In 2005, along with the release of the Xbox 360, Microsoft introduced Gamerscore, built around an elaborate achievement system that would reward profiles with points that could be accumulated over thousands of games. 16 years later and there are nearly 225 thousand achievements in the Xbox ecosystem. Many of these come very easy, requiring you to just beat a level, or in extreme cases, just requiring you to press start in the main menu, but this list will shine light on quite the opposite, the hardest Xbox achievements to unlock.
Avid Xbox gamers have probably heard of Gears of War’s “Seriously” series of achievements, or the infamous “A Monument to All Your Sins” achievement in Halo: Reach, and sure, these are tricky, but they’ve got absolutely nothing on the ten achievements listed here. Many of these achievements come from games that you likely have never even heard of, and have been unlocked by very, very few people.
Top Ten Hardest Xbox Achievements
10. Hail to the Chimp – Animals’ Choice (50G)
Hail to the Chimp’s “Animals’ Choice” achievement is a unique one on this list, as it’s one that if you mess up once, you can never get a second chance. This requires players to beat the entire game without ever losing a primary. If you do lose a primary, that record is saved, not to your hard drive, but to your profile. The best you can do if you mess up is to quickly turn your Xbox off in a frenzy and hope it hadn’t saved yet. Since this game’s release in 2008, four players have unlocked this achievement. This may be in part due to the fact that many players don’t check the achievements before playing, and lose a primary without knowing they would be forever barring themselves from unlocking this achievement.
9. Trackmania Turbo – End of the Road? (90G)
One of the more recognizable names on this list, Trackmania Turbo includes an achievement for earning a gold medal on every track in the campaign, titled “End of the Road?”. As generic as this achievement is for a racing title, it needs to be emphasized that this game has 200 races. The last 40 alone – the Black Series tracks – make this one of the hardest Xbox achievements of all time. All of these races are incredibly unforgiving and require absolute mastery of the game before they’re even worth attempting. This achievement has a fair amount more than the previous one (a few hundred), but this game is significantly more popular.
8. Lost Planet 2 – Committed ’til the End (100G)
The “Committed ’til the End” achievement in Lost Planet 2 requires you to do basically everything and is one of the hardest Xbox achievements out there. You need to unlock all of the items, rank every faction to Level 99, and earn all 476 Nom de Guerres. The Nom de Guerres is the trickiest part, requiring you to win faction matches as each of the five factions three times, which takes a minimum of 15 weeks, earning gold medals on every training level, breaking a world record speedrun time on any one of the 48 highly optimized Training Mode levels, and, well, 460+ other things. The speedrun, in particular, is very difficult, as you need to be better than every other person to ever play the game, and that only gets harder the longer you wait, so you might want to get on that now.
7. Pinball FX2 – Perfectionist (200G)
Less than 50 people can proudly say they have unlocked this behemoth of an achievement. Pinball FX2’s “Perfectionist” achievement is earned by completing each of the minigames in a single game of the Sorceror’s Lair table. The table has six minigames in total, all of which need to first be triggered by hitting three targets in the middle of the board, then launching the ball precisely into the cellar. After this, you will begin playing through one of the six minigames, chosen at random. The six minigames range from easy to extremely hard, and if you fail one, you have to play through all of the remaining minigames, then complete the Midnight Madness final minigame to reset the cycle, just to get another chance.
6. Cloudberry Kingdom – Shenanigans!
Words can’t do this one justice. Cloudberry Kingdom’s “Shenanigans!” requires you to beat the final level, level 320. What’s so hard about level 320? Well…
Yeah. If you get hit by anything, you die, and you have to beat 319 levels just to get here. It’s not too surprising that only 11 people have done this.
5. Asteroids & Deluxe – Platinum
Asteroids & Deluxe is a modern spin on the classic Asteroids arcade game we all know and love. You’d think a game as simple a concept as this would have an easy achievement list, but you’d be dead wrong. The “Platinum” achievement requires you to earn a score of 250 thousand points, a feat which only two people have accomplished, allowing it to earn it’s spot on our list of the hardest Xbox achievements. That’s two people in a 14-year-old game. You start with three lives and can earn an extra life every 10,000 points, but you’ll need more than just extra lives to pull this off. Coming even close to this score is going to require an incredible amount of skill and maybe even more luck
4. Robotron: 2084 – Wave 100
Immediately following that classic twin-stick shooter is yet another twin-stick shooter: Robotron: 2084. “Wave 100” is a pretty self-explanatory name, requiring you to reach the 100th wave of combat. This game is the oldest on the list, having been released on the Xbox 360 in its launch year, 2005. In that time, less than 100 players have reached Wave 30, let alone Wave 100. Like Asteroids, this requires an insane amount of precision, patience, and luck to accomplish. While more people (more than thirty) have unlocked this one than “Platinum”, this game has a much larger player base, and this one holds the title of the most difficult twin-stick shooter achievement in the ecosystem.
3. Deathsmiles – The True Tyrant
Our top three beings with “The True Tyrant” in Deathsmiles, the hardest achievement on the Xbox 360. This requires you to beat Bloody Jitterbug, reached by completing all six main stages of the game on the hardest difficulty without continues. Then, you need to beat the three extra levels that follow without dying, kill Tyrannosatan without continuing, then Bloody Jitterbug spawns. Thankfully, you can use continues after he spawns, but that by no means makes this easy, as evident by the four people who have unlocked this achievement in the game’s 11-year history.
2. Brick Breaker – Survival Skill Level 5
Everyone, at some point or another, has played some form of Atari Breakout. Brick Breaker is just another game of this genre, requiring you to bounce a ball upward off a paddle at a bunch of bricks a whole lot. “Survival Skill Level 5” is unlocked by beating all 100 levels in Survival Mode, meaning you need to play, starting from Level 1 with five lives, all the way through the 100 levels. This has never been done “legitimately.” Both of the players who unlocked this (one being yours truly) had to abuse turbo controllers to pause and unpause the game 30 times a second in order to slow gameplay down. Despite that, it took numerous failed attempts to reach Level 100, and dozens upon dozens of hours thanks to the game’s horrible build and crash frequency. Without this cheat method, no one has ever made it past Level 34 in Survival Mode, and that is far before the game’s difficulty peak.
1. Deadliners – Survival Master
Out of more than 200 thousand achievements, it’s Deadliners’ “Survival Master” achievement that takes the title of the hardest, and honestly, half of this game’s achievements could fill the top ten hardest Xbox achievements, but that would be pretty boring, so we’ll let this achievement represent the whole game. Six of the game’s 11 achievements have never been unlocked, ever. That’s more than half. This achievement is just the most demanding of the list. Oddly enough, it doesn’t sound hard at all. Deadliners is effectively just a fancier version of Snake, that can have up to four players, couch co-op only of course. This particular achievement requires you to get a score of 200 in Survival Mode with any number of players. So how many players is optimal? Well, the achievement for getting a score of 75 with one player has… no unlocks. 75 with two players: No unlocks. 75 with three players? Yeah… no unlocks. 75 with four? Nope. “Survival Master” requires a score of 200, so if nobody has even hit 75 with any arrangement, it’s safe to say that we can sideline this achievement for the time being. Baby steps, people.
In case you’d like to see some more achievements that are less impossible:
- Grounded | List of All Achievements – Guide Fall
- Resident Evil Village | Secret Achievements List – Guide Fall
