[Enemy] "Hey!"
Nope!
I gotta review to do!
I need to say something that I'm not sure should be worn as a badge of honor,
or if it's best left out of normal conversation,
But, I've...
played...
quite a few Assassin Creed games in my past.
In my defense I have yet to buy a copy myself, the one that started all this was Assassin
Creed 2 I got in a trade with a friend for something like Crossedge on playstation 3,
and while Lady Etna was in it, I still think I came out ahead on that exchange.
So I started out with Assassin's Creed 2 and things were innocent enough
...minus that sexy nun
--but I really dug Ezio and while the out-of-animus stuff was okaaaay, I saw
what was goin' on with Assassin's Creed 3 and just had zero interest in it.
Snow and trees?
The heck can you stealth kill from that?
The ship battles were cool, but they were a minor aspect and there's still all that
Abstergo shlock and bleeeeh.
No, not for me.
Give me an Assassin's Creed game all about ship battles and nothing about Abstergo and
you'll have my attention.
And then Black Flag came out, and damnit, fine I'll play your... stupid... naval combat
plunder sim with treasure maps and diving bells and they had me at the shanties.
I still listen to those things!
Since then I've played Unity which was painful to play and Syndicate which was even more
painful to comprehend, but here we are at apparently the start of it all
with Assassin's Creed: Origins.
Black Flag's trailer really stood out from the rest, and Origin's did the same.
You got the nice creepy, dark setting of ancient Egypt and all the emphasis on death and afterlife.
A sprankle of political drama and turmoil and there's plenty of room for some stealth stabbin' to go on.
It also featured a bunch of combat moves you can replicate in-game, which is always a bonus,
plus the song they used set the tone in a great way.
Not gonna lie, looped the trailer in another tab for a few hours due to that song alone.
But hype only sets the stage and works the crowd to loosen their wallets.
How will the actual game measure up, hands on?
Assassin Creed: Origin's opens up in just about the biggest mess of confusion I have
ever seen in a video game.
This is the first real taste of the game proper, you have your most captive audience waiting
to see what's in store... and we get... this.
The trailer moved from time and place so smoothly, but here...
Comparing it to the trailer isn't really fair, at least in terms of quality between the two,
so let's just forget the trailer happened for now and give the game a fair,
...if not overly-beneficial shake of it.
When you start up the game you are treated to a cutscene where, honestly we don't know
anyone or even the main character's name, but it's only just started so we can give
em time to get to that.
It's establishing setting, old Egypt.
Everything is doing okay, serviceable, not BAD by any means.
You got a sense of scale of the monuments, Prince Ali is arrivin' with the elephants
on parade and you see some brief love between the main guy and chick.
And then.
We get.
The duel of the sassy lashes.
There is some serious guyliner staredown warfare goin' on, lads!
Why the sudden dramatic emphasis and stare down--
No time!
Mask!
Mummy!
Slap!
Touchdown!
Scream!
Masks!
Scream again!
Fast forward a full year!
What the hell just happened there?
Nothing was explained, I can't even say anything was even TEASED it just... hey, we need to
get the game going soooo just put on a parade, show a guy, and so some cryptic stuff.
Unfortunately this isn't the end of the game's story problems, and keep in mind I'm comparing
this to OTHER Assassin Creeds, this intro is really out there.
To somewhat compensate, we are next treated to this guy who not only has a list of names
literally tattoo'd into his arm, but he crosses them out with the blade of an arrow when finishing
them off.
I can get behind this guy.
He's a man with priorities AND a sense of organization.
Hey hun, what's on the to-do list today?
Oh, my right bicep is telling me it's a full day of interrogation with the Ibis and then
a quick meeting with the Snake.
Busy day.
Welp, off to work!
This scene also starts to showcase the Kratos Quality tendencies this guy has, which is
also something I can get behind.
Early Kratos, though.
None of the sequels shenanigans where they stretched it out.
I gotta bad feeling the next one is actually going to end the opposite way Origin's does,
but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it.
One thing that did stick out of place was this one Chuck Norris line
I mean I know they were trying to make him sound badazz here, but it really blew the whole bit.
Minus the dagger mask impalement.
That made up for it.
And then, potential dream sequence sandstorm! [du du du du du]
Here comes the fighting tutorial, which isn't half bad.
Storyline wise we are fighting the guard of the guy we just killed.
Not much of a guard, but then again, we are awesome.
