Gavin Dunaway

I love Assassin's Creed as a whole, but this game was so difficult for me to play. The story is great, and the world is engaging, but the combat, parkour, and detection systems are incredibly flawed. Starting with the combat; I can say that playing this game became much easier after gaining the ability to counter kill, but the inconsistency of whether the counter would kill or stun was the difference between life or death in most fights. Not only that, but enemies can hit the player twice without being able to fight back. The lock on system in combat has caused me to rip my hair out in agony, wishing that I wasn't a completions and could skip this game in the franchise. Parkour and climbing are buggy and inconsistent, and most always lead to me falling on the ground to get attacked my several enemies gathered in one place, which leads me to my next point, the detection. Enemies can detect you in the blink of an eye for the most ridiculous of reasons. Fell off of a building? Combat. Got pushed into a guard by some random drunk? Combat. Literally walked at a decent pace? COMBAT. I understand why people love this game, it's interesting and is the beginning of a great franchise, but the lurking issues constantly making me have to put the controller down and take a drink of water to cool off after 25 minutes of trying to run away from at least 30 guards, on top of being forced to play the same mission 9 times over and calling it a main story is boring as hell. The game doesn't provide the player with intrinsic motivation to keep going, and is incredibly hard to play or want to play. I'll rate 5 stars for the sake of the story, but if you want to play something fun, skip this one and play literally any of the others.