I'm going to split this review up in a sandwich so we'll have some good then some bad then a overall but it will be a lot of list of thoughts and just things about the game. I only ever played Brotherhood other than this so you can have that to go off of for reference. I've had dreams about this game before I played it and while I knew that it would never meet the expectation of those dreams, it still surprised me at how good it did.
The good. There are parts where the wind will blow your ship hard enough to make you change course and you have to steer against it, that sounds like one of the easily finicky features but I had no problem at all, it was welcome. This really is a definitive pirate experience, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can sync watch towers to teleport from one part of the island to another or if you sync all of them in that island then you can just fast travel from anywhere there rather than traversing the entire map (whole diff island). There's a Mayan outfit that you can collect tokens for throughout the game, so I got it and it has some neat perks my only complaint is that it has no hood. You have a scope to check out ships and what level and cargo they have so you know whether to bother plundering them or not. The shipmates sing songs (which are called shanties) whenever you're sailing which really kind of brings it to life which and you can collect these shanties in the form of flying pages so they can sing new songs. You can rescue pirates and add them to your crew, whether they're castaways stuck at sea or need your helping fighting guards, I always liked recruiting in Brotherhood. Every time you get on the ship, the crew cheers, I love it!
You can technically see a beefy ship and watch it tussle with other ships until they chip it down, as long as you get a blow in then you can still plunder it but you still have to take out the crew, especially the captain. You have a blow dart so you can tranquilize people but it's only a limited time before they wake up unless another guard finds them then they can wake up faster. You can change the colors of your sails but I think it would have been more effective to have the sails act as an upgrade so certain ones will give you better speed or something, just something that would have been cool but you can upgrade the ship through other means so that's cool. You can skin animals and use their hides to create armor or upgrades to health or whatever but I rarely ever hunted anything so it's not necessary at all but I appreciate that you can skip the cutscene of actually skinning it. Which is another thing that's not all that bad but something to point out, you don't have instant health vials like you do in Brotherhood, you just kind of have to work through it, if you're good then it's not a problem though.
One more thing...BLACKBEEEAAARRRRDDDD!
The bad. So I played this without subtitles...because I couldn't find how to turn them on, then I did find it in the main menu settings towards the end, I really hate that but it's my bad, just a disclaimer for how my experience went. However the story isn't all that great or big, it's kind of just whatever, half the time I'm not sure what relevance some characters have to the plot but it's not a big deal, this isn't really a game for story but that doesn't mean it doesn't have good scenes.
There's a windmill that sounds pretty cool but climbing up it is a pain in the rear partially due to controls, it took me so long to figure out and do it properly. James Kidd is a douche, enough said. There's a certain person you have to kill when you get marooned which doesn't make much sense to me because I had a berserk dart (meant for the crocodiles but again I barely hunted so I saved it) so why couldn't I have had the option to use that?
Glitches and stuff. When you open chests, it's a bit finicky and you have to be in a certain spot, same with when you knock someone out, it will say "loot ammo" but you have to be in the right spot even if it gives you a button prompt (towards the head). I was on a trailing mission and was in the final stage where they have a conversation before the cutscene, so I was hiding in a bush, didn't move because I was listening. They almost finished the convo when it said "target lost" which if you know AC games, there's a vicinity where you need to be in, I was well within that range and I was practically in the exact same spot when I succeeded the second time. In the last part of Havana, I was looking for the target, using eagle vision and such but he didn't show up. I went everywhere in the green area, I even ended up taking out every person in the area and nothing. I looked it up and sure enough the guy who was supposed to be there, didn't spawn! I had to exit the animus and go back in to restart the mission. (he was on the close side of the church). I infiltrated a naval base and in order to capture it, you need to go into the war room. I took out the officers then went there, in the middle of the cutscene of me opening the door, some guy back-stabbed me, there was no way I could have defended from it. A similar instance happened (but without the cut-scene) in the jungle. I died to a jaguar I believe and respawned but when I respawned, the little summary of the island showed up where it gives stats for what collectibles you have and stuff, it take up a 1/3 of the screen so I couldn't block any attack from it in the quick time event because I had no idea what button to press. I mentioned the Mayan outfit, with collecting the tokens, Edward will say "One more to finish my collection" after collecting so many which gets your hopes up but chances are that you'll need more, he says it too early. I went after a courier and I was right behind him whenever the chase started and I guess the game didn't like that so he rubberbanded away at an unreasonable speed. A shipmate glitched out of the ship and just hung there in mid air while I sailed.
Major rant. Back in the day it was cool to collect stuff because you would usually get something cool out of it and it was mysterious but with the internet now, it's just not mysterious so it doesn't work as well, so why not tell people what doing something will reward you? Especially if it sounds boring like "Animus Fragments" which are nothing more than balls of light. I ended up looking it up when I was around 75% done with the game which means I could have collected at least half of them right? (there are 200!) I'm not a completionist but alas the reward is too good...a skeleton crew! I wanted to end it as decked out as I could because I'm not usually one for post game content either but I did a nice big roundup of these fragments, but not quite all of them...I looked more into it and apparently you need to do challenges and the fragments are just a piece of the bigger picture...so alright, a lot more work but I WOULD still do it in order to get the skeleton crew. It even involves online missions I believe and I'm not up for that. But then...I figured out all of this requires you to more or less 100% the game which means you don't get it UNTIL POST GAME. So you finish the game and you don't even have it for the end, it doesn't even show up in cut-scenes (which wouldn't be a big deal but given the circumstances-) It's just not worth it, you can't even save after the main missions are done apparently so you get to just roam around with it for a little bit. I would rather it not be in the the game at all than tease me like it did, what a let down, what a sham! I was going to say how GREAT this game was but this made me mad because of how promising it was. There aren't even mods or bypasses or anything because it's an AC game.