But for the timeline's stake in all this, he admits we killed his master, so this is
after the face mask stabbage and somehow we are here just outside of Siwa when a second
ago we were really, reaaaally far away from here.
So I take it we jumped ahead another chunk of time?
Okay, that was a bit sporadic to process so let's summarize:
Cutscene starts out okay, but awkwardly veers off course
We jump ahead a full year We Kratos Norris a guy
a few days or weeks later we kill his guard to tie up any loose ends, and for the combat tutorial.
I honestly thought I nicked the side of my controller on the couch and skipped an important
cutscene as it's so... weird.
I later made a new save and, yup, that's just how they wanted to begin the game.
For some reason.
Fortunately this lack of storyline mentality and the start of the game are the roughest parts to get through.
...give or take, but the idea of it gets stuck in my head and I have difficulty getting
past it.
It's like starin' at the mona lisa but only now she's got something stuck in her teeth.
Da Vinci coulda fixed it, but he specifically made it like that.
Why?
Why did you make this game this way, Da Vinci?!
This is the FIRST thing we see, this sets our expectations for the entire rest of the
game!
And we've seen them do so much better.
From hitting start to gaining control of the main character takes three minutes.
You know what else takes three minutes?
That slick as hell trailer hyping up this game.
In the same amount of time they painted all the major players, stacked up intrigue, and
did it in a smooth and sexy cinematic...
(Ceasar's a dreamboat)
and this is what we get in-game in the same amount of time.
This is why I said you can't compare the two, one does an amazing job, the other is pretty terrible.
To cap this off for now, as well as highlight how weak the starting story is, I gotta tell
you about the Magic Cave.
Admittedly I got here waaay earlier than the game wanted me to, but I'm glad I did!
After helping a kid get out of a hyena den in Siwa, I ran across this literal hole in
the wall.
What makes this cave magical?
In this case a few things, but let's start with the second one: this wasn't actually
a cave at all, it's a crypt!
But I already gave it a title though, so the name's stayin'!
This place apparently holds the bodies of the previous Medjay, a very high rank of honor
the main character and his fathers' fathers have been for generations.
Think a jedi of the sands who aim for peace for their gods and justice for their people.
The real magical part comes in that the main character commented often about the place
as I explored it.
He mentioned his family, how the place has fallen to disrepair, and you can even find
the final resting spot of his son where you can interact with and hear a few poignant
lines.
In this one random encounter I stumbled into way early on, I got more tangible storyline
in minutes than I had in the entire previous two hours.
In fact, not for many *missions*, but many CITIES of missions and content later did I really get enough
story straws to say we have decent footing to *start* telling a story since this one
is so utterly nonexistent.
If the designers wanted the player to ask "What happened here?" to intrigue us to play
more, I can't say they didn't get their wish.
Only instead of asking about the main character and his past, I was asking the question about
the game and the developers themselves.
The lack of story issue unfortunately never really goes away, but fortunately for everyone
this crypt is MAGICAL!
Back in the beginning, after killin' off that guard you end up in a dark, dark tomb.
In the dark dark tomb there's some dark dark loot!
Puzzles and switches and parkour pillars aplenty in tombs like this, but from the disappointing
story we come into the subtle yet satisfying mechanics of fire.
Both in how it lights up dark areas, to the many interactions you can have with the stuff
and the environment.
The obvious one is what you see now, bright torch lights up dark area, simple.
But you can throw your torch across the room, light up another one and now you got double
the brightness.
Or triple!
One of the surprising elements of how they handled fire is, it isn't binary.
It's not just an animated stick you are holding onto, it's a live, open flame.
Walk near anything flammable with your torch out and it will start to darken and smolder
almost immediately.
A few moments of that and it'll catch alight and begin to spread in fast order.
Straw, wood, or the motherload: jars of oil!
Any and all can spread the delicious element around, you can even make semi-elaborate chains
with tossed oil jars or dead bodies!
The furthest I got was three or four bodies away from the fire before teh game stopped
letting it spread.
I really think I can hit five, but Misses was fallin' asleep so I had to put my toys
down and get back to just killin' everyone.
Didn't stop me from makin' a minigame with the stuff later on when she passed out, though!
I'll show ya some pointers to get ya started on that towards the end!
But of all the flamin' fun to be had in this historic sandbox, the single greatest feature
of it, in my opinion, is you can walk over to an unlit beacon or brazier and your character
will extend his arm and spread it around.
