Some observations after finishing the story and finishing the top/middle 100% (barely starting the bottom now, 52 missions to go down there ^^
:
-There's way too many guards in this game. I must have killed about 2-3,000 guards by this point. Some of the later story chapters and a lot of the 4/5 star missions are just hundreds of guards. Sometimes there's some real impossible situations (more than often) on these maps where you end up fighting guards and when there's like 8-12 of them at once it's pretty bullshit. Poison gas + medicine is kind of helpful in those situations but still annoying.
-But then on co-op the game is ridiculously easy. Holy shit! I finally played my first co-op game as 50 hours in I saw for the very first time a guy appear on map asking me to help out on a mission. It went from being really tough 1p and frustrating to being a joke. The enemies don't even seem to recognize the 2nd player (and I'm guessing same goes with player 3/4) so player 2 can just walk up and shoot the enemies all in the back while they're fighting player 1 lol. Wish I could get into more co-op games. Would help for some of these 5 star co-op maps that really feel made for more than one player.
-Controls still suck. There's still too many times where Arno doesn't do what you what him to do and getting stuck on an object or not being able to go in a window combined with all the buggy AI and such can just make situations a lot more annoying.
-So many bugs on follow AI. Had multiple quests where NPCs I'm supposed to follow would just stand still and not move. I had to mess with the nearby area to try to "push" them out of their stuck phase and get them moving again. This is after patch 3 btw.
-Too many of the collectibles are locked chests. Just makes it even more of a chore to grab them all.
-Time rifts are wasted. They make some very cool locations and you run through them on rails once and then do a crappy iOS mini-game a bunch of times. They could've at least made some fun missions in these locations :\
-Murder Mysteries are cool, but when there's like 7 locations they take forever and there's a ton of them. I like the ones with multiple locations all in the same general building/area. But the running around ones can easily take 30 mins just to go get all the clues.
-A lot of the tediousness of the game after hour 30 or so kicks in until hour 70 or so when you finish all the missions is because of the 1:1 scale of the game. It's very cool in that it makes the buildings feel huge and visually it's impressive. But honestly, when the entire game takes place in one city and you spend 150+ missions constantly running from one marker 400M away to another...it feels slow. I think they could've fixed this by having Arno run A LOT faster, especially if he's not under attack, and there could've been even more save points because for some reason the dots you need to reach in missions are never near any fast travel/social clubs! Game just feels like it takes forever because of all the running back and forth.
-...which could have been cut down dramatically if there were more locations. Putting this many missions in a single city just makes a whole bunch of back & forth chore-work vs. exploring new areas like ACIV or Far Cry 4.
-Story was not very good. Outside of Elise and maybe Arno, no interesting characters; everyone is paper thin, there's hardly any plot and it skips around a ton so much that the bad guy has to explain the plot of the game at the end and it doesn't really add ANYTHING to the mainline modern story. Probably only better than AC3 in story. ACII series > ACIV >>>> the rest of the games in story/characters.
-Last boss was terrible, but oh well.
-Not even using half the map makes me really feel that the game is unfinished in an FFXII way. I mean the game has literally HUNDREDS of missions across the entire map. There's no reason why some of these missions in the south couldn't have been incorporated into the main storyline. The main storyline could've used more missions with some more character development to make it worth caring about, plus it could've done some nice cinematic stuff with these southern Paris locations like the Pantheon.
-AC games are so weird now. An AC game is a 10-12 hour story and then 50-70 hours of BIG SANDBOX MAP WITH HUNDREDS OF MISSIONS (and collectibles). It's almost like the story is now just a throwaway like campaign modes in multiplayer fps games. The meat of the game is in all the sidequest missions and exploration. There's a huge disconnect and if that's the direction AC is going in this post ACIII world (pre-ACIII the games would be about 50% story, 50% sidestuff), then I think it works a lot better as a pirate sailing series, as big sandbox map with hundreds of missions is a lot more satisfying when it's actually a world you're exploring and doing missions in rather than couped up in a city or two.
I think after like 50+ hours I've played enough to generally know what I think I of the game even if I've got another 20-25 hours of missions left to mop up. It's generally a well made AC, outside of the bugs, framerate problems, controls; but it feels pretty disjointed, rushed, unfinished and made by committee rather than having some heart and vision. Unity reminds me a ton of ACIII, so much that it feels as if the bulk of the designers were ACIII designers who were making ACIII-2 "this time not shitty version", which is fine, but ACIII was the first AC where it really got tedious and was missing the "fun enjoyable videogame" part. ACIV brought that back, but now Unity feels like it's taken a step back again. It's just never that much fun and just feels like going through the motions, and when it's not really that fun and just sort of mildly enjoyable...you don't necessarily want 75 hours of it. ACIV lacked the graphical wow and had a much lighter tone, but it was a fun game to play.
If you only play the main story, Unity has the edge because the story missions are generally good in Unity and the story missions in Black Flag tended to be the weaker part. But again, post-ACIII AC games are <15 hours of story and 45+ hours of "other stuff" and ACIV's stuff was a lot more fun to play than Unity, plus ACIV actually had a modern day story and the way it was done was nice looking and enjoyable. On a 1-10 scale where ACII+B is a 9 and ACIII is a 6, I'd put ACIV at an 8 and Unity at a 7.
Will probably play Rogue at some point since people are liking it and it's supposed to be fairly short. But next 75 hour AC in fall 2015 I'm probably gonna skip. The games are just getting too bloated in design at this point when the inherent gameplay isn't fun enough to support that many hours doing the same types of tasks over and over (and when half the playtime is running from one area to another).
