Spacelung
its like armored core but with crabs and shrimp, except incomprehensible and presumably made on a budget of like 1000 yen. Kinda fucks though. Barnacles are top tier.
This game is painfully, unfortunately mid. Not because it lacks merit as a game, or has no interesting ideas, but because it sabotages itself on a fundamental level. Pretty much every single cool or interesting idea or mechanical choice it contains is buried completely under an all encompassing, overbearing, irrevocably clunky fixation on filling the game with every single AAA, Games as a Service design cliche the developers could muster. There's almost a desperation to it; you can practically hear the developer begging you not to stop playing it, as they show you all their little compulsion loops and arrays of skill trees crying to be filled out, their awkward crafting and inventory management, their constantly spawning timed live events, their sidequests that put huge yellow objective text and waypoints on the screen at all times, and their whole department store full of ugly-looking unlockable skins. It all ends up being kind of sad, really, because this could have been a pretty dope zombie-dodging parkour game if the developers merely had confidence in the ability of their own game's core ideas to stand on their own.
The level/world design is the best part, followed by movement. The middle eastern city setting is pretty novel for a zombie story, the game looks pretty decent visually, and the parkour mechanics can feel cool when they actually work right (though playing it right after Mirror's Edge Catalyst did not do Dying Light any favors... but it's still solid). The day-night cycle and the tension that the looming threat of nocturnal monsters and the dark creates is genuinely cool, even if running from the monsters can be a bit janky and annoying in practice.
The combat would feel cool if it weren't for how obnoxiously damage spongy the enemies are, especially the humans. The kick is great, though. Love a good kick. If the weapons didn't have arbitrary feeling RPG stats, and instead were something more like Dead Rising and were all useful in their own ways, it would MASSIVELY improve the game. As it stands they tend to all feel like skins of the same 2 or 3 weapons, and that's boring as hell. The crafting is also boring. In a zombie game I'm not opposed to crafting by any means, because it can be a great mechanical tool to make the player feel like they are scavenging for survival and making do with what little resources they have available to them. But that requires restraint on the amount of crafting, actual limited resources, and meaningful choices to make about what you do with them. This game has none of that. So it just feels like busywork instead. They do not have the confidence to ever deny the player their trickle of little gamer treats.
I understand why people like this game. It gestures at some interesting immersive sim mechanics and is big and full of stuff, and some of that stuff is actually pretty cool. The parkour is neat and not too many games try that and get it right. I haven't tried the multiplayer but I could definitely see how playing with a friend could make certain parts of the game a lot more fun. But every time I started having fun the game would throw some kind of obnoxious obligatory feeling dog biscuit of game design at me and after I while it just became too annoying, tiring, and vaguely depressing to want to continue.
Maybe someday if want the game design equivalent of a big bowl of candy corn (too much sugar, kinda disconcertingly waxy, bad for you but weirdly addictive, a perverse simulacra created from the processed remains of the very thing it strives to recreate...), then I will return to this, perhaps with friends if I can rope them into it. But for now Dying Light is just not it.
The level/world design is the best part, followed by movement. The middle eastern city setting is pretty novel for a zombie story, the game looks pretty decent visually, and the parkour mechanics can feel cool when they actually work right (though playing it right after Mirror's Edge Catalyst did not do Dying Light any favors... but it's still solid). The day-night cycle and the tension that the looming threat of nocturnal monsters and the dark creates is genuinely cool, even if running from the monsters can be a bit janky and annoying in practice.
The combat would feel cool if it weren't for how obnoxiously damage spongy the enemies are, especially the humans. The kick is great, though. Love a good kick. If the weapons didn't have arbitrary feeling RPG stats, and instead were something more like Dead Rising and were all useful in their own ways, it would MASSIVELY improve the game. As it stands they tend to all feel like skins of the same 2 or 3 weapons, and that's boring as hell. The crafting is also boring. In a zombie game I'm not opposed to crafting by any means, because it can be a great mechanical tool to make the player feel like they are scavenging for survival and making do with what little resources they have available to them. But that requires restraint on the amount of crafting, actual limited resources, and meaningful choices to make about what you do with them. This game has none of that. So it just feels like busywork instead. They do not have the confidence to ever deny the player their trickle of little gamer treats.
I understand why people like this game. It gestures at some interesting immersive sim mechanics and is big and full of stuff, and some of that stuff is actually pretty cool. The parkour is neat and not too many games try that and get it right. I haven't tried the multiplayer but I could definitely see how playing with a friend could make certain parts of the game a lot more fun. But every time I started having fun the game would throw some kind of obnoxious obligatory feeling dog biscuit of game design at me and after I while it just became too annoying, tiring, and vaguely depressing to want to continue.
Maybe someday if want the game design equivalent of a big bowl of candy corn (too much sugar, kinda disconcertingly waxy, bad for you but weirdly addictive, a perverse simulacra created from the processed remains of the very thing it strives to recreate...), then I will return to this, perhaps with friends if I can rope them into it. But for now Dying Light is just not it.
Mirror's Edge: Catalyst feels like it never gets talked about except for through lamentations of it being open world instead of level based like the original Mirror's Edge was, or people complaining about how it has a couple movement abilities locked behind a skill tree, or people talking about how EA doesnt make original games anymore. And I get that position on paper, since Mirror's Edge: Catalyst came out right in the middle of the ps4 generation when open worlds were everywhere in AAA and every game seemed to have an obligatory skill tree regardless of whether it added anything of value. I can't blame people seeing a sequel to a really tight, linear, level based game going open world and throwing up their hands about Trends and Bandwagons.
But here's the thing. This game is barely an open world in the Ubisoft sense or the GTA sense. Rather, I think it has a lot more in common with the Metroidvania genre.
Mirror's Edge is about parkour, or free running, in a dystopian future. Everything about the gameplay and theming is centered on these two ideas. What this means for its "open world" design is that you have several decently sized but not huge sections of city, largely rooftops, interiors of buildings, some infrastructural installations, and a construction site, that is all there to facilitate free, expressive movement, often while escaping from The Cops. No matter what route you take, you are always pushed to engage with the detailed and active parkour mechanics. This isn't like the other big Parkour game, Assassin's Creed, where you just hold a button and occasionally another button while moving and your guy does it all automatically (not a knock tho, I love AC). Its stick-shift platforming and it's a ton of fun. The mechanics have been slightly refined from the original game and provide more ways to enter a state of rapid, flowing movement, or recover it if you fuck up. Every route you take becomes a chain of vaults, slides, jumps, wall-runs, impact rolls, and swings off pipes and flagpoles. New to this game is a shift move that works both as a dodge and a way to build, rebuild, or maintain momentum, that I found myself using in a way that almost simulated the rhythmic, controlled breathing of distance running. Tying it all together is the absolutely unparalleled design of full-body presence in its first person viewpoint, where it not only shows your body when you look down but actually makes it feel like you're inhabiting and moving in it, with the weight and momentum and grace of an athlete in motion, instead of just a floating camera with arms like so many other first person games. There are honestly very few AAA games that care about detailed, flavorful movement mechanics to this degree.
The combat is vastly improved from the first game, where clunky fighting or shooting segments often brought the game's beautiful momentum to a screeching halt. In this one, you can no longer use guns, thank god, so its all punching(light attacks) and kicking(heavy attacks). The new shift-dodge means you can more easily avoid damage, and also get behind them to do extra damage or kick them off ledges. But the key to combat is traversal attacks, which is when you attack while doing parkour. Light ones do less damage but preserve your momentum, so they're good for getting enemies out of your way while escaping, or for setting them up for a knockout from a stronger heavy traversal attack. These attacks are snappy and well-animated, and the combat is actually quite satisfying once you get the hang of incorporating parkour into it. There are several enemy types that all require slightly different tactics, so it keeps things from getting stale. The combat is also very frequently optional; you can often simply bowl them over and get the heck out of there instead.
The game does contain a skill tree, but it is honestly quite unobtrusive. It has 3 parts: movement, combat, and gear, and 80% of the movement tree is unlocked already at the start of the game, with the majority of the rest of the actual parkour mechanics easily unlocked in an hour or two of play. The rest of it is all combat skills, damage or defense upgrades, and new gadgets. The gadgets you actually just get from story progression, and they give you new movement abilities that open up new paths and new areas as the story progresses. Its not quite as free-form in its exploration as traditional Metroidvanias, and there's no sequence breaking due to the mission-based story, but it still has that feeling of the world gradually unfolding as your abilities grow. The map contains some of the typical open-world collectables and busywork missions, which are usually time trials, timed deliveries, or small combat challenges followed by escapes. They're fun enough to do, but can be safely ignored without consequence if you aren't interested or just want a more tightly paced game. The story missions themselves, and the character-given major sidequests, are all very solid and bring you to a variety of more linear, contained levels scattered around the city. This stuff is classic Mirror's Edge, and where the game shines brightest. I especially liked the Art Museum level and the under-construction skyscraper you have to sabotage for the mafia.
Like the original game, Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a real looker. It paints its world in splashes of vivid color against stark, sterile white and polished glass. The use of color is a bit more restrained here compared to the first game, but its still very effective. Sometimes you slam open a door from the blindingly white rooftops and are blasted with the most incredible shade of green you've ever seen in a game as you sprint through an office corridor to the closest exit. Huge video billboards or displays cover buildings, with constantly shifting advertisements or news reports lighting up the night. It feels lightly futuristic and dystopian in a way that balances mundane believablility with stylized hyper-reality really well. There are some really lovingly crafted service corridors, corporate office buildings, and infrastructural facilities; mundane places transformed and made stranger by the context of how you move through them and why, which is something I always love to see in games (see also: INFRA, for the ultimate perfection of this aesthetic in games). The sound design is quite immersive, and makes you feel the speed and physical exertion involved in everything you do. The music on the other hand is only OK, as it serves the atmosphere and action well, but isn't especially memorable. They commissioned a pretty solid CHVRCHES song but bafflingly, don't even use it at all other than in a jukebox in the hideout. It doesn't even play over the credits! Why even commission it then!!