It's a silly, little thing, but for some reason I found it scratched an itch.
Usually in say, Infamous or Saint's Row you wreak some havoc and not only take out a gas
station, but stack up cars around the pumps before lettin' loose a grenade to really crank
up the fireworks.
And while that takes awhile to get boring, even with the odd ragdoll body physics thrown
in, they always lean on the destructive side so you can't help but feel a little bad about
it even if it's fake and virtual.
But here, I remember seeing an unlit torch in one of the first caves I met in the game
and wondering if I could light it.
And just then my character reaches out his arm and sure enough the thing not only lights,
but brightens the entire side of the cave it's on and the feel of the place looks different.
I went all the way across the room, looking for any torches I can wake up again, and from
that first cave on I never stopped spreadin' the glow.
I can't really put into words why, but every time I entered a place with unlit torches
I had to light up at least one before leaving.
I'm not sure if it was a mixture of role playing the guardian of Egypt and paying respects
to the gods of the temples or bringing lights to long abandoned caves as a sign of hope,
or old habits from years of Minecraft... or just some pyro-centric form of OCD.
I don't wanna set the world on fire!
I just want to start a flame in your hearth.
And what was the first place I started lightin' torches like so?
The musing, magnificent Magic Cave, of course!
While there is a ton you can do and mess around with in Origins, there is no avoiding it was
clearly influenced by other heavy hitters in the industry.
While it isn't a straight up clone of any one thing, it's hard to miss the comparisons
once you notice.
If I could summarize Origins, and props to the Misses for hammerin' this out with me:
Origins is Skyrim's exploration and lackluster quests meets Witcher's gritty world and lackluster combat.
I don't mean to tear down either of those franchises, I've put hundreds of hours into
each and mean them no ill will.
But I think we can all agree Skyrim ain't known for it's quests, as Witcher is known
for it's story first and combat a distant second.
It isn't obvious at first and the game still feels like an Assassin's Creed, but once you
spot that Skyrim meets Witcher vibe you can't unsee it.
The horse travel and it's auto-pilot.
Hard level-locked areas, somewhat rigid combat, and quasi-Witcher-vision investigation ares.
In many ways it's a great combination... but is it a good one for Assassin's Creed?
The open world...
I'd say is a win.
Tons to explore at you own pace, no load screens between them which is a nice bonus, ways to
tackle things and again, you got all the playground for fire as ya like!
But water is also a big point of this game, and while it's not as fun as the River Thames
could be, even games like GTA can fail when it comes to water and this one did all right.
So a skyrim world to explore is an upgrade.
Actually on the topic of water, one way they prevent you from getting stranded and taking
forever to get back to shore is, after a few seconds they ALWAYS spawn a boat for you.
And not just anywhere, but the guy driving it wants to kill you with kindness.
HEY GUY, DIDN'T SE YA THERE.
NEED A LIFT?
I'm not sure if those guys are on a Scubar app, but tip your drivers is all I'm sayin'.
Now a Skyrim world is great, but this place is set with the Witcher mindset of hard level
caps and the combat that comes with it.
While it sorta fit Witcher with it's RPG elements, here it just clashes and feels wrong.
In previous Creeds you wouldn't want to mingle in high level areas early on, but for the
most part you could skirt around the edges and the fighting was simple enough you could
Dynasty Warriors meets Arkham Asylum your way through the grunts and escape with parkour.
But here?
You know those annoying enemies that never stop blocking or spam fast, power attacks?
And the heavy hitters that have tons of health and strong weapons?
They basically combined all three of those enemy times together for everyone now.
Oh, and even the guys with two handed clubs have ranged attacks.
So everyone is annoying, everyone is an archer, all the grunts have shields that you HAVE
to counter as they never put it down, and fighting anything three levels above you is
best avoided to save frustration because you are gonna get wrecked.
As the story didn't really give me any reason to not want to zoom past it, I went from quest
to quest and only did minor side quests along the way that had titles that caught my eye.
Because of this, I hit a particularly nasty wall where I was further along in the story
than my level would let me progress, which lead to every encounter going something like
this.
Note these guys don't have regular shields, but tower shields, the best in the game.
And there's two of em.
I backed up and luckily you can light the torch on this corner so I used that as a makeshift
battle and cover station, but in the end I only have so many arrows, their health was
so high, most of the shots didn't even hit unless you invest a talent in on that, and it only takes three shots and it's 'start over.'
