daninthemix
Member
Just got around to playing this. Have done the main quest and quite a lot of side content. One thing that really annoys me is how so much of the critical attention was directed at bugs rather than the desperately flawed, non-evolving gameplay. As a result, most of the reviews are now irrelevant since the bugs and performance were fixed by patches to a certain extent. Runs fine for me, anyway, and goes to show how much stock games reviewers place in that all-important launch week.
As to the game itself, as someone who's been playing this series since 2007 - and always equal parts amazed and irritated by it - I have to paraphrase Homer Simpson:
"Same old garbage".
The three components of the game - traversal, combat and stealth - are all equally flawed, as they have been in every entrant in this series.
Parkour is as unreliable as ever. The addition of the 'down' button is very much appreciated, but Arno is just as likely as his predecessors to suddenly get stuck on a bucket or washing pole and refuse to move, whether or not you're in the middle of some timed mission objective or trying to escape ten pursuers. As has been repeatedly noted, entering building windows is particularly troublesome as Arno will seemingly clamber every which way except inside the damn thing.
Combat is worse than before. Sometimes I want to shoot an enemy before he sees me, but even after pressing the button nothing happens because the game is 'transitioning' into the combat state, so Arno has to get his sword out, assume his stance etc. Equally, the game seems reticent to let me get on with my life long after combat has ended because I haven't performed some finisher on the last enemy, so we're still in the combat state. Often I can't interact with things because "combat is nearby" even if that combat has nothing to do with me. The camera regularly locks itself into a position that doesn't show enemies who are attacking me. The dodge function frequently fails to work when I most need it - trying to avoid the pinpoint sniper fire of enemies whose accuracy is not congruent with the weapons of their era. The fact that Arno insists on performing a long-winded finisher on each and every enemy before allowing me to easily move onto the next is as galling as it is boring. Exercising agency over who Arno attacks seems to be, for the most part, impossible. I also hate how two or more enemies will attack in short sequence, meaning you have to parry again and again, without having time to get any jabs of your own in. Seems like a way of just stretching out combat yet further, when its already flabby to the point of crapulence.
Many problems stem from the introduction of the character development systems. Because of those ill-conceived, half-baked mechanisms we now have to earn our way to basic abilities that were always present in prior assassins, and we have to grind our way through a nonsensical gear ladder in order to maintain par with an arbitrary difficulty system that assigns enemies a 1-5 star rank. If your gear is ranked lower than the enemy's, trying to fight them is often an exercise in futility, regardless of how immersion-breaking it is seeing an enemy receive twelve sword thrusts to the face and lose no health. Frustrated players may well be tempted into spending real money to shortcut the arduous gear tree, and this was absolutely Ubis intention. Why give players a difficulty selection when you can get them to pay more money instead?
The most fun comes from using berserk blades to cause enemies to fight each other. Brilliantly, if you hit a couple of enemies with berserks, the effect will often, somehow, spread to other enemies, resulting in a brawl of crazies which you can watch from the rooftops. Fantastic fun, as it was in Black Flag, but here Ubi are absurdly stingy with the blades until you upgrade Arnos gear you just get 2, and theyre expensive to replenish. It speaks volumes as to Ubis priorities take the single most fun thing from the previous game and heavily ration it, in an effect to emphasise the character progression system and microtransactions lurking behind it.
The addition of a dedicated stealth button is good, but why oh why does merely running down the street attract so much attention from guards? Its like the game was either designed by or for people suffering from ADD, who cant bear to go more than 10 seconds without combat. That might be tolerable if the combat was good, but it isnt. Its execrable.
Regarding the optional content, I thoroughly enjoyed the detective missions. They were a lovely change of pace (no combat, thank heavens). I mightve enjoyed the Nostradamus enigmas for the same reason, but they were too hard. Couldnt figure them out, and using a guide for them just seems to defeat the point so I skipped them. I also skipped the rift missions as the glitchy visuals and time pressure dont gel well with the capricious parkour (for the same reason, timed objectives during the main quest were also frustrating). The Paris stories and other random sidequests are enjoyable for the most part, and some of them are surprisingly long.
The collectibles are laughable, of course, but you can ignore them if you like (though it would be nice if the game had customisable map filters like Far Cry 4). I dont get why the difficulty of a chest doesnt seem to correlate with the quality of its contents. Nor why every red chest is guarded by three or four enemies. It makes no sense that the full-time job of those four people is to guard a treasure chest sitting in a courtyard. Combat! Have you had some in the last thirty seconds? No? Heres some more! Oh Ubi. Calm down. The fact you have to earn three skills in order to unlock all of the chests was poorly thought out, as youll end up simply passing a lot of locks that you wont bother returning to.
