Recent reviews by sina

It's probably my least favourite Wolfenstein title in the series but I don't see why the reviews are mostly negative. Story-wise it's probably the weakest. Graphics are really good looking, the action is engaging. Doesn't take ages to complete. The maps are repetitive but so is killing a billion similar looking NPCs. Repetition is an inherent part of the genre. It's not bad, it's just forgettable.

I see a recurring criticism about the one dimensionality of the characters; how up to this point, characters were scarred and traumatised by war, whereas the two protagonists in this game are just unfazed by the death and gore around them. Although I don't think it's deliberate, it kind of makes sense to me, because the kids did not get used to war like others, they were brought up by BJ Blazkowicz himself, so it would be weird if they were just acting like regular kids reacting to war. They snipe animals, catch snakes with bare hands and recreationally hate Nazis with daddy as past time activity for ffs.

I wouldn't recommend it if it were the only game you'll play from the series, but in the general scheme of things it's a passable addition. It's fine. In terms of substance Youngblood to the Wolfenstein series is what Thor movies are to the MCU.

- Arbitrary access to the real world story arc and a fleshed out Animus user that provides a narrative hook for the player.
- The bleeding effect is back. Useless, but still there. It was probably missing in AC:Unity because they couldn't work it in.
- The original artifacts and no sages or blood drops or lightning swords or teleportation camel saddles (ok I made the last one up, but why not after the AC:Unity sword)
- Eagle sense is a LITERAL EAGLE circling above you, how cool and fresh is that?
- No camelcr*p eagle sense gimmicks like "smell-sense" from AC:Unity
- Completely figurative assassination cut-scenes and farcryesque, hallucinogenic dream sequences that feel more like a visual poem / eagle-sense-fever-dream than an FX-happy intern's post processing assignment.
- Heatstrokes
- "OMG is the Sphinx really that small?"
- Everything from the AC logo to the finger cutting practice get an origin story, which is a nice touch. Also the point of the title of the game. Obviously.
- Animus glitches are Egyptian Gods' personifications.
- No "income system with a lazy backstory because Ezio was a landlord" (I'm still looking at you Unity)
- Brutus

It's as if... It's as if Ubisoft was listening to the reviews. AC:Origins fixes everything I hated with a passion in AC:Unity.
BUT

- New game plus is a joke (you can practically jump right to the second play-through by turning the auto-level enemies on and playing at hard difficulty.)

- UI is confused about its relationship with Layla. Is it her Animus interface or is it the actual game's interface? Animus hacking and new game plus do not belong to the same narrative level. OR IS LAYLA'S STORY ANOTHER LAYER OF A SIMULATION? (cue in the Inception Bwah)

- Really, really on the nose dialogue along the lines of "we are assassins and our creed will live on... *wink wink*". Only thing missing in certain scenes is Bayek staring right into the camera like Jim Halpert from the Office, along with a snap zoom.

- I guess it was designed to be this fateful saga in the AC universe that sets everything in motion, but I think it was too spread-out in general and too on the nose when it was emphasized.

Well I'm knitpicking.

Story-wise it's still not anywhere near the Desmond story arc, but it's a way more dignified continuation than churning out new things like the sages or whatever the f*ck that stupid sword was in AC:U out of thin air to replace the currently expired elements. It doesn't frustrate like AC:U because AC:O is either taking elements from the previous games by making it obvious (like the artifacts), or trying something new like the Eagle-eagle-sense.

It's self contained. The characters are appealing. It's a specific, personal and fresh little story. Starts violently and ends with a powerful historic scene.

Fair enough Ubisoft, you won me back.

I love Alien: Isolation and have zero experience with steroids, but I'm pretty sure "Alien: Isolation on steroids" is a succinct and precise description for this game.

And also that this is sort of a compliment.

About 50 hours into the game, while I was grinding achievements in a hypnosis-like haze the game had induced on me, I slowly realized the kind of man Mad Max is.

Mad Max is the story of a psychologically unstable man who forces his own view of justice and order on a disturbed yet otherwise functioning post-apocalyptic society.