The narrative is fine. It's not like poorly executed, but its nothing new either. Kinda feels like a middling TV show from that time period. It provides a solid enough framework for a bunch of cool levels, so I guess it did its job. It is at least, better than the absolutely atrocious storytelling from the original game with its e-surance cutscenes and barely sketched characters. The characters here feel like people with a history in this world, and the presentation is solid, it just lacks a certain extra spark. Even so, it's well-paced and doesn't overstay its welcome by any means.
Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is a seriously underrated game. It doesn't quite hit the transcendent highs the original does, but it also comes nowhere near that game's very low low points either. It is simply a good time, and it really deserved better than the low sales and critical dismissal it seems to have gotten when it came out. If you like deep first person movement I highly recommend it.
But here's the thing. This game is barely an open world in the Ubisoft sense or the GTA sense. Rather, I think it has a lot more in common with the Metroidvania genre.
Mirror's Edge is about parkour, or free running, in a dystopian future. Everything about the gameplay and theming is centered on these two ideas. What this means for its "open world" design is that you have several decently sized but not huge sections of city, largely rooftops, interiors of buildings, some infrastructural installations, and a construction site, that is all there to facilitate free, expressive movement, often while escaping from The Cops. No matter what route you take, you are always pushed to engage with the detailed and active parkour mechanics. This isn't like the other big Parkour game, Assassin's Creed, where you just hold a button and occasionally another button while moving and your guy does it all automatically (not a knock tho, I love AC). Its stick-shift platforming and it's a ton of fun. The mechanics have been slightly refined from the original game and provide more ways to enter a state of rapid, flowing movement, or recover it if you fuck up. Every route you take becomes a chain of vaults, slides, jumps, wall-runs, impact rolls, and swings off pipes and flagpoles. New to this game is a shift move that works both as a dodge and a way to build, rebuild, or maintain momentum, that I found myself using in a way that almost simulated the rhythmic, controlled breathing of distance running. Tying it all together is the absolutely unparalleled design of full-body presence in its first person viewpoint, where it not only shows your body when you look down but actually makes it feel like you're inhabiting and moving in it, with the weight and momentum and grace of an athlete in motion, instead of just a floating camera with arms like so many other first person games. There are honestly very few AAA games that care about detailed, flavorful movement mechanics to this degree.
The combat is vastly improved from the first game, where clunky fighting or shooting segments often brought the game's beautiful momentum to a screeching halt. In this one, you can no longer use guns, thank god, so its all punching(light attacks) and kicking(heavy attacks). The new shift-dodge means you can more easily avoid damage, and also get behind them to do extra damage or kick them off ledges. But the key to combat is traversal attacks, which is when you attack while doing parkour. Light ones do less damage but preserve your momentum, so they're good for getting enemies out of your way while escaping, or for setting them up for a knockout from a stronger heavy traversal attack. These attacks are snappy and well-animated, and the combat is actually quite satisfying once you get the hang of incorporating parkour into it. There are several enemy types that all require slightly different tactics, so it keeps things from getting stale. The combat is also very frequently optional; you can often simply bowl them over and get the heck out of there instead.
The game does contain a skill tree, but it is honestly quite unobtrusive. It has 3 parts: movement, combat, and gear, and 80% of the movement tree is unlocked already at the start of the game, with the majority of the rest of the actual parkour mechanics easily unlocked in an hour or two of play. The rest of it is all combat skills, damage or defense upgrades, and new gadgets. The gadgets you actually just get from story progression, and they give you new movement abilities that open up new paths and new areas as the story progresses. Its not quite as free-form in its exploration as traditional Metroidvanias, and there's no sequence breaking due to the mission-based story, but it still has that feeling of the world gradually unfolding as your abilities grow. The map contains some of the typical open-world collectables and busywork missions, which are usually time trials, timed deliveries, or small combat challenges followed by escapes. They're fun enough to do, but can be safely ignored without consequence if you aren't interested or just want a more tightly paced game. The story missions themselves, and the character-given major sidequests, are all very solid and bring you to a variety of more linear, contained levels scattered around the city. This stuff is classic Mirror's Edge, and where the game shines brightest. I especially liked the Art Museum level and the under-construction skyscraper you have to sabotage for the mafia.
Like the original game, Mirror's Edge Catalyst is a real looker. It paints its world in splashes of vivid color against stark, sterile white and polished glass. The use of color is a bit more restrained here compared to the first game, but its still very effective. Sometimes you slam open a door from the blindingly white rooftops and are blasted with the most incredible shade of green you've ever seen in a game as you sprint through an office corridor to the closest exit. Huge video billboards or displays cover buildings, with constantly shifting advertisements or news reports lighting up the night. It feels lightly futuristic and dystopian in a way that balances mundane believablility with stylized hyper-reality really well. There are some really lovingly crafted service corridors, corporate office buildings, and infrastructural facilities; mundane places transformed and made stranger by the context of how you move through them and why, which is something I always love to see in games (see also: INFRA, for the ultimate perfection of this aesthetic in games). The sound design is quite immersive, and makes you feel the speed and physical exertion involved in everything you do. The music on the other hand is only OK, as it serves the atmosphere and action well, but isn't especially memorable. They commissioned a pretty solid CHVRCHES song but bafflingly, don't even use it at all other than in a jukebox in the hideout. It doesn't even play over the credits! Why even commission it then!!
The narrative is fine. It's not like poorly executed, but its nothing new either. Kinda feels like a middling TV show from that time period. It provides a solid enough framework for a bunch of cool levels, so I guess it did its job. It is at least, better than the absolutely atrocious storytelling from the original game with its e-surance cutscenes and barely sketched characters. The characters here feel like people with a history in this world, and the presentation is solid, it just lacks a certain extra spark. Even so, it's well-paced and doesn't overstay its welcome by any means.
Mirror's Edge: Catalyst is a seriously underrated game. It doesn't quite hit the transcendent highs the original does, but it also comes nowhere near that game's very low low points either. It is simply a good time, and it really deserved better than the low sales and critical dismissal it seems to have gotten when it came out. If you like deep first person movement I highly recommend it.
2023
This review contains spoilers
Pikmin 4 is a fantastically well made game, it looks incredible, it's bursting with ideas and is a lot of fun to play, but it has a sort of weird relationship to its status as a sequel to the previous 3 pikmin games.
Pikmin 4 makes a pretty rough first impression. The tutorial is very long, limited in player agency, poorly paced, and egregiously, overbearingly talkative in that old way that you would have hoped nintendo would have learned not to do by now. It is also immediately apparent that some kind of weird retcon is happening with the previous games; Pikmin 4 acts as if none of them have happened, and also contains elements and characters from each of them. It sort of feels like they were afraid to move beyond including Olimar, since he's the Brand Mascot, but also couldnt come up with a justification for his inclusion other than "Olimar crashed AGAIN, time to go rescue him." Its a real Modern Nintendo move, the same nintendo that wont let you ever play as Zelda cause Link is the hero and thats just the way it has to be, the same nintendo that wont allow mario characters to have more than a smidgen of individuality in Paper Mario anymore cause it would somehow compromise the purity of the Brand Identity. Alongside this is a shift in tone that does away with most of the melancholy, mystery and menace that remained in the series from the first two games. Its replaced by an optimistic, hopeful whimsy, where it doesn't want you to think about the brutal struggle for survival in a hostile environment, or the unknown fate of the former human inhabitants of the planet that built all these gardens and houses you explore and used to own the objects you collect. There are some body-horror-ish things in the game that raise some truly wild questions about the nature of pikmin, but the game seemingly doesnt even realize this because it does almost nothing with them narratively. It feels like they didnt even notice or care about the implications of what they had come up with. It is the least the Pikmin series has ever been interested in its own inherent weirdness.
But, once you are through the tutorial and the game begins to open up, what you have ahead of you is a genuinely clever, incredibly well designed puzzle game, that is a complete joy to explore. The main areas of the game are huge, theres a lot of them, and there's an excellent variety of modes of play that all feel quite different despite sharing the same basic gameplay. And it is more of a puzzle game than previous entries in the series; those elements were always there, but in Pikmin 4, the struggle for survival and resource management of Pikmin 1-2 takes a complete backseat to exploration and puzzle solving. This is framed in the game by the concept of Dandori, which is the art of efficiently organizing and executing tasks to achieve better results in less time. Its a much more compelling take on strategic multitasking than Pikmin 3's incredibly half-baked 3-captain approach, even if it sacrifices a lot of the larger-scale tension of the older games to get there.
This brings us to Pikmin 4's biggest addition, Oatchi the Rescue Dog. Oatchi is a bug eyed little freak and I love him. Oatchi plays the role of secondary captain, combat and labor backup, and mobile weapons platform. He also has huge staring eyes that he will make unbroken eye contact to NPCs with every time you talk to them. You can command Oatchi to do various things, you can ride him around and throw pikmin from his back or charge into things, or you can assume direct control of him and split away from your primary captain. Oatchi simplifies and streamlines a lot of things that were troublesome in the previous games, without limiting the game design very much, and that's an impressive feat. The simplicity actually enables the design to focus in on what's best about the multitasking approach, the actualization of Dandori, which neither Pikmin 2 or 3 achieved with their attempts at the same ideas.
At the start of each in-game day, you wake up at a hub where all the people you've rescued are hanging out, and from there you can talk to them, upgrade yourself and Oatchi, buy items, and go on missions. The primary mode of play is exploration of large environments, just like in the previous games, and this feeds into all the other modes. There are more of these big levels here than in previous games, and the levels themselves are huge and detailed. It was a real joy to discover them and explore all the nooks and crannies of each in search of treasure, dungeons, and castaways. They look genuinely amazing as well, especially for a switch game. The lighting and shadows as the day passes, the detailed and believable material and texture work, and the immense sense of scale (or feeling of being very tiny) really sells the setting and makes it feel tangible. The monsters are lovingly animated and the sound design is fantastic. Its the closest the series has gotten to feeling like those great stop-motion pikmin shorts nintendo produced way back when. Its kind of wild to think this game looks this nice on the same system where a much less visually ambitious game like pokemon scarlet struggles to run at all.
