I like this game a lot, it's a pretty seamless integration of Prince of Persia and a GTA clone, the combat is the best to ever be put into an "open-world" game, the missions are always fun and it looks gorgeous. I haven't seen a game this polished since C&C3. But some of the design, particularly the plot design, is really dissonant.
The sci-fi stuff really hurts the game, plot-wise. It's nice in that it provides a device to explain away and integrate things like respawning, load times, invisible walls and the fact that everyone speaks english into the gameplay, all that in itself adds to the immersion of the game, but they really dropped the ball with the little "interludes" in which the Damien the bartender-who-swears-he's-not-an-assassin-but-apparently-is-and-holds-all-his-ancestors-memories-in-his-DNA "unravels the mystery". It totally disrupts the flow of the game, and it's annoying and totally pointless in the context of the game. And given the stupidly contrived "your ancestor's memory is fully encoded into your DNA", I'm not expecting the big reveal of what exactly the scientists want out of you to be all that relevatory or interesting in any way. So whenever Kristen Bell wants me to rest or whatever, I do it as fast as possible so I can get back to the meat of the game, and I think the devs wanted me to take more interest in their sci-fi setup.
It's like if you took the movie
Terminator 2, and every 20 minutes you added a 10 minute interlude about office workers trying to figure out why their copy machine is broken. And on top of that, start off the movie with a guy talking about how the Terminator stuff isn't actually happening and is a means to an end to figure out why the copy machine is broken. Even if you're going to link up the copy machine plot with the Terminator plot at the end and have the copy machine plot totally foreshadow the next movie,
who fucking cares about a broken copy machine, we want to get to the terminating, because the terminating is fun, interesting and engaging, and it's what the movie is supposed to be about, and the copy machine stuff isn't any of those things.
So Ubisoft went overboard on the plot side of things. They couldn't really decide whether they wanted a sci-fi tinged medieval combat game or a medieval combat-tinged sci-fi game, so they figured they'd make a medieval combat game that's also a sci-fi game, and the game is fun enough that they almost made it work when it shouldn't work at all, but they bit off more than they could chew and decided to combine two plots that don't work together. It's a shame they had to burden it from the outset with the responsibility of setting up a franchise instead of just letting it be a perfect game. Had they made the game just about the assassin in the Holy Land it would have been just that.
Jerusalem is pissing me off. Fucking templars on every corner where you least expect them, then you hear them go "HUAGLBLAGUHUGHLABGH" and you know you're screwed. I've only killed one of them so far, but all the rest seems to have their backs against a wall so it's impossible to sneak up for a silent kill. This has made me even more determined to get the kill all the templars accomplishment.
You're going to want to primarily rely on parrying and counterattacks. The Templars don't get auto-kills when countered but are staggered, and you can just run up and hack them to death, provided you aren't prevented from doing so.
