StaticVxD

Stunningly beautiful **** of a beloved game. There is a lot to love in this game but the developer removed sooooo much of the beloved mechanics. The game suffers for this. Berserk darts are now functionally useless instead of an essential tool. You can no longer pick up enemy rifles. Hidden blades are for assassination only. Ship upgrades barely make a difference in survivability or damage output. The increased requirements for upgrades and in-game cosmetic unlocks. Kenway's fleet is now useless with rewards tgat dont even cover a fraction of repair costs. Its mind boggling to me that some of the most integral parts of the original were removed for extra grind. The game is beautiful, the game is still a fun Assassin's Creed title, but I wouldn't compare it to the original, it would lose.

Update Edit: I am leaving the old review up so that prople that read it understand how important this edit is. I posted my review a few days after release, the game has only been out for 2 weeks and 90 percent of the issues that I regarded as negative have been patched. The devs have released 4 patches in 2 weeks; that is an incredible dedication to this game. I still experience some annoyances in the game but i am now confident that the devs will fix it if its contrary to their vision for this game. The game is would rate a 9 but the dedication shown by the devs and the outright amazing gameplay experience get it a 10 from me. Old Review: I don't often write on my opinion on games but I felt i should in the case of this game. First of all I will disclose that I pre-ordered this game and was looking forward to it. I have now spent about 6 hours in the game and for the most part I am completely blown away. I found the controls slightly complicated but they were so similar to Red Dead Redemption 2 that I was able to get comfortable with the scheme in a short period of time. The scale of the world, in terms of the size but also the population of that world I find unique among other games on the market. I have been enjoying my time with the game immensely and I enjoy the exploration, the combat and puzzles so far and appreciate the progression system. I am constantly coming across new activities and my play time is always rewarded with something fun and interesting. I find myself uttering the phrase "wait, you can do that?" More often the more I play. I do find some things that could use improvement though, some are minor QoL improvements and some could possibly be too late to address. To start with quite possibly a fundamental issue is the storytelling. I found it odd that the main thrust of the storytelling regarding the main characters path and the lore of the world, recieved a frustratingly minor amount of dialogue and character reaction. In contrast, the simplest interaction with an NPC goes on for and on, sometimes with the characters digressing and repeating lines. Not being able to skip these long, sometimes inane, conversations is frustrating, but doubly so because I am jealous that the main story beats aren't nearly as verbose. Lore for the world is available as journal entries which is nice, this does fill in some blanks on world lore as you find them. There are two issues with this however. This first is that while I appreciate most of the entries, there is a large percentage of entries that just do not need to exist. Unfortunately you can't ignore these entries as the notifications for these entries with test even the least OCD among us. A "Read All" option wouldnt go amiss. The second issue with the journal entries is that the size of the entry. There is no zoom option and the print size is tiny. It may be fine on a monitor but on a larger TV it is almost unreadable. As the only delivery system for actual story, this needs to be addressed. Moving on to combat, I would say that for the most part, I am enjoying it a great deal. When I manage to pull off dominating a swarm of enemies or downing a challenging boss, I feel amazing. There is one issue that I do have though and its my largest pet peeve for any game with a technical combat system. That is stun locking. I totally have no issue with player stun locking, thats understandable, but enemies that ignore attacks and then swing through my attacks (even attacks meant to stun) to hit and stun lock the player is unacceptably lazy. That isn't a challenge, thats a cheap way to have enemy bots do damage. There are some other minor issues, such as, no storage at home base for items you want to keep, odd glitchy corner textures on rocks, odd lighting related artifacts, annoying repeated sounds or phrases from NPCs and slow response to button presses. I do believe these are all simple fixes that will be addressed in time. Overall, I love this game and I am look forward to any time that I can spend with it. It's a game that calls to you to come play it. I have a unbelievable amount of respect for the devs for what they have put together and also the speedy response to addressing issues. I think that in a short period of time this game will go from amazing to legendary if the devs give it even a fraction of love they have put into their other games.