Good day ladies and gents, hope your all doing well today.
Today's topic is going to be AC4.
After finally getting the game at Christmas, I pushed through it as quickly as I could (which isn't very fast) because I was so excited to play a new AC game, but also because, well, bloody pirates, and I wanted to keep the whole game clearly in my mind so I could write this. Who doesn't want to sail the black flag, robbing ships of their booty and living by your own rules. This premise offered AC4 a whole new landscape to play in, and I was super excited.
Off the top, AC4 isn't a bad game. That's what I'm going to say - that's it. It wasn't bad and it wasn't great. It was different, lets move on to what I really wanna talk about, which is everything that drove me nuts about it. I'm going to put the story aside for the most part because it wasn't bad, if and when you could heard and understand what the heck was being said.
Glitches. Holy crap. How often did some of you try to run across a fence only to get to the end post and have your character stop and start turning 180 then 180 again uncontrollably? Or stuck under a tree, or on top of a rock?(I actually fell knee deep into a rock??) Perhaps you shot an individual and he kept on walking for a few more seconds? Did any of you actually fall through the game floor map into the underworld nothing? I did once. All semi common in my experience, but what wasn't, was the frequency of these glitches. Hence the complete frustration at some points.
Or how about just bad game mechanics in general. I forgave you Ubisoft for such things in AC3 because it was a new engine but honestly I feel like this game held more glitches and bad mechanics than AC3. I'm serious. How come Edward can't figure out to run up a pillar or column and instead insists on trying to lean in and hide? I wanna climb! For the most part moving and free running worked fairly well and did what I needed and wanted the character to, but more than once I failed a mission or some such thing because my character simply kept trying to do one action over the buttons I was actually pressing. More than once I went to throw my controller because of odd issues with actions not occurring as I press buttons or different unintended ones, and I am not that kind of a gamer - really.
Overall AC4 is not a bad game as I said. It has a wicked cast of characters, an excellent new setting and slightly different premise. Unfortunately Ubisoft did not seem to come together to bring this game to what it really deserved, despite all the hype around it. As I said before I'll forgive you for these shortcomings in AC3, even though you had a perfect set up for an excellent assassin excursion in that one and yet chose to squander it(just one game?). AC4 has all the delights of AC3 with much more grandeur and adventures on the high seas, but it also comes with its fair share if not more of the defects as well.
I'm also going to give honours for likely longest credits. I started to write this as the credits rolled and they are still going at this moment.
To end this, please Ubisoft, go back to what made Assassin's Creed not Good but GREAT - well thought out characters, story, locations(you still got those). Excellent combat(wrong/no action), smooth game play(run up the wall damn you!), with long and interesting cinematics, all in a game the player can see and hear clearly(I honestly dunno what happened in AC4).
Sincerely, a huge fan of a wicked set of games that I don't want to have to have to despise later in life.