Unrelenting skepticism will also eat your soul from within. Give "healthy doses" of skepticism a shot!

I've been following the staff twitter comments on the main page. Any individual reviewer can rate up or down, but to me it is no surprise. You catch on to the drift, obtuse as it might be.

I'm still getting this game and glad that it has positive reviews.

I went against my general rule of no pre-ordering it, and I picked it up for $33 CAD from Nuuvem. Deal's off now, but It's seems like a very good buy for that price, considering the reviews it's getting especially.

I do. Imagine if everyone was just as cynical. Maybe you wouldn't have about 50 comments on every review calling for the writer's resignation.

@fredchuckdave: Assassins Creed 1 seems to suffer from an inverse case of rose tinted glasses as people tend to think more poorly of it as time goes on. I'd hardly say it was a TERRIBLE game. It introduced some amazing gameplay but got a little repetitive halfway through. Even so it stayed true to the original design a lot more than any of the subsequent entries in the series. You gathered information, stalked your target and went in for the kill. I also liked the story arch for the protagonist way more than Ezio's "eyyyy I'm a playboy, eyyy I'm a master assassin now!"

Not to digress, I just wanted to say it wasn't a terrible game.

@humanity: Unity is supposed to be a return to form with that sort of gameplay isn't it? Actually planning your assassinations and all that. I remember in the E3 demo there was some proper sneaking around with cover too, which is great because the line of sight bush hopping wasn't particularly engaging stealth gameplay.

But yeah, that first game kinda had whole Hitman thing where you learned the environment, assessed potential routes and opportunities, and struck when everything lined up according to your plan. Except in AC you booked it afterwards instead of calmly walking away undetected. Still, a lot more satisfying than most of the stuff you do in the later games (the most notable exception being naval combat).

Man, I'm gettin way more interested in Unity now.

@humanity: The problem though is it is super janky by today's standards. Just the way everything works is very reminiscent of a PS2 game.

@theht: I sure hope so. Some of their recent videos got me a little worried. The co-op they showed didn't look very sophisticated. It would be a dream if they reeled it all back a bit, went back to actual stealth, made it about assassinating key targets rather than boring busywork and convoluted intrigue. If anything this will mark the first Assassins Creed game where everyone having an awkward french accent won't seem incredibly out of place. I know that people from France say the french spoken by Canadians is weird although I don't know in what way - I assume it's a dialect thing like someone from Texas compared to someone from New York?

I'm also really interested in seeing where they take the modern day stuff. I hope this won't drag those same characters from Ezio's story arch into this. With the new generation in console I'm really hoping they make a clean break from that entire storyline.

Phew, it's a 33 gig download on PC. Thank god for preloading.

Quebecois and French are actually slightly different languages, as well as the usual accent difference.

Yah thats what I heard as well. I did take French in high school but can't really make any claims in being able to use it effectively. So it will be fun to play a game where I might catch every 5th or 7th word here and there. If anyone is french here and has heard Quebecois, or vice versa, I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!

Pleasantly surprised by these reviews. I honestly expected a decent to middling game, so to hear it's actually quite good is refreshing. I'll still likely wait to buy it though as between Destiny, Assassin's Creed Unity and NBA 2K15, I really doubt I'll have any time to play it in the near future.

This definitely look like a game you'd want to play with a controller, or does anyone know if the mouse and keyboard controls would be doable?

Destructoid 2nd opinion:

Hearing the comparisons of the controls with Ass creed concerned me a bit. I have always struggled with the controls for those games, always found myself running in the wrong direction or either running too fast or walking too slowly! However after giving this a go at EGX I was surprised how well it complements the Asscreed and maybe a bit of Batman style of controls. As you jump off a cliff for example you can press the x button to give yourself a boost in speed allowing yourself to get around very quickly. Big open landscapes made it satisfying to traverse the environment and get too objectives quickly.

Fuck. I may actually pay $50 for this game now. I can't tell you when the last time I paid full price for a game was.

I definitely would not want to do mouse & keyboard for this game...I mean I have a nice mouse and a Ducky Shine mechanical that I try to use as much as possible, but for essentially any third person action game, I never feel comfortable with anything except a controller. It'll be interesting to see how they handled the m+k control scheme, though. But let's not kid ourselves, this game seems like it was designed around a controller from the very beginning and seems like the clear choice as far as I'm concerned.

I played this a bit at EGX in London this weekend having largely avoided much about the game. I was pretty curious given the pre-release buzz and having put my hands on it I ended up pre-ordering it.

It seems pretty forgiving (we were given access to a buffed up build) so it can be played more like hack & slash rather than Creed stealth style at some point later in the game.

The key thing I took away is that it is far more complicated than I had initially assumed (thought it was just straight up beat'em up). There are tons of icons, missions, and the nemesis "chess board" is really dense with information. We all had someone next to us explaining to us what to do and how to set up targets, etc. Quite frankly I would have been lost otherwise having jumped in cold.

Same boat here :)

Any word on how it runs on pc? That 50$ price tag is looking pretty good, but it may be another shitty console port plus i can't max it out anyway (6gb of vram for ultra :-0 )

I was watching other people play this at EGX and have to agree that it looked quite dense and complex game play-wise... but the combat looked solid and the reviews are suggesting that I ought to pay some serious attention to it.

@corevi said:

@gunslingerpanda said:

Any word on the PC version?

Nice.

Looked up some videos when I realized all I knew about this was things I'd heard about the nemesis system, and fucking hell it looks like the Assassin's Creed game I've wanted since the assassinations got extremely linear after AC1. I'm gonna allow myself to get hyped, I think.

On the flipside to this, I've played every main Assassin's Creed game with a keyboard and mouse (as well as the two Arkham Games I played), and would in all likelihood have a less enjoyable time with this if I used a controller. I like being able to quickly and precisely change my direction, especially in these sorts of third-person action games, which is something I can't get with thumbsticks.

When running around on rooftops and such, instead of having to correct my direction from overshooting my aim or having to move the sticks more slowly for accuracy and missing my timing, I want to be able to turn 90 degrees on a dime to exactly where I wanted to go. It's all usually a smoother experience for me with a mouse and keyboard.

But I'm sure both will be supported.

@james_hayward: That was kind of my point. I tend to like more complex / deep games.

I didn't have much interest before but I was pleasantly surprised by the complexity I saw at EGX, and the positive reviews only made me more confident that this is something far more interesting than I had initially assumed.

I like Max, but those were five pretty stupid points.

I am pretty sure he is just being a dork. Max is rarely ever serious in his videos.

Does the environment have any variation at all?

That's the only thing putting me off of the game. Every video I see looks like a big open, brown environment with a couple of brick walls here and there. Is there anything else? Like nice looking set piece areas (buildings... something)?