Recent reviews by Meaty Mell

Literally a game changer

The Crystal Hunt mode update is probably one of the best updates ever

Playing against the AI you'll know how Lightning McQueen felt racing against Chick Hicks.

Apart from that very fun and extremely moddable, and the career mode mods are great.

An amazing game with an amazing story, fun combat and a great soundtrack. The only thing that really holds it back for me is the lack of difficulty options, the game for the most part is pretty easy.

Game is amazing but matchmaking is sometimes a bit broken, on operations at least.

Enslaving wild animals is cool, but you can also send rare and powerful Pals to breeding camps. When you've found the ultimate warrior with perfect traits, you can use the unsuccessful newborn rejects to make the ultimate warrior even stronger!

• Enemies using clever tactics to outsmart you.
  
• Enemies playing to their advantages.

• You'll be screwed over constantly by the parkour system, examples:
  
  • Talion will sometimes decide to randomly jump off buildings into groups of enemies, instead of the nearby beam you were aiming at.
    
  • Talion likes standing still in the middle of combat and temporarily ignoring player input every now and then.
    
  • Talion will sometimes keep running back up the wall you dropped down from when you're trying to run away from it, the only way to stop this is to wait for Talion to slowly turn away from the wall then hold space again.
    
  • Talion likes to climb up buildings when you're not even aiming at them, so archers can hit you easier, or so fleeing enemies can get away.
    
• The combat is pretty broken too at times:
  
  • You go to drain an enemy and the game refuses to do anything and they hit you.
    
  • Enraged captains travel 50m in one sword swing somehow and hit you.
    
  • A captain may have an unblockable and instantaneous special attack which is literally impossible to dodge.
    
  • You use Wraith Stun on a Captain and they completely ignore it and hit you.
    
  • You use Shoulder Tackle on a Captain and they completely ignore it and hit you (in this case the game will sometimes even outright ignore your key presses so you cant do the move).
    
  • You blow up a barrel next to a captain and go to ground takedown him, what does the game do? Targets the grunt orc thats like 20m away instead. Applies to executions sometimes too.
    
  • Ranged and melee attacks with zero prompt at all (no I wasnt stunned or poisoned), this is actually the most annoying for me since this issue was never in SoM at all (not that the other issues weren't, but SoM was so mind-numbingly easy I might've never noticed them if they were there).
    

I'd probably not recommend this game if it wasn't for the fact that both the Middle Earth and LotR series held a special place in my heart, me enjoying the story and the characters, and also for the fact that it gets exponentially more fun when you get the Domination ability (along with other future abilities).

I'm currently writing this review with an agonising headache after spending the past 15 mins or so as Level 10 Talion using a stealth attack cheese tactic to kill level 60 a Machine orc (who got to that level thanks to his insta-kill axe throwing attack that is almost instantaneous with no dodge prompt) It took like 40 stealth attacks to kill him. Thanks for reading my review.

As a Terminator fan I really enjoyed this game, was a blast to play. The DLCs are great too. Recommend playing with the original movies soundtrack mod from the nexus for the best experience.

I guess the only complaints would be the voice acting seems a bit on the lesser side at the start but I got used to it after a while. Also the T-800s quickly go from being intimidating to being a joke and you'll soon by wiping them out in droves. The AI is also a bit stupid too, with enemies being easily cheesed because they don't hunt you down very well, and you can just snipe them in the head and waiting for them to turn around before rinse and repeating till they die.

LET ME COUNTER I LITERALLY PRESSED THE BUTTON (same applies to human shields, which are 10 times more broken and ignorant of your input)

also, LET ME PICK UP THE DAMN MUSKET I PRESSED SHIFT A MILLION TIMES

also keep in mind if theres an easy extra objective the game won't tell you - also for the purposes of being desperate to fail you it will consider hiding in a water well to be the same as hiding in a bush

honorable mention to the cancer mission where you have to tail putnam, where you get insta detected from a mile away while swimming, and an unavoidable guard dog stops you getting anywhere, and the checkpoint (tyranny of king george has atrocious checkpoints may i add) literally spawns me in with two guys shooting at me

• Amazing story and ending.
  
• The Altair flashbacks you can play every now and then are really cool, though they are quite short and there are not many of them.
  
• Notoriety was removed and replaced with 'Templar Awareness' which, when full, can end up with your bases being attacked and you needing to do play a tower defence segment to keep the base - though I find that the tower defence is actually super fun. I definitely prefer it over notoriety as I go out of my way to murder all guards in my path anyway.
  
• Really memorable soundtrack, on par with the first and second games (sorry I really wasn't much for Brotherhood's soundtrack).
  
• Fun parkour (when it's not being messed up by the contextual camera in some linear sections), the hookblade is a cool new addition too aid with parkour.
  
• Combat is fun, though very easy. Most of the difficulty comes from weird non-sensical changes such as removing the ability to counter spear enemies in any way, charged throwing knife no longer instant-killing; and bugs such as the still-finicky lock-on.
  
• At first I had some struggle fighting the Janissaries (elite enemies) which added a fun sense of difficulty to the game, but then found out you can get rid of them pretty easily with stealth kills, chain assassinations, or bombs.
  
• Assassins recruitment & missions return with new features such as capturing and holding cities by doing missions, and also promoting Assassin's to Master. The only downsides is a rare bug where your beloved Assassins can fail (and die) on missions even if the odds of success are 100%, and assigning a Master to protect an Assassin Den makes it immune to attack (which disables the fun tower defence thing for it).
  
• The stalkers that stealth attack you are a interesting new feature, turning around before they can attack and beating them up is really satisfying.

• Like with AC2 and Brotherhood, the game prioritises civilians for double assassinations.
  
• Thankfully you still get lots of useful items from enemies to make up for the combat issues.
  
• The extra objectives have just reached a new level of cancer! Not only does the game still make you restart the whole mission if you fail the objective, but now on some missions (e.g: catch the templar boat without being hit, kill someone from a hiding spot in the janissary-outfit-stealing mission) you can complete the objective fair and square and the game will get triggered and decide you aren't allowed to do that objective and lie, saying you somehow failed.
  
• Lock-on still broken as hell, in fact it's gotten worse: the game will sometimes straight up refuse to lock-on to enemies to give them time to detect/attack you, and the game protects fleeing enemies by straight up turning off your lock-on when you try to do it.
  
• Throwing knives are now nerfed so the special attack no longer one shots. They are now effectively useless for stealth, they have some use in combat for killing enemies who can't be countered (and can't be dodged because of how much the dodge sucks).
  
• Game is occasionally subjected to weird lag spikes.
  
• You can no longer counter enemies with spears with any weapon at all, that literally makes ZERO SENSE. Dodge works like 20% of the time too so most of the time you are forced to get hit.
  
• If you are in combat with both melee enemies and ranged enemies, the game will move any lock-on you have from ranged enemies to melee enemies to help them shoot you more. If you are being attacked by civilians you pickpocketed the game will prioritise them (for obvious reasons, since it gets you desynchronised pretty quick if you kill them by accident).
  
• Constantly picking up bodies while trying to loot corpses or do anything useful is so annoying. To make matters worse, the game lets you pick up bodies in combat (you have to sit there and watch as enemies hit you because you are stuck in an animation for something you didn't even want to do) but cancels any looting.

• The pull down scaffolding feature is super useful in combat, but also REALLY finicky. Sometimes I find myself running and jumping around in combat trying to find the exact trigger point where I can press shift to pull down the scaffolding.
  
• The interact button was moved to the E key so if you are used to playing AC Brotherhood expect to waste ammo/bombs because until you get used to it.