doesitactuallymatter
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Cyberpunk 2077 is a game that was obviously conjured up to be a huge platinum, AAA hit and that, for not totally clear reasons, it fell very short of achieving that.
The best way I could describe it would be this: imagine that the game was very well thought-out, a lot of resources and creativity put into it to make sure good ideas were concepted and developed, a very solid base laid out in terms of the overarching structure and design of the whole product but that, at some point, the budget was pulled from the game and developers ordered to wrap it up for deployment in the cheapest, quickest way possible with whatever resources they had at the time.
The whole game and most individual aspects of it feel wide but not deep. Everything about Cyberpunk 2077 feels fine but very few things feel fully realized.
Let's take Night City, the actual place the story takes place in, as an example. When you are in the outskirts of town and you look at the city from afar, it looks majestic. When you get close to that cityscape and look the faces of those very same buildings from a close distance, things start to feel off. When you are down on street level and look up towards the tall skyscrapers all the way from below, it looks amazing but when you actually want to climb or interact with those skyscrapers, you're denied of that. At first glance, everything is nicely-modeled, detailed, realistic, intriguing and inviting but on closer inspection, disappointment takes the wheel. Even the initial quests and introductory areas really conjure up the notion that you're in a vast, unexplored world that's alive and that has a ton of things to see and experiences to enjoy. A few minutes later, however, when you actually walk down the streets of the town and are left to free roam, everything feels incredibly generic and empty. In the first firefight, the level layout is engaging, there are many tactics to approach it and there's a sense of imminent danger. When bullets start flying, you can shoot pieces of plaster and concrete off the walls really allowing you to appreciate a sophisticated and promising physics systems that would make any battle much more interesting and satisfying. Yet all of these promises get diluted very quickly and the rest of the game has nothing to do with the initial impressions.
It's hard to put a finger on what exactly creates this disappointing vibe. Whatever the cause, I take a look at the game world and it's very clear that this was set up to be a huge game with a lot of content and high quality subsystems but for some reason this vision was left unrealized. All pedestrians do one thing: walk in a straight line, 90% of the buildings you can't go into, as if they were made of cardboard, highways and avenues are, at times, populated with only one or two cars and so on and so forth.
This phenomenon also trickles down to the actual missions and gameplay content. Most side-missions are just 'steal that', 'hack this computer', 'kill this NPC' and they become stale, repetitive, very easily. Also, they have pretty much no impact on anything tangible other than the self-contained experience of completing that mission. Dialogues? More of the same: most conversation choices are absolutely irrelevant and seemingly penned in as an after-thought to create some illusion of player interaction and choice. Even on missions where you are required to do things stealthily, if you don't, the only consequence is the quest-giver saying "hey, you're a disappointment" but rewarding you (albeit with a bit less money) for finishing the mission and calling it complete regardless.
Character development? Same deal-o. Yes, there was clearly some thought put into romance routes with different characters but all those scenarios feel like sketches of what they were meant to be. You can romance a character, have sex with them and all but confess your love for them and a couple hours later they are with you on the phone speaking distantly as if you had just met. Skill trees and character customization? Yup! There's like 10, 12 different skill trees and, save a few notable exceptions, they sure as hell don't feel like they mold or specialize your character into anything separate from any other character.
Let me beat the proverbial dead horse for the last time: there's this quest, right? One of those staple secondary questlines in modern RPGs you are introduced to very early on in the game, a pursue-at-your-own-leisure type of deal. We all know the kind. In this particular one, you have to fight a bunch of different opponents in street fights and, eventually, reach a big bad boss. When you finally beat him, nothing really happens. Yes, you are given some money. Yes, one NPC says "hey, good job!", but that's it. Even the NPC that hands you the quest and keeps tabs on progress through it all says absolutely nothing at the culmination of it. It's so abrupt and anticlimactic that a lot of people took to Google in search for answers having the same thoughts: "the quest must have bugged out" or "there must be a glitch where the dialogue for the finishing of the quest didn't trigger". But no: it's just the way it is haphazardly implemented.
There's definitely a pattern: the foundations for most aspects of the game are great and solid but something happened along the way and Cyberpunk 2077 became a rushed, unfinished, empty product instead of an honest labor of love. By the way, this company clearly knows how to make a hugely successful, beautiful game: they've done it with the The Witcher series. It's clearly not a matter of expertise or know-how. What's also clear is that the game was going to be bigger and better than what we actually got.