Lemme flash forward to the end of this little encounter, here.
Note the insane reload of this stun shot.
You have to hit a button to get up when they hit you with it or you just stay down.
And it's trajectory-defying angle.
Nothing makes me happier after eight minutes of hell than seeing this as the end result.
I was stuck in this hard-mode predicament from level 20 to level 35, and it was quite
the annoying grind.
The tooltips even let you know they you only really get experience to level up from completing
quests as the minor objectives in cities give 2-300 when you need multiple thousands to
ding, but I couldn't do any of the quests because the enemies were way too high.
Ended up having to spend a full day of grinding bases and finding hidden objectives to prop
myself up enough not to get one-shot with a stray harpoon.
It's been interesting to watch over the years how things that used to be given to you automatically
or over time as your character hits certain story checkpoints, are now cut up and put
on a talents.
On one hand it feels good to progress and grow as a character, but on the other usually
half of these should have just been baked in from the beginning.
What's this, a charge attack?
Something I need to break those never-yield-the-shield cheese enemies?
You mean the ability pre-bound to my controller, thus implying it's rather important?
I can *choose* to spend my level up point to get that all but required ability?
Why thanks, game.
How generous of you.
Also on that list, slowly regenerating health, headshot xp, assassination xp, being able
to parry, and being able to use each of your tools you could automatically in previous
games like sleeping darts and smoke bombs.
Not to mention you can only equip ONE tool at a time now.
You can still swap mid battle by opening up the menu and manually swapping it around,
but it gets tedious fast.
Something else that gets tedious is you no longer have eagle vision.
You have a quick loot pulse thing to light up anything you can interact with in a decent
radius, but that doesn't mark enemies for you anymore.
Now you have to take cover, summon your bird and manually scan each and every enemy down
in the area.
And I DO mean manually as when first starting out you need to be absolutely dead on for
it to register.
It isn't explained, but sometimes you see a white arrow telling you where something
is, but that almost always is just the objective of the location, so hidden loot caches when
you really are trying to mark all the guards of a fortress.
And this process can take quite some time, the bird at least on Playstation 4 can only
see things about 50 meters away
You can see them moving and walking, yourself, but it does not register further than 50 meters. At least not at the start.
So you best bet is to fly to the center of the place,
hold position, and either zig-zag every possible parallel or just spaz your controller around
to cover the most ground.
This gets better the more bird synchronization points you hit as your detection increases
from a pixel to a widening cone, but by the time you buff it up you are so used to doing
things this way it really doesn't matter.
You'll often miss enemies who are patrolling juuuust out of your vision radius even when
you can see them it just doesn't trigger, so it's best to scan the fort from multiple
angles to be safe.
I can somewhat understand this as in a way this IS a prequel as it's titled Origins and
all, but this is a big problem with prequels.
How do you make something functional and fit the lore without making the stuff you get
in the future look worse?
You'll either upset the lore fans or the gameplay fans, unless you work really hard to balance
the two.
Here they apparently sided with lore over gameplay, which considering the lore in 'jeopardy'
it's a bit surprising they went that route, but in short I miss my scan button as this
change alone easily tacked on a few hours of my total play time.
But, there's one major combat flaw I saved for last.
Let me set the stage.
You are the exact level of the enemy grunts at a fortress.
Captains and commanders have two levels or more on you, but you'll save them for last
anyway.
You find a hiding spot and call out the birb, carefully marking each enemy from multiple
locations to ensure you won't be caught off guard.
You've put talents in to cover the essentials and leveled up your gear to take a few hits
if necessary.
You begin picking off stragglers, trapping any alarms alarms, and then purge this place
in earnest.
You've weakened the command enough to take out one of the high ranking foes with impunity.
You line up your target, hit the stabby button, and assassinate them point blank.
Only problem is,
Assassinates don't one-shot enemies anymore.
I mean you CAN one shot enemies with it, but are they higher level than you?
In this example he's two levels *under me*! And I'm fully maxed out.
Tough luck there, pal!
Now you got a guy with almost full health, alert, angry, and in melee range.
And he's a high rank guy, so his attacks hit for even MORE damage than usual so you are
going to get two shot, three at the very most.
That's a double suck situation!
You can't one shot high levels, but they sure as hell wipe your azz out!
And I didn't test this specifically, but I wouldn't doubt they have an anti fun code
in place as no matter how high I pumped up my health, commanders and the like ALWAYS
managed to do juuust enough damage to lower my health by a third, rendering that regeneration
talent completely useless.
