Recent reviews by RED

This is the most soul-draining Assassin’s Creed ever. Been waiting for the Japan setting forever and wow, can a game possibly get more repetitive and unenjoyable than this?

• It’s Japan. Japanese voice actors are great. Music is very nice.
  
• It’s graphically beautiful, the vegetation is especially well done. (playing on a 3080Ti)
  
• Temples are well recreated. Koyasan especially, it’s almost exactly like real life.
  
• Customizable hideout is something new and very cool.

• Scout system. Very annoying, such a waste of time.
  
• Horses are copy and paste from previous ACs. No effort was made.
  
• Story is terrible, insanely cliché. It’s excruciating to watch the cutscenes. Facial animations almost nonexistent. You play Yasuke for 10m and then Naoe for what feels like an eternity, enough time to forget that Yasuke is even in the game. Right after Naoe’s father dies, you get a flashback about her father, which completely takes you out of the vengeful emotion they were trying to convey. (also, it's kind of hilarious that the first thing you do is train for combat with him, when just minutes ago you were slashing entire armies).
  
• The Iga meditation flashbacks are such an excellent way to break immersion and fragment the story.
  
• Sync points are all in the most horrible, inconvenient locations possible. Not enough of them. It’s a waste of time.
  
• Parkour is bad, it’s like nothing is made for parkour. Magnetically follows the top of temples. Doesn’t flow well, it’s not enjoyable. Animations feel disconnected from one another. AC Unity felt superior. This is what I used to enjoy most about AC. What happened?
  
• “Only Yasuke can move this object”. Are you kidding me? Also Yasuke can’t climb castles? What kind of Assassin’s Creed is that? Being forced to switch characters to do certain things is stupid. Yet another waste of time. (As least this message reminded me that Yasuke was in the game.)
  
• RPG/level system. Completely hinders natural exploration, removes the fun, forces you to grind.
  
• Combat system, I don’t understand the praise. It’s actually very mid.
  
• Every mission so far has been extremely boring. Even the ones with “action” were not entertaining and poorly orchestrated.
  
• Exploration is painful, you can no longer cut through vegetation and you’re forced to follow extremely boring paths. You can no longer climb anything. Trying to cut through vegetation will often result in you getting stuck and having to reload the game, making you waste even more time. I guess it’s more realistic but not fun. Games are supposed to be fun. Even areas around some castles were poorly designed, you can get stuck and will need to reload.
  
• The world is pretty much dead. The towns feel dead. It’s very underwhelming. Very repetitive too, no sense of awe or discovery, it’s all the same, there is no surprise, no sense of interaction with anything.
  
• You can’t skip the night, are you kidding me? Half the game is spent barely seeing anything. You didn’t need to take “Shadows” so literally. Yes the nighttime looks good but it’s nowhere near as beautiful and vibrant as the daytime.
  
• Rain, wind and fog: Why is it always so rainy, foggy or windy? That’s legit infuriating. When it’s not night, you have a 5 minutes window to actually enjoy the environments before there’s another thunderstorm.
  
• Some parts of the game look like they were procedurally generated and others are straight up unfinished (there’s areas with terrain devoid of trees, just bare geometry). AAAA gaming I guess?
  
• Photomode is a downgrade from previous entries, at least on PC, the interface is slow and inconvenient to use.
  
• World map is slow and not properly reactive when zooming in/out and moving around on PC, both using the keyboard and the mouse.
  
• Clutter and microtransactions are back.
  
• No more bird to fly around. It would seem especially useful and nice to have in this AC, but it was deleted.
  
• Game crashes sometimes (apparently it’s been fixed).

What I thought would be a big tech upgrade and revival of the franchise ends up being an incredible letdown. Game had massive potential, even for DLCs with new prefectures/islands. But it’s already extremely repetitive and exploration is a pain. Gameplay/parkour isn’t fun. Everything seems made to waste your time. Atmosphere is off, and it’s hard to enjoy the environments due to the unskippable nights and exaggerated weather system. Some parts of the game feel unfinished. Story is abysmal. I seriously wish good luck to Ubisoft trying to sell another AC game to me ever again, and that’s coming from a Ubisoft sheep who bought every single Assassin’s Creed game.

Underrated. 100/100.