Pikmin 4 does dungeons better than Pikmin 2 did. They're all hand-designed this time instead of the janky half-procgen setup in that game, and feel like miniature puzzle challenges a bit like the shrines in BotW/TotK, but without being disconnected from the game setting like in BotW/TotK. They split the difference between puzzle and exploration really well, and dive into the mechanics tied to different pikmin types in more detail than the other modes.
Alongside the dungeons are the Dandori challenges and battles, where you are tasked with collecting objects, or collecting more objects than your opponents, as efficiently as possible in given a time limit. These are self-contained tests of skill where you don't bring in your own pikmin and instead have to use the ones given to you, so you in the more difficult ones you have to get pretty good at working effectively within limitations to get a good score, and thats a lot of fun to figure out.
The last mode of play is the Nighttime Expeditions, which are all about defending a base from a stream of hungry monsters. You have to use glow pikmin for these, which are sort of an all purpose super ghost pikmin. The harder ones can get pretty frantic as you try to head off multiple streams of beasts or defend two bases at once, and they're pretty fun as a result.
All of these modes relate to the overall goal of rescuing all the castaways, and due to them being interconnected in key ways it very smoothly incentives you to change up which ones you're engaging with as you play. Despite being fairly open-ended and not enforcing a particular order of doing things besides new areas unlocking at certain treasure score thresholds, it feels very well paced. Its a brilliantly put together framework for progression.
As a game it's also fucking huge in a way i was not expecting. There is a lot going on in this game and it keeps going on, and going on, long after you expect it to end. But it maintains such a high quality that it never feels like it's overstayed its welcome. It is bursting with gameplay ideas and is very enthusiastic about sharing them with you. I haven't even touched the mode that appears to be a miniature remake of Pikmin 1, timer and all, yet! its wild that something like that is even in there!! Its really a feast of a game.
So once you get past the weird tonal and narrative choices and the generally softer-edged feel of it all, Pikmin 4 might genuinely be the best in the series from a game design standpoint. Its a bit too easy until the endgame finally ramps up, its a bit less strange and compelling tonally, and the characters talk way too much, but its such a joy to play that it overcomes those flaws and then some.
Pikmin 4 makes a pretty rough first impression. The tutorial is very long, limited in player agency, poorly paced, and egregiously, overbearingly talkative in that old way that you would have hoped nintendo would have learned not to do by now. It is also immediately apparent that some kind of weird retcon is happening with the previous games; Pikmin 4 acts as if none of them have happened, and also contains elements and characters from each of them. It sort of feels like they were afraid to move beyond including Olimar, since he's the Brand Mascot, but also couldnt come up with a justification for his inclusion other than "Olimar crashed AGAIN, time to go rescue him." Its a real Modern Nintendo move, the same nintendo that wont let you ever play as Zelda cause Link is the hero and thats just the way it has to be, the same nintendo that wont allow mario characters to have more than a smidgen of individuality in Paper Mario anymore cause it would somehow compromise the purity of the Brand Identity. Alongside this is a shift in tone that does away with most of the melancholy, mystery and menace that remained in the series from the first two games. Its replaced by an optimistic, hopeful whimsy, where it doesn't want you to think about the brutal struggle for survival in a hostile environment, or the unknown fate of the former human inhabitants of the planet that built all these gardens and houses you explore and used to own the objects you collect. There are some body-horror-ish things in the game that raise some truly wild questions about the nature of pikmin, but the game seemingly doesnt even realize this because it does almost nothing with them narratively. It feels like they didnt even notice or care about the implications of what they had come up with. It is the least the Pikmin series has ever been interested in its own inherent weirdness.
But, once you are through the tutorial and the game begins to open up, what you have ahead of you is a genuinely clever, incredibly well designed puzzle game, that is a complete joy to explore. The main areas of the game are huge, theres a lot of them, and there's an excellent variety of modes of play that all feel quite different despite sharing the same basic gameplay. And it is more of a puzzle game than previous entries in the series; those elements were always there, but in Pikmin 4, the struggle for survival and resource management of Pikmin 1-2 takes a complete backseat to exploration and puzzle solving. This is framed in the game by the concept of Dandori, which is the art of efficiently organizing and executing tasks to achieve better results in less time. Its a much more compelling take on strategic multitasking than Pikmin 3's incredibly half-baked 3-captain approach, even if it sacrifices a lot of the larger-scale tension of the older games to get there.
This brings us to Pikmin 4's biggest addition, Oatchi the Rescue Dog. Oatchi is a bug eyed little freak and I love him. Oatchi plays the role of secondary captain, combat and labor backup, and mobile weapons platform. He also has huge staring eyes that he will make unbroken eye contact to NPCs with every time you talk to them. You can command Oatchi to do various things, you can ride him around and throw pikmin from his back or charge into things, or you can assume direct control of him and split away from your primary captain. Oatchi simplifies and streamlines a lot of things that were troublesome in the previous games, without limiting the game design very much, and that's an impressive feat. The simplicity actually enables the design to focus in on what's best about the multitasking approach, the actualization of Dandori, which neither Pikmin 2 or 3 achieved with their attempts at the same ideas.
At the start of each in-game day, you wake up at a hub where all the people you've rescued are hanging out, and from there you can talk to them, upgrade yourself and Oatchi, buy items, and go on missions. The primary mode of play is exploration of large environments, just like in the previous games, and this feeds into all the other modes. There are more of these big levels here than in previous games, and the levels themselves are huge and detailed. It was a real joy to discover them and explore all the nooks and crannies of each in search of treasure, dungeons, and castaways. They look genuinely amazing as well, especially for a switch game. The lighting and shadows as the day passes, the detailed and believable material and texture work, and the immense sense of scale (or feeling of being very tiny) really sells the setting and makes it feel tangible. The monsters are lovingly animated and the sound design is fantastic. Its the closest the series has gotten to feeling like those great stop-motion pikmin shorts nintendo produced way back when. Its kind of wild to think this game looks this nice on the same system where a much less visually ambitious game like pokemon scarlet struggles to run at all.
Pikmin 4 does dungeons better than Pikmin 2 did. They're all hand-designed this time instead of the janky half-procgen setup in that game, and feel like miniature puzzle challenges a bit like the shrines in BotW/TotK, but without being disconnected from the game setting like in BotW/TotK. They split the difference between puzzle and exploration really well, and dive into the mechanics tied to different pikmin types in more detail than the other modes.
Alongside the dungeons are the Dandori challenges and battles, where you are tasked with collecting objects, or collecting more objects than your opponents, as efficiently as possible in given a time limit. These are self-contained tests of skill where you don't bring in your own pikmin and instead have to use the ones given to you, so you in the more difficult ones you have to get pretty good at working effectively within limitations to get a good score, and thats a lot of fun to figure out.
The last mode of play is the Nighttime Expeditions, which are all about defending a base from a stream of hungry monsters. You have to use glow pikmin for these, which are sort of an all purpose super ghost pikmin. The harder ones can get pretty frantic as you try to head off multiple streams of beasts or defend two bases at once, and they're pretty fun as a result.
All of these modes relate to the overall goal of rescuing all the castaways, and due to them being interconnected in key ways it very smoothly incentives you to change up which ones you're engaging with as you play. Despite being fairly open-ended and not enforcing a particular order of doing things besides new areas unlocking at certain treasure score thresholds, it feels very well paced. Its a brilliantly put together framework for progression.
As a game it's also fucking huge in a way i was not expecting. There is a lot going on in this game and it keeps going on, and going on, long after you expect it to end. But it maintains such a high quality that it never feels like it's overstayed its welcome. It is bursting with gameplay ideas and is very enthusiastic about sharing them with you. I haven't even touched the mode that appears to be a miniature remake of Pikmin 1, timer and all, yet! its wild that something like that is even in there!! Its really a feast of a game.
So once you get past the weird tonal and narrative choices and the generally softer-edged feel of it all, Pikmin 4 might genuinely be the best in the series from a game design standpoint. Its a bit too easy until the endgame finally ramps up, its a bit less strange and compelling tonally, and the characters talk way too much, but its such a joy to play that it overcomes those flaws and then some.
2023
That caked up bunny-goat-cat woman really has some radical moves. This is one of the few 3D metroidvanias that actually captures the feeling of 2D metroidvania exploration. Does 3D Castlevania better than any of the actual 3D Castlevanias.... its Castlevania 64, but good (and I say this as a pretty big fan of Castlevania 64). The movement is super rich and expressive, and the level design is both interesting to explore and surprisingly evocative considering how simple it is visually. The soundtrack is all bangers. Its just a really well made little game and I liked it a lot!
2023
For a playable ad its actually not too bad of a game. Hopefully those GB Studio devs got that big clown money for this one.
Not as good as McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure for the Sega Genesis though, but then again what is
Not as good as McDonald's Treasure Land Adventure for the Sega Genesis though, but then again what is
Assassin's Creed Unity is a real mess of a game. The first half of it makes you start to think maybe its underappreciated and doesn't deserve its reputation as a bad, buggy, unfinished game. Then the second half throws nearly all of that away.
First of all its ridiculously good looking coming from ACIV Black Flag, like just a staggering jump in visual detail. The density of the environment, the gorgeously naturalistic lighting, the teeming crowds of truly huge numbers of citizens, and especially the interiors of buildings, of which there are many. Some of those interiors, especially in the important buildings like the palaces and chateaus and the like, are so finely crafted and detailed they're still kind of jaw dropping 9 years later. The character models mostly look excellent too and are really well animated. The city is dense with paths over roofs, through chaotic streets, and into and back out of buildings, and its genuinely very fun to move through most of the time. There are also a couple animus sequences set in Paris in other time periods as well that make for pretty cool setpieces. The visual presentation and design of the city of Paris itself is the only thing that I don't really have any major issue with, and it's what kept me going through the game as it gradually collapsed around me.
