Oh my, this is a really terrible game. I'm serious. I don't mean to hate, but it's so bad.
I don't really play "AAA" games anymore, it's been some years now, but I had time recently and this was in my library for a while, probably from a Humble Bundle because I don't remember ever purchasing this, and I thought "why not, this will for sure not be revolutionary but at least it will be some high-budget polished fun". IT'S NOT. AT ALL. I've played Far Cry from 1 to 4, and enjoyed them for their merits, even if each was progressively less good than the previous one, they were still pleasant to play, so I though "how bad can this one be", oh my...
The fact it's sitting at 80% recommendation at the time of this review is baffling to me. How bad can the rest of UbiSoft games have become after this one for so many people to consider this as a good game?!
It's crazy how it can have so many cutscenes that prevent me from playing, and at the same time have almost no story whatsoever. I have a vague clue of what's going on, but nothing really makes sense, no character does, everything is forgettable, and it's not like it's an interesting sandbox: the map is large and empty at the same time. You're bombarded with tons of things to do, but this is just "content", uninteresting, repeating, "bad-mmo-go-kill-me-10-wolves" type of content. I kid you not, In the first hour of playing I already had a quest to kill 3 bears. In 30 min, I must have seen more than 10 times the same van with a prisoner go by so I could release him, over and over again.
There's no friction anywhere when it comes to gameplay, everything is made to be as easy as possible, not to frustrate even a child, which is, funny enough, very frustrating. There's no stakes, you're just supposed to have fun rolling on everything and just check the list of the 3 types of activities there is to do (basically, besides boring and uninspired story missions, it's destroy some crap, free some prisoners and liberate a camp), repeated other and other again all other a soulless map.
At one point I had two quest givers talk to me at the same time about two completely different missions over the radio while driving around, and then I ended up in a cutscene of the main mission while I was still driving and not on a main mission, completely unrelated to where I was, so I'm pretty sure this was a second bug on top of the first one.
The very first moment I had control of the character, my left side of the screen was bombarded with notifications about unlocks, skins, weapons, vehicles, outfits, etc. It's a solo PC game that feels like an online mobile game. Every in-world shop of the game has a cash shop where you can spend real money to buy casino money to get ridiculous unlocks : horse masks, rainbows, neon-colored weapons, vehicles with unicorns on them, etc. This is insane!
You can tell nobody cared about making a good coherent game, this is just a vessel to sell micro-transactions, everything revolves around it. The gunplay is weak, everything is so rince-and-repeat, the game is full of bugs and runs like ♥♥♥♥ (on the same system I run much better looking games at a much better framerate), every time I load for fast travel or after a death (not because the game is hard, it's actually childly easy, you can even let it play itself by activating auto-driving, but because I had a mission with a truck that kept exploding even though I was nowhere near anything that should have, forcing me every time to reload), it takes more than ONE FULL MINUTE, on a M2 SSD!
I've played too many video games, and I have too many very good games to play in my library, to go through this more than I already did. I see where this is going and I know I won't enjoy it, I already didn't enjoy at all what I've experienced so far, I sighed so many times in just the handful of hours I've played, so I'll just consider this as my reminder to stay away from companies like UbiSoft, and I'm pretty sure they got even worse with their most recent games.
