- Estimated achievement difficulty: 5
- Offline: 37 (1000 )
- Online: 0
- Approximate amount of time to 1000 : 10-15 hours
- Minimum number of playthroughs needed: 1
- Number of missable achievements: None
- Glitched achievements: No (Some descriptions aren't clear)
- Do cheat codes disable achievements? No cheats
- Does difficulty affect achievements? Yes
I gave this a difficulty of 4 which is aimed towards any player wanting to get the full 1000 from the game. The majority of achievements are easy and can be done in a good amount of time which would give them a rating of 2. I decided to up the difficulty number to 5 as there are a few events which are tricky as well as the AI getting hard to beat on the 3rd career.
Introduction
This is a Road Map on how to get all the achievements for Summer Athletics. First glance at the achievements might make you think that this will be quick as you see that a lot of achievements are done for doing certain things in an event and the rest for getting gold medals. They can be obtained quickly, however its the career mode and competitions that will eat up the time as you have to progress through career a minimum of 3 times and do all 5 + 1 competitions. This Road Map is going to help you order the way you go for the achievements in the quickest way possible for the full 1000. Note I will recommend getting achievements such as 30 gold medals as late as possible into your progress through the game as these can be unlocked at the same time via career mode. Therefore, you need to use a bit of your own initiative and change my order to suit your needs if you want to get as much gamerscore in as little time as possible without bothering to go for the 1000.
The HIGHEST, FASTEST, FARTHEST achievement is glitched, meaning you need to do all the competitions in one go, so no booting to the dashboard or turning off your console because otherwise you will have to do the competitions already completed again. People have also claimed this is the case for the medals achievements too.
Walkthrough
Step 1 – Straight Into Career
Even if you have never played a game such as this before, I still recommend you going in to career mode first. Don’t worry if you do really badly on your first playthrough. Where you may believe it to be a good idea to go and practise the events outside of career, it will be time consuming. This is because you will eventually have fully completed career and most likely still not have max stats. As you get 100 points to train on your stats after every event in career it would be wise to use career mode to practice the events and not care about what position you place as there are no negative or drawbacks for not winning.
You need to understand that career mode doesn’t finish after you place first like I expected it to do. What happens is you move up to medium difficulty and now have to compete in a longer and harder competition, the same happens when you win this and get onto the last and hardest competition. I was able to win the easiest tournament on my third try, the middle one in 2 tries and the hardest first go which meant I ended up completing career 6 times. I still didn’t have max stats after this so I then I went back and did another career in order for my Stamina potential to increase from 98 to 100.
My tip for you when playing through career is to choose which stats you want to improve wisely. The amount of medals or podium places you get isn’t what determines the winner, it’s the amount of points won in the events added up. This means that when it comes to an event you're good at, you can get loads of points and help boost your position lots. Take advantage of this and maximize the skill in your good event, so that when it comes to the event you can thrash the opposition. I was bad at cycling and running first and I knew that even with good Stamina I wouldn’t be able to do much better, so I let myself do badly in those events and trained my Power skill so that I could throw a Javelin much further than the rest and get lots of extra points.
Step 2 – Competitions
After you have finished career mode, getting the achievements for maxing out your skills and winning the hardest one, your next step is to do all of the competitions. You MUST remember that your progress will reset if you boot to dashboard or turn your console off therefore all six must be done in one sitting. It takes a couple of hours, but can be done easily as settings can be put on to Easy and game type to Arcade so you get boosts which help improve your skills in an event when activated. The last competition is a custom made one, so just add one to it and win for that one to be counted to the total.
You can help make Step 4 easier if you focus on making sure you get a gold medal on all events here as you will eventually need to make sure you have gold on every event on the game.
Finally, it’s worth noting that you can purposely get disqualified at the start of an event in order to skip it and make the competition end quicker. So if you're thousands of points ahead of 2nd place and a 4-minute long swimming event comes up, don’t bother doing it, just get a false start and move on to the next event to save time. This can also be done in career mode, but I advise against it as the difficulty of the opponents is much harder.
Step 3 – Individual Event Achievements
Although you’d have unlocked most of these by now, there will be a few I’m sure which you have not managed to do. Archery is arguably the hardest one, but done easily with nine boosts, as are the majority of them. There are threads in the forum that have answers to how to win cycling and running events if you’re finding them difficult.
Step 4 – Getting Medals
By now you’d have hopefully already obtained the three achievements for getting gold, silver and bronze medals and that means this step isn’t necessary for you. If, however, you haven’t gotten them then head to the 100M Sprint in Single Event Mode on Easy to boost your way to getting the medals. This event is very easy and you should be able to place in whichever position you want in order to get the required achievement. After the 10 second race you can hit yes when it asks if you want to retry to repeat the process again, these achievements can be gotten very quickly this way.
People on the forums have complained that the achievements are glitched and won’t unlock despite getting the desired medal 70 or so times. I personally had no problem as I had Notepad up and kept a score of how many times I had gotten the medal. It may well be possible that you need to get 30 gold medals, 35 silver and 40 bronzes all in one sitting without exiting out of the game. Nobody has confirmed this so don’t take my word on it, just be aware and aim to do this in one go without turning the game off.
Conclusion
Summer Athletics is an enjoyable 1000 that shouldn’t be too hard for anybody to get. Remember the glitched achievements where you need to play in one sitting and keep practicing in career mode if you’re finding hard as it will help boost your stats. If career mode is too hard for you (on the hardest difficulty the AI are good), then you can skip to step three and then four, coming back to career when you’re better and ready for it. There’s nothing wrong doing that, it will just take you longer to get the overall 1000.