Amazing world, troubling gameplay. Same as always, same as its been for the past 8 years.
As to the game itself, as someone who's been playing this series since 2007 - and always equal parts amazed and irritated by it - I have to paraphrase Homer Simpson:
"Same old garbage".
The three components of the game - traversal, combat and stealth - are all equally flawed, as they have been in every entrant in this series.
Parkour is as unreliable as ever. The addition of the 'down' button is very much appreciated, but Arno is just as likely as his predecessors to suddenly get stuck on a bucket or washing pole and refuse to move, whether or not you're in the middle of some timed mission objective or trying to escape ten pursuers. As has been repeatedly noted, entering building windows is particularly troublesome as Arno will seemingly clamber every which way except inside the damn thing.
Combat is worse than before. Sometimes I want to shoot an enemy before he sees me, but even after pressing the button nothing happens because the game is 'transitioning' into the combat state, so Arno has to get his sword out, assume his stance etc. Equally, the game seems reticent to let me get on with my life long after combat has ended because I haven't performed some finisher on the last enemy, so we're still in the combat state. Often I can't interact with things because "combat is nearby" even if that combat has nothing to do with me. The camera regularly locks itself into a position that doesn't show enemies who are attacking me. The dodge function frequently fails to work when I most need it - trying to avoid the pinpoint sniper fire of enemies whose accuracy is not congruent with the weapons of their era. The fact that Arno insists on performing a long-winded finisher on each and every enemy before allowing me to easily move onto the next is as galling as it is boring. Exercising agency over who Arno attacks seems to be, for the most part, impossible. I also hate how two or more enemies will attack in short sequence, meaning you have to parry again and again, without having time to get any jabs of your own in. Seems like a way of just stretching out combat yet further, when its already flabby to the point of crapulence.
Many problems stem from the introduction of the character development systems. Because of those ill-conceived, half-baked mechanisms we now have to earn our way to basic abilities that were always present in prior assassins, and we have to grind our way through a nonsensical gear ladder in order to maintain par with an arbitrary difficulty system that assigns enemies a 1-5 star rank. If your gear is ranked lower than the enemy's, trying to fight them is often an exercise in futility, regardless of how immersion-breaking it is seeing an enemy receive twelve sword thrusts to the face and lose no health. Frustrated players may well be tempted into spending real money to shortcut the arduous gear tree, and this was absolutely Ubis intention. Why give players a difficulty selection when you can get them to pay more money instead?
The most fun comes from using berserk blades to cause enemies to fight each other. Brilliantly, if you hit a couple of enemies with berserks, the effect will often, somehow, spread to other enemies, resulting in a brawl of crazies which you can watch from the rooftops. Fantastic fun, as it was in Black Flag, but here Ubi are absurdly stingy with the blades until you upgrade Arnos gear you just get 2, and theyre expensive to replenish. It speaks volumes as to Ubis priorities take the single most fun thing from the previous game and heavily ration it, in an effect to emphasise the character progression system and microtransactions lurking behind it.
The addition of a dedicated stealth button is good, but why oh why does merely running down the street attract so much attention from guards? Its like the game was either designed by or for people suffering from ADD, who cant bear to go more than 10 seconds without combat. That might be tolerable if the combat was good, but it isnt. Its execrable.
Regarding the optional content, I thoroughly enjoyed the detective missions. They were a lovely change of pace (no combat, thank heavens). I mightve enjoyed the Nostradamus enigmas for the same reason, but they were too hard. Couldnt figure them out, and using a guide for them just seems to defeat the point so I skipped them. I also skipped the rift missions as the glitchy visuals and time pressure dont gel well with the capricious parkour (for the same reason, timed objectives during the main quest were also frustrating). The Paris stories and other random sidequests are enjoyable for the most part, and some of them are surprisingly long.
The collectibles are laughable, of course, but you can ignore them if you like (though it would be nice if the game had customisable map filters like Far Cry 4). I dont get why the difficulty of a chest doesnt seem to correlate with the quality of its contents. Nor why every red chest is guarded by three or four enemies. It makes no sense that the full-time job of those four people is to guard a treasure chest sitting in a courtyard. Combat! Have you had some in the last thirty seconds? No? Heres some more! Oh Ubi. Calm down. The fact you have to earn three skills in order to unlock all of the chests was poorly thought out, as youll end up simply passing a lot of locks that you wont bother returning to.
Amazing world, troubling gameplay. Same as always, same as its been for the past 8 years.