Having said all this, I still believe you should play this game through, at least once, if nothing else, for the main story.
From a technical standpoint, we all know the release for this game was awful and unplayable for some people, but as of today, in patch version 1.3 the game is playable. It still is glitchy and frustrating at times, but it's stable: just had literally two crashes in more than 60 or 70 hours of playtime and I could finish all content in the game without having to do crazy workarounds to finish missions (okay, maybe once).
Incomplete as it might feel, what's present in Cyberpunk 2077 can be fun. Depending on the playstyle, the basic gameplay loop can be pretty rewarding for quite a few hours, particularly if you can jive with the main narrative from a storytelling point of view.
Speaking of the story, I would venture to say that the main selling point of the whole shebang is the plot. It's interesting, it's more or less well narrated and structured and the interactions between the main cast and the world around them are, for the most part, compelling enough to leave you hungry for more. Hell, I'll say this: Keanu even had me in (very manly) tears a couple of times.
Now for some hyper-specific personal recommendations that most people will hate, but hey, who's writing this review?
1) Play the game in Japanese with English subs.
Don't ask me why, but it works. I never do this in any game, but there's something about the general aesthetic of Cyberpunk 2077 that lends itself to this. Feels much closer to the anime Akira and Ghost in the Shell than Bladerunner and Total Recall. It just makes the whole experience feel much more natural, engaging and immersive than hearing the English voiceovers.
2) If on PC, get the mod "Muted Markers".
Default loot visibility is weird and annoying, since you have to constantly be spamming your scanner for item markers to pop up and, even so, it glitches out and you might miss important loot. This mod fixes this and is the #1 quality of life improvement I can think of.
2b) If on PC, also get the mod "Annoy Me No More".
Removes fall damage (come on, people have cyberlegs and can telepathically hack into stuff but they die if they drop from a 20-feet-high ledge?). Other very good quality-of-life fixes that you'll probably want to install are bundled in this very same mod as well.
2c) If on PC, also get the mod "Holster by Tap". Whoever designed the holster/weapon cycling for the PC version was a sadist.
3) Play a Netrunner.
The whole playstyle revolves around hacking people and devices while remaining more or less away from the action. It starts out a little slow and it's a bit gear-dependant, but, after a while, the way you can control and dominate multiple enemies instantly and safely with quickhacks becomes pretty fun and unique to this game so it's probably something you want to experience to some extent in your playthrough.
4) Play a time-stopping Samurai.
Grab a katana, the Qiant Sandevistan Mk. 4 "Warp Dancer" cyberware (don't punch Fingers!) and 3 Sandevistan heatsinks. This is one of (if not *the* most) fun builds in the game. If on PC, there's an essential mod that really fixes the mechanics in this build to what it should've been by default: it's called "Better Melee". It contains not only fundamental fixes, but it there's also a module that gives Mantis Blade functionality (basically a leap-to-enemy attack) to any melee weapon, which makes katana builds super fun. Very highly recommended.
4b) If on PC, get a trainer that has a 'no cooldown on skills' option.
Being able to use your Sandevistan to time-stop constantly, combined with the "Better Melee" addon turns you into an anime Samurai. Freezing time, rushing a room slashing through and leaping to every enemy and thawing time to watch them all get dismembered simultaneously is oh-so-satisfying.
6) Play a knife-throwing ninja.
By default, the knife-throwing system is ridiculous and unusable, but if you're on PC you can get a mod called 'Enhanced Throwing Knives' that makes knife-throwing absolutely viable as a build and while the stealth shenanigans are not great in the game because of AI and the skill tree, it's still fun and a decent option if you prefer a less direct approach.
The best way I could describe it would be this: imagine that the game was very well thought-out, a lot of resources and creativity put into it to make sure good ideas were concepted and developed, a very solid base laid out in terms of the overarching structure and design of the whole product but that, at some point, the budget was pulled from the game and developers ordered to wrap it up for deployment in the cheapest, quickest way possible with whatever resources they had at the time.
The whole game and most individual aspects of it feel wide but not deep. Everything about Cyberpunk 2077 feels fine but very few things feel fully realized.
