all opposition. It is smart at reacting to your defenses. Build a ton of anti-air defenses to deal with enemy planes, and the AI will quickly react by throwing more tanks and ships at you. Any vulnerability is identified and attacked, even on the default normal difficulty, making the challenge occasionally difficult to take. You might get a base set up, think you have everything covered, and be ready to roll out enough fighters and bombers to blot out the sky, only to be steadily whittled away by probing enemy strikes that are inevitably followed up by massive waves of units.
An easier difficulty setting might have provided time to get fully accustomed to the interface and then ramp up the speed, but its global battles can get under your skin, keeping you coming back for more and more. Planetary Annihilation is a good, challenging RTS designed along very familiar lines. True, its best qualities can be obscured in the early going by its unforgiving difficulty and the absence of good tutorials, but even when you're overwhelmed, speedy combat and smart AI reel you in. Give it time, and the fast and furious combat smooth out the rough edges into a compelling and challenging strategy game.
Eight years is a long time to wait for answers, and the opening scenes of Dreamfall Chapters understand as much, providing a tearful gut-punch that is as much of a conclusion as it is an introduction. This is the universe that has occupied my thoughts and fantasies since 1999, when The Longest Journey was released and earned rightful praise as one of the best adventure games ever made. It was a game about balance: the balance between the mundane and the magical, the head and the heart. Its sequel, 2006's Dreamfall, found new worlds to balance--those of waking life and dreams--and Dreamfall Chapters returns to this same theme soon after its emotional opening. Returning Dreamfall heroine Zoe Castillo has remained comatose, but she has not allowed her body to serve as a prison.
Those earlier games provided another kind of balance: that between a slow-paced opening and meaningful narrative tension that rose as the stakes grew higher. The first episode of Dreamfall Chapters provides the former, laying the groundwork for a potentially rousing adventure, but too little rises from that foundation. Those eight years between Dreamfall and its sequel were long--but I suspect that the wait between the Dreamfall Chapters' first and second episodes will feel just as lengthy, even if it's a matter of months and not years. As part of a long-term arc, Book One: Reborn may prove highly effective; on its own, it plays at a measured adagio that rarely quickens. The episodic format doesn't seem a good fit for the series' long-term storytelling, and I felt stranded by the abrupt ending, as if I had been invited to an opulent dinner only to arrive and find no one was home.
Zoe has a knack for getting in over her head.
Dreamfall Chapters may begin with an answer, but it is more concerned with questions--questions that you can add to the growing list of Longest Journey mysteries. The nature of the Tower being built in Marcuria, the relationship of the Undreaming to the dream machines, the identity of the white dragon: these lingering wonders are left to occupy your thoughts while you navigate Book One's more pressing themes. Zoe's spirit has been left to wander the Dreamtime, that otherworldly dimension first introduced in Dreamfall, even as her body rests in hospital. Here, she helps those stranded in the Dreamtime, people in the waking world that are connected to WATIcorp's dream machines, which provide on-demand dreams as entertainment to the masses.
The subsequent level provides both an intriguing setting and an effective tutorial, putting you in control of Zoe from a third-person perspective, and having you assist lost dreamers in finding their way home. A selection cursor automatically hones in on interactive objects in your field of vision, flipping between choices as you move and look about, and indicating the type of interaction available with an appropriate icon. This system is a natural progression from Dreamfall's selection cone, making both controller and keyboard-and-mouse setups viable options.
Two characters, two prisons.
More importantly, this sequence familiarizes you with Dreamfall Chapters' dialogue mechanics, which allow you to choose responses that suit your vision of Zoe. One of the game's successes is how it allows you to set a path, but ensures that all paths are authentic to this lovable woman who captivated me and so many others years ago. Zoe has always been gentle but aimless, making her indecision during these conversations an authentic aspect of her character, and not a game-ish contrivance that contradicts the earlier games' linear tales. When faced with a choice, Zoe thinks each choice aloud as you hover over it, speaking every line with a thoughtfulness and sincerity that should easily win you over. "I'm not ready to wake up, to face myself again," she thinks to herself. "I'm scared of losing what little I have left." Having found a purpose in this supernatural zone, it is no wonder she would have reservations about leaving. But because her choices--and therefore yours as well--occupy different places in the same emotional spectrum, none of them contradict what we already know of her.
Zoe ultimately finds her way back to the real world--well, the real world the series calls Stark, in any case--but her memories of the past are left behind in the Dreamtime. Months after her revival, Zoe has made a home in Propast, another of the series' rich and gorgeous locales. It's a multicultural neighborhood, far removed from the dystopias science-fiction stories typically depict. Propast is a future that rose from a past and present we understand; that the city should be home to people with American, European, Asian, and African accents is perfectly reasonable. This is the global village the age of the Internet has produced. Gorgeous lamps sway above you as you traverse the Chinese district; just blocks away, neon signs written in German ("Sonnenschein" consumer goods company) and English advertisements ("Cloud Nine Prosthetics") peacefully coexist. Food carts sell every kind of food you can imagine from the world over. You have never been to this city, but it sure feels like home.
Choice leads to consequence.
The relationship between technology and culture isn't always so peaceful in Dreamfall Chapters, though your earlier choices determine how you approach that dichotomy. In my time with Zoe, I learned about her job as a laboratory technician, and set about testing synthetic algae with the help of a little hovering robot called Kidbot. Other players have told me of a mechanical friend called Shitbot, but my choices never led me down a path that included him. I don't regret my time with Kidbot, however: her playfulness is cute but never grating, a difficult balancing act that Dreamfall Chapters gets exactly right, thanks to adorable dialogue and fantastic voice acting that conveys innocence without ever becoming saccharine.
Dreamfall Chapters thus reflects the series' history with its imaginative settings and empathetic characters. There are puzzles to solve and tasks to perform in your time here, but the episode is short on brainteasers: the obstructions you encounter are easily surmounted. The few inventory items you accumulate have intuitive uses and are quickly disposed of, making the first episode as much of an extended tutorial as it is a meandering prologue. Episode one is not short on glitches, however; the game struggles somewhat with its lens flaring, sometimes streaking your screen with distracting lights and colors, and in the game's final and curious scene, I walked right through a door and out of the level.
The super-city of Europolis sprawls across what used to be entire countries. Propat is just one part of the whole.
That final scenario isn't just intriguing from a story perspective: it also puts you in control of an unlikely protagonist with a particularly charming way of interacting with the world. Earlier in the game, you also take control of Kian Alvane, so the world of Arcadia does not go unacknowledged, though a prison is the only setting you get to explore there. Kian's chapter is light on challenge, but the thematic ties to Zoe's story give his section heft regardless: just as Zoe refuses to let her comatose body cage her, so too does Kian embrace the opportunity to flee his cell. Both characters are getting second chances, just as the series itself has risen from the crevasse Dreamfall left behind.
The Longest Journey crafted a protracted story arc that featured an equally leisurely opening, but grew into one of the genre's greatest citadels. The first episode's flat narrative structure may not be entirely satisfying, but Dreamfall Chapters' diverse and endearing cast, nuggets of political and personal tensions, and glimmers of the poignancy that made the previous Longest Journey games so memorable make me hopeful for the futures of Stark, Arcadia, and the Dreamtime, wherever those places might take me.
