What game you currently playing?

[Wainy316]

You sure?

If so there's a lot of people on the internet who have got it wrong

I can't really find a definitive answer either way though so I'll take your word for it.

Always liked "Break it Down" too, but did also enjoy the Run DMC DX song.

Ginko is correct

[Chindie]

I'm increasingly of the belief that Assassin's Creed 3 was shoved out the door somewhat unfinished.

Disappointment of the year contender.

[Stevo985]

Nah I'm not sure, that's what it said on wiki so take it as you like. I think I checked up on it years ago and it said the same thing then. I do, however, remember watching RAW when they did this VT on DX recording a music video for the theme where HHH was smashing a car with a baseball bat and kept breaking them because he swung so hard. There was no mention of RATM at all, you'd think there would be,

I remember that. That was the Run DMC version (terrible quality)

I'm increasingly of the belief that Assassin's Creed 3 was shoved out the door somewhat unfinished.

Disappointment of the year contender.

I'm glad you've said this. Basically saved me a purchase.

Not as good as AC2 I assume?

[Chindie]

I'm glad you've said this. Basically saved me a purchase.

Not as good as AC2 I assume?

I've spoken a lot about the issues I've had with it over the last couple of pages but more and more things strike me about it. Some of it is just daft - Messing around earlier I decided to fiddle with the look of Connor and went and bought a new outfit. I actually bought a couple. But when you buy an outfit, you just get a description and a graphic of a wooden crate - you can't look at the outfit before you buy. And then I seem to be unable to change back - in previous AC games you'd have what amounted to a wardrobe at your base, and this has that too... but my new looks are not there to change back into. Or if you dyed an outfit, you could just go and dye another colour. You can't do anything like that either. And then if you do change your look it's incredibly inconsistant as to when it does and doesn't show your new look in cutscenes, in some it does, in others it doesn't.

The crafting system has some moronic design choices - you can produce items for trading, there are loads of items and there are loads of basic materials you can use to produce them, and given the time period a lot of it is wooden items. The game decides to offer many varieties of wood you can purchase from the woodsman in your homestead in the crafting menu - walnut, pine, oak etc - and different items use different woods. But the items don't specifically tell which wood they use, they simply have a picture of wood. And guess what? All the different woods have minutely different tiny pictures of piles of wood, which needlessly adds difficulty to the system. The game also doesn't explain that your craftsmen level up, which leads to more confusion, and even when you do cotton on to the fact they level up you won't be immediately clear as to how they level up (for reference, if you do their associated Homestead missions, each craftsman will eventually have something said about them like 'Dave can now make higher quality items!').

You can also produce items that upgrade Connor - a twin holster that allows you to carry 2 pistols, a larger quiver - which you can only produce once... but the game then leaves them there in the menu for you to have to scroll past every time.

The game suffers for a lack of character, to be honest. Connor is a dull, crazily naive blank canvas, not a touch on Ezio, and to be frank there isn't a character in it that isn't mindnumbingly uninteresting. The world isn't helped for that either - none of the cities are interesting. They are flat, monotonous... You rarely take to the rooftops as it is difficult to really cover major distances there, and given the ubiquitous nature of riflemen on rooftops, you will find yourself sticking to the streets pretty constantly, which feels strange for this series. When you are on the rooftops you're climbing the highest structures in seconds.

The Frontier is empty, and massively trying to cross when playing sequences in winter as Connor struggles in deeper snow. That might be an accurate take on reality but it also makes it a chore when you need to cross the entire map to reach a sequence slowly trudging along... Even when you have a (rare) fast travel location nearby you'll wish you could just skip to your objective as there is nothing to do on the way there, besides track collectables and (largely pointlessly) shoot wildlife. Jumping through the treetops is an attempt to add verticality to the game but lacks the freedom of the rooftop gameplay Ezio and Altair had, as you are effectively forced to run through set pathways (that you'll soon see corners cut on - they repeat sequences of trees across the maps. Particularly noticeable with the Frontiers Viewpoints - a couple are buildings but most of them in the wilderness are the same tree repeated 5 or 6 times).