Shortly after being ambushed by the warlord Scrotus the Immortan Jr., "the crazy eyed road warrior" Max, hellbent on revenge, goes completely out of his way: he topples down every single stronghold that probably without option declared allegiance to the tyrant Scrotus, he pillages every single isolated and obscure domicile where starving scavengers survive and get hostile only if anyone trespasses their territory and he creepily collect their private photos and diary entries, reading and cataloging every single one of them for god knows what reason. By the end of his rage induced rampage that he ironically performs in a chillingly and psychotically restrained composure, Max opts to kill a disabled and mentally handicapped man, Chumbucket, whose messianic delusions were ultimately exploited by Max to make him build his war-rig. As Chumbucket continually upgrades his life’s greatest work, appropriately named the Magnum Opus and have creepily ecstatic moments of joy as “his saint” Max drives it, he grows an unhealthy affection for him, most likely as a result of Stockholm Syndrome. The social bond that keeps the narcissistic-codependent duo together is Chumbucket’s orgasmic joy of having Max drive his car and Max perpetually feeding on Chumbucket’s unhealthy obsession.

Perhaps falling victim to his ever building, self-mutilating, caustic hatred, Max suffers from a psychological breakdown. He becomes the sole prisoner of his rotten psyche and gets trapped in his own subconscious; his personal limbo. At the very end of his saga, every significant person that were unfortunate enough to cross paths with Max inexplicably come back to life in this timeless mental Wasteland, perhaps as a manifestation of his guilt.

And Max spends his days here until eternity, where he was supposed to leave as soon as possible, surrounded by the unforgiving "Big Nothing" - the borders of his own subconscious, driving in his combustible, fire spitting mount restlessly, Chumbucket whispering praise in the wind behind him, with his inner demons only seeping out during fleeting moments as the red in his eyes.

10/10 I’ve never been into cars, now I'm dreaming of building one.

Update: Unity lowered the bar to such a point that almost all the positive comments recommend the game because IT CAN RUN. The sympathy for the game is bordering Stockholm Syndrome. It is praised for doing what exactly every single game should be able to do: execute. It’s almost brilliant and a great business model, too: 1) Release a game with no content that cannot run. 2) Fix all the bugs. 3) Profit.

First of all Unity is actually a decent game but since this is supposed to be a part of the Assassin’s Creed storyline, it miserably fails to fit in, hence the vote down.

Secondly, of course, spoilers.

The overall feel of Unity is more like a fan fiction project with an enormous budget rather than a proper, canonical installment.

I think the most important thing that I would have liked to know before buying Unity is this: It has NO ADVANCE IN THE MODERN DAY STORY ARC. Apart from the occasional server change ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ (which I think is a lazy excuse to include the Eiffel Tower in the game) there is nothing happening today.

Honestly I gave up on expecting any good story material after playing AC3, because the compelling and coherent story of the first civilization and their artifacts that will help prevent the 2012 apocalypse ended with Desmond. The story as it was revealed up to that point didn’t require the juno plot twist to be any better.

In Black Flag the sages were introduced, which were only conceptually replacing the artifacts. But I still had no problem with it, because the reason I play the games is the beautifully complex story that actually takes place today, which has layers and layers of narration embedded in each other. Like the way the game used to be about the modern day assassin Desmond, living Ezio’s life, who has visions of Altair and the way these characters are interconnected centuries apart (the last speech of Ezio in Masyaf).

But the good side is that you do not have to be annoyed about not being able to replay modern day missions, since there are none.

Maybe I’m mistaken but I remember an interview, explaining this initiate thing to be a way of supporting the immersion of the game play, that the player would indeed feel like the person who is actually in the animus. Well, it does not. and I do not. When there was this confused, interacting, afraid deep within and overall relatable Desmond, I cared about his story. His layer of narration was the buffer between the animus and the actual game. His presence was a mental bridge; he was there to suggest the mode of interaction and how to feel. Now that the game has no modern day content, no outer layer of narration that I can relate to and is based on a complete rehash of the finding artifacts plot with the one key difference that there is no cataclysmic end game like the DESTRUCTION OF THE EARTH, it is reduced to some kind of assassination simulation.

