Recent reviews by Albata

Unfortunately another shallow addition. I haven't really enjoyed a DLC since Tours and Tournaments to be honest. Really wish they would just decide wtf they want CK to be, because frankly I see no direction. I might be in the minority here, but I don't think this area of the map needed to be in CK; especially when Europe itself hasn't gotten any major attention since launch (other than the byzantines) and likely won't be getting any for the foreseeable future thanks to the map expansion.

This is a very weird positive review for me, mainly because there was something about each element of the game that I hated, and yet I still enjoyed it. I'm just gonna keep it simple and use a list of things I did and didn't like because I'm lazy.
Cons:
- The parkour is extremely sticky when you don't want it to be, and incredibly finicky when you need it to be sticky. Freerunning is just really frustrating because its extremely easy to just cling to climbable stuff, it feels like a significant downgrade to AC:BF aswell which I found strange.
- The story, especially the ending, are incredibly underwhelming. I seriously don't know what they were trying to show here, because it just comes across as "Assassins good, Templars bad" when they're showing Assassins do the most stereotypically evil stuff and Templars trying to stop them. It's like they're trying to convince you that the Assassins are the good guys in this story despite them being incredibly stupid and straight up evil
- Leads me into the next point, WTF was the Assassins plan??? It's never explained, it's just bizarre. It was genuinely tripping me tf out watching them continue to seek the relics after the first two times of them levelling cities, what was their goal??? Were they meaning to kill hundreds of thousands? Why then are they so baffled that Shay would betray them, and why tf would they stick around?? WHY ARE THEY SO MAD AT SHAY AFTER HE TOLD THEM TO STOP KILLING THOUSANDS IT MAKES NO SENSE For that matter what was the Templars plan? if it's to stop the assassins from essentially nuking major population centres, then why are they using stereotypical villain voices, why are the devs trying to convince me im on the bad side??
- The ending. It's super abrupt, leaves more questions than answers, is super anti-climactic. hell one of the characters who works for abstergo says "jump into the animus one last time, what you will see will change who you are" and then it's just Shay taking the box back from the remnants of the assassins... Okay? Why is that meant to be an earth shattering revelation? Is it because it's in france foreshadowing the revolution? I already knew there was going to be a timeskip, they weren't exactly subtle about it from the very beginning, is it meant to be a cameo of King Louis and Marie Antoinette? Because we literally never see them, just get a name drop. I'm so confused
- I wanted to play more, explore more and get as close to 100% as I could possibly get before getting bored, but around sequence 4 or 5, I ended up getting REALLY bad traversal stutters. I tried everything I could think of, and while playing in windowed borderless made it playable, it was still pretty bad, so I was forced to speedrun the ending. That's sort of the risk of playing older games with an AMD GPU though.

Pros:
- It's essentially black flag 2, pretty much every element of gameplay is the same. this might be a negative for you, but from what I've heard, most people adore black flag so thats why this is a positive
- You play as a Templar, not really a spoiler since its the main gimmick of the game and why it's called rogue to begin with. If playing Haythem in AC3 was your favourite part fo the game like it was mine, you will love this.
- SO MANY CAMEOS. Normally I would hate cameos, but AC does it so conservatively most of the time, so this was very refreshing. Most cameos are from AC3 and Black flag as this game is sandwiched between the two in terms of timeline.
- I can't put my finger on it, despite the gameplay having super annoying quirks and despite the technical issues, I still enjoyed the game. I mean normally traversal stutters that bad would make me drop any game, but I think it says a lot that I came back to it.

Also I'd recommend speedrunning the first 2 sequences as after that you get to the meat of the game, that's when you should start exploring and doing all the black flag type stuff.

I have now completed all levels (before more inevitably get released) and gotten perfect scores on all of them. For the most part I enjoyed my time with this game, more so than power wash simulator, though it isn't without flaws (more on that later)
I'll keep everything relatively concise with dot points, so let's get into the good:
- The progression is quite satisfying, you unlock perks after each level to upgrade certain things such as better cleaning power, detergents, the ability to use multiple detergents, etc etc.
- There's a bit more of a story than something like powerwash, it's extremely simple and cliche but it's much appreciated.
- The man you're playing as, Kowalski, has various reactionary dialogue about the task he's doing, what he's seeing etc. He also speaks in the same way as House which I found amusing.
- The cleaning is actually more fun than powerwash simply because it's not just grime you're cleaning, it's people, bullet casings, blood, shattered glass etc. so It gives you more variety. You also have a few more tools like a mop, a sponge (which you can later duel wield, and is also a knockoff version of a scrubdaddy) and others which i won't spoil, though I rarely used them.
- You can collect music tapes throughout the game which add to your in game playlist. There are some bangers, but since they vary WILDLY on genre, there's only ever going to be a small sample size that each player will like (I'd recommend playing your own music as these tracks will quickly get repetitive)

Now let's get into the things I found a little annoying:
- The guy you're playing as can get kind of annoying with repeated dialogue and overly "witty" reactions that were just not hitting for me. He also doesn't really have a character progression, it's like he just abruptly changed on the second or so level and that was it.
- The last 3 or maybe 4 levels fell into the trap of thinking bigger map = better, but frankly it just become more tedious than it was fun; Having to run a marathon bringing misplaced furniture to their respective spot on the map over and over just isn't fun.
- Certain perks, namely the flat increases in skill/efficiency, didn't seem to make enough of a change, using detergent, which became tedious (especially after you unlock the multi-detergent perk) was really the only way you could speed up the cleaning.
- The mop having collision and constantly breaking glass bottles or pottery and then having to chuck all of that into a garbage bag was infuriating.
- Not enough reason to justify why there is a sponge AND a mop AND a powerwasher when they can effectively do the same thing, just with small differences.
- Some strange and unnecessary off the cuff comments made by the playable character that honestly feel like the devs own bias sneaking through. Only a few in the whole game (granted its a short game), but enough to warrant a confused look before moving on.

