Ok, I've finished ACL now, the game takes through about the third sequence to unlock most of the side mission types. By that point you can hunt alligators and bobcats in the bayou area, but there's no skinning or crafting mechanic. You can buy shops after killing their owners in side missions, but that didn't seem to give you much advantage (maybe lower prices? I hardly wanted to buy anything...never really buy weapons in the later AC games, hidden blades all the way).

The final couple boss sequences will give you some ... trouble unless you go into the first boss sequence with a full satchel of bombs (preferably a satchel that holds more than 5), and have two left for the true final boss (you have to have completed all citizen E missions to complete the true boss, that's not that big a deal). Some of the collectibles in the game are odd, you can buy watches which then claim to be quest items (never found any questgiver for that), you can murder (it asks you to beat them up, murdering works fine) thugs and take their foreign coins, you can charm specific gentlemen to earn brooches, and you can pickpocket hungan(s) to get voodoo dolls. I don't see any of those items in the hideout. You can also collect diary pages from your mother. You need to go deep into the menus to find them and read them, and when you do, you'll already know the surprise twist before you get there.

Overall the game is better than my initial impression was. I do see things in here that seem like they are taken from AnvilNext in terms of gameplay, but I'm not sure that graphically it's up to the AC3 standard in most cases. The bayou is both the best and worst area for environments, you get some awesome naturalistic free running, but it also has a tendency to get you caught in trees, or swimming above the water line (unable to get onto the ground). I've also gotten stuck between two tents in the city until I bounced around and finally out one end. I had probably six crash to desktops in the course of the game (running Nvidia here, but my driver didn't seem to cause the crash).

With more first civilization or modern era material (i.e. anything more than hardly any at all), I would have given this a more enthusiastic review.