In my last post I gave my opinion on the easiest Xbox One game completions of 2015 and now it’s time to go to the other end of the spectrum by taking a look at the top 5 most difficult and/or longest game completions from the same year. Seriously, these games have some extremely annoying and tricky achievements so you’ll need to be prepared for a massive grind to 100% them.

5) Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires

As a personal enthusiast of the Dynasty Warriors franchise, I was excited when DW8: Empires dropped for the Xbox One, the first next gen game of the series. I had no idea going into it however, that the slog for a couple of the achievements would be long, arduous and at times frustrating. Specifically the ‘Decorated Veteran’, ‘Many Ways To Live’ and ‘Completionist’ achievements require a long, laborious grind of over 100 hours (I currently have over 56 hours logged and am still missing the last two). Luckily the game is pretty darn fun and can be completed on the easiest difficulty to help reduce the completion time.

4) Gears of War: Ultimate Edition – Read our review

Any fan of Gears of War knows that each game in the series has that one BS achievement, its name being ‘Seriously’. Gears: UE is no exception and in this particular case the ‘Seriously…’ achievement requires you to get 10,000 kills in multiplayer matches. As a result this will require a serious amount of game time to accomplish (well over 200 hours most likely), even if you are particularly skilled at the game. That being said this is way easier than Seriously 3.0 from GoW3, which required you to obtain all Onyx medals in the game, so if that’s any comfort then good luck with the hunt.

3) The Elder Scrolls Online

TESO is on this list because it is an MMO, and by definition that means a tonne of grinding. General gameplay, exploration, progression and story based achievements alone will take a couple hundred hours, but there is one particularly annoying and hard leaderboard achievement that has prevented all but a select few players from getting 100%. Becoming the Emperor of Cyrodiil! Although it sounds cool it requires your character to be first on the leaderboard when your team wins the final battle and you will only have one chance per week before it resets. Considering you will be competing against thousands of players for this AND then need the co-ordination with others to win the final battle, it is likely that the vast majority of players will never accomplish this.

2) The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth

The notorious top down, randomly generated, RPG, shooter, arcade game is particularly tricky ever since the devs patched it to stop cheat exploitations. You will have to complete a plethora of long, arduous and annoying achievements to complete it. This includes the ‘Real Platinum God’ achievement which requires you to 100% the game by getting all endings, beating all bosses and collecting every item. It sounds straightforward but getting each item relies on a random number generator to give you what you need, so you are not guaranteed to receive what you want. Subsequently, you are going to have to complete the game around 40 times or so to reach your goal and spend around 200 hours to unlock everything. Therefore I highly recommend not going for the thousand points in this game unless you are a keen and committed Binding of Isaac fan.

1) Elite Dangerous – Read our review

I am going to go on record and state that Elite Dangerous is the hardest game from 2015 to 100%! Why you might ask? Is it because you must attempt to fly through thousands of uncharted systems for literally days to reach the centre of the Milky Way? Is it because you must save up millions upon millions of credits in order to buy every ship in the game? Well no, not exactly. Funnily enough, the hardest achievement in this game is: Well Trained – COMPLETE THE TUTORIALS! Yes you read that correctly. Only three tracked gamers over at the premier achievement tracking site, TrueAchievements, have completed this challenge and just one has fully completed the game. But the difficulty doesn’t stop there. In total you must commit well over 800 hours of your life to this game! That’s about 34 days of mining, selling, exploring, shooting and bounty collecting. I love Elite and it is without doubt the best space flight sim ever made, but there’s no way I will be completing it any time soon.

So there we have it, the top 5 hardest game completions of 2015. There are of course many other difficult games that I haven’t mentioned so what do you think of the list? Is there a particular game you think should be on here? What’s the hardest game you’ve completed and what achievement are you most proud of from 2015? Let us know in the comments!