Regardless of the negatives, I would still HIGHLY recommend this game, the earlier levels are a blast to do, and who knows, maybe you'll like the larger levels later in the game!

No account management or account deletion after so many years of requesting it.

Very fun game IF you like BGS games. They made some advances in the RPG aspects, but everything else is basically identical to previous games.
The engine however is making me scared for TES6, It's fine enough now, but alot of the animations, typical bugs, horrendous facial animations etc. are very dated, and are going to be so damn dated by the time TES6 comes out. Creation engine 2 bought maybe 2 more years for the engine, but it's just a fundamentally flawed engine. I'm not expecting much for TES6 unfortunately.

Good luck getting the 10L achievement.

Wow. what an experience, so much so that I feel I need to write a review so here goes.
I played this game first on PS4, but never ended up finishing it, so I promised myself that when I build a new PC, I would finish the game on there. There are a few cons for PC that I will get into later, but first I want to focus on the story (no spoilers)
First off, the story is ALMOST perfect! There are two areas that drag it down for me, that being chapter 5 and how quickly the game transitions into the epilogue. Chapter 5 has had a lot of cut content to it so it's by far the shortest chapter, and thank god it is. It's not bad in terms of writing and fun, but it really just sends the pacing into the toilet. That being said, if you can find a way to look past this, you will certainly like chapter 5.
As for the transition into the epilogue, it's really hard to explain without spoilers but I'll try my best. Chapter 6 is by all means the end of the main story, and it ends with a bang. It's really well done, however the game doesn't give you much time to reflect on it, you're straight into the epilogue. This is where I think the credits should've rolled instead of the end of the epilogue part 2. They should've given us that moment to really feel something with the ending. other than these two gripes with the story, it is perfection!
Game play is up next and this is where the PC version suffers quite a bit. The movement is quite weighty which is absolutely fine for the controller, but for M&K, it's really clunky in some parts. The movement can be quite restrictive, especially on a horse. And in that I mean that the game frequently but not consistently takes control away from your movement (most likely if you're about to hit something, or worse yet, are in a story mission with REALLY restricted movement) and Ironically this often leads to running into something else. Granted this isn't just an issue for M&K, but I just noticed it a lot more with it.
So you're likely better off playing with a controller, but there's a bit of a dilemma to this as well. Aiming SUCKS with controller, so you're stuck with either good movement but bad aim, or good aim but bad movement.
A lot of the rest of the game play suffers from this fact and so something as simple as movement ends up hurting the rest of the game.
BUGS, whoa boy there were a lot of bugs I encountered. A lot of them were simple "skyrim-esque" bugs such as animals getting stuck in the ground and freaking out, to other IRRITATING bugs.
I had 2 major bugs that really hurt my experience. The first being Audio which I never found a permanent fix. For some reason the Audio would start crackling, especially during talking scenes. I found a temporary but super annoying fix to it in which I changed my sample rate from 48000Hz to 44100Hz, and this would fix it for around 30 mins to an hour, to which I would then need to change it back (same deal here), and constantly have to switch it back and forth whenever I noticed crackling.
The second bug was a lot more game breaking, and took me ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ hours to find a "fix" to it. The game would randomly crash with an error "Unknown errorr FFFFFFFF". This began to get more and more frequent to the point where I could no longer take it and looked for a fix. After hours of searching, it turns out that the game has a VRAM leak issue on AMD cards, particularly the 6000 series. The fix isn't so much a fix, but more of a time buyer (though you would need to play for over 12 hours straight for it to be an issue). Simply turn off Smart access memory and the game will no longer eat through your VRAM so quickly. Should you be playing for a long time, or have higher settings turned on and the VRAM usage goes up quicker, the only other solution is saving and reloading or rebooting the game.

Other than all of this, I still think my immense frustration was more than worth it, and that frankly should tell you how much I still love this game. (But ♥♥♥♥ Vulkan)

Great sandbox game, have well over 200 hours in this game before it came to steam and the fact that they gave me a free steam key since i purchased it before is commendable.
I have a few suggestions though:
- Workshop support (at the very least for pre-created maps, but allowing us to create new creatures/animals, materials etc would be great)
- Smarter AI (especially when it comes to war, they often just sit around and do nothing even if they're the ones that declared war, and then if they do attack, the other nations military won't respond unless they're in the vicinity)
- Added depth to the plague (not always fatal, survivors will become immune however have a chance to be permanently disfigured/weakened, perhaps even infertile)
- Fix tornadoes, they appear way too often when natural disasters option is checked and they also last wayyyyy too long
- Fix zombies, make it so even with a horde, a nation can still survive, because once the number of zombies gets over 5-10, it's game over even if the colonies have thousands of people

Got one of the most infuriating endings ever because I said something simple to a simple question to one person, then said something nuanced to a nuanced question to the other but since they don't line up PERFECTLY, I got the bad ending. And I just have to say that the ending was really pathetic granted how small the difference was.
That being said, ♥♥♥♥ Emily.
Still recommend though

Amazing game. The littlest things are made terrifying in this game, a simple cut can be lethal, a thunderstorm can wipe out your whole base in a blaze of glory, a crazed rat can kill easily, manages to always keep you on your toes.
Another fun thing in this game is the versatility of what kind of colony you want to be. A cannibilistic tribe? go for it. Pirates that trade slaves? sure. Drug cartel? definitley. you can even harvest organs from the sorry people that get captured by your colonists.
I managed to harvest a prisoners right and left kidney, and the right lung before they bled out....

10/10