It's also buggy. At the moment I get a little notification every time I enter a new region saying I've received a new weapon - I haven't. I also regularly get notifications telling me I'm in the top X for Activity Y - believe me when I say I'm not. I've had it get stuck in a loading loop this morning and I've had a couple of hard lock ups. I've also had a few weird graphical hitches. I've had a mission fail to load in the objective - the game required me to track down a target in a set area, par for the course for the series, but on 3 (of the required 4 targets) it did not load in the target, leaving me wandering round the (small) area looking for the target, flicking Eagle Vision on constantly, for quite some time. I took leaving the area and re-entering each time to get the target to appear. It's not like I was just doing badly and couldn't find a moving target - they were static targets. I was also killed in the cutscene following completing a mission, which would have been bloody annoying had it not been so funny (thankfully the game checkpointed the beginning of the cutscene and I lost not progress).

I'm fairly convinced the Brotherhood recruitment is actually broken. Liberation Contracts supposedly allow you to recruit new guys, but on visiting any of the locations for a Liberation Contract in Boston (a town I've largely otherwise cleared now), there isn't a mission to do there. So I'm left with an un-completable couple of missions in Boston it seems. If I'm doin something wrong, that game has not explained so.

And of course you'll fail objectives because of the gameplay mechanics, even with the new safe free running they've put in, and as usual it's the chases that show it up most. After 5 years and 5 games, I've kinda had enough of that.

The strange thing is, I'd probably not be so disappointed by all this had the game any charm, like it's predecessors. But it doesn't. I can see a lot of people think I'm being harsh but, as someone who likes the series, I'm really struggling with this. It's hard to care about it all. In actuality the only aspect of the title that is anywhere near flawless is the naval combat, and you could easily complete the game barely touching that on current showing.

[Rino8]

Not hearing good things about this game from well, anybody. Might even give it a miss which I'd have never considered myself saying a year ago. Might pretend the game died with Ezio and not bother.

[Ginko]

I'll just pick it up when it's cheap in a year or two. Some of the things Chindie has flagged up are things I've noticed in the previous games in the series. I've always thought the AC games were unpolished, especially when it comes to bugs. I thought I might be being a little harsh because I was a games tester for 4 years, but compare these games to many other huge game franchises and you'll notice how poor some of the development choices have been and how careless the devs have been. Not just bugs either, I've noticed corner-cutting in the other games too.

Chindie's right though. After five games you'd think they would have fixed a lot of the issues.

[Stevo985]

Well I've had a love/hate relationship with AC anyway. Thought the first one was a brilliant idea executed very poorly and ended up being repetitive and extremely boring.

Then I was pleasantly surprised at how good the second one was. Really enjoyed it, played it to death. Thought it was brilliant.

But given what I've heard of this one, i don't think I'll be splashing out.

[Chindie]

If you like AC2, Brotherhood is definitely worth a play, it's basically AC2.5 and a really enjoyable play (apart from the last hour or so - they make a fairly silly gameplay shift that is pretty unsatsfying).

Revelations is skippable - it's additions are pointless and it feels like a buffer entry in the series.

As for AC3... if you really, really love the series, you won't care about my issues with it. I like the series but also found the niggles prevented my absolutely loving it. AC3, as far as I can tell this far, is perfectly playable, but is riddled with little flaws and in some cases makes silly mistakes and errors. Even the Brotherhood stuff, which I simply can't get my head round to the point it might be broke in my game at least, is unnecessary, you'll be able to finish it without touching the system (I only want to look into it as I'm a bit of a completionist).

If you just like the series, I think you could do well to leave it for now and wait for a price drop whilst playing the other great games this year has given us.

[villa4europe]

Ah thanks for this, I hadn't checked it this week, and haven't played either of those. They any good?

crysis is ok, i dont think they use the huge maps as well as they could and despite the weapons having a good chunky feel to them they arent particulary great and varied, neithe are the enemies, still worth a play

R&C i havent played yet, played previous games and enjoyed them but this one is aimed at 4 player co-op so im a bit unsure of it

[hogso]

The R&C game is 16gb too, so I've given that one a miss. I'll try crysis 2 though.

I finished borderlands today. Glad I stuck with it, got a fair bit of fun out of it in the end. The non-human bosses were pretty terrible. I'm not bothering with the dlc though, or the sequel, for now at least.

[Rino8]

If you like AC2, Brotherhood is definitely worth a play, it's basically AC2.5 and a really enjoyable play (apart from the last hour or so - they make a fairly silly gameplay shift that is pretty unsatsfying).

Revelations is skippable - it's additions are pointless and it feels like a buffer entry in the series.