Let's take Night City, the actual place the story takes place in, as an example. When you are in the outskirts of town and you look at the city from afar, it looks majestic. When you get close to that cityscape and look the faces of those very same buildings from a close distance, things start to feel off. When you are down on street level and look up towards the tall skyscrapers all the way from below, it looks amazing but when you actually want to climb or interact with those skyscrapers, you're denied of that. At first glance, everything is nicely-modeled, detailed, realistic, intriguing and inviting but on closer inspection, disappointment takes the wheel. Even the initial quests and introductory areas really conjure up the notion that you're in a vast, unexplored world that's alive and that has a ton of things to see and experiences to enjoy. A few minutes later, however, when you actually walk down the streets of the town and are left to free roam, everything feels incredibly generic and empty. In the first firefight, the level layout is engaging, there are many tactics to approach it and there's a sense of imminent danger. When bullets start flying, you can shoot pieces of plaster and concrete off the walls really allowing you to appreciate a sophisticated and promising physics systems that would make any battle much more interesting and satisfying. Yet all of these promises get diluted very quickly and the rest of the game has nothing to do with the initial impressions.
It's hard to put a finger on what exactly creates this disappointing vibe. Whatever the cause, I take a look at the game world and it's very clear that this was set up to be a huge game with a lot of content and high quality subsystems but for some reason this vision was left unrealized. All pedestrians do one thing: walk in a straight line, 90% of the buildings you can't go into, as if they were made of cardboard, highways and avenues are, at times, populated with only one or two cars and so on and so forth.
This phenomenon also trickles down to the actual missions and gameplay content. Most side-missions are just 'steal that', 'hack this computer', 'kill this NPC' and they become stale, repetitive, very easily. Also, they have pretty much no impact on anything tangible other than the self-contained experience of completing that mission. Dialogues? More of the same: most conversation choices are absolutely irrelevant and seemingly penned in as an after-thought to create some illusion of player interaction and choice. Even on missions where you are required to do things stealthily, if you don't, the only consequence is the quest-giver saying "hey, you're a disappointment" but rewarding you (albeit with a bit less money) for finishing the mission and calling it complete regardless.
Character development? Same deal-o. Yes, there was clearly some thought put into romance routes with different characters but all those scenarios feel like sketches of what they were meant to be. You can romance a character, have sex with them and all but confess your love for them and a couple hours later they are with you on the phone speaking distantly as if you had just met. Skill trees and character customization? Yup! There's like 10, 12 different skill trees and, save a few notable exceptions, they sure as hell don't feel like they mold or specialize your character into anything separate from any other character.
Let me beat the proverbial dead horse for the last time: there's this quest, right? One of those staple secondary questlines in modern RPGs you are introduced to very early on in the game, a pursue-at-your-own-leisure type of deal. We all know the kind. In this particular one, you have to fight a bunch of different opponents in street fights and, eventually, reach a big bad boss. When you finally beat him, nothing really happens. Yes, you are given some money. Yes, one NPC says "hey, good job!", but that's it. Even the NPC that hands you the quest and keeps tabs on progress through it all says absolutely nothing at the culmination of it. It's so abrupt and anticlimactic that a lot of people took to Google in search for answers having the same thoughts: "the quest must have bugged out" or "there must be a glitch where the dialogue for the finishing of the quest didn't trigger". But no: it's just the way it is haphazardly implemented.
There's definitely a pattern: the foundations for most aspects of the game are great and solid but something happened along the way and Cyberpunk 2077 became a rushed, unfinished, empty product instead of an honest labor of love. By the way, this company clearly knows how to make a hugely successful, beautiful game: they've done it with the The Witcher series. It's clearly not a matter of expertise or know-how. What's also clear is that the game was going to be bigger and better than what we actually got.
Having said all this, I still believe you should play this game through, at least once, if nothing else, for the main story.
From a technical standpoint, we all know the release for this game was awful and unplayable for some people, but as of today, in patch version 1.3 the game is playable. It still is glitchy and frustrating at times, but it's stable: just had literally two crashes in more than 60 or 70 hours of playtime and I could finish all content in the game without having to do crazy workarounds to finish missions (okay, maybe once).
Incomplete as it might feel, what's present in Cyberpunk 2077 can be fun. Depending on the playstyle, the basic gameplay loop can be pretty rewarding for quite a few hours, particularly if you can jive with the main narrative from a storytelling point of view.