That regeneration talent you have to buy to get it to work in the first place, I might add.
So we are left with this love triangle of games of sorts.
A menage game trois, if you will.
Skyrim's world and quests, Witcher's mentality and combat, and Assassin Creed's universe.
In a perfect game we'd have Skyrim's world, Witcher's quests and Creed's combat, but here
we get an off-balance mix of that.
So at least for now to compromise it, I'd say
Give Witcher Origin's combat, let Creed have it's normal style back, but keep the big world
Aaand, well, yer gonna mod the hell outta Skyrim anyway so you probably like it as is right now.
Ran into some oddities along the way, too.
This one was right at the start.
You don't have the hidden blades for a little while, so when you try to stealth take down
enemies you just kinda maul them with your fists.
Then they just sorta roll around in agony.
While that solves one problem, they created one that doesn't need to exist, and as best
as I can remember it's a problem that never has existed before: once you knock an enemy
out or whatever state of hell that guy is in, you can't move the body.
You should be able to pick them up, or put them in a bush or something outta the way
but here they just drop to the ground like an anchor and never move.
I mean you can kill em, but that's bit excessive.
I tested it out and while one guard ignored his friend in pain, this DOES alert enemies
and can blow your cover.
Most importantly I had muscle memory of wanting to pick these guys up but the game wouldn't
let me, so I don't know how they forgot to code this function in as it looks so weird
to boot.
Something else sorely missing is the emphasis on history.
Previous Creeds you'd get a popup every darn building you came across and person you glanced
at, but here you got Cleopatra, Caesar.... and pyramids.
Even then they don't highlight anything about them, and according to the internet they likely
got one of the few stories they added in wrong.
Cleopatra brags that anyone could screw her as long as they were put to death in the morning,
but that seems to unconfirmed at best.
Also, for as much as the majority of the cast and villagers seemed to have the right dialect,
and major props to Bayek's voice actor you did an amazing job with this character, kudos to you!
But tell me if you can notice a difference between, let's say these kids and Cleopatra.
Why did they give Cleopatra the stereotypical British Badguy voice?
Really stood out awkwardly, but did make me feel better since her voice direction suggested
I shouldn't trust her anyway.
My only regret and minor spoilers here as the story doesn't really matter that much
anyway, but Cleopatra ends up using us for her own gains and tries preventing us from
having our revenge for our son's death because they are tangled up in Caesar's army who she's
now shacking up with.
Before when I thought we might get a Kratos twist in the story, I REAALLY wanted us to
have a part in Cleopatra's curtain call.
How's that story go again?
She ends up having a son of her own, everyone dies and poison is involved?
And whats that, we're a band of assassins that has access TO poison?
"You die easily for a god!"
But back on topic, ancient egypt has a toooon of potential for history factoids to lay on
us, but nadda.
Might have something to do with how they changed the out-of-animus storyline around, but they
could have put some effort into more than just making the place look nice and authentic.
And they do!
But I think they dropped the ball here on this history front.
Oh and they still do that thing were they occasionally drop in a word from the native
language the game is taking place in, I call it the Klingon Lingon.
Trek obviously aren't the only folks who do this, and they don't over do it here, but
it's perfect drinkin' game material if yer lookin' for one!
glitch This is MY race, this is MY place, get outta muh face! Yeah!
Gimme that crown! Gimme--dat--
Yeah---ah, whAT THE--!
Oh nooow you patch it out.
And make the races easier!
To really rub that salt in.
This is kinda funny, for quite a few hours both the Misses and I thought they guy we
were playing was going to die and the friend that helps you out at the beginning was the
real main character as trailer made him look entirely different than with all the hair
and beard we started out the game with.
Eventually the game lets you shave both off and we never got replaced, so hey, I guess
we're Bayek of Siwa after all!
On no less than three occasions did I get stuck in the ground at the oddest of times.
Once in a snake pit, once dismounting onto a rock, and once at the tail end of a flawless
stronghold clear.
Had to restart and rescan all the enemies on that last one.
From glitches to b......aaahhYa!
Didn't see ya there!
Aya's the main character's wife.
Things are really weird here though, and I think it is ultimately the fault of Origins
being a prequel so the end result was already decided and the writers worked backwards to
the present, which for the record, hardly ever works out in reality.
Long, story short, Bayek was supposed to open a door for the bad guys, but had no idea it
was even a door to begin with.
