Recent reviews by ElitistMadman

It's pretty good, but the DLC was very lackluster. Many features that should have been standard are only attainable in mods. After many patches and DLC's, the game STILL does not support ultrawide resolutions.

Possibly the weakest entry in the series to date. The entire story feels arbitrary and half-told, and the "climax" was far from satisfying, leading the end of the game to feel abrupt, as if it ended early to accomodate more DLC. Issues that have dogged the series have only gotten worse, with ground combat being the worst I have seen yet. I don't think I've ever played a game where I felt simultaneously more powerful and incredibly weak, but they have managed to somehow pull that off. It also bears, in my opinion, several strong resemblances to Far Cry 3 while failing to capture any of the uniqueness of that game. Hunting and scrounging for materials to craft upgrades, weird visions where you're forced to walk really slowly by people from your past as they rage at you, taking over enemy forts to give yourself fast travel locations - fans of the tedious parts of FC3 will be very happy with this title.

Despite buying the game in Steam, it plays in Ubisoft's terrible Uplay, which requires a separate account and tracks achievements separately. Buying a large pack of DLC here on Steam therefore requires manually copy/pasting each individual code over into Uplay, which is cumbersome and unnecessary.

My playthrough was also plagued with lost savegames, which a quick search shows has been an issue known to Ubisoft for several months and has received no attention, resulting in the loss of about two dozen hours of playtime. Despite Uplay's "always on" cloud syncing of savegames, I was able to lose entire sessions with no real warning on multiple occasions. Ubisoft forum denizens offer a workaround for this issue in the form of a batch file to back up your savegames (I did not try this), but the fact that Ubisoft has failed to resolve this issue several months after a botched launch reflects extremely poorly on their further involvement in the title.

Gone is the ability to recruit new assassins, replaced by the ability to create a trading fleet managed in a minigame instead (The less said about this new minigame the better). I suppose this is due to the fact that Edward isn't actually an assassin until the end of the game, and while he occasionally works with them his ends seem mostly at odds with theirs throughout the game.

In the plus column - this game is gorgeous and there is no way to overstate that. Every sightline falls on something just beatifully done. This game also has some of the great jumping and climbing puzzles that has made the series great, and collectibles are very liberally sprinkled all over the place, which made for a lot of fun until I lost an entire day of collecting due to a savegame corruption as mentioned above.

The overall impression I felt while playing was less like I was playing AC4, and more like I was playing a reskinned AC3.