Speaking of the story, I would venture to say that the main selling point of the whole shebang is the plot. It's interesting, it's more or less well narrated and structured and the interactions between the main cast and the world around them are, for the most part, compelling enough to leave you hungry for more. Hell, I'll say this: Keanu even had me in (very manly) tears a couple of times.
Now for some hyper-specific personal recommendations that most people will hate, but hey, who's writing this review?
1) Play the game in Japanese with English subs.
Don't ask me why, but it works. I never do this in any game, but there's something about the general aesthetic of Cyberpunk 2077 that lends itself to this. Feels much closer to the anime Akira and Ghost in the Shell than Bladerunner and Total Recall. It just makes the whole experience feel much more natural, engaging and immersive than hearing the English voiceovers.
2) If on PC, get the mod "Muted Markers".
Default loot visibility is weird and annoying, since you have to constantly be spamming your scanner for item markers to pop up and, even so, it glitches out and you might miss important loot. This mod fixes this and is the #1 quality of life improvement I can think of.
2b) If on PC, also get the mod "Annoy Me No More".
Removes fall damage (come on, people have cyberlegs and can telepathically hack into stuff but they die if they drop from a 20-feet-high ledge?). Other very good quality-of-life fixes that you'll probably want to install are bundled in this very same mod as well.
2c) If on PC, also get the mod "Holster by Tap". Whoever designed the holster/weapon cycling for the PC version was a sadist.
3) Play a Netrunner.
The whole playstyle revolves around hacking people and devices while remaining more or less away from the action. It starts out a little slow and it's a bit gear-dependant, but, after a while, the way you can control and dominate multiple enemies instantly and safely with quickhacks becomes pretty fun and unique to this game so it's probably something you want to experience to some extent in your playthrough.
4) Play a time-stopping Samurai.
Grab a katana, the Qiant Sandevistan Mk. 4 "Warp Dancer" cyberware (don't punch Fingers!) and 3 Sandevistan heatsinks. This is one of (if not *the* most) fun builds in the game. If on PC, there's an essential mod that really fixes the mechanics in this build to what it should've been by default: it's called "Better Melee". It contains not only fundamental fixes, but it there's also a module that gives Mantis Blade functionality (basically a leap-to-enemy attack) to any melee weapon, which makes katana builds super fun. Very highly recommended.
4b) If on PC, get a trainer that has a 'no cooldown on skills' option.
Being able to use your Sandevistan to time-stop constantly, combined with the "Better Melee" addon turns you into an anime Samurai. Freezing time, rushing a room slashing through and leaping to every enemy and thawing time to watch them all get dismembered simultaneously is oh-so-satisfying.
6) Play a knife-throwing ninja.
By default, the knife-throwing system is ridiculous and unusable, but if you're on PC you can get a mod called 'Enhanced Throwing Knives' that makes knife-throwing absolutely viable as a build and while the stealth shenanigans are not great in the game because of AI and the skill tree, it's still fun and a decent option if you prefer a less direct approach.
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow 2 is a vast improvement over the prequel. Excusably flawed in some areas, a well-rounded combat system, great atmosphere and a pretty decent story make it a tasty experience.
Story-wise, you continue a few .. centuries? after the events of the previous title. You play as Gabriel Belmont's evil incarnation Dracula in all his blood-sucking, finger-licking, fang-bearing glory. Good ol' Zobek pops up at the beginning of the game and tells you Satan is raffling a whoopass and you two have all the numbers. Considering the urgency of Bigredhorny chasing y'all around, he asks for a temporary alliance to prevent Satan's summoning in exchange for Dracula's ultimate wish: eternal rest.
I won't spoil any details of later sections of the plot but, for an action game, the narrative is surprisingly solid and enthralling. A lot of the good things happening in this reboot of Castlevania have to do with the atmosphere surrounding the game universe. The soundtrack is chillingly good, the feeling of utter devastation throughout the levels is awesome and the general design of characters and enemies alike is top-notch. Worth noting, some boss encounters come with an extra serving of epic sauce.
There have been a few changes in terms of how the game plays out in respect to the original Lords of Shadow. First off, the camera is now dynamic, which is a simple yet outstanding improvement over the fixed view. Also, we are now thrown into a sort of open-world format. However, the result is something closer to Darksiders or old school console action games where the freedom to roam is limited and what happens is you actually end up revisiting locations that (usually thanks to a recently-acquired ability) reveal a path that would've been previously inaccessible.