His son sneaks him a blade to free himself, there's a struggle with the bad guy, and Bayek
is thrown off balance and ends up one-shotting his own son.
This becomes the major driving focus for Bayek and to a noticeably much lesser degree Aya.
Now you got an angry guy who killed his kid thanks to the shenanigans of the archvillain.
Anyone else thinking we in God of War territory?
Surprisingly Bayek is aware of this, and after wiping out the first wave of baddies he might
have noticed the body type and accent of the guy he killed were absolutely nothing like
the one he scuffled with back in Siwa, and questions Aya if the killing is really over.
Shortly later on when the bigger plan is revealed that they aren't even half way over with their
death tolls, he asks if killing even more bad guys is the right answer.
Would all this bloodshed really honor his son, and if not, when would enough be enough?
Slightly off topic: Almost every single problem in this game *is* solved by killing, so it might be a bit biased there.
But I did find it weird when one person said they are having difficulty paying their taxes
Bayek says he'll look into it, and the next thing you know the objective is "kill the tax man"
Thought that was a bit much XD
Didn't know Bayek was in the mob!
'It would be a shame if uh... some unpleasantness were to happen because of this transaction.'
But anyway--
It is Aya who convinces Bayek to keep going and see the job through... now if only SHE
could remember that herself, that'd be great.
Bayek's goal was really simple: to make those involved with their son's death pay, get it
over with as quickly as possible, and then things go back to normal once it is resolved.
But Aya had zero intention of doing that, as she constantly extols the greatness that
is Cleopatra, always coming up with excuses on why she can't spend more time with Bayek
and that everything will work out in the end with her in charge.
Bayek makes a comment they are only exchanging one dictator for another, but she ignores
him and carries on with her plans.
Mind you, for the majority of the game Cleopatra doesn't hold ANY power as her brother single-handedly
rules the throne and wants her dead.
They go outta their way to make him look like a Disney henchmen more than a ruler, so
you can tell he's not the one really at the helm, it's the dudes in the masks that are runnin' the show.
I'm not saying he's right, I'm not sayin' he's a good guy. I'm just saying right now Cleopatra's got nothing goin' for her.
Throughout the game she's actively seeking political allies and asylum while holding parties and avoiding
getting assassinated, that's not a place of power to rule from.
How she has the nerve to command an air of superiority in the first place is bristling
at best.
She even gives a speech to the people no one cares about, and she's supposed to be worshipped
as the living embodiment of a god so if even the commoners aren't impressed, guuurl you
got some problems.
So for her to demand *us* to follow her rule, and for Aya to repeatedly push Bayek away
for this obvious schemer comes across as idiotic, short-sighted, and selfish.
I'm not sure if this was the game bending over backwards to be able to say "look! we
made the main chick support another chick rising to authority, yay girl power!' or what,
and there was some of that that popped up now and then usually around Ceaser and proving him wrong,
but nothing that took us out of the experience like what happened in Syndicate.
It's there if you look for it, but it's subtle enough for you to choose to miss it.
At the end of the day, as long as I can play my games in peace and not have some cause
shoved in my face constantly, I'm good.
Just give me the gameplay, keep your friggin' stuff to yerself.
UPDATE
Ubi just dropped a free update all about history!
So, I mean I'm glad it's there now because it was so obviously missing at launch, but
it's weird they didn't have any of this in at day one.
Did they do that to rush the game out faster?
Are they testing the waters to charge for this in the future?
Well have to wait and see.
As for what was added, here's a handy bit of text from it.
Remember when I said they did subtle things in the background but you could mostly ignore
it?
Here is them admitting to doing just that.
But, back to the review--
In the end, Aya just walks away from all her commitments with Bayek, and the writers have
them nonchalantly, awkwardly, and most of all aggravatingly break things off for almost
no reason at all.
This was quite taxing on the Misses and myself as, even though the ending was predetermined
to align with the first Assassin's Creed and thus they were themselves tied to that, they
still could have swung this in sooo many better ways that would be more satisfying and worth
the effort of making it through the bleh at best story, if they would have just tried.
For people with such strong convictions like the assassins to cave under absolutely zero
pressure and with nothing restraining them at all was shenanigans.
Wanna keep em apart and stuck in their own cities?
Fine, they have responsibilities to their brotherhood and need to keep that a priority
over their relationship, but every couple months they still need to 'exchange information'
and boom it's right back to the long distance relationship.
