It’s 2017, two years after the last Assassin’s Creed game, and more notably, two years after the success of The Witcher 3. Ubisoft has taken further steps to reinvent the series. Ten games in now, and the last string of titles (excluding Rogue) have all tried to refine the basic mechanics, but this one is far more obvious about it. Even the “low/high profile” action modifier button from the original 2007 game is gone — and unmissed, as it turns out. The Arkham Asylum-inspired cinematic timing brawls are no more, replaced by a lock-on & shield/parry system similar to Zelda, or Dark Souls, though without the stamina mechanics. This is the first and probably most important thing to come away from the game with: There is a very effective, basic appeal in shooting people in the head with arrows, parrying big attacks, or dodging around an enemy’s swing and slashing into their exposed back.
There are no menu percentages to tell you about the sync objectives you fucked up or treasure chests you’ve missed. It’s mercifully free of the pointless bullshit gewgaws. Just a massive map full of question marks — unexplored animal dens and bandit camps — and a massive pile of sidequests, each with its characters and conversations. It’s built around the open world pretty well, and you only rarely have to worry about the game scolding you for “going out of bounds” during a quest. A lot like The Witcher 3, then, only without the magic signs and potions, and with war elephants as the closest thing to dragons.
Frankly, the core combat feel is probably better than the Witcher ever got, but the game still doesn’t quite measure up. Those sidequests? Most are boring. And without Zelda’s tree-surfing & paragliding mechanics, or other reality-defying tricks in other open-world games, you’re working with something of a handicap. As a game set two thousand years ago, what has Assassin’s Creed got to offer over other open-world series, aside from meeting Cleopatra and Caesar, atrociously ahistorical encounters anyway? This far into antiquity, you may as well have given Bayek a permanent Apple of Eden that lets him do Dishonored ghost mode stuff, and claimed that all first-hand accounts of his magic burned with the Library of Alexandria or else faded into folklore.
Stealth has seen better days. Basic mainstays like the hidden blade (apparently far older than Altair’s days, as it turns out) often fail to work, as it seems you can neither be too close nor too far away. On the micro level it’s quite easy to be spotted — especially when your bow is drawn, which makes you so highly visible to guards that it’s not only pointless to hide in the bushes, but I was even seen through walls a couple of times. (Even so, the stealth bows are so overpowered for one-shotting enemies at range that it doesn’t even matter if you’re seen, as long as your aim isn’t atrocious.) On the macro level, guards are so spaced apart, facing the wrong directions, and otherwise dumb that it’s usually trivial to clear an encampment without alerting the whole place, even if you start a few loud fights along the way. I would prefer it to be the other way around: difficult to be spotted once if you’re stealthing by the book, but once you are, those guards should start screaming and lighting signal fires immediately.
I miss those silhouettes that would appear when you broke line of sight, but you hardly need them here. It’s a small shame. There are also a few other moves that are pretty janky, like chain assassinations and adrenaline combo finishers, which often hit like a wet fart due to anything that can happen between the time you start your kill animation and finish it.
Areas have level ranges, and a higher level skull enemy will shrug off a hidden blade stab with barely any damage, which is pretty cool. I love it in Fallout games and the like when I’m freely allowed to run straight into the hell zones at low level and die in one hit, but they screwed up here by having level scaling on treasure chests, and nothing to gain from these ventures. Even if you managed to cheese a strong enemy to death with fire or by knocking him off a ledge or something, it wouldn’t do you any good. If you can’t suicide-run for some overpowered tool at the beginning of the game, or at least to get a faster camel or something, what’s the point in all that freedom? Where’s the thrill?
You can unlock skills as you level, but you can’t get enough points to learn all abilities by the time you’ve finished the game and all sidequests. Many are useless or have terribly imbalanced costs. 3 skill points to hold your breath longer underwater, or to buy chariots? Completely worthless. Animal taming? Fun gimmick until your animal decides ten seconds later that it wants to attack you again, or you quick-travel away and it disappears. Some classic overpowered tools, like Berserk darts, have become an amusing gimmick which only works from close range, probably for the best. Smoke bombs are pretty good at stunning a dangerous enemy at close range, but can no longer be thrown as an all-purpose stealth tool. I like the change, though half the time I was throwing them accidentally while trying to loot a corpse, as both are on the same button.