Combat is pretty straightforward: your go-to weapon is the Blood Whip, which is reminiscent of the Cross in the previous entry, but there's also the Void Sword and the Chaos Claws. The former serves as a leech-life-back weapon that also has attacks to freeze your opponents, while the latter is more focused on heavy damage and breaks defenses on certain enemies. All three weapons have similar attacks and the inputs are almost the same in all cases, but the whip is the only one that doesn't require a finite 'mana' bar to use. Besides these three puppies, you also get some secondary weapons and on-use items that have different temporary effects, like slowing down time or unlocking all attacks with all weapons. It can get a bit convoluted juggling both resources for the sword and claw plus the secondary abilities plus the inventory items plus remembering all combos, but all in all, it's a neat combat system that works pretty well and doesn't get in the way of fun.
Praises aside, there are a few flaws with Lords of Shadow 2.
For starters, while I can appreciate the intention to redo some of the things that were wrong with the first game, I'm not completely sold on the pseudo-open-world thing. Having to go back a bunch of screens just to pick up a health upgrade you may only get access to 6 hours in doesn't sound particularly enticing to me. Also, it might just be me being silly, but I often times got lost and couldn't really figure out where I was supposed to go next (there's even an objective marker, for Pete's sake!) and I attribute that to levels working the way they do with this kind of system. I found backtracking through scenery I've already seen really exhausting, particularly so when it came to collectibles and upgrades. To be fair, though, the game world is sort of circular, so you're not literally backtracking, therefore your mileage may vary.
Simultaneously, while the combat is good, solid fun, I would've liked to see maybe more instances with weaker but more abundant enemies to make things a bit more dynamic and feel a tad more powerful. Even with full upgrades, often times you feel like you're chipping away at those demons with a wet noodle. Despite urban legends, wet noodles don't hurt at all.
While we're on the topic of combat, some bosses and sequences are very underwhelming, either visually or mechanically, which is a shame because some others are absolutely phenomenal. The peeps at MercurySteam clearly know how to come up with great ideas but consistency goes a long way. Maybe some portions of the game were a bit rushed, which would make sense considering certain parts towards the end of the story also feel somewhat vague and inconclusive.
What it all boils down to is a very interesting and unconventional rendition of the Castlevania mythos that's even better than the first Lords of Shadow. Some details in the final product could have been a bit more polished, but the sum of its parts make for a really fun and engaging action game.
Story-wise, you continue a few .. centuries? after the events of the previous title. You play as Gabriel Belmont's evil incarnation Dracula in all his blood-sucking, finger-licking, fang-bearing glory. Good ol' Zobek pops up at the beginning of the game and tells you Satan is raffling a whoopass and you two have all the numbers. Considering the urgency of Bigredhorny chasing y'all around, he asks for a temporary alliance to prevent Satan's summoning in exchange for Dracula's ultimate wish: eternal rest.
I won't spoil any details of later sections of the plot but, for an action game, the narrative is surprisingly solid and enthralling. A lot of the good things happening in this reboot of Castlevania have to do with the atmosphere surrounding the game universe. The soundtrack is chillingly good, the feeling of utter devastation throughout the levels is awesome and the general design of characters and enemies alike is top-notch. Worth noting, some boss encounters come with an extra serving of epic sauce.
There have been a few changes in terms of how the game plays out in respect to the original Lords of Shadow. First off, the camera is now dynamic, which is a simple yet outstanding improvement over the fixed view. Also, we are now thrown into a sort of open-world format. However, the result is something closer to Darksiders or old school console action games where the freedom to roam is limited and what happens is you actually end up revisiting locations that (usually thanks to a recently-acquired ability) reveal a path that would've been previously inaccessible.
Combat is pretty straightforward: your go-to weapon is the Blood Whip, which is reminiscent of the Cross in the previous entry, but there's also the Void Sword and the Chaos Claws. The former serves as a leech-life-back weapon that also has attacks to freeze your opponents, while the latter is more focused on heavy damage and breaks defenses on certain enemies. All three weapons have similar attacks and the inputs are almost the same in all cases, but the whip is the only one that doesn't require a finite 'mana' bar to use. Besides these three puppies, you also get some secondary weapons and on-use items that have different temporary effects, like slowing down time or unlocking all attacks with all weapons. It can get a bit convoluted juggling both resources for the sword and claw plus the secondary abilities plus the inventory items plus remembering all combos, but all in all, it's a neat combat system that works pretty well and doesn't get in the way of fun.