The parkour is always a huge part of AC, and in Unity it at first seems like a big improvement, as does the combat and stealth. Its all incredibly well animated, and the parkour now has 3 modes: neutral, ascending, and descending. This, in theory, should give you a lot more control over movement across the more complex cityscape of paris, and sometimes, it does. Descending in particular is a great addition and feels really cool. When it works. Unfortunately you get stuck on objects or climb on ones you didn't mean to far more in Unity than in any AC game since the first one.You can be in the middle of the coolest looking and feeling chase or escape in the series yet, and then some tiny piece of furniture, or roof gutter, or whatever will just bring it all to a screeching halt. It's so close to being great, but it has just enough jank that it ends up falling way short of the parkour in AC3 and 4
The combat and stealth also seem really solid at first, but they have a major problem: they fall apart completely as the difficulty ramps up. Early on, when its easy, the combat feels weighty and satisfyingly lethal, but still responsive, and the stealth is more detailed than before, with an increased emphasis on crowds and verticality. But they seemingly could not figure out, or did not have time to figure out, how to make those mechanics work for more challenging content. High level enemies parry almost every attack, while their off-screen buddies shoot you to death with bullets that instakill you if you are at all wounded, as you get locked into slow recovery animations. Somehow they regressed to the worst aspects of AC2's combat, and then made it even worse. The stealth on the other hand sometimes stops functioning in later levels because they just put 1000 guards everywhere facing in every direction, many of which dont ever patrol or turn around. The cover system is busted as hell and 50% of the time will cause you to clip into the wall or just get stuck in between animations for 20+ seconds at a time when you try to use it. Many of your tools barely work to manipulate guards. So often in later levels your options become either find the exact specific path they want you to take past all the guards (not well telegraphed, if it even exists in a given mission), or just forget stealth and brute force your way through with the extremely tedious combat. Its a vicious cycle of frustrating tedium.
The story too, is a pathetic parade of squandered potential, missed opportunity, baffling choices, and incoherent and utterly inert plotting. They made an assassins creed game set in the french revolution where the assassins, the secret organization dedicated to changing the world through murder, decide to be radical centrists and not get involved in politics. Except when inevitably the characters, seemingly begrudgingly on the writers' part, do get involved, they are weirdly favorable to the fucking king and other nobles rather than the revolutionaries. The story itself otherwise has nearly nothing to do with the actual revolution, instead being a personal melodrama in which French store brand ezio auditore and his osananajimi (who is a templar, something they manage to wring nearly no tension or intrigue or conflict out of) who he's in love with must find her father's killer. The revolution is constantly "happening" in the background, with plenty of protesting crowds and other details like that, but that's basically all that it is: set dressing. Many of the major events happen offscreen, and the major figures of the revolution are barely present except to be plot devices for the largely unrelated story sequences. Especially after the honestly surprisingly sharp political viewpoint that AC3 had of the American revolution, it's truly baffling how much they managed to fumble such an overflowing cornucopia of storytelling potential. It's like going to a fancy French bakery and being served wonderbread instead of the nice buttery croissant with chocolate and almonds in it that you thought you were going to get.
The most baffling decision of all though, is that if you play with the English voice acting, all of these French people, in Paris, France, during the French Revolution, in a game made by France's largest game development company, speak with EXTREMELY BRITISH ACCENTS. It is so painful to hear all these cockney fucking voices speaking about robespierre and the Notre Dame and other things of an extremely French nature. It comes off like they were ashamed of their own Frenchness, too embarrassed about it to show the world, too afraid an American who watched too much TV during the bush administration might make a cringey surrender joke at them or something. In the AC2 games Ezio and co had goofy Italian accents! In AC3 Connor and his people spoke the actual Kanien'kéha language!! They had a variety of the usual pirate accents all over ACIV: Black Flag!!! But here, on their own home turf they wimped out and went with the generic British-as-foreigner voices you always see in Hollywood movies. Maybe they did deserve those surrender jokes from ol' Joe Sixpack after all.... they must be serving freedom fries over in the cafeteria at Ubisoft HQ. To combat this grotesque transgression against my ears and against the French people, I ended up changing the language of the voices to French, with English subtitles. This was a massive improvement to the presentation but it also meant that whatever dialogue didn't get subtitled, like nearly all incidental dialogue, or any time the subtitles conflicted with another UI element and didn't show up, I had no clue what they were saying. The funniest example of this was the final lines in the base game, which are said by the present day characters (who are barely there, this game, disappointingly, is the first one to barely include any present day segments) as the credits roll. But they apparently forgot to allow subtitles during the credits so literally for the last lines in the story, the concluding statement of the whole mess, I had no clue what they were saying. What an appropriate ending to a very foolish game.
The whole game in general has that feeling of being sloppy and unfinished. There are visual bugs and glitches, janky NPC behaviors, constant aggressive LoD pop-in visible on screen at nearly all times. You can get stuck on or inside of objects at a moments notice. The cloth physics are super busted and need a mod to restore them. Sometimes when you go to pick a lock it takes 10 seconds to start the minigame. UI elements are constantly overlapping each other rendering important info unreadable while you wait for them to fade. Many common events and actions have no sound effects to go along with them. The story is a fucking embarrassment. Its really a shame. And this is apparently after a campaign of extensive patching and bugfixes! Turns out releasing a AAA game series on a yearly schedule is unsustainable!!! Not even Nostradamus himself could have foreseen this turn of events!!!
There is the Dead Kings DLC though, which serves as a sort of epilogue to the main story. Dead Kings is pretty good! It takes place in a small self-contained mini-open world and has a slightly spookier feel. Unlike the main game it actually feels polished and complete, with a consistent tone and an OK story arc (still barely related to the revolution though lol). The gameplay additions and changes work really well and actually mitigate some of the problems in the base game. It actually makes some pretty cool use of the catacombs, which the base game had but did nearly nothing with! The sidequests in it are actually kind of worth doing! So it was nice to play that and have it kind of wash the bad taste of the last like 1/3rd of the base game out of my mouth, but at the same time the fact that it presented a vision of how good the base game could have been if they had actually finished it and had been able to pull together any level of coherency to the proceedings, actually kind of bummed me out too, it just makes the base game look even worse in comparison.
AC Unity is like watching a parkour master from inner-city Paris pound a monster energy, trip over their own untied shoelaces while going for a sick leap onto a flying buttress of a 1000 year old cathedral, and fall 68 feet to the cobblestones below, breaking 203 of their 206 bones on impact. And then as the ambulance is carting them away, still somehow alive, they muster the last of their strength to whisper, in a cockney accent: "Louis XVI was actually a really nice and dignified guy and it was honestly really mean of the brutally impoverished starving peasants he was oppressing to break into his house and guillotine his head off. I bet you never considered that!"
First of all its ridiculously good looking coming from ACIV Black Flag, like just a staggering jump in visual detail. The density of the environment, the gorgeously naturalistic lighting, the teeming crowds of truly huge numbers of citizens, and especially the interiors of buildings, of which there are many. Some of those interiors, especially in the important buildings like the palaces and chateaus and the like, are so finely crafted and detailed they're still kind of jaw dropping 9 years later. The character models mostly look excellent too and are really well animated. The city is dense with paths over roofs, through chaotic streets, and into and back out of buildings, and its genuinely very fun to move through most of the time. There are also a couple animus sequences set in Paris in other time periods as well that make for pretty cool setpieces. The visual presentation and design of the city of Paris itself is the only thing that I don't really have any major issue with, and it's what kept me going through the game as it gradually collapsed around me.
The parkour is always a huge part of AC, and in Unity it at first seems like a big improvement, as does the combat and stealth. Its all incredibly well animated, and the parkour now has 3 modes: neutral, ascending, and descending. This, in theory, should give you a lot more control over movement across the more complex cityscape of paris, and sometimes, it does. Descending in particular is a great addition and feels really cool. When it works. Unfortunately you get stuck on objects or climb on ones you didn't mean to far more in Unity than in any AC game since the first one.You can be in the middle of the coolest looking and feeling chase or escape in the series yet, and then some tiny piece of furniture, or roof gutter, or whatever will just bring it all to a screeching halt. It's so close to being great, but it has just enough jank that it ends up falling way short of the parkour in AC3 and 4
The combat and stealth also seem really solid at first, but they have a major problem: they fall apart completely as the difficulty ramps up. Early on, when its easy, the combat feels weighty and satisfyingly lethal, but still responsive, and the stealth is more detailed than before, with an increased emphasis on crowds and verticality. But they seemingly could not figure out, or did not have time to figure out, how to make those mechanics work for more challenging content. High level enemies parry almost every attack, while their off-screen buddies shoot you to death with bullets that instakill you if you are at all wounded, as you get locked into slow recovery animations. Somehow they regressed to the worst aspects of AC2's combat, and then made it even worse. The stealth on the other hand sometimes stops functioning in later levels because they just put 1000 guards everywhere facing in every direction, many of which dont ever patrol or turn around. The cover system is busted as hell and 50% of the time will cause you to clip into the wall or just get stuck in between animations for 20+ seconds at a time when you try to use it. Many of your tools barely work to manipulate guards. So often in later levels your options become either find the exact specific path they want you to take past all the guards (not well telegraphed, if it even exists in a given mission), or just forget stealth and brute force your way through with the extremely tedious combat. Its a vicious cycle of frustrating tedium.
The story too, is a pathetic parade of squandered potential, missed opportunity, baffling choices, and incoherent and utterly inert plotting. They made an assassins creed game set in the french revolution where the assassins, the secret organization dedicated to changing the world through murder, decide to be radical centrists and not get involved in politics. Except when inevitably the characters, seemingly begrudgingly on the writers' part, do get involved, they are weirdly favorable to the fucking king and other nobles rather than the revolutionaries. The story itself otherwise has nearly nothing to do with the actual revolution, instead being a personal melodrama in which French store brand ezio auditore and his osananajimi (who is a templar, something they manage to wring nearly no tension or intrigue or conflict out of) who he's in love with must find her father's killer. The revolution is constantly "happening" in the background, with plenty of protesting crowds and other details like that, but that's basically all that it is: set dressing. Many of the major events happen offscreen, and the major figures of the revolution are barely present except to be plot devices for the largely unrelated story sequences. Especially after the honestly surprisingly sharp political viewpoint that AC3 had of the American revolution, it's truly baffling how much they managed to fumble such an overflowing cornucopia of storytelling potential. It's like going to a fancy French bakery and being served wonderbread instead of the nice buttery croissant with chocolate and almonds in it that you thought you were going to get.
