Recent reviews by onurv

Best city builder I've played. Great music, atmosphere and gameplay.

Got bored with the story and characters. Pretty much all "tell, don't show". Has every cliche you can expect. The gameplay has nothing better either. Weakest one in the series in a long while. On the other hand, I don't know what i was expecting.

A bit too gamey and less immersive compared to the first one but it's definitely a step-up in terms of gameplay.

Would recommend it to no one unless you are starved for something Viking. Even then, it's a hard maybe. I will still rush through the main story because I played all AC games until now and also because I am an idiot. Don't be like me.

Ramblings in detail:

This is an Assassin's Creed game in name only. You can say that about every game in the last trilogy but goes doubly so for this one. I bought it on a big sale and I still feel ripped off. It's a lazy reskin of a game with the same problems, which seems to be the industry standard of most greedy publishers like Ubisoft in the last decade.

This one is a mediocre action game in reality. Emphasis on mediocre. Everything is a reskin of the previous ones. Feels aged. Calling it last gen would be a compliment. Combat is repetitive without depth. Only difficulty comes from damage sponge enemies with enormous damage. Then you have the bosses and the mini bosses which are just the same enemies with maybe one extra attack that are waay more spongy for some reason. Like I said, the same problems... The saving grace is the highly customizable difficulty. You can just tone down anything that sucks the fun out. Too bad you can't tone down the bloat of meaningless stuff to do on the map but yeah...

The story doesn't flow. Things just happen with no weight. Ended up rushing through most of the stuff and still got bored. Even the vikings, which are supposed to be the focus, are just made softcore. You get desynchronized for killing civilians, for example. Not that it's an integral part of the game but still... Vikings never hurt an innocent soul according to this game. That wasn't even the case in Odyssey, where you were a mostly good mercenary. Now it's taboo when you play as one of the most bloodthirsty, proudly I might add, cultures in the middle ages?! I get it's your main hero's culture but let's get real. Vikings were raping and pillaging ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. At least keep that a bit real.

HDR doesn't work well. Switched to SDR even though HDR is supposedly supported. Other than that, graphics are basically the same as a decade ago. All the usual clippings and visual bugs are still there. Animations are also way behind most AAA titles.

Audio sucks as usual. Stuff that are close don't feel as close. Stuff that are supposed to be loud, don't feel as loud. Voice acting is almost as bad as in Origins. Even the main characters are bad. It mostly feels like being read from a wall of text with a forced accent.

I want to say something good as well. I'll edit this if something comes up.

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Sunken cost fallacy: The game. I was done with this game around hour 20. Until then I thought I would do every activity or quest at least once to give it a fair chance. After 20 hours, I just wanted it to end. I basically played only the main quest. But it was the worst disconnected, boring, filler quest chain in the series,I have seen. Can't stress enough how bad the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ MAIN quest line is. With every hour I invested, I wanted it to end more but I also didn't want to throw away all the hours I already invested so I kept at it. It. Was. NOT. Worth. It. Even if you want to rush it, there is simply too much time-wasting ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ in this game. Would not recommend it to anyone.

Still a bit buggy, not very well optimized, and missing a lot of quality of life features of newer TW titles. I am not a big fan of the time period either.
Neither am I a fan of the design of the Huns, where you have to fight against their infinitely spawning full-stack hordes until you kill Attila around 120 turns in. I get what they were going for but after you get past the surviving phase and start thriving, they are just a nuisance that don't bring any enjoyment. Eventually, I stopped attacking them unless they were in my territory and garrisoned armies at my border. They never attacked either, so it turned into a boring waiting game of waiting for Attila.
All that said, this is still the best historical TW game. Some of the issues can be modded away (modders are truly a blessing), and some have other workarounds. The ones remain, I try to tolerate. And if you add the other gigantic overhaul mods this game has and still coming (Dawnless Days please), I'd say worth it even now.

You play almost as much Gwent as in Witcher 3. 9/10

The deepest, the most freedom oriented stealth game I played recently.
It rewards different play styles.
It's challenging enough by itself but it also offers 3 difficulty settings and several challenges per map to satisfy even the most masochistic stealth player.

I expect nothing and I'm still let down

+ The world
+ Many and detailed monster types

+/- They tried something new with the fight system. Not that good but still...

- Buggy port with bad performance
- Childish dialogue
- Cheesy story
- Boring characters
- Over-dramatized story-telling
- Unclear for new-comers, despite being told otherwise
- EVERYTHING takes too long to pad the game time. Traversing the world being the most important

I regret the time I spent with this game

Beatiful looking, sometimes challenging platformer