Awful game as usual. It's a half decent story full of holes that is mostly covered by the books written by Oliver Bowden. Personally I didn't really think the story was great enough to even look for holes but I read this statement several times and it's completely in line with previous AC's. I have read all the books though, and they are quite good for the most part.
- Most of the storyline quests revolves around following some douche around while eavesdropping to get to the next repetitive stage.
- The naval free roam looks and feels great to begin with. Soon you'll realize that potential piracy victims are simply too many and there's flotsam and survivors on rafts literally ALL OVER THE PLACE!
- The naval combat is fun three-four times, until you've pretty much seen the few different ships and gotten the different "boarding objectives". The camera is completely useless during boarding scenes by the way.
- The enemy ships aren't particularly diverse, their strategies are almost non existent and ships have two hit locations (sails and hull) but they share the same pool of HP's. So, basically it's pointless to attack sails since you cannot board until their main mast breaks. This always happens faster with regular broadsides.
- The boarding is also completely useless unless you got a specific objective on board a specific ship. Just sinking the victims taking half the loot goes so fast that you can sink 4-5 ships in the amount of time a boarding scene takes. If there weren't 10 victims in the vicinity at all times, this would've been a different story. I only used boarding when I needed to repair my ship mid-combat (yes, daft isn't it...).
- The pirate hunters posed a threat in the beginning but they fast became a minor nuisance at worst. For the most part they just add to the amount of free victims in the vicinity.
- The diving/fishing mini games were OK to begin with, but these are also extremely repetitive. I found no reason to do fishing at all to be honest because I was so rich anyway so I just bought whatever crafting materials I needed from the store.
I loved the first AC, and I enjoyed the second one even if it was obviously more gimmicky. I've played every single one though, and the game is steadily decreasing in difficulty while steadily increasing the pointless time-sink material that makes the games appear huge. This time around, for example, you were once again allowed to improve your armor but unlike last time, there's no visual change dependent on actual armor worn. Increasing armor is therefor completely needless since the game is so piss easy to begin with. Increasing armor just removes the tiny bit of challenge this game poses.
The different outfits are pointless too, because they're basically just recolors of the same outfit. There isn't a single good looking proper pirate outfit either for that matter. I'm not even mentioning the DLC and uPlay outfits.
I did enjoy the game even though it seems like I think it's a complete waste of HD space. I enjoy it out of habit, but I didn't bother with gathering all the pointless stuff. I basically used one of the worst swords and hardly any armor to get some difficulty out of it. I did get a nice pair of guns though, which I wore but hardly ever used. My ship was completely upgraded very early which probably made the naval part too easy. Playing AC is generally an enjoyable experience because sneaking around and being a killer is fun, and the sword master part is quite fun too even if it's piss easy. I'm mostly disappointed because this game could've easily been so incredibly good. Instead it's probably the worst AC ever released.
4/10 |