I was very excited when I heard about this game, a return to the more classic Assassin's Creed playstyle. In that, it totally delivers. Baghdad is a joyful experience to clamber around, pull off stylish kills, and disappear. After a trio of truly exhausting, bloated experiences, it's nice to see that gameplay-wise Ubisoft still has the flashy, fun playstyle of the past to draw on.
However, the story is still lacking due to their overreliance on their mysticial precursor race, the Isu. Now, don't get me wrong; it's the very bones of the series and it's fine to have their mystical and powerful artifacts play key roles. But they themselves are not interesting as characters. They work as a mystical, arcane force, like elder gods reaching beyond in inscrutable ways, so that the monsters of human history can twist and manipulate powers they do not understand into their own ends.
Whenever these powers get too explicit, when they wind themselves too deeply into our protagonist's lives, it just takes you out of the experience. And unfortunately this game has mystical bullshit more deeply tied to our protagonist than any other, to the detriment of the actual characters in the game, who mostly seem like afterthoughts. I had a lot of fun playing this game, but I just want a more grounded AC experience.