Achievement Guides Highlight Flaws

Sometimes you can learn more about a game’s flaws from an achievement guide than its reviews.

This makes sense, since learning how to get all of a game’s achievements requires engaging much more closely with its mechanics and systems. (It’s the same reason Joseph Anderson plays games on the hardest available difficulty before reviewing them, to expose the flaws of their combat systems and such - he mentioned this in his God of War video though that is currently unavailable due to a presumably-bullshit copyright claim.)

Since Horizon Chase Turbo recently went free on PlayStation Plus and reviews are generally positive, I tried it out and it made a good first impression. I then checked the trophy guide and found an explanation of why only two of the five stats on each car actually matter, an exploit for getting around difficulty spikes in collecting “race coins”, and tips for dealing with the game’s aggressive rubber-banding and cheating AI. Very revealing.