The most baffling decision of all though, is that if you play with the English voice acting, all of these French people, in Paris, France, during the French Revolution, in a game made by France's largest game development company, speak with EXTREMELY BRITISH ACCENTS. It is so painful to hear all these cockney fucking voices speaking about robespierre and the Notre Dame and other things of an extremely French nature. It comes off like they were ashamed of their own Frenchness, too embarrassed about it to show the world, too afraid an American who watched too much TV during the bush administration might make a cringey surrender joke at them or something. In the AC2 games Ezio and co had goofy Italian accents! In AC3 Connor and his people spoke the actual Kanien'kéha language!! They had a variety of the usual pirate accents all over ACIV: Black Flag!!! But here, on their own home turf they wimped out and went with the generic British-as-foreigner voices you always see in Hollywood movies. Maybe they did deserve those surrender jokes from ol' Joe Sixpack after all.... they must be serving freedom fries over in the cafeteria at Ubisoft HQ. To combat this grotesque transgression against my ears and against the French people, I ended up changing the language of the voices to French, with English subtitles. This was a massive improvement to the presentation but it also meant that whatever dialogue didn't get subtitled, like nearly all incidental dialogue, or any time the subtitles conflicted with another UI element and didn't show up, I had no clue what they were saying. The funniest example of this was the final lines in the base game, which are said by the present day characters (who are barely there, this game, disappointingly, is the first one to barely include any present day segments) as the credits roll. But they apparently forgot to allow subtitles during the credits so literally for the last lines in the story, the concluding statement of the whole mess, I had no clue what they were saying. What an appropriate ending to a very foolish game.
The whole game in general has that feeling of being sloppy and unfinished. There are visual bugs and glitches, janky NPC behaviors, constant aggressive LoD pop-in visible on screen at nearly all times. You can get stuck on or inside of objects at a moments notice. The cloth physics are super busted and need a mod to restore them. Sometimes when you go to pick a lock it takes 10 seconds to start the minigame. UI elements are constantly overlapping each other rendering important info unreadable while you wait for them to fade. Many common events and actions have no sound effects to go along with them. The story is a fucking embarrassment. Its really a shame. And this is apparently after a campaign of extensive patching and bugfixes! Turns out releasing a AAA game series on a yearly schedule is unsustainable!!! Not even Nostradamus himself could have foreseen this turn of events!!!
There is the Dead Kings DLC though, which serves as a sort of epilogue to the main story. Dead Kings is pretty good! It takes place in a small self-contained mini-open world and has a slightly spookier feel. Unlike the main game it actually feels polished and complete, with a consistent tone and an OK story arc (still barely related to the revolution though lol). The gameplay additions and changes work really well and actually mitigate some of the problems in the base game. It actually makes some pretty cool use of the catacombs, which the base game had but did nearly nothing with! The sidequests in it are actually kind of worth doing! So it was nice to play that and have it kind of wash the bad taste of the last like 1/3rd of the base game out of my mouth, but at the same time the fact that it presented a vision of how good the base game could have been if they had actually finished it and had been able to pull together any level of coherency to the proceedings, actually kind of bummed me out too, it just makes the base game look even worse in comparison.
AC Unity is like watching a parkour master from inner-city Paris pound a monster energy, trip over their own untied shoelaces while going for a sick leap onto a flying buttress of a 1000 year old cathedral, and fall 68 feet to the cobblestones below, breaking 203 of their 206 bones on impact. And then as the ambulance is carting them away, still somehow alive, they muster the last of their strength to whisper, in a cockney accent: "Louis XVI was actually a really nice and dignified guy and it was honestly really mean of the brutally impoverished starving peasants he was oppressing to break into his house and guillotine his head off. I bet you never considered that!"
2023
This is a real two steps forward, one step back kind of game. It improves on Pikmin 1's mechanics in almost every way, especially with the Pikmin's AI and pathfinding (though its still not perfect), it looks and sounds excellent, and the level design of the surface areas is great. The issues come in when you enter the dungeons.
On paper the idea of a pikmin dungeon crawler with a big emphasis on endurance through smart strategy and resources management is a pretty interesting idea, but the execution is really uneven. The lack of a timer means that the pressure of there being consequences from inefficient play, or for getting careless and losing pikmin, exists almost entirely just in the dungeons. The easier ones are a little too easy, and the difficult ones can feel a bit cheap and unfair. Their semi-procedurally generated nature means the level design can be very iffy in terms of encounter design placement of treasure, and the later ones tend to pull a lot of "Surprise! Something randomly fell from the sky and will instantly kill dozens of your pikmin if you're unlucky or weren't expecting it" type of tricks. There are a lot of pointless gates with nothing but blank walls behind them. The fact that you can only get white and purple pikmin in dungeons is also pretty annoying, because if you lose a bunch it can be really tedious to get more of them. Purples especially can only be reliably gained through egregious amounts of grinding in very specific dungeons. It all feels a bit underbaked. The dungeons arent all bad, and most of them have a couple more hand-designed floors that stand out, plus there's the Submerged Castle with its highly terrifying gimmick. But the dungeon issues are enough to drag the game down a bit.
Having 2 captains is a good idea, but it ultimately doesn't actually do much with this mechanic since there's no way to tell them to go somewhere on their own other than having them lie down so pikmin bring them back to the ship. Occasionally you have to position them to relay-throw pikmin up a series of ledges, or weight-activated platforms, but it again, feels a bit underbaked.
One of my favorite parts of Pikmin 2 though is the creature design, and the piklopedia. The descriptions of all the creatures and items from Olimar and the ship's AI add a ton of flavor to the world. The creatures themselves are much more varied than the first game, with plenty of new ones and some variants of old ones. Some are only seen once or twice, and the illusion of a larger ecosystem is very well crafted. Their animation and sound design is fantastic and strikes a perfect balance of cute, weird, and upsetting. Shoutout to what a horrifying concept bulbmin are.
When i was a kid, I liked this sequel more than Pikmin 1, because it felt like a vast world full of hidden secrets and dangers. And it does still evoke some of that feeling even now! But I think in trying to go bigger they created a lush, alive world to explore but spread themselves too thin and lost a lot of the first game's tension and the magic it created.
On paper the idea of a pikmin dungeon crawler with a big emphasis on endurance through smart strategy and resources management is a pretty interesting idea, but the execution is really uneven. The lack of a timer means that the pressure of there being consequences from inefficient play, or for getting careless and losing pikmin, exists almost entirely just in the dungeons. The easier ones are a little too easy, and the difficult ones can feel a bit cheap and unfair. Their semi-procedurally generated nature means the level design can be very iffy in terms of encounter design placement of treasure, and the later ones tend to pull a lot of "Surprise! Something randomly fell from the sky and will instantly kill dozens of your pikmin if you're unlucky or weren't expecting it" type of tricks. There are a lot of pointless gates with nothing but blank walls behind them. The fact that you can only get white and purple pikmin in dungeons is also pretty annoying, because if you lose a bunch it can be really tedious to get more of them. Purples especially can only be reliably gained through egregious amounts of grinding in very specific dungeons. It all feels a bit underbaked. The dungeons arent all bad, and most of them have a couple more hand-designed floors that stand out, plus there's the Submerged Castle with its highly terrifying gimmick. But the dungeon issues are enough to drag the game down a bit.
Having 2 captains is a good idea, but it ultimately doesn't actually do much with this mechanic since there's no way to tell them to go somewhere on their own other than having them lie down so pikmin bring them back to the ship. Occasionally you have to position them to relay-throw pikmin up a series of ledges, or weight-activated platforms, but it again, feels a bit underbaked.
One of my favorite parts of Pikmin 2 though is the creature design, and the piklopedia. The descriptions of all the creatures and items from Olimar and the ship's AI add a ton of flavor to the world. The creatures themselves are much more varied than the first game, with plenty of new ones and some variants of old ones. Some are only seen once or twice, and the illusion of a larger ecosystem is very well crafted. Their animation and sound design is fantastic and strikes a perfect balance of cute, weird, and upsetting. Shoutout to what a horrifying concept bulbmin are.
When i was a kid, I liked this sequel more than Pikmin 1, because it felt like a vast world full of hidden secrets and dangers. And it does still evoke some of that feeling even now! But I think in trying to go bigger they created a lush, alive world to explore but spread themselves too thin and lost a lot of the first game's tension and the magic it created.
Game absolutely rips as always with Ys, though I think I liked this one the least out of the three Ys VI era games.
The level design was great, with wonderful pacing and a surprisingly good sense of scale at times. It took inspiration from its roots as a remake of a sidescrolling game and had some parts where it switched to pseudo sidescrolling perspective as well (long before Nier did the same thing! neat), and the platforming is a big step up from how it felt in Ys VI. The music was fantastic as always, it slaps so hard that it really keeps the momentum going as you sprint through each dungeon. The portrayal of small communities is always a highlight in Ys games, and this one is no different, and while it only has the one town this time, it does a good job of giving each resident of Redmont their own little story arc. The combat mostly felt better than Ys VI's did, with tighter control and more interesting abilities that integrate into your combos more smoothly, but the boss fights were a bit rough (occasionally more than a bit rough, like the final boss). The story was pretty standard stuff, but the addition of extremely hammy anime dub-esque voice acting helps elevate it a bit.
