Time took to complete: 40 hours (did pretty much all the side stuff except the ones in the Frontier because that place is a pain in the ass to navigate)
I am going to dive right into what felt new. Naval battles and the homestead land. These are the only two worthy editions for this version of the game. The former is a game changer and I'll talk about it more in a second and the latter gives you a very nice sense of progression.
What does still suck, and if you don't care about these, then OK, but I do. Is the discontinuity when transitioning between cutscene and gameplay. An early example is I won a brawl on a ship and in this case the enemy went through a barrel as I finished him off. I was thinking, "cool, the cutscene is going to look very cinematic with the bad guy plastered all over a broken barrel". But no, everyone teleports to a preset location and the cutscene just 'plays'. That's one thing I can never stand in AC. This happens in almost every cutscene<->gameplay transition, and sometimes more sever things.
It really is setup where you go to somewhere and the game hits play on a cutscene. They make near no effort to make it feel seamless. If you are going to have a game this cutscene heavy, I feel it's really lame not to put effort towards that. Many cutscene heavy devs take great care of it, but not Ubisoft.
And then there are the features that are there just to be there and serve no substantial purpose to the overall game design. Hunting, trading, silly side missions (not homestead ones, delivering messages etc). It to me looked like there were just checklists in the main menu to be ticked off. These are not fun by the way, most, if not all of them is you going somewhere and pressing action. Even fighting a bear is just a very easy QTE. Totally kills any tension.
And I know you can hunt and then sell the wares but you can also buy them from homestead so you just buy the most expensive item (bear pelt), trade a convoy full of it, and bam, 12mins later, watch the money roll in.
The money for me was only used for ship upgrades anyway. There are other things you can buy like outfits and weapons but I don't know why they bother with what seemed like a good weapon collection when...
...The combat is still way too boring and easy. Counter, if enemy can't be counter, 'break defence', rinse repeat. Satisfaction is also non existent as you are just blindly tapping most of the time and again just watching the game play for you pretty much.
Those are all things that made me bored of AC games previously before I could finish them. So what was different this time?....
The naval warfare!
Oh my days, that naval warfare. First of all, this is the only part of the game where you feel fully in control. Smart navigation of the seas is needed to get a shot on your enemies but it is not easy as the winds and the waves can also be your enemy, but for a smart captain, they can be your ally also.
You get to make a shot selection and they are all good for different things. Chain shots break the masts and hinder enemy movement, fire shots have narrow field of fire but do extra damage and so on. You can also dodge out of the way of incoming fire so you have to pay attention to when you are being targeted.
All this is so streamlined and easy to control, it really is the most impressive thing I've seen from Ubisoft in years. You are doing all that but are never fighting the controls, you are always in full control and feel 100% engaged. I was just taken to another world every time a naval warfare part started. It's super gripping and fun stuff. I really hope they manage to keep the intensity of these battles in ACIV and in a 30 hour campaign of constant naval warfare it doesn't wear off.
So what can I say, a game full of mechanics I don't really approve of, saved by addition of naval warfare. There are also other redeeming qualities of course, like the setting is always an automatic win for the AC series. Although I had no interest in the sci-fi part of it.
Seeing as naval warfare really is one of the most exciting things I've played in recent times I think it manages to push the game just above the 'meh' average that the rest of the package is;
6/10.
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