Top 5 Hardest Xbox One Games for Achievements of 2016

Dishonored 2

Bringing more of the same stealthy action that the first Dishonored offered up to players, Dishonored 2 sees players face a pretty tough choice from the get go. Dishonored 2 is a tricky game of perfectly executing revenge plots using the mystical abilities at your disposal to fend through brilliantly designed levels filled with hostile NPCs. Of course, navigating all of this is only the start. Once you’ve made your way past all of these defenses, you’ll then need to take care of a high-importance target.

This then leaves players with two options on how to play the game. Will you opt for the stealth approach of Emily Kaldwin, or the more offensive style of Corvo Attano? You can either use brute force to hack and slash your way through, or you can adopt a quieter, stealthier approach to slip by unnoticed. With so many NPCs searching for you and the environments designed in such a way that create a tough but fair level of challenge when adopting the stealthy approach, you might be beginning to get an idea of just where the difficulty lies in Dishonored 2’s achievement list.

This comes primarily down to the fact that the game scores each of your missions on a scale from stealthy low chaos runs where you try and avoid encounters and being spotted, to the kill-fest, alert every guard high chaos runs. In order to get all 1000 Gamerscore, players will need to play through the game at least twice to get the low and high chaos playthroughs. On top of that, there are achievements for completing the game without killing anyone, and another for completing the game without ever being spotted by an enemy. Toss in a few that’ll test your combat expertise, such as eliminating six enemies in less than 1.5 seconds, and others that’ll have you hunting for collectibles and it’s quite the feat. Dishonored 2’s achievements list isn’t just time-consuming, it’s downright tough, especially if you tend to rely on Corvo and Emily’s powers to give you the upper-hand. After all, you’ll need to do without them for the Flesh and Steel achievement. Best get practicing.

Gears of War 4

Gears of War 4 starts a new saga in the world of the popular Xbox exclusive franchise. Putting players in control of JD Fenix, son of the legendary Marcus from the first trilogy, players will embark on a quest to save loved ones and put a stop to a new threat to humanity. The game also includes the popular Horde mode and the intense multiplayer action of its predecessors, too.

As such, Gears of War 4’s achievement list is stretched across all three different pillars of the Gears of War experience. While many of the campaign achievements won’t be too demanding for most, completing it on insane difficulty and grabbing all of the collectibles can stretch out the time you’ll spend here. However, most of the challenge in this achievement list comes from the multiplayer and Horde-based trophies.

“Seriously 4.0,” responsible for 200G of the 1000 available in the game, requires players to complete the campaign on insane, get all ribbons which are awarded for meeting certain criteria like having the most headshots in a Versus match, reach the highest competitive rank online (which takes a heck of a long time), reach max level and “re-up” 10 times in multiplayer, get all Horde character classes to level 10, level up five Horde skills to level 5, and finally reach level 50 on all Horde maps. All of that for one, single, achievement.

While going after some of the other tricky achievements such as those which require you to reach wave 50 on a particular Horde map on insane will see you progress towards Seriously 4.0, it’s still going to take quite some time, even to just do one of these.

Doom

When Doom arrived on the Xbox One back in May, players were quick to pick up the chainsaw and all other manner of crazy weaponry to hack their way through the demon horde. And while the game was plenty of fun and offered up a nice challenge when playing through on a normal difficulty setting, it all got a bit insane when trying out the Nightmare difficulty.

If you want to collect every achievement up for grabs in Doom, you’ll need to face an incredibly tricky challenge of beating the entire game on Nightmare. Demons will deal huge blows to your health bar, consume bullets for breakfast, and come at you far faster and in vaster quantities, too. Toss in the fact you’ll need to find and unlock all Praetor suit upgrades scattered through the levels, find all of the other collectibles dotted around the world, fully upgrade your character, and rack up a hefty amount of kills with a range of weaponry, and you’ve got one tough achievement list. Prepare yourselves, endless hours of frustration await.

Overwatch

Overwatch released in May and has gone from strength to strength ever since. From day-one, Overwatch has grown and evolved over into a much more comprehensive and competent shooter. Heroes have been balanced, it’s received a ton of new content, and players have ample reason to spend countless hours attacking and defending the objective.

Yet, even those who have poured hundreds of hours into Blizzard’s shooter will likely find themselves tearing their hair out at its achievement list. The achievements task players with killing a certain number of enemies with a particular hero’s ability, requiring you master each respective character. This means some will likely remain locked long after you’ve grabbed the achievement for reaching level 50. Overwatch’s achievement list is a challenge for seasoned veterans, and even then, you’ll be perplexed about how some of their criteria are even possible without supernatural powers.

The Witness

One of the big draws to The Witness is the fact that it drops you in an open world of puzzles with little to no direction as to what you’re supposed to do, and in what order. Instead, it teaches you the very basics at the beginning of the game and then opens up its giant island for you to explore. However, there are certain puzzles you’ll need to complete in order to learn the technique for another. The further you dive into The Witness, the more complex the puzzle’s solutions will become, to the point where you’ll be making some quantum physics-like calculations on any scrap of paper you can lay your hands on.

The Witness’ achievement list focuses solely on you completing a variety of different puzzles dotted around the world, as well as reaching the end of the game. While this may seem relatively straightforward, it’s worth remembering that to actually work out the solution to some of these puzzles, you’ll need to have completed several others previously. Grabbing all 1000 Gamerscore will be time-consuming and frustrating, but it’ll look mighty impressive in your collection.