Praises aside, there are a few flaws with Lords of Shadow 2.
For starters, while I can appreciate the intention to redo some of the things that were wrong with the first game, I'm not completely sold on the pseudo-open-world thing. Having to go back a bunch of screens just to pick up a health upgrade you may only get access to 6 hours in doesn't sound particularly enticing to me. Also, it might just be me being silly, but I often times got lost and couldn't really figure out where I was supposed to go next (there's even an objective marker, for Pete's sake!) and I attribute that to levels working the way they do with this kind of system. I found backtracking through scenery I've already seen really exhausting, particularly so when it came to collectibles and upgrades. To be fair, though, the game world is sort of circular, so you're not literally backtracking, therefore your mileage may vary.
Simultaneously, while the combat is good, solid fun, I would've liked to see maybe more instances with weaker but more abundant enemies to make things a bit more dynamic and feel a tad more powerful. Even with full upgrades, often times you feel like you're chipping away at those demons with a wet noodle. Despite urban legends, wet noodles don't hurt at all.
While we're on the topic of combat, some bosses and sequences are very underwhelming, either visually or mechanically, which is a shame because some others are absolutely phenomenal. The peeps at MercurySteam clearly know how to come up with great ideas but consistency goes a long way. Maybe some portions of the game were a bit rushed, which would make sense considering certain parts towards the end of the story also feel somewhat vague and inconclusive.
What it all boils down to is a very interesting and unconventional rendition of the Castlevania mythos that's even better than the first Lords of Shadow. Some details in the final product could have been a bit more polished, but the sum of its parts make for a really fun and engaging action game.
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag seems to have come out a really short while after Assassin's Creed III. Maybe a hurried product is enough to explain the overall dull feeling this sequel is placated with.
You play as Edward Kenway, a Welsh bucanneer out for riches and fame who bumps into the Assassins-Templars feud. The plot is one of the few reasons left to keep buying into this franchise, not necessarily because it's a great story but more due to the fact that a lot of the players from the previous entries are somewhat already invested in it.
Caribbean and pirates sounds like a natural match for an Assassin's Creed game and it plays like it. Even though most core mechanics are old and predictable by now, boarding ships, bombarding forts and being an otherwise badass salty sea dog works really well with the AC engine and gameplay. Naturally, most of the things you'll be doing have to do with seafaring, treasure hunting, naval combat and other pirate-related demeanor.
In the graphics department, Ubisoft seems to have kicked things up a notch from the previous title. While you can still play the game in the lowest possible settings and feel okay with it, the highest settings are a world apart by comparison. PC users beware: AC4 is not really optimized for PC gaming and many users have reported unacceptable performance issues with settings their rigs should be able to handle. AC3 had some terrible texture problems on computers as well (on release, at least), so it might be a new fad Ubisoft is going for. If you have the rig (and luck) to max it without silly glitches or FPS hits, you're in for a treat. Regardless, the game world looks pretty amazing, water in particular.
Black Flag plays pretty much like any other AC game and, as usual, more than half the content are side-missions. Some of them are fairly interesting and fresh, but most of it is filler that we've seen in the past.
My first complaint is that content feels way too spread out. I hardly ever go for 100% in sandbox games; I don't have the patience to complete absolutely every mission. On this occasion, though, it feels like developers made a conscious, sadistic effort to make completionists waste a ton of time. The world map is split up into sections, each one with different islands, settlements, villages or towns. Each settlement or town has its own set of side-missions. There are also some 'uncharted' objectives in open sea. The problem lies with islands being relatively too far apart from one another and having to spend the better part of your time just sailing (or swimming) to your next objective. Fast travel hubs and 'travel speed' when sailing remedy this some, but it's still painfully difficult to spend so much time just staring at the back of your ship to tackle a side-mission that's probably going to take a fraction of the time it took you to get to it. Don't get me wrong - unlocking every chest in AC2 sucked as well, but there just wasn't so much open nothingness (I'm looking at you, sea) and secondary objectives felt clustered closer together. Rewards for actually completing these challenges are predictably underwhelming, too. All of this put together makes AC4's biggest flaw since the main missions go by pretty quickly.
