Assassin’s Creed Shadows

So at time of writing I'm 113 hours in, I've beaten most of the game... TL:DR; just go play Ghost of Tsushima instead. It makes more sense, has a more compelling story and characters, better stealth mechanics, way better soundtrack an world design... It is what this game should have been and failed to be. To get into it... 1. The Characters. I'm not sure who Naoe is as a person. A few times she's spouted things that sounded like she's a downright anarchist and other times she's just a normal person, then she's a young girl, then she's a badass assassin... But not in a way that a real person contains multitudes, it feels like a dozen people wrote her and they all took a few scenes but no one shared notes. Ironically, Yasuke is by far the most compelling but I rarely play as him as, can I cannot stress this enough, this is an AC game and I come here to do sneaky kills. There are other people in the world, I'm sure, but aside from the udon guy I can't remember anything about any of them. 2. The music. I'm sure it's there, but you'll have to forgive me if I don't recognize a single theme or motif. How far they've fallen from AC2... I still listen to that score and while AC1 is a bit more vibes focused it still has a style and texture that this one doesn't. It's just... forgettable. It's like the worst parts of what Hollywood is doing with blockbusters. 3. The voice acting, at least for English, always sounds like people putting on accents. Like if you told me that most of the voice cast was just people they had around the office or that they went down to the local community drama group instead of hiring professionals I would not doubt you, it'd actually make sense. 4. The world design sucks. Remember when they said their goal was anything that stuck out by 1-2 inches would be a climbable surface? Well now you can look face first at a wall my fat ass could climb but Naoe? She doesn't feel like it. And even then that'd be fine if they were clear about marking what was and was not climbable but nope. You just kinda have to guess. Oh, and don't bother going overland, the game hates that. There's nothing to discover in the woods anyways. Just follow the paths. This game has a large map and 99% of it does nothing but make a pretty-ish background. Besides, the foliage is so dense that you can't see anything anyway, you randomly get blocked by tiny trees, slide down slopes that don't look too steep... The game explicitly does not want you doing anything off the well beaten path. Oh, and I said "pretty-ish" because I've never stopped and stared at the scenery in this game. I do that all the time, Ghost of Tsushima had me doing that every 5 seconds. This game? During the day it's muted and bland, golden hour is 3 seconds long, and at night it's almost impossible to see. I have a very nice high-color accurate monitor that's been calibrated. Still can't see ♥♥♥♥ without cranking the in-game brightness. 5. Naoe is useless in open combat. I know the idea is that Yasuke is the fighter and she's sneaky but even with her maxed out she struggles in any fight that isn't a boss fight. If the story drops me into an arena fight? I just die so it will. reset and I get to choose Yasuke because they clearly don't want you fighting with her. At all. Ever. 6. Open world means I wiped out more than a few "unknown organization" groups before I found out who they were. Hell I had one group I killed half of and one of the guys turned out to be the boss so I magically "spared" the other ones. I didn't want to spare them. But that ship had sailed. I could go on but you get the point. AC: Mirage was short and a bit rough but it told a story and they brought back a lot of the old mechanics that made it feel like a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ assassin game. At this point AC games are off my auto-buy list. I'll finish this game because it's fine and despite my complaints it's still a reasonably solid game. But I do not recommend and definitely don't buy it for full price. Maybe like half price then it'd feel like a solid value. At full price? Go get Ghost of Tsushima. It is, in literally every way, a better game.