AC4: "I hate this game!"

AC4 is a good game and in many ways a return to form after the dismally boring AC3. Its not easy to write any thoughts about AC4 without referring to AC3, so I'm not gonna bother trying to do that. Also, despite it being a good game, i'm going to mainly discuss the things I don't like about AC4 (as I usually do..)

 

AC3 was a game that took all the Desmond stuff we had been doing for 3 titles and threw it in the garbage. AC3 also gave us Connor, the biggest loser of a protagonist we could have not asked for.

 

Edward Kenway is a great character. I don't care much about his pirate story, but I do like his banter and general demeanor. As a character, he wants me to continue playing as him to figure out what happens to him. AC4, on the whole, does a far better job of keeping me going from objective to objective to see the final outcome of the game. But I haven't quite forgiven the clusterfuck that was AC3's plot, and for that reason, I haven't invested myself in the main pirate story of AC4 (as I fully expect it will devolve into meaningless crap, as these games always do).

 

I'm at sequence 9 out of 13 at the moment. A lot has happened, some quite exciting, some quite tropey and expected. But lets ignore the story for a moment.

 

AC4 still suffers from all the problems of its predecessors. Trying to run through a narrow doorway? Kenway will, without fail, climb the wall right next to the door. Trying to drop down and air assasinate two targets? This will work 50% of the time, and for the remainder, you will jump down on one guy and his buddy will be alerted to your (rather nearby) presence. Sometimes you get lucky and the guy is oblivious to the assassin standing less than a foot away, and that leads to good times.

 

However, the biggest problem, the SINGLE BIGGEST GRIPE I have with this game, and those that came before it, are the fucking eavesdrop missions. God how I hate them. I end up having to redo so many of them because something absurd happens each time, and it becomes a painful iterative process of getting just far enough to fuck up, and learning how to deal with that fuck up the next time around. And there are at least 20 "Follow X" / "Eavesdrop on Y"  missions in the main plot where getting detected means restarting the mission. 

 

Fine, maybe this is what it would be like to be an assassin, but every time I failed one of these sections, I'd shout "I hate this game!". I'm just over it, I've been doing the same thing every year since 2008, and it's become harder to forgive with each new iteration of the one Assassin's Creed game we've been playing for 5 years. (Cue the "I've never failed an eavesdrop mission!" statements from Joker and Hotfuj.)

 

I also find sailing somewhat boring. I initially quite liked taking down navel fortresses but after doing 3, they are all the same.  I'm at a stage now where the game constantly asks me to upgrade the Jackdaw before starting every mission, and I'm trying to see how far I can get without doing so. I'm not particularly inclined to do any hunting (on land or sea) either, but it's nice that its there I guess.

 

As for the historical aspects of the game, I like these when they're not so damn hammy. AC3 takes the famous Paul Revere ride and puts Connor on the same horse. While my knowledge of Pirate history is very limited, there's clear evidence that AC4 tries to shoehorn Kenway into  bits of 'true history' with similarly awkward results. And it just dilutes the overall effectiveness of the history lesson.

 

Now that I've done my usual rant, one thing I really enjoy about AC4 is the modern Abstergo Entertainment plot. I've really enjoyed finding out what's happened to Desmond and company by hacking PCs at Abstergo. I don't tend to read the stuff I find (soooooooo loooooooong), but have listened to all the Desmond recordings so far.