So while it was a super well-paced game game with great, simple-but-deep combat mechanics and a banger ost, it felt less like it had its own identity compared to Ys VI and Ys Origin. It is simply a good "one of these." but since no other action RPGs have the same energetic enthusiasm, the same chutzpah Ys does, it's still a great time to play.
The level design was great, with wonderful pacing and a surprisingly good sense of scale at times. It took inspiration from its roots as a remake of a sidescrolling game and had some parts where it switched to pseudo sidescrolling perspective as well (long before Nier did the same thing! neat), and the platforming is a big step up from how it felt in Ys VI. The music was fantastic as always, it slaps so hard that it really keeps the momentum going as you sprint through each dungeon. The portrayal of small communities is always a highlight in Ys games, and this one is no different, and while it only has the one town this time, it does a good job of giving each resident of Redmont their own little story arc. The combat mostly felt better than Ys VI's did, with tighter control and more interesting abilities that integrate into your combos more smoothly, but the boss fights were a bit rough (occasionally more than a bit rough, like the final boss). The story was pretty standard stuff, but the addition of extremely hammy anime dub-esque voice acting helps elevate it a bit.
So while it was a super well-paced game game with great, simple-but-deep combat mechanics and a banger ost, it felt less like it had its own identity compared to Ys VI and Ys Origin. It is simply a good "one of these." but since no other action RPGs have the same energetic enthusiasm, the same chutzpah Ys does, it's still a great time to play.
Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag is a fine time. It is enjoyable. Occasionally it aims higher than just that, and does some weird or unique things just like previous AC games did, but largely it is Ubisoft taking the incredibly ambitious and unusual foundation laid by Assassin's Creed III, and shaping it into a larger and more normal open world game. The lows are less low, but the highs are also less high. This is the first of the AC games where I started to feel like the modern Ubisoft formula, that dominated their game design during the PS4 generation, was a more significant presence in the structure of the game.
The coolest thing about ACIV is also the biggest departure from previous games: the ships and crew and what that enables. You are a pirate captain and you have your own ship which you can sail on the high seas as you please, from island to island, hunting for treasure, battling the English and Spanish fleets and plundering them, raiding forts, and so on and so forth. The ocean looks incredible, and the feel of the ships in motion is very physical and tactile. Wind and waves and weather all have a big impact on your navigability and perception of whats around you, and they did a good job of translating this to a much more dynamic open world setup from the highly scripted ship missions of ACIII. The English and Spanish fleets (and the occasional other pirate crew) will battle if they encounter each other, regardless of whether you are involved, which goes a long way to make the oceans feel more alive. The flow of ship battles from cannon fire and maneuvering, to boarding and fighting man-to man, is a bit simple, and gets repetitive by the end of the game. Still, it works for making you feel like a swashbuckling captain, and can feel pretty satisfying and exciting when it all comes together just right. Your crew also sings sea shanties as you sail, which are one of the collectables you can find, and you bet your ass i got all the sea shanties in the game. My favorites were "Farewell, Spanish Ladies" and "Fish in the Sea." but they're all great, love to sing with the lads about how much the ocean sucks and how horny we are for all the ladies we haven't seen for weeks.
You can upgrade your ship to have more cannons and armor, and a bigger crew, but aside from cannons most of the upgrades don't feel especially meaningful, either mechanically or visually. Part of this is that I never made enough money to get many of the cosmetic upgrades, cause they really want you to do a ship management mini-game to make money. It has mobile game style timers and can only be accessed while on the ship, so it is generally a pain in the ass to keep on top of while doing other stuff. The other way to make money is to grind ship battles, which No I will not do that Ubisoft. Because of this my ship was never strong enough to really take on one of the legendary boss ships.
On-foot, its an evolution of what ACIII was doing, and while the combat feels a little worse (swords will never be as cool as Connor's dual tomahawk fighting style, sorry Edward), it is otherwise a bit more polished. Stealth in particular is much better here and feels smoother in general. While it is a bit simpler and relies more on the stalking zones, it largely avoids the issues ACIII had where you could easily get caught by accident because you got caught on something or the AI was just excessively observant, or there was nowhere to hide. Accidental failure is less common in general in ACIV. It also does not do the awful thing ACIII did where whole squads of redcoats would spawn in offscreen when you got caught, so that's nice. All the gameplay systems of combat, movement, stealth, are working in harmony here more than they ever had in the series up to this point.
There are several medium-sized cities and a ton of smaller islands, some of which contain jungles (which look awesomely lush for a 2013 game). Its still a lot of fun to move through the environments, and there are plenty of very natural feeling routes to make that work smoothly, slightly more so than in previous games I think. There's a pretty good variety of missions and setpieces and the main story does a good job of bringing you to new places and putting you in interesting situations. There are also a few underwater zones, which are awesomely atmospheric. These are mostly setpieces based around exploring wrecks for treasure while hiding from sharks and trying not to drown or get swept away by currents, so they are a bit simplistic, but its a nice change of pace and makes the ocean exploration feel a bit more robust.
The story itself is a bit of a mixed bag. It feels kind of scattered, like its missing some pieces. The sense of time passing is quite a bit more vague than previous games, which convolutes the pacing in the latter half of the game as things accelerate perhaps a bit too suddenly towards an ending. I imagine it was a bit rushed due to the yearly schedule AC was on at the time. I like the characters, and it hits all the classic pirate story beats you want to see but doesnt do nearly as good a job of exploring the Caribbean setting compared to previous AC games. It does ok with creating interesting gameplay that emerges from the specificity of the historical setting, but narratively and thematically it doesn't have nearly as compelling a viewpoint on the politics of the setting as ACIII did with Connor. I wish Adewale had a bigger role (though I know he got his own side game) beyond being like "Edward I love you bro but you are a huge dipshit." all the time, because he does get some of the better writing. I also wish we spent more time with the Central American assassin's brotherhood since their whole deal would have been very interesting to explore in more depth. Its also kind of a shame that there's no equivalent to the homestead characters from ACIII in this game, as your crew and the people at your hideout are largely just nameless set dressing, and the hideout here feels very much like it only exists because other games had it. The game does do a good job though in how it integrates the precursor civilization into the main story more directly. It ties into character motivations and worldbuilding throughout and leads to some fun story beats and gameplay.
The present day segments here really worked for me, though, and are quite different from previous games. What to do when Desmond is no longer around to provide an easy modern day viewpoint? Well they went buckwild with it and made a whole Abstergo Game Development Studio Office to explore, that is blatantly a thinly veiled parody of Ubisoft itself. You are an unnamed QA tester for the first commercial animus game, and you wander around the office in first person, and get talked at by execs and project managers between animus sessions. Eventually you also end up involved with uncovering precursor secrets, and some of the assassins from the other games coerce you into hacking computers and sneaking around. I love representations of real, "mundane" spaces in games and this is a very good one of those. The audio logs and other data you uncover by hacking also serve as a pretty interesting epilogue of sorts to Desmond's story. It feels like they were setting up a bunch of stuff for how the future games could handle the present day aspect, so I'm interested to see where it goes. The cyber ghost of Juno appearing from the server is a pretty wild moment, and is exactly the kind of goofy yet cool bullshit I want from AC's modern day segments.
So this is an AC that, while it takes some big swings of its own with the sailing and the weirdass present day stuff, it ends up feeling like they've sanded down a lot of the rough edges the series had, for better and worse. It's a very good game, but it doesnt quite justify its size, and it is not quite as memorable or interesting as its direct predecessor.
The coolest thing about ACIV is also the biggest departure from previous games: the ships and crew and what that enables. You are a pirate captain and you have your own ship which you can sail on the high seas as you please, from island to island, hunting for treasure, battling the English and Spanish fleets and plundering them, raiding forts, and so on and so forth. The ocean looks incredible, and the feel of the ships in motion is very physical and tactile. Wind and waves and weather all have a big impact on your navigability and perception of whats around you, and they did a good job of translating this to a much more dynamic open world setup from the highly scripted ship missions of ACIII. The English and Spanish fleets (and the occasional other pirate crew) will battle if they encounter each other, regardless of whether you are involved, which goes a long way to make the oceans feel more alive. The flow of ship battles from cannon fire and maneuvering, to boarding and fighting man-to man, is a bit simple, and gets repetitive by the end of the game. Still, it works for making you feel like a swashbuckling captain, and can feel pretty satisfying and exciting when it all comes together just right. Your crew also sings sea shanties as you sail, which are one of the collectables you can find, and you bet your ass i got all the sea shanties in the game. My favorites were "Farewell, Spanish Ladies" and "Fish in the Sea." but they're all great, love to sing with the lads about how much the ocean sucks and how horny we are for all the ladies we haven't seen for weeks.
You can upgrade your ship to have more cannons and armor, and a bigger crew, but aside from cannons most of the upgrades don't feel especially meaningful, either mechanically or visually. Part of this is that I never made enough money to get many of the cosmetic upgrades, cause they really want you to do a ship management mini-game to make money. It has mobile game style timers and can only be accessed while on the ship, so it is generally a pain in the ass to keep on top of while doing other stuff. The other way to make money is to grind ship battles, which No I will not do that Ubisoft. Because of this my ship was never strong enough to really take on one of the legendary boss ships.
On-foot, its an evolution of what ACIII was doing, and while the combat feels a little worse (swords will never be as cool as Connor's dual tomahawk fighting style, sorry Edward), it is otherwise a bit more polished. Stealth in particular is much better here and feels smoother in general. While it is a bit simpler and relies more on the stalking zones, it largely avoids the issues ACIII had where you could easily get caught by accident because you got caught on something or the AI was just excessively observant, or there was nowhere to hide. Accidental failure is less common in general in ACIV. It also does not do the awful thing ACIII did where whole squads of redcoats would spawn in offscreen when you got caught, so that's nice. All the gameplay systems of combat, movement, stealth, are working in harmony here more than they ever had in the series up to this point.
