This game is Quadruple Ass.

I am so glad I don't have to play this at launch. I played the open beta and an even earlier version about 6 months ago. The two versions were identical, and all accounts are saying that nothing has changed from the beta and the final game meaning I can talk about what I played.

That is, to say, a baffling regression from the 11-year-old AC: Black Flag. A game where 95% of all actions are done in your ship, only stepping out at specific ports to buy items and accept menial side quests. A game where you do all of the combat, exploration, and SURVIVAL MECHANICS in your ship. A truly baffling game that is so clearly limping out of development hell, and you can see it in every aspect of the game.

You can tell this game was going to have some sort of story at some point, but it just.. doesn't. I sometimes complain about RPGs that have a main quest that feels like a bunch of side quests duct-taped together but that's LITERALLY what this is. There is no overarching storyline, no interesting characters, NOTHING. Just awkwardly presented window dressing for you to do boring open-world quests that either ask you to find some materials kill a couple of ships or some flavor of those two.

It doesn't help that the game doesn't look that great either. There are moments where the visuals look pleasing like during a sunset, but the closer you are to the visuals the crustier and less defined they look, made all the worse when you see just how BUGGY this game is. There were so many opportunities to fix the bugs from the previous times I've played this game and we got NOTHING. Audio bugs, visual bugs, frame drops, server crashes, game crashes, the whole shebang. I have reported at least 8 of the bugs that still show up in the final product of this $70 Quadruple-A game.

The open-world and survival bullshit is not frustrating, but it is incredibly monotonous. Ship controls are generally janky and the process of mining for loot, using it to upgrade your ship, and increasing your infamy level CAN be super rewarding if it weren't for several baffling design decisions like the fact that you have to do ALL of that in your ship. But the other big one is that.. that's the extent of the game.

It's not deep enough to invest all your time into, but it takes the place of an interesting story, actual quests that mean anything, out-of-ship exploration, all of it. While it may have some nice music and there are brief moments where the stars align and the gameplay loop is decently engaging and interesting, it just doesn't make up for everything that was lost. It's just an objectively lesser version of a PART of Black Flag, stuffed with microtransactions and shoved onto stores for $70. What an embarrassing turnout from Ubisoft.

Alan Wake is one of those games where the sheer intrigue of where it's going is practically the only thing keeping you invested in it.

It has very little else going for it; the gameplay gets boring really, really quickly, to the point it almost becomes a competition with itself for worst encounter with its own combat. Lots of official game designers say that the best way to make horror game combat is to make it just frustrating enough that you feel helpless, but not so much that combat is downright annoying: Alan Wake went so off into being annoying that the end of the game corrects itself by giving you enough items that make monsters leave you alone that you could easily just walk by them without hassle.

The story isn't necessarily good, either, but it has a weird quality to it that makes it interesting enough to see to the end. So many characters are either one note or just weird for the sake of it that you can't really like any but about three of them, but the fact the writing of the game is in a mobius-strip like loop and that it has an effect on how literally everything else is supposed to go is the strongest reason to finish it.