It's just so sad that Ubisoft could've done much better job with this potentailly amazing game.
For the first time in last few years, we have a very intense combat oriented single player game. That doesn't mean the game's story telling is weak nor sound and graphic quality is poor. We have a great single player game with lots of replayable factors.
I have this game and played for more than 10 hours now, and I never found Xana annoying but just amusing sometimes. Storyline is not transparent at all as I never figured out and predicted the game's ending even after chapter 7. Considering there are total of 9 chapters, that doesn't really sound like the game has a predictable ending, does it?
When it comes to sound quality, they just did a superb job. Apparently, the music is so dramatic and the choir during the battle against Cyclop makes you dive right into the game. Only improvement I would like to see from the sound is the AI's conversation as it could be a bit repetitive sometimes because they say pretty much same thing everytime they encounter you.
Like I said again, and I can never say this too many times. It is just so disappointing that this game needed little more effort to make this game earn a Gamespot's editor's choice award. I am afraid to say this game is full of bugs and errors, random game crash due to memory handling problems, and many bugs with multiplayer version.
During my last 10+ hours of play, I encoutered many bugs including having unlimited number of items and unlimited mana, and countless game crash with error message saying memory sector could not be read. Bigger problem with game crash is that it's so random and you can't really predict when your game's going to crash, and that could make you frustrated after your game crashed as you just finished a very difficult part of your level. The game does have automated saving feature, but obviously it's not frequent enough as it only saves your game everytime your quest object is updated.
Also, it seems like everytime you play as an Warrior in multiplayer server and gain Level 2 stamina skill, the game crashes. Also, multiplayer game suffers from random memory reading errors that causes the game to crash and it seems that crash kicks out everyone from the server everytime it happens.
There are also minor balancing problems with skills. Apparently, some of the skills are so useless, they are never used, and number of weapon and item types are not significantly different nor varies. Ending credit is also quite unsatisfying compared to the amount of work and effort you need to put into finally killing your last boss.
As you can see, all the problems this game is suffering from can be fixed by putting more effort and time into the game. If this game was completely bug free, I can give this game an instant 8.5+ of rating. But Ubisoft just failed to do so, and it's just so sad to see the game could've been the one of the greatest game of the year becoming one of the most disappointing game of the year.