There are several medium-sized cities and a ton of smaller islands, some of which contain jungles (which look awesomely lush for a 2013 game). Its still a lot of fun to move through the environments, and there are plenty of very natural feeling routes to make that work smoothly, slightly more so than in previous games I think. There's a pretty good variety of missions and setpieces and the main story does a good job of bringing you to new places and putting you in interesting situations. There are also a few underwater zones, which are awesomely atmospheric. These are mostly setpieces based around exploring wrecks for treasure while hiding from sharks and trying not to drown or get swept away by currents, so they are a bit simplistic, but its a nice change of pace and makes the ocean exploration feel a bit more robust.
The story itself is a bit of a mixed bag. It feels kind of scattered, like its missing some pieces. The sense of time passing is quite a bit more vague than previous games, which convolutes the pacing in the latter half of the game as things accelerate perhaps a bit too suddenly towards an ending. I imagine it was a bit rushed due to the yearly schedule AC was on at the time. I like the characters, and it hits all the classic pirate story beats you want to see but doesnt do nearly as good a job of exploring the Caribbean setting compared to previous AC games. It does ok with creating interesting gameplay that emerges from the specificity of the historical setting, but narratively and thematically it doesn't have nearly as compelling a viewpoint on the politics of the setting as ACIII did with Connor. I wish Adewale had a bigger role (though I know he got his own side game) beyond being like "Edward I love you bro but you are a huge dipshit." all the time, because he does get some of the better writing. I also wish we spent more time with the Central American assassin's brotherhood since their whole deal would have been very interesting to explore in more depth. Its also kind of a shame that there's no equivalent to the homestead characters from ACIII in this game, as your crew and the people at your hideout are largely just nameless set dressing, and the hideout here feels very much like it only exists because other games had it. The game does do a good job though in how it integrates the precursor civilization into the main story more directly. It ties into character motivations and worldbuilding throughout and leads to some fun story beats and gameplay.
The present day segments here really worked for me, though, and are quite different from previous games. What to do when Desmond is no longer around to provide an easy modern day viewpoint? Well they went buckwild with it and made a whole Abstergo Game Development Studio Office to explore, that is blatantly a thinly veiled parody of Ubisoft itself. You are an unnamed QA tester for the first commercial animus game, and you wander around the office in first person, and get talked at by execs and project managers between animus sessions. Eventually you also end up involved with uncovering precursor secrets, and some of the assassins from the other games coerce you into hacking computers and sneaking around. I love representations of real, "mundane" spaces in games and this is a very good one of those. The audio logs and other data you uncover by hacking also serve as a pretty interesting epilogue of sorts to Desmond's story. It feels like they were setting up a bunch of stuff for how the future games could handle the present day aspect, so I'm interested to see where it goes. The cyber ghost of Juno appearing from the server is a pretty wild moment, and is exactly the kind of goofy yet cool bullshit I want from AC's modern day segments.
So this is an AC that, while it takes some big swings of its own with the sailing and the weirdass present day stuff, it ends up feeling like they've sanded down a lot of the rough edges the series had, for better and worse. It's a very good game, but it doesnt quite justify its size, and it is not quite as memorable or interesting as its direct predecessor.
2017
I Finally beat this game after several years of playing it on and off. This may be the most 7/10 game I have ever played, which I mean mostly as a compliment, but also slightly derogatorily. It has a million ideas and it really goes for all of them, and in many ways it actually does succeed! But it can also feel sloppy and unfair nearly as often.
The combat system, where you can target specific limbs and chop them off after doing enough damage to acquire those gear parts from enemies, is legitimately very cool. Once you get the hang of it, the combat feels pretty good and has an interesting pace and rhythm and set of tactical considerations to it. When you are fighting humans. They put so much work into making this system feel good with humans, the most common enemy type, that fighting anything else can feel very janky and vague. The limb targeting still works on robots and such but only kind of, and their designs can make reading and reacting to their animations very difficult. And of course non-human enemies tend to be the ones that do the most damage and can often kill you in one or two hits. Many of the deaths in this game did not feel like they were my fault, and were instead due to jank, vague animations, weird hitboxes, and things that do way more damage than they look like they should.
The level design is also highly mixed. On the one hand the environment art and attention to detail is fantastic, and I respect how ambitious and complex they can be. On the other hand, they are often incredibly labyrinthine, far more so than anything Fromsoft ever made, and because they are primarily indoors there is a lack of landmarks to aid navigation. Many times I unlocked a shortcut and was extremely confused about if it had actually helped cause I could not for the life of me tell where the fuck i even was in relation to the OPS room. I did eventually learn my way around, sort of, but there was a lot of me wandering around going huh??? and I would say that I am pretty good at navigating and internalizing complex 3D environments.
So the game is a mixed bag, but where it excels, other than the combat against humans, is in its setting, presentation, and worldbuilding. The whole industrial dungeon + techbro horror vibe is super well done and the constant PR interviews and marketing bits playing on screens throughout the CREO facility are pitch perfect. The writing was sharper than I was expecting too. This game has a pretty clear viewpoint on silicon valley, climate change, the exploitation of workers, and it ties it all into the setting and level design pretty well. The NPCs are some dark souls ass NPCs to be sure, but that style of writing transplanted into this sort of setting is surprisingly novel, and they do a good job making them feel distinct. The sad, vaguely inspirational country song that plays in the OPS rooms is also an absolutely inspired choice, its exactly the kind of thing a corporation like CREO would pipe in to breakrooms to try and connect with and motivate its workers. And like, it literally works! I'm humming it to myself right now! I felt relieved every time i heard that song! You are so right The Surge, I was always as free as I wanted to be, always as free, as a bird.... It is true that you cannot miss what you have never seen before. And weren't we all born in a prison? The prison of this modern tech obsessed society???
I think what is the true mark of this game as a 7/10 game (complimentary) though is that I am still thinking about it a week after finishing it. Its a genuinely weird and ambitious little game that truly does go for it in all respects. Its got gumption and you know what I gotta respect that.
The combat system, where you can target specific limbs and chop them off after doing enough damage to acquire those gear parts from enemies, is legitimately very cool. Once you get the hang of it, the combat feels pretty good and has an interesting pace and rhythm and set of tactical considerations to it. When you are fighting humans. They put so much work into making this system feel good with humans, the most common enemy type, that fighting anything else can feel very janky and vague. The limb targeting still works on robots and such but only kind of, and their designs can make reading and reacting to their animations very difficult. And of course non-human enemies tend to be the ones that do the most damage and can often kill you in one or two hits. Many of the deaths in this game did not feel like they were my fault, and were instead due to jank, vague animations, weird hitboxes, and things that do way more damage than they look like they should.
The level design is also highly mixed. On the one hand the environment art and attention to detail is fantastic, and I respect how ambitious and complex they can be. On the other hand, they are often incredibly labyrinthine, far more so than anything Fromsoft ever made, and because they are primarily indoors there is a lack of landmarks to aid navigation. Many times I unlocked a shortcut and was extremely confused about if it had actually helped cause I could not for the life of me tell where the fuck i even was in relation to the OPS room. I did eventually learn my way around, sort of, but there was a lot of me wandering around going huh??? and I would say that I am pretty good at navigating and internalizing complex 3D environments.
So the game is a mixed bag, but where it excels, other than the combat against humans, is in its setting, presentation, and worldbuilding. The whole industrial dungeon + techbro horror vibe is super well done and the constant PR interviews and marketing bits playing on screens throughout the CREO facility are pitch perfect. The writing was sharper than I was expecting too. This game has a pretty clear viewpoint on silicon valley, climate change, the exploitation of workers, and it ties it all into the setting and level design pretty well. The NPCs are some dark souls ass NPCs to be sure, but that style of writing transplanted into this sort of setting is surprisingly novel, and they do a good job making them feel distinct. The sad, vaguely inspirational country song that plays in the OPS rooms is also an absolutely inspired choice, its exactly the kind of thing a corporation like CREO would pipe in to breakrooms to try and connect with and motivate its workers. And like, it literally works! I'm humming it to myself right now! I felt relieved every time i heard that song! You are so right The Surge, I was always as free as I wanted to be, always as free, as a bird.... It is true that you cannot miss what you have never seen before. And weren't we all born in a prison? The prison of this modern tech obsessed society???
I think what is the true mark of this game as a 7/10 game (complimentary) though is that I am still thinking about it a week after finishing it. Its a genuinely weird and ambitious little game that truly does go for it in all respects. Its got gumption and you know what I gotta respect that.
2023
The only part of this game that doesn't perfectly hold up is how your Pikmin are just the dumbest little bitches on the forest floor and have pathfinding so bad its a miracle they survived on this planet without Olimar to look after them. They seem to go out of their way to get stuck behind things that are not in their way, they walk into fire, they fall off ledges they aren't even near, grab stuff you didn't tell them to, and try to help carry things only to randomly give up and just be left behind as an idle trail of pale fools lounging about as their friends do all the work. Several times i saved them from drowning only for them to literally go out of their way to run back into the water and finish drowning. They are always getting caught up in a nectar frenzy and hanging out under ramps and bridges cause they wandered in there and couldn't get back out. I was at my wits end dealing with these little freaks. And yet.... they are still my precious little idiot vegetable murder children, the bane of my days on this fallen earth, and I love them so much.
Shoutout to the mockingly loopy circus clown music in the final trial level for perfectly capturing the mental state i was in after dealing with the endless carrot-brained shenanigans of 100 primary colored nincompoops all day.
Shoutout to the mockingly loopy circus clown music in the final trial level for perfectly capturing the mental state i was in after dealing with the endless carrot-brained shenanigans of 100 primary colored nincompoops all day.
2012
This game is mostly like, incredible. Its a huge leap in gamefeel and presentation over the Ezio games, and also a largely successful shift away from swashbuckling coolguy adventure towards something more serious and tonally ambitious. But it feels weirder and more ambitious than your usual "prestige" game from this era. The revolutionary war period American colonies are a surprisingly unique setting for any game that isn't a hex based strategy game for 90s dads, and they did an amazing job realizing that setting. Boston and New York are really dense and detailed and alive feeling, and the wilderness zone really does feel like a New England landscape. It takes AC2s commitment to the details of the setting and premise much further. Stuff like how it handles the prevalence of muskets, or the unlocking of fast travel by searching the tunnels under the city, or the more constant presence of squads of troops due to the war. I really respect the commitment to turning period detail into gameplay in this game.
