I am playing Assassin's Creed: Shadows. Since I just completed the main story, I could also have posted this in "Last games you finished", but since there is still much side content open, I will be playing it for several more hours, I guess.
I love the game, it has the same qualities as AC:Origins and AC:Odyssey and I like it even more.
The positives:
- Great world, which is fun to travel. I loved this already in the other games and it is at least as good here. The landscape and buildings are great, also the overall atmosphere.
- Exploration is even more fun than in the other games, since you can choose to find locations on your own, based on general direction hints given. As an alternative you can also decide to send scouts to narrow down the targets for you.
- While I can't judge the accurateness of Japanese history, the presentation of historical lore etc. is great. If you assume that it is as accurate as Hellenistic Egypt in Origins or classical Greece in Odyssey, it is surely worth learning.
- I liked the main story even more than the ones in the predecessors and I found the fates of the two protagonists very moving. Also the motives of the villains are presented in a way that you can understand them. You even get doubts, whether you are on the right side from time to time.
- I found stealth and fighting well done and fun.
- A change in character progression, which I liked very much: Besides the normal way to gather experience through fighting and completing quests, you can get knowledge points from peaceful activities like meditating at new shrines or finding lost scripts in temples. The normal experience gives you mastery points to learn new skills, as usual. The knowledge points allow you to access higher levels of skills in the skill trees. I liked that combined mechanic.
The negatives:
- One small nitpick I have: You can play two characters and even change the character, as you wish. This is the good side. But from time to time you are forced to use one of the characters for specific tasks and I didn't like that. If, for example you have infiltrated an area with the stealthy character, you may find an obstacle, which can only be removed by the fighter guy. Since you have to leave the area in order to change the character, this can be annoying. However, this is only a small nuisance.
All in all, this is a 10/10 for me and recommended to everybody, who likes Open world exploration games with story and stealth like Origins and/or Odyssey or games like Horizon Zero Dawn or the newer Tomb Raider games.
Some statistics: Steam says that I played 130 hours, the save game says 110 hours, the difference my be idle time or time lost by reloads after death. I assume that I will spend 50 more hours completing the side quests and exploration of the map. I played on the highest difficulty level with one modification: I chose the option to auto-complete quick time events, since I don't like those. Such QTEs are only relevant for some of the meditation tasks and samurai training tasks needed for knowledge points.