As it is stated by many other players, now the fighting is much, much better. It is more realistic that you can’t take 30 people at once.

Unless you use the smoke bomb generously.

I was one of the people who thought the fighting should be more challenging and I actually liked this improvement at first, but the fact that it is easily overcome by buying powerful enough gear and smoke bombs, does not make me believe that this is a genuine attempt to make it realistic, but rather a way to make players grind points, or much better, buy helix points to upgrade. The new fighting mechanism doesn’t require skill, it requires points. At some point, I ended up running into lifts like an idiot to collect extra creed points for a sword. There are nice improvements but all of them feel contrived.

Plus, since with enough smoke bombs, skill and gear the fighting is exactly the same, the only difference now is that you don’t see a damn thing through the shroud of the smoke while fighting. Or you can activate the eagle sense, of course, so now you’re fighting luminescent, solid colored bald figures.

Unity adds nothing to the main story arc and everything in the game is a rehash of an old concept, without proper justification (unless you count being cool as a legitimate reason). I could completely skip this installment and I wouldn’t miss anything story-wise:

Like Arno owning the Cafe Theatre is analogous of Ezio owning a town. But, well, Ezio is a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ landlord! Why does the Assassin Brotherhood just give away the entire income of a huge cafe to this one seemingly insignificant new recruit?

What is the proper justification of the ancients devising a lightning sword, which is analogous of the apples and the shroud, that teleports to undefined distances? The apples and the shroud that was always there at every turning point of human history, as opposed to the sword which is there as a nice gimmick and an end game reward.

Why nobody is freaking over the existence of such sword and looking for it, instead of looking for the body of a man, who was explained to be an identical genetic copy of another man with the identical set of memories, who was already captured dead in the previous title?

Seriously, where is that sword? Doesn’t the existence of such an artifact implies an additional title on Arno, where the modern day Assassins try and find the sword before the evil reverse engineers of Abstergo?

Where did this Desmond-replacement, unnamed initiate come from? Desmond was held captive by Abstergo and later rescued by the Assassins. Why is this person agreeing a possible lobotomy and why should I relate myself to such an immaterial idiot? The stakes were real in the story for Desmond, because he was there in flesh and bone. And really, in AC:R, his consciousness was [able to get] trapped in the animus, since he was introduced as a separate character (and a plot device) than the actual player. Since the initiate is an avatar of the player, We know that there is no risk of brain damage that will change the course of the modern day story, thus anything Shaun says is ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ to make the game sound cool.

What happened to the bleeding effect? Is the initiate being trained now? For what? Or is this an upgraded animus that doesn’t cause the bleeding effect? If so, then, is it actually a downgrade?

What is the deal with Arno’s eagle sense? Why are they making up new, ambiguous powers as they go along? When was the “super smelling” power introduced? Why Arno and no one else has the power of sharing consciousness with a dying person? If the eagle sense was a genetic trait coming down from the first civilization as explained in previous games, isn’t it supposed to be more powerful as you go backward in the inheritance tree and not other way around?

Why is everyone British? Of course they will have some accent after all, but why such a distinctive one? Just because there are palaces and it is Europe? With the nasal sounding butler and other characters, saying pretentious ♥♥♥♥ like “*rse” or “myes sire”?

If the entire Helix and Abstergo Entertainment subplot is their new immersion trick, how am I supposed to feel immersed while being asked to pay actual money for upgrades?

Why is Ubisoft doing this to the franchise?

So all in all, if you are a loyal fan of the series, you’ll disregard all the negative comments, including this one and play the game anyway. That’s what I did, because I was curious about the progress in the main story arc, which turned out to be nonexistent.

If you are new to the series, please do yourself a favour and go start from Ezio’s story. Assassin’s Creed Unity is the single most beautiful Nvidia showreel I have ever seen and nothing more.

The game of course had its few moments, which I will not spoil, the graphics were gorgeous and the soundtrack was the best so far (bar the Revelations main theme). But I could be completely fine with watching few scenes online and listening to the soundtrack of “Tous les matins du monde” instead.