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Overall a very solid AC game. A lot of love went into this game, and sad to see all the hate it is getting. If you like the newer style AC games and go in with an open mind you will likely enjoy it. Overall: 8/10 Visuals and animation: 10/10 Phenomenal. Possibly best graphics I have ever seen. Lighting, environments, models, combat animations, destruction physics, and weather effects are all nearly flawless. For me, it's worth playing the game simply to experience the beauty and the photo mode! Also the changing seasons are incredible. One of the coolest things I have ever seen in a game for sure. Just give us a torch or lantern and let us meditate to skip time PLEASE! Sound and voice acting: 8/10 The sound effects like sword clangs and wind/rain/nature sound are top notch, but the game is let down by its English voice acting. I'm sure the dubbed voices are much better but I don't like staring at words constantly when playing games so was hoping for better VA. Yasukes VA is pretty good actually, but Naoe sounds very uninterested most of the time. Other characters are hit or miss but definitely more miss than hit. Story and activities: 7/10 Overall pretty average story but the unique characters do add a lot. I really dislike the objectives structure being a giant photo album of people you have to slowly scroll through to find missions though. Would much prefer a simple text based mission catalogue like previous games. Many times, missions discontinue when you start a new part of them and you have to go back into the menu and try to find that character and re select. Very cumbersome. Gameplay and combat: 9/10 Typical new AC gameplay in terms of mission structures, exploration and combat. I love the exploration side of things and can just wander for hours learning history and completing random events. The combat feels MUCH better than the last few AC RPG games. Weapons look, sound, feel like they connect and have great visual effects and blood/impacts. There is still something wonky with the block/parry where it doesn't register unless you hit the button immediately when the prompt shows up. Hope they fix this or at least make the window adjustable. There are a few other issues that hold back the gameplay as well, but hopefully they can fix some of these with patches Biggest complaints are lack of a torch and meditation along with some weird design decisions like making all animals invincible, a ton of terrain that you can't traverse due to steepness or foliage, and parkour issues where you get stopped in your tracks or the game chooses the wrong path for you. Still very much enjoy, but the game could have easily been a 9 or 10 with some of these issues fixed.