My second gripe with the game is the amount of content that got cut off on release to put out as DLC later. The whole DLC deal has become commonplace these days, but let me keep fighting the good fight. The pre-order or retailer DLC is fine. Who cares if you get an extra semi-useless sword for buying in Walmart? However, Blackbeard DLC (TBA?), Aveline DLC and so forth should have been included in the base game. Even if it takes you a long-ass time to go for 100% (see above), AC4 is not particularly fleshed out in terms of content and things to do, so being stingy with DLC just to get an extra $14.99 sucks monkey's testes. To add insult to injury, you now must be online and logged into uPlay to send out your fleet on quests alla Brotherhood. We can get philosophical about why this is wrong and it's not a huge deal, but it doesn't make it right. Up yours, Ubisoft.
All in all, you're probably gonna play AC4 if you played the previous ones just for the sake of continuity if nothing else. The main storyline is fun to play through and some of the new types of missions are engaging, but it still is a pretty shallow experience. Chalk it up to putting out the same game for years, with the same re-hashed ideas and improved graphics.
You play as Edward Kenway, a Welsh bucanneer out for riches and fame who bumps into the Assassins-Templars feud. The plot is one of the few reasons left to keep buying into this franchise, not necessarily because it's a great story but more due to the fact that a lot of the players from the previous entries are somewhat already invested in it.
Caribbean and pirates sounds like a natural match for an Assassin's Creed game and it plays like it. Even though most core mechanics are old and predictable by now, boarding ships, bombarding forts and being an otherwise badass salty sea dog works really well with the AC engine and gameplay. Naturally, most of the things you'll be doing have to do with seafaring, treasure hunting, naval combat and other pirate-related demeanor.
In the graphics department, Ubisoft seems to have kicked things up a notch from the previous title. While you can still play the game in the lowest possible settings and feel okay with it, the highest settings are a world apart by comparison. PC users beware: AC4 is not really optimized for PC gaming and many users have reported unacceptable performance issues with settings their rigs should be able to handle. AC3 had some terrible texture problems on computers as well (on release, at least), so it might be a new fad Ubisoft is going for. If you have the rig (and luck) to max it without silly glitches or FPS hits, you're in for a treat. Regardless, the game world looks pretty amazing, water in particular.
Black Flag plays pretty much like any other AC game and, as usual, more than half the content are side-missions. Some of them are fairly interesting and fresh, but most of it is filler that we've seen in the past.
My first complaint is that content feels way too spread out. I hardly ever go for 100% in sandbox games; I don't have the patience to complete absolutely every mission. On this occasion, though, it feels like developers made a conscious, sadistic effort to make completionists waste a ton of time. The world map is split up into sections, each one with different islands, settlements, villages or towns. Each settlement or town has its own set of side-missions. There are also some 'uncharted' objectives in open sea. The problem lies with islands being relatively too far apart from one another and having to spend the better part of your time just sailing (or swimming) to your next objective. Fast travel hubs and 'travel speed' when sailing remedy this some, but it's still painfully difficult to spend so much time just staring at the back of your ship to tackle a side-mission that's probably going to take a fraction of the time it took you to get to it. Don't get me wrong - unlocking every chest in AC2 sucked as well, but there just wasn't so much open nothingness (I'm looking at you, sea) and secondary objectives felt clustered closer together. Rewards for actually completing these challenges are predictably underwhelming, too. All of this put together makes AC4's biggest flaw since the main missions go by pretty quickly.
My second gripe with the game is the amount of content that got cut off on release to put out as DLC later. The whole DLC deal has become commonplace these days, but let me keep fighting the good fight. The pre-order or retailer DLC is fine. Who cares if you get an extra semi-useless sword for buying in Walmart? However, Blackbeard DLC (TBA?), Aveline DLC and so forth should have been included in the base game. Even if it takes you a long-ass time to go for 100% (see above), AC4 is not particularly fleshed out in terms of content and things to do, so being stingy with DLC just to get an extra $14.99 sucks monkey's testes. To add insult to injury, you now must be online and logged into uPlay to send out your fleet on quests alla Brotherhood. We can get philosophical about why this is wrong and it's not a huge deal, but it doesn't make it right. Up yours, Ubisoft.
All in all, you're probably gonna play AC4 if you played the previous ones just for the sake of continuity if nothing else. The main storyline is fun to play through and some of the new types of missions are engaging, but it still is a pretty shallow experience. Chalk it up to putting out the same game for years, with the same re-hashed ideas and improved graphics.