#xsx

Now! What exactly got me there? I will say it has nothing to do with any kind of glitching issues, whenever I play games, I don’t really ever get to a point where I cause a game to break down like that; I didn’t even have issues with base Cyberpunk 2077.

Let me start with “The Good”:

Playable Characters: One of my favorite things about the game is that both characters have very clear and distinct playstyles

Naoe is basically the “Assassin” character, if you need to be stealthy and don’t want to be seen, play as her and at night. And holy shit did it feel great! Being able to get in and out of a fort without anyone noticing was probably the best I felt playing this game. She’s also your parkour character, if you need to get to a viewpoint; make sure you switch to her

Yasuke is the tank, if you want to go head first into combat he’s your man (once you unlock him 10-ish hours in). He’s also almost comically strong it feels like, we’ll get back to that. If you do somehow get him up to a viewpoint, he looks like he’s going to fall over at a moment’s notice; hell, you’ll even get an achievement when you get him to jump into the hay AND watch him bounce right the fuck back out.

Base Building: I spent a quite a bit of time actually trying to place buildings and decorations in pleasing places.

The Weird:

This just stuff that feels… “off” when I play, not necessarily bad, just odds and ends that may be able to be easily dismissed by other players.

Yasuke is comically strong. At times it’s one way to show the differences between the two characters; Naoe will climb or hop over fences, Yasuke will bust through them. However what happens when they hit a locked gate in a fortress? That’s right, Yasuke uses his head and becomes a battering ram to bust that sucker down. Now this is probably an attempt by the developers to even out the abilities of the two characters so take that how you want.

Canon Mode: a somewhat new feature for the series that takes away most dialogue choices and replaces those scenes with a normal cutscene. I would recommend doing that option, mainly because it just looks terrible. With characters moving with an animatronics grace to hit every motion the dialogue choices require without them pausing to wait for the player to choose the needed dialogue.

The UI in relation to the quests: this is probably a weird mind goblin on my part, but while it is easy to differentiate between main and side quests, the fact that they share the same screen without much separation outside of circle size gives me the feeling of “if it’s all on this screen, it’s all important”

The Voice Acting: this is something that I find has become more hit-or-miss as the games have come out, weird or just poor line reads that are being let into the game proper: with Origins, Odyssey, Vahalla it would just be a single line. For Shadows, it was an entire side-character, whose tone sounded somewhat like a grade schooler giving a book report. Notable exceptions being Naoe and Yasuke who sounded great

If the articles made it to you, then you probably know: Ubisoft is kind of a scum-fuck company. Not the worst, but still a shit place to be. And also probably one of the reasons I dropped off.

The Bad:

These are the things that actively drove me away

The Map Size: while the map is supposed to be smaller at least in comparison to Valhalla, Shadows continues the Ubisoft tradition of needing a big-ass map for… reasons? And not really using it to the best of their abilities

The Leveling System: Shadows has two leveling systems that play into each other. The first is the normal system; gain experience, become bigger level, ???, profit. The other is a Knowledge Point system, that breaks the skill trees into segments and locks you out of higher rank skills until you complete a certain number of activities. There’s probably some good examples of this out there, but shadows isn’t one of them especially since it can force you to cross the entire map to do stuff you probably don’t want to do to be able to do skills that you want.

Activities: The Activities are broken up between a few different ones: a couple QTE variations, going to temples and praying, going temples and finding scrolls, archery, exploring tombs, or parkour. There can be some fun to these, however the fact that you’re kind of forced to try and find them to unlock the full skill trees can cause them to overstay their welcome and become boring.

The Hidden Blade: WHY CAN’T THE HIDDEN BLADE JUST BE A ONE HIT STEALTH KILL? DON’T JUST MAKE IT AN ACCESSIBILITY FUNCTION, IT SHOULD JUST BE A MAIN FUNCTION!

Score: I quit, so that should probably tell you what I think