As for AC3... if you really, really love the series, you won't care about my issues with it. I like the series but also found the niggles prevented my absolutely loving it. AC3, as far as I can tell this far, is perfectly playable, but is riddled with little flaws and in some cases makes silly mistakes and errors. Even the Brotherhood stuff, which I simply can't get my head round to the point it might be broke in my game at least, is unnecessary, you'll be able to finish it without touching the system (I only want to look into it as I'm a bit of a completionist).

If you just like the series, I think you could do well to leave it for now and wait for a price drop whilst playing the other great games this year has given us.

I feel a bit different with Brotherhood/Revelations. I felt like Revelations was the better of the two, Brotherhood didn't grab me like the others, city isn't as good, and it's kind of the inbetween bit of Ezio's story, 2 introduces you to Ezio and Revelations wraps it up.

What I'd have really liked them to do is not bother with Brotherhood and Revelations, and instead spend 2/3 years really nailing the Ezio story to come back in AC3 because if you look at what say, Rockstar do with there games, it makes the AC series look simply disappointing.

[GarethRDR]

Brotherhood was the best of the series for me. All the better parts of 2, refined to a point and with a couple nice additions. Telling, however, that I've had Revelations sat on the shelf for about a year now and have played all of 5 minutes of it, didn't grip me at all in the same way. If 3's as poor, think I'll wait for that to hit the bargain bins.

[Risso]

Well I'm playing AC3 on the Vita, and it's OK as a Vita game, but it's buggy as all hell and has nearly had me flinging the Vita at the wall in anger several times. I'm having to do one mission where I am supposed to tail a business rival, except I can't because my notoriety is high, and nearby guards keep coming over and then I always get spotted. I can't seemingly do anything about it either.

[The_Rev]

It's spoileriffic beyond belief, but if you have played The Walking Dead (and if not, why not?) then it should make you laugh. It's some guy making the arsehole choice every time.

[Chindie]

I liked AC2 more than Brotherhood, myself, despite the latter adding nice extras to the decent AC2 foundations. I just didn't like Rome as much as I liked AC2's bits of Italy, and the story wasn't quite as interesting. Revelations constantly felt like a game shaped buffer for the development team of AC3, made to sate Ubisofts taste for an annualised series. It takes Brotherhood and adds things to the bow that don't feel necessary. The hook blade ziplines never felt useful, the bombs were never needed beyond the missions they forced you to use them in and they didn't make for particularly fun tools to use for the sake of it, Istanbul didn't inspire me either and the story didn't really do much either (it's one of the most poorly titled games I can recall - they're aren't any revelations?!).

On Scumbag Lee, I want to play the Walking Dead after how much praise it's had everywhere, but on hearing its getting a retail release in the US at least I'm holding off.

[hogso]

It's spoileriffic beyond belief, but if you have played The Walking Dead (and if not, why not?) then it should make you laugh. It's some guy making the arsehole choice every time.

Haha, I've done this on one of my playthroughs - the best bit is in ep 2 when you can make clem say shit. It's so out of character its hilarious.

[NorthEastVillan]

Just finished Deus Ex: Human Revolution and I have to say it's a phenomenal game. For me it was as near to perfect as you can get. Like playing as harrison ford in Bladerunner. Great game. 10/10

I'm now 7 hours into Deadly Premonition and I have to say it's a delightful trainwreck of a game in a very good way. Think Twin Peaks the game and you'll have some idea of how awesome this is. Graphics: 1/10 gameplay: 1/10 voice acting: 1/10 overall: 9/10 I don't know how it manages it but it just seems to work, the characters are just amazing and seem ripped straight from Twin Peaks. I'd urge anyone who's not played it to give it a go. It's on 360 only at the minute but a directors cut is coming to PS3 early next year

[Ingram85]

Im looking forward to the directors cut of Deadly Premonition mainly due to the re-worked controls. Always wanted to play it but never quite got round to it so the re-release will suit me down to the ground.

[NorthEastVillan]

Im looking forward to the directors cut of Deadly Premonition mainly due to the re-worked controls. Always wanted to play it but never quite got round to it so the re-release will suit me down to the ground.

You'll hopefully not regret it. You're guaranteed to have one of two reactions to Deadly premonition. You'll either completely love it or detest it in every way, there's just no middle ground with it.

[Ingram85]

I've watched a few videos and 'let's plays' on youtube so kind of know what to expect, like you say, its pretty much Twin Peaks: The Videogame. Marvellous.