7 Hardest Xbox Achievements Of All Time (2024)

Achievements are designed to reward players for reaching certain milestones and completing specific challenges during a playthrough of a game, but there are a few that only true "Achievement hunters" would try to earn because of how difficult they were. Many developers will place one or two Achievements in their games that are brutally difficult so that the game doesn't end up being too easy to 100% complete, but some of these Achievements were so ridiculously hard that they felt near-impossible to earn.

Xbox Achievements work a little differently from PlayStation Trophies as rather than being graded from bronze to gold, Achievements instead reward the player with Gamerscore which will show up on their profile. Therefore, a lot of these more difficult Achievements have a boatload of Gamerscore to offer anyone brave enough to try and earn them, and these are among the very hardest that can be found on Xbox consoles.

7 What A Journey It Was

Hi-Fi Rush

• How To Earn: Complete the Wall of Fame in the Hideout.

Hi-Fi Rush is arguably one of the most unique games ever made, with the hack-and-slash combat being directly tied to the beat of the songs playing in the background, rewarding players every time they manage to land attacks in time with the rhythm. There are plenty of Achievements within the story that are unlocked automatically, but once the Wall of Fame is introduced, it opens up access to some of the much harder Achievements, with by far the most challenging being "What a Journey it Was."

Most of the wall is pretty straightforward to fill in, but three specific areas will take a lot of work - finish the game on every difficulty, achieve an S rank on every stage, and defeat every boss without taking a single hit. Acquiring strong Chip Sets and getting accustomed to the beat in each stage is the best way to go about completing these challenges, but they're undoubtedly still very challenging, especially the no-hit boss run.

6 Seriously 4.0

Gears Of War 4

• How To Earn: Complete Insane Campaign, ribbons, rank placements, Horde maps, re-ups, classes, and five skills.

The Gears of War games have always had some pretty brutal Achievements that only hardened fans of the series would seek out, but Gears 4 went above and beyond in making sure it posed as much of a challenge as possible. Completing the main campaign on Insane Difficulty is already hard enough, especially since it's often considered one of the hardest in the series, but this is only the first step to earning the Achievement.

The player will also have to earn all 141 Ribbons in multiplayer, earn a rank placement in each game mode, prestige 10 times, and complete a staggering 50 waves of Horde mode on every single map. This is one of those Achievements that's easy to just ignore because of how ridiculously difficult it is, but for any completionists or die-hard fans of the series, it's a must-have as it essentially tasks the player with completing the game from top to bottom.

5 7 Day Survivor

Dead Rising

• How To Earn: Survive for 7 days.

Back during the early years of the Xbox 360 when Achievements had only just been introduced, they often tended to be very vague in their descriptions, but while this Dead Rising Achievement may seem pretty easy on the surface, it's the smaller details that make it so hard to earn. There are luckily plenty of exciting weapons scattered around the mall for Frank to use to protect himself from the endless hordes around him, but the catch is, this Achievement can only be earned in Infinity Mode where the player is unable to save their progress.

Therefore, 7 days in Dead Rising equates to roughly 14 hours of real-time, so the game is literally tasking the player with keeping the game open all this time to earn the Achievement. On top of the amount of time it takes, there's also so much resource management that goes into this as Frank will need to eat and drink to stay alive, so it's easy to imagine how brutal this challenge can be to complete in practice.

4 Energizer

Outlast

• How To Earn: Finish the game in Insane Mode without reloading the camera batteries.

Outlast is a first-person survival horror game where the protagonist, a reporter who has ended up in a psychiatric hospital full of murderous patients, must try to escape with only a video recorder to light his way. A core gameplay mechanic is picking up batteries to keep the camcorder on, but this Achievement requires the player to skip past the batteries entirely, relying on just one for an entire playthrough.

What makes this even worse is that it can only be completed on Insane Difficulty where, not only will enemies kill the player in one to two hits, but there are also no checkpoints, and saving is disabled. This Achievement is so difficult that it's usually reserved for speedrunners who are able to quickly run through each section of the game and only use their camcorder when they absolutely need it, but even for these professional players, it's certainly no easy task.

3 Hard To The Core

Dead Space 2

• How To Earn: Complete the game on Hardcore setting.

Dead Space 2 takes a slightly more action-oriented approach to its gameplay compared to the more atmospheric angle of the first game, and this means that there are plenty more Necromorphs that show up on the screen at once in the sequel that Isaac must try to survive against. Hardcore mode makes every enemy far more menacing. Not only are they able to take down Isaac extremely easily, but they also have massive health pools that are guaranteed to use up tons of ammo.

The real challenge comes from the fact that players are only allowed 3 saves on this mode, and since checkpoints are disabled, it can mean hours of progress are lost if the player makes one wrong move. There are entire guides online that essentially go step-by-step through each area of the game since this mode is so downright difficult, and that's not even mentioning the final boss, who is one of the most unfair and unforgiving in video game history.

2 LASO Master

Master Chief Collection

• How To Earn: Complete each game-specific LASO playlist for every Halo game.

Completing the classic Halo games on Legendary with every single game-modifying Skull active was always seen as the ultimate challenge for fans of this beloved series, but rather than completing it just once, "LASO Master" requires the player to achieve this feat in four different games. The only games out of the collection that don't count in this Achievement are Halo Reach and Halo 3: ODST, but the first four games, which are already extremely difficult on their own, all count.

Some Skulls will simply make the game a little more whacky, such as Grunt Birthday Party for example, but the majority of them are designed to ramp up the difficulty considerably, such as Mythic where all Covenant enemies have twice as much health. A few other examples include Skulls which can disable auto-aim, halve the amount of ammo in dropped weapons, and even force the player to start from the beginning of a level upon dying. All of this brought together makes for one of the most challenging experiences in gaming, which not even the overpowered Magnum can make any easier.

1 World Champion

Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter

• How to Earn: Climb to the top of the universal leaderboard.

While this Achievement isn't technically "impossible," it's by far the closest it can get to being unobtainable since it literally requires the player to be ranked as the best in the world at Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter on the universal leaderboard. This is an Achievement that those who have it claim took them weeks of non-stop playing just to earn, and considering how competitive it made the multiplayer, it means getting that top spot nowadays is more or less impossible.

Some players have even resorted to creating multiple accounts to boost their main account up to the top of the leaderboards, but even then, this is a very slow and arduous process that doesn't even guarantee that they'll get there in the end. This is undoubtedly the hardest Achievement featured in any Xbox game, and it's pretty shocking that it only offers 40 Gamerscore for completing such a difficult task.

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