And things were fine long distance at the start of the game after all, and now they
are guarding their own cities and allies closely so it goes back to that.
But information if awful important so every few months they can spare a day or two to meet up.
Privately.
Could even keep it on the down-low from their own allies if necessary, they are friggin'
assassins for cryin' out loud, they sneak around all the time, they know how to keep
things quiet if they gotta.
But nah, writers didn't want that to happen so lone rangers it is.
Gonna have to give the first game a go to see how that ties in and see if that was really necessary to do this, but I suspect that'll
just make me even more mad than anything.
Something else weird is there is a lack of a direct SPRINT option, both on horseback
and on foot.
There IS a boost when captaining a ship, but nadda for the rest which is weird.
Very often your horse just trots for the longest time and then finally kicks into a sprint,
but it can take minutes before then when all you would have needed was a direct button for sprint
which would have helped boost that along.
The cutoff tends to be combat and the city limits, get out of both and then your horse
can move freely.
But the moment you get in range, and down to a weak jog at best you go.
Let me decide when to boost game, I think I can manage.
For all the previous game's faults with parkour, they all but nailed it in this installment
and I really gotta give it to em.
Unity was abysmal. Heard it described as 'parkour auto-correcting' and that was just about right.
It got better in Syndicate though there was still some sticky
moments, but here things are just about where they should be.
Still run into the occasional slow-down where you are just bookin' it up a building and
then you stop moving because Bayek can't find the ledge right in front of his friggin' face
or he does climb up but the pace realllly slows down and it almost always happens RIGHT
at the very top of a building when you tend to want to avoid getting shot in the back
the most or just out of sight and undetected.
They could work on shortening those animations or gaps in grabbing detection, but all in
all it's the least frustrating parkour experience I've had in a Creed game.
Almost no time was spent at all swearing at the controller for getting stuck on a corner
I didn't intend to... though navigating the menus or accidentally calling the bird instead
of doing a quick pulse scan, that's another story.
Music is nice, some times you don't hear it for awhile but tends to be good when it pops
up to the surface.
Nice mix of the assassin's theme along with other new tracks.
There's actually a rif or two in there that sound almost identical to Dying Light's load screen music or ambiance or something.
I think you'll recognize it when you hear it, it's pretty common.
There's also the occasional synth track which is equally out of place and welcome, as I
dig that style myself.
The photography mode in the game is a nice addition, love it when games give you something
so simple and you end up making new content they never imagined with it because of how
open ended it is.
Find a good shot, line it up, tinker with some settings to make it look juuuust right,
and snap away!
You can find your pictures where you've taken them on the map, along with other players
which can be helpful to mark out hidden areas you might have missed.
You can also be cheeky-beeky and use it to check around corners or other tactical options
when you are on a timer.
And some of the 'bosses' were well guarded grunts, there was a real lack of oomph and gravitas
around some of the later ones.
After awhile it dragged on and felt more like filler content than anything. Add in the questionable
storyline, slow process to scan down patrolling baddies and hard-coded enemy levels all coming
in at once there just to apparently stall you to stretch out the runtime of the game.
For the record I stuck around a long time after I beat the storyline, so I wasn't done
with the game itself, but I DID want out of the story like waaay before the plot finally
ended.
The story was a far from satisfying experience, but that tends to be the case with prequels anyway.
I did appreciate how they finally explained the logo. How that came to be. I won't spoil it for ya.
And also you get to see how you minus a finger in order to use the blade. Though clearly you don't NEED to do to use it.
But, either way. I did like how they tied that in.
And then outta nowhere they gave us boss fights like this, which is something.
Tend to be summed up with "Use your bow" and "stay out of the fire" but hey at least they look cool.
Oh!
And I promised you a fire mini-game din-I?!
You can come up with whatever variations you'd like, but at least on Playstation 4's normal
model, you are capped at about 100 meters before things stop registering.
Some spots it's closer to 90, others 105, but right around 100 is the cap.
I prefer Letopolis as it has some nice shots built in, but the goal is to find something
flammable and hit it with a flaming arrow as far away as possible with, preferably,
the fewest amounts of arrows.
Now you'll need a legendary fire arrow bow, or a torch or brazier handy.
It can get clunky, but if necessary you can drop the torch, aim down to light your arrow,
and fire off a shot, but for the range we are aiming that wouldn't be very engaging
so keep those flaming bows handy.