The broader, less vertical terrain in AC3 with more natural elements like trees and cliffs, and largely much shorter buildings was actually quite refreshing coming from 4 games of slower vertical climbing, and Connors agile movement feels and looks fantastic and fits perfectly within this landscape. The animations in this game are wildly good, there's so much speed and power and momentum in them. The combat ones especially. The combat in general is much better, its a bit simple but it feels and looks great, and it has none of the issues with the previous games where you would sometimes just get parried or dodged forever. It feels much more focused and polished, and the details like environmental interaction being woven into combos and executions is neat too. The running assassinations though are my favorite addition, I have to imagine it came from the idea of a musket charge and they just applied that to every other melee option, but being able to sprint through, take out a guy or two before they knew what hit them, and just keep running, is fucking sick. The long reloads of firearms is also a great bit of period detail. Outside combat, the side missions are better here than in previous games, and the only ones that really feel like busywork are some of the hunting missions. The rest are either interesting, funny, or tie back into the homestead storylines. I really liked the ones where Daniel Boone rants about some wild cryptid or ghost he saw and then it turns out to just be an umbrella caught in a tree or something. The homestead stuff is great too, it really does feel like a living, growing town, and the characters there are fun to follow through their lives. The amount of detail put into animating them working is also really something. The naval missions are fucking awesome as well, they are just long enough and just simple enough that it nails the fantasy of naval combat without being too much or too little to learn or deal with. And the presentation during them is so rad. The Pegleg/Captain Kidd "dungeon" missions were also a lot of fun, great setpieces that explore other parts of the setting farther from the main sites of action in New England, and get into some interesting naval exploration and pirate lore.
The story is pretty well written for AAA games and while a bit hamhanded at times it gets a lot right about how shitty the founding fathers and the British were, how much things sucked for indigenous peoples (or anyone who wasn't a white man), and comes to some surprisingly progressive conclusions about it all. The commitment to accuracy with representing the Kanien'kehá:ka people is really great (as far as i can tell), and I love how much of the dialogue is in their language. Connor is a great character too, he's a lot more subtle than Ezio but his anger and frustration about everything happening to him and his people, and the way he grows out of naivete of youth, and his relationship with his father was all really compelling. Haytham and Charles Lee are fantastic villains as well, and the MGS2 style bait n switch where you play as Haytham in the beginning is really good. The present day stuff here is the best its ever been up to this point in the series, with way more time spent with the characters, and the location of the precursor site it takes place in is used really well. Its also just incredibly cool to finally get to go on real assassin missions out in the world with Desmond, and those are all rad setpieces.
AC3 isn't perfect though; it has the same layer of jank behind the whole game as all the other ACs, and it also kind of drops the ball a little in the final act, not nearly as badly as Revelations did, but it definitely feels like they ran out of time trying to hit their pre-2012 "apocalypse" Mayan calendar date, had to cut some stuff, and couldn't quite polish up the last few missions the way they needed. I still liked the ending narratively, despite the issues. The biggest problem with the game, though, is the enemy AI and the stealth mechanics. On paper it should be the best yet in this regard, cause it introduces a lot of new options for stealth (trees, bushes, hiding around corners, whistling to attract attention, assassin recruits can do more complex stuff), and the AI has more stages and more behaviors. But in practice, the AI has superhuman eyesight and aim, massive peripheral vision, and worst of all, when open conflict is triggered, enemies literally can spawn from nowhere just off camera to swarm you, so its much harder to break line of sight and hide from them. Once you learn to work with the messiness of this its not so bad, and sometimes it comes together into something that feels really cool, but it can also create a lot of frustration. Its worst in the far-cry style forts, and when trying to escape a chase in the cities. Luckily the combat is fun so when you do get caught, its not all bad.
AC3 is a game that swings bigger and stranger than any of the other games up to this point in the series —which in their own right were games that often swung bigger and stranger when it comes to AAA!— and I think its my favorite of the series so far.
The broader, less vertical terrain in AC3 with more natural elements like trees and cliffs, and largely much shorter buildings was actually quite refreshing coming from 4 games of slower vertical climbing, and Connors agile movement feels and looks fantastic and fits perfectly within this landscape. The animations in this game are wildly good, there's so much speed and power and momentum in them. The combat ones especially. The combat in general is much better, its a bit simple but it feels and looks great, and it has none of the issues with the previous games where you would sometimes just get parried or dodged forever. It feels much more focused and polished, and the details like environmental interaction being woven into combos and executions is neat too. The running assassinations though are my favorite addition, I have to imagine it came from the idea of a musket charge and they just applied that to every other melee option, but being able to sprint through, take out a guy or two before they knew what hit them, and just keep running, is fucking sick. The long reloads of firearms is also a great bit of period detail. Outside combat, the side missions are better here than in previous games, and the only ones that really feel like busywork are some of the hunting missions. The rest are either interesting, funny, or tie back into the homestead storylines. I really liked the ones where Daniel Boone rants about some wild cryptid or ghost he saw and then it turns out to just be an umbrella caught in a tree or something. The homestead stuff is great too, it really does feel like a living, growing town, and the characters there are fun to follow through their lives. The amount of detail put into animating them working is also really something. The naval missions are fucking awesome as well, they are just long enough and just simple enough that it nails the fantasy of naval combat without being too much or too little to learn or deal with. And the presentation during them is so rad. The Pegleg/Captain Kidd "dungeon" missions were also a lot of fun, great setpieces that explore other parts of the setting farther from the main sites of action in New England, and get into some interesting naval exploration and pirate lore.
The story is pretty well written for AAA games and while a bit hamhanded at times it gets a lot right about how shitty the founding fathers and the British were, how much things sucked for indigenous peoples (or anyone who wasn't a white man), and comes to some surprisingly progressive conclusions about it all. The commitment to accuracy with representing the Kanien'kehá:ka people is really great (as far as i can tell), and I love how much of the dialogue is in their language. Connor is a great character too, he's a lot more subtle than Ezio but his anger and frustration about everything happening to him and his people, and the way he grows out of naivete of youth, and his relationship with his father was all really compelling. Haytham and Charles Lee are fantastic villains as well, and the MGS2 style bait n switch where you play as Haytham in the beginning is really good. The present day stuff here is the best its ever been up to this point in the series, with way more time spent with the characters, and the location of the precursor site it takes place in is used really well. Its also just incredibly cool to finally get to go on real assassin missions out in the world with Desmond, and those are all rad setpieces.
AC3 isn't perfect though; it has the same layer of jank behind the whole game as all the other ACs, and it also kind of drops the ball a little in the final act, not nearly as badly as Revelations did, but it definitely feels like they ran out of time trying to hit their pre-2012 "apocalypse" Mayan calendar date, had to cut some stuff, and couldn't quite polish up the last few missions the way they needed. I still liked the ending narratively, despite the issues. The biggest problem with the game, though, is the enemy AI and the stealth mechanics. On paper it should be the best yet in this regard, cause it introduces a lot of new options for stealth (trees, bushes, hiding around corners, whistling to attract attention, assassin recruits can do more complex stuff), and the AI has more stages and more behaviors. But in practice, the AI has superhuman eyesight and aim, massive peripheral vision, and worst of all, when open conflict is triggered, enemies literally can spawn from nowhere just off camera to swarm you, so its much harder to break line of sight and hide from them. Once you learn to work with the messiness of this its not so bad, and sometimes it comes together into something that feels really cool, but it can also create a lot of frustration. Its worst in the far-cry style forts, and when trying to escape a chase in the cities. Luckily the combat is fun so when you do get caught, its not all bad.
AC3 is a game that swings bigger and stranger than any of the other games up to this point in the series —which in their own right were games that often swung bigger and stranger when it comes to AAA!— and I think its my favorite of the series so far.
This feels more like an actual sequel to the previous 2 than another direct continuation like Brotherhood was. The visuals and feel of the controls are much better, and the presentation is mostly great. Istanbul/Constantinople is an amazingly atmospheric and textured setting, and I appreciate the smaller scope of it. The stealth here is better too, since you can see guard routes, and the bombs add a lot of possibilities even if they're kind of a pain to deal with when you want to switch them out. The hookblade is a great addition to movement, which just feels better and more responsive in general. The story with Old Ezio mostly works, and I loved the interludes with Altair that finally make him an interesting character, but it feels like development got cut short or ran out of time/budget cause it truly drops the ball in the final act on everything other than Ezio and Altair's personal endings. I cant believe they did my dude Yusuf so dirty like that! The present day stuff is weird this time since Desmond is in a coma inside the animus, so most of it is pretty abstract. So abstract it even has an entire abstract dreamscape-brutalist first person narrative puzzle game in there to deliver that story through! Which is maybe the most 2011 thing I have ever seen in a game. The puzzle levels are pretty good though, honestly, so ultimately I respect them for making that very strange choice. Why not! Anyway, this one plays the best of the Ezio games and I liked his actual ending a lot, but the rest of that final 1/4 of the game being so weirdly truncated and sloppy prevents it from being the best of the trilogy.
This is basically just AC2 part 2, like it continues right where it left off and is fully an extension of its gameplay, plot, visual design, and structure. Rome is an incredibly well-realised setting, full of varied terrain and architecture that finally makes the horses not suck, and the brotherhood of assassins mechanic is awesome. Seeing Ezio grow into his own as a leader is really well done, and the story of his conflict with the Borgia is well told. The present day stuff is good here too, and exploring Ezio's villa in the modern day was neat, even if you barely need to do it. Desmond and company continue to be fun to hang out with. The mission design has more variety and there's less repetitive busywork, BUT the failure conditions are incredibly overbearing in a lot of the missions so its easy to accidentally fail and be forced to restart. This holds it back from real greatness and kinda drags the whole game down a peg, when it could have otherwise been the best game in the trilogy.