A few other neat features. There’s a fun thing where you can find the bodies of other players, and get “revenge” for them by killing the enemies who killed them, which was a satisfying source of extra XP for a while. There are also high-level map-roaming “Phylakes”, who would respond to the lighting of a fort’s signal fires. It was pretty cool, one of the more emergent systems in the game, and you could even try to lure them into a trap by lighting the beacons yourself, and killing them with ballista on the walls of a keep, or shooting jars of oil to burn them or something. It worked, but most of the game’s efforts to accommodate such outside-the-box thinking were thwarted simply by being less effective than a series of predator arrows into every guard’s head. Loading screen tips would clue you into some ideas, like poisoning a corpse with Flesh Decay, setting it on the back of a horse, and scaring the horse to run into a group of enemies, spreading poison to them. Which is brilliant in theory, except it’s a huge pain in the ass, the horse is unlikely to run in a straight line even if you do set it up without being seen first, and the poison damage will probably wear off before killing anyone. The reward simply isn’t commensurate with the effort.
Northern Egypt in 49 BC, at the end of the Ancient era, isn’t bad to explore. Buildings don’t get as tall and grand as those in Revolutionary France, but the view of the pyramids in Giza in the distance can be gorgeous, and they’re among the more fun things I’ve climbed (or slid down the side of) in any of these games. Although obviously scaled down (and better that way), a massive amount of real geography is covered, pretty much everything west of the Nile, from the Mediterranean in the north, into the desert south of the Faiyum. But once you’ve seen your first Roman fort, you’ve seen them all. Most sidequests tend to have the same objectives, too, and I lost count of the times I was sent to carry some guy out of a cage in a fort somewhere.
A few stood out, like the Final Fantasy XV tie-in, some stuff involving the “First Civilization”, and some others, like a Seven Samurai-inspired quest about preparing a small village to ward off a bandit attack. But they’re bound to get stale unless you have more ways of interacting with your environment. You can climb stuff and you can kill stuff. Sometimes you “inspect” a crime scene, but as with the Witcher, there’s not much gameplay here. You can examine stuff from the air by calling for your pet eagle, but this usually just means waggling the control stick to add some objectives to your HUD, and it’s tedious. Some tombs really like to remind you that you’re not playing a game full of cool interactive systems like Breath of the Wild, such as when you can only tediously carry blocks onto a platform to provide counterweight to an elevator, and sometimes you’re not allowed to move said blocks at all. (In BotW, you’d be able to drop some crap straight out of your inventory for an outside-the-box solution.) There’s also no “conquering the map” like there was in Syndicate, or various other open-world games. No replacing the guards in a keep with your own men. No establishing extra fast travel points. No faction rep… in short, many systems are lacking.
Load times were pretty good again, thankfully, but I had several crashes to desktop, and terrible issues with texture pop-in unless I set the game’s priority to “high” in Task Manager every time I opened it. Not the first game where this has been an issue, but there’s been enough of these games that you’d think Ubisoft would have figured out how to do a PC port by now. Not even close to the buggiest AC game I’ve played otherwise, but I’ve definitely seen my share, including dialogue lines getting cut off, or even one time an NPC had roamed to somewhere the game didn’t expect when I initiated a sidequest with him, so I had to slowly walk behind him in silence for five minutes until he exited the city and went down the road to his villa. You can do a lot of great stuff with day-night cycles and roaming characters, but… not like this, please.
The story has also taken on a darker and more cynical Witcher-esque tone, with many sidequests seeming to end with you finding the tortured body of the person you were sent to rescue and other such tragedies. But it’s not exactly smart, and many of the usual AC problems persist — ridiculous motives, leaps of logic, and needless complexities. Sometimes when I’m on a quest to kill some middle-manager I can’t even remember why I’m doing it. The game has things to say about colonialism, the tragedies caused by Greeks and Romans fighting for their slice of Egyptian wealth, but it’s funny then how you choose to support Julius fucking Caesar for a while, putting down rebels who seek independence in what turned out to be the end of Egypt as world power, all due to some fake proto-Templar nonsense. A long-recurring problem with this franchise: the historical figures are the bad guys, but also your friends.
I don’t know what I expect from these games anymore, or why I keep playing them, but is that “build a whole game around Apple of Eden magic powers” idea of mine really off the table? Gimme something, man.
The Millionth Game Blog on the Internet 