Note: hours played are an underestimate.

"it’s about feeling comfortable with not owning your game" -Philippe Tremblay

Underneath a thick encrustation of Ubisoft (™, ©, ®) jank, there's a fun game hiding. You need the patience of a saint to put up with what Ubisoft (™, ©, ®) has decided is appropriate in a *recreational activity*. Every single game they make turns into a tedious slog, fighting against the inane decisions that impede your flow through the enviromnent/story.

Immediately note this game requires 'Ubisoft Connect'(™, ©, ®) and an associated account to play, regardless of the status of your Steam account linked to the purchase. This is a kind of malicious design that treats you like cattle, and disrespects the ownership of your personal computer by inflating its storage with yet another garbage application. I expect 'Ubisoft Connect' (™, ©, ®) will probably shut down within a decade or so to be replaced by 'Ubisoft Get Together' (™, ©, ®) (the game shipped with 'UPLAY' (™, ©, ®), now defunct itself), which probably won't let you play 'legacy' titles like FC3 (™, ©, ®) without paying $70 for the remastered version that won't work at all either.

The servers are also no longer active, or at least I cannot connect to them. This means every time you launch the game, you have to first wait for the game to poll the servers, then fail, then click "confirm" on a dialog box registering you understand that the servers have been abandoned, then repeat this again on the first pause of your play session, every single time, and then periodically after that in the same session. If your game repeatedly tells the user there's and 'ERROR,' fixing it should be a priority if you value your corporate brand. Everyone knows now that Ubisoft (™, ©, ®)'s brand is already held in contempt by the very people who own and operate it. The developers could have probably easily remedied this bunglef***, but their management decided that wasn't necessary (It's worth noting that a Ubisoft (™, ©, ®) branch office is currently under investigation by government authorities in Canada for workplace violations). Every time you play this game you will be confronted with the sugar rush high/short attention span style of AAA game development Ubisoft (™, ©, ®) has perfected: force every user of your software to install additional bloatware (introducing god knows how many new attack vectors to your systems and theirs), then cease operating the bloatware that was required to use the game in the first place. Shareholders can be deluded into thinking this high install rate for each successive, failed Steam alternative platform is a good thing, and not a serious brand handicap.

There are towers. You will climb them. There's a cutscene involved in climbing them. You don't have any choice in this. There are cutscenes. They are poorly written. You will watch them. You don't have any choice in this. You could be playing this game for the 400th time, but your monitor will always emit identical photons each time you enter a cutscene. Presumably, some pathetic manager was convinced that the cutscenes were so good that no one would ever want to skip them. I think this creep still works for Ubisoft (™, ©, ®). Or they think you are so stupid that you won't be able to figure out what's going on if you didn't watch them. Keep a book or a mobile game on hand.

As an example of the degraded quality you can expect from this particular developer, at one point the protagonist interacts with an analog, push button cell phone by swiping on its nonexistant touchscreen. Undoubtedly, the people who made the phone model didn't talk once to the people who did the first person 'player character answers phone' animation. They may not even have ever met each other, or know their respective partners' names. Who came first, the phone or the animation? It doesn't matter: the jank is obvious.