I liked trying to hit the really big olympian-sized beacons and most major cities have a few you
can light up, though Letopolis also has the more difficult target of an enemy brazier
which normally summons guards to fight you. Yes you can light it yourself. Found that out the hard way on my first stronghold clear XD
But as for this footage, I think the shot it too far away as I put quite a few arrows down without any hit detection at all.
Normally you can see a little spot, but nothin'. I think for this spot it was too far, the arrows were just disappearing in the air.
So!
After using all my ammo I decided with my last shot just to wing it.
I moved to a completely new location, I have no idea where the arrow's gonna go, just gonna eyeball it.
Took a guess, hoped for the best, annnd....
[Braizer horn]
I'M PSYCOCINEMATICS AND THIS IS MY FAVORITE PART OF THE LETOPOLIS!
For another variation, you don't need the bow and will get unlimited ammo, which is a nice bonus, but at a
cost to range, but you can also try hitting flammables with tossed fire torches.
Either direct hits or rolling touches can count. It's gonna be a factor on how far away it is to trigger, as well as house rules
on what you and your friends decide is out of bounds.
If you haven't tried the game out yet and are planning on it, here's a couple tips from
what I've learned the hard way:
I'd recommend doing all the side missions you find as you come across them and to stay
as high above enemy levels as possible.
Slightly on tangent: the first city in the game, Siwa, kinda screws you over on this.
Cause there's this one spot where the guys there are level 28, when the level range for the whole place is 1 to 8
So the game kinda puts it in your head on the literal first city, so that's rough.
Your weapon of choice might dictate how high you can go, I preferred the heavy mace and
later on heavy axe much as I unlocked new attacks from the talent system.
I preferred the heavy axe in Unity as well, that's what started it all. But both being powerful but slow, but a faster
weapon like dual blades or any short one armed weapon option might be more your style.
I found the dual blades a bit too effective in combat, and mixed in with the button mashing
involved they got really one-dimension so I couldn't get behind em.
Also beware any captain or commander with a staff weapon.
Insane reach, combos, damage and mobility.
So keep an eye out for that.
As mentioned before with the fire challenge thing,
If you come across a rare, yellow weapon you like the perk of, hold onto it.
Fire arrows for example are always useful, and we have unlimited weapon slots.
Break purples and blues for crafting materials, but keep the yellow.
Once you hit max, pay the blacksmith to rank it up and it'll be super cheap.
The cost isn't based on levels gained, but the level the weapon currently is.
15 to 40 a third of the cost of 39 to 40, so savin' yer wallet a little bit of heavy lifting there.
Focus on your damage more than your health.
I pretty much zerged that up to legendary as soon as possible, but fights remained as
lopsided as before.
If we remain squishy, might as well max weapons and go full glass cannon.
All in all, for Assassin Creed fans or otherwise, I think this is worth the look.
Get it on sale if ya gotta, that's fine with me, but as long as you dig the core experience you are looking
at a good 60 to a 100 hours of DLC-free game time I think you'll like.
The Ubisoft store is of course in full effect and you got just tons of things to throw money at
and by the way they give you just enough not to be able to buy anything worthwhile.
Curious that.
But all that stuff is easily avoided anyway. It's mostly just cosmetic or weaker weapons you can get better yourself.
I got no plans on getting paid DLC ever
but even with the frustrating parts I had a decent time.
Bayek's charm goes a long way, and even if it takes some finessing on our part to make it work,
the stealth stabbin' action is still just as good.
This is my first full scale review in quite some time, lookin' to do more of these in the future.
If there's any game out there now, or soon to be that you'd like me to take a gander at
Feel free to give me any suggestions you like
Thank-you for watching
Take care!
All right, we're goin' as fast as we can.
Off roadin' it.
It would be smart to us a map.
But I'm just gonna wing it.
Little... little rough terrain here, but the horses are fine.
Oh, caref-- oh, good suspension, okay.
Just watc--okay, rocks are fine.
See this is flat. This is good.
Probably should stay on road. Got aggro from somethin', but we're good!
We're just gonna figure... okay that's a bit of a drop.
We're fine. Yeah, it's all good. It'll regenerate, you're good.
I'll give you some *care* --rrots when we get back.
Just stick to--stick to the ground, little bouncy.
Just a little...
Okay that's--
Okay that's a LOT of air...
Perfect.
Uhh, eeny, meeny, miiiiiny...
Mo!
I'll go with Mo.
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