Ahmed Salehin

I’m about 35 hours in.. and I just finished Act I to unlock Yasuke. I’m pleasantly surprised by the sudden grip this game has on me, I’ll be honest, in the beginning I was skeptical, did not think I liked the game and put it down to go replay Sekiro instead, but I remember Assassin’s Creed Odyssey had the same effect on me so I went back the next day and after 3 hours spent with intro stuff and long cutscenes and dialogues (that I have been skipping through now), the game lets you go out and explore, play as you wish. I ran into higher level Samurai’s at the castles whom I couldn’t beat but there weren’t any restrictions like in the previous games where an over-leveled lion would f you up! There seems to be much less clutter around the world this time, but still seems to be just enough to keep the world not feeling empty. I’m glad I can just climb up hills and mountains with ease, and even as Naoe.. Naeoe(?) slips sometimes, I can always still go around, so traversal is easy. Combat is repetitive but fun, yes I still died a lot when I was surrounded or during the early hours, but as I kept playing I started to become the badass cold blooded ninja assassin. I mean Yasuke is fun to play, you can feel his strength and brute force.. but maybe I just like to be stealthy so probs will play as the girl more. Base building is alright, you don’t have to make it like sim city if you don’t want, but there’s the option. My favorite part was finding a glowy thing on the map when holding the aim button to randomly find objective bosses from random clans! and then taking the entire clan down, for some of these they allow you the option to keep someone alive and also tells you a brief story about the deceased and those you left alive when you go back to the objectives and check, how rad! Not revolutionary by any means, but this is just fun. While I am having a lot of fun, I do run into some random bugs where dudes I assassinate randomly come back to like and I have to kill them 3 times for them to properly be taken care of lol, but hey free xp. I wish there were Ubisoft Connect rewards, not seeing those this time around. The micro transactions are not necessary.. but they are still there which is whatever but I’ll never bother buying anything cosmetic on this $70 game so I’m not worried. All in all, this game helps me scratch that AC itch I’ve had, I recently went back to Valhalla to get that urge removed, but the sheer size of the world and plethora of clutter and stuff to do just felt overwhelming.. with Shadows, they have it toned down just right and this game feels like a breath of fresh air and I absolutely LOVE the samurai genre.. sekiro, ghost of Tsushima, (can’t remember any others) and now Shadows. Happy to say the hard work from Ubisoft paid off. I don’t care for all the woke/true to history type crap and skip through most cutscenes (I’m playing on canon mode btw so it’s okay 😂), so none of that bothers me. You can just leap (of faith) in and you’ll probably have a blast, after a couple hours of intro of course.