The overall. It outdoes Brotherhood in the gameplay but the story for BH was better. In the end, I had more fun with this one for sure but I'm going to dock it for the misinformed skeleton crew, save yourself the hours of trying to get it. I will however say that if you are into pirates then check this game out! Like even if you're only slightly into them or have some sort of soft spot, try it! I played KH3 in the Caribbean and while I liked the world, I never thought I would be so giddy over a bunch of pirates like I was with this game. However this apparently connects to AC3 in some way, so I didn’t understand it, I might or might not try that one, not sure yet, I hear it’s sort of weak but if you want to understand the ending to its fullest then you should probably plan on playing AC3 either before or after or just look it up and spoil it, whichever you prefer. If there’s anything I’m wrong about or you want to convince me to play AC3, everything’s welcome, be my guest.
The good. There are parts where the wind will blow your ship hard enough to make you change course and you have to steer against it, that sounds like one of the easily finicky features but I had no problem at all, it was welcome. This really is a definitive pirate experience, the good, the bad, and the ugly. You can sync watch towers to teleport from one part of the island to another or if you sync all of them in that island then you can just fast travel from anywhere there rather than traversing the entire map (whole diff island). There's a Mayan outfit that you can collect tokens for throughout the game, so I got it and it has some neat perks my only complaint is that it has no hood. You have a scope to check out ships and what level and cargo they have so you know whether to bother plundering them or not. The shipmates sing songs (which are called shanties) whenever you're sailing which really kind of brings it to life which and you can collect these shanties in the form of flying pages so they can sing new songs. You can rescue pirates and add them to your crew, whether they're castaways stuck at sea or need your helping fighting guards, I always liked recruiting in Brotherhood. Every time you get on the ship, the crew cheers, I love it!
You can technically see a beefy ship and watch it tussle with other ships until they chip it down, as long as you get a blow in then you can still plunder it but you still have to take out the crew, especially the captain. You have a blow dart so you can tranquilize people but it's only a limited time before they wake up unless another guard finds them then they can wake up faster. You can change the colors of your sails but I think it would have been more effective to have the sails act as an upgrade so certain ones will give you better speed or something, just something that would have been cool but you can upgrade the ship through other means so that's cool. You can skin animals and use their hides to create armor or upgrades to health or whatever but I rarely ever hunted anything so it's not necessary at all but I appreciate that you can skip the cutscene of actually skinning it. Which is another thing that's not all that bad but something to point out, you don't have instant health vials like you do in Brotherhood, you just kind of have to work through it, if you're good then it's not a problem though.
One more thing...BLACKBEEEAAARRRRDDDD!
The bad. So I played this without subtitles...because I couldn't find how to turn them on, then I did find it in the main menu settings towards the end, I really hate that but it's my bad, just a disclaimer for how my experience went. However the story isn't all that great or big, it's kind of just whatever, half the time I'm not sure what relevance some characters have to the plot but it's not a big deal, this isn't really a game for story but that doesn't mean it doesn't have good scenes.
There's a windmill that sounds pretty cool but climbing up it is a pain in the rear partially due to controls, it took me so long to figure out and do it properly. James Kidd is a douche, enough said. There's a certain person you have to kill when you get marooned which doesn't make much sense to me because I had a berserk dart (meant for the crocodiles but again I barely hunted so I saved it) so why couldn't I have had the option to use that?
Glitches and stuff. When you open chests, it's a bit finicky and you have to be in a certain spot, same with when you knock someone out, it will say "loot ammo" but you have to be in the right spot even if it gives you a button prompt (towards the head). I was on a trailing mission and was in the final stage where they have a conversation before the cutscene, so I was hiding in a bush, didn't move because I was listening. They almost finished the convo when it said "target lost" which if you know AC games, there's a vicinity where you need to be in, I was well within that range and I was practically in the exact same spot when I succeeded the second time. In the last part of Havana, I was looking for the target, using eagle vision and such but he didn't show up. I went everywhere in the green area, I even ended up taking out every person in the area and nothing. I looked it up and sure enough the guy who was supposed to be there, didn't spawn! I had to exit the animus and go back in to restart the mission. (he was on the close side of the church). I infiltrated a naval base and in order to capture it, you need to go into the war room. I took out the officers then went there, in the middle of the cutscene of me opening the door, some guy back-stabbed me, there was no way I could have defended from it. A similar instance happened (but without the cut-scene) in the jungle. I died to a jaguar I believe and respawned but when I respawned, the little summary of the island showed up where it gives stats for what collectibles you have and stuff, it take up a 1/3 of the screen so I couldn't block any attack from it in the quick time event because I had no idea what button to press. I mentioned the Mayan outfit, with collecting the tokens, Edward will say "One more to finish my collection" after collecting so many which gets your hopes up but chances are that you'll need more, he says it too early. I went after a courier and I was right behind him whenever the chase started and I guess the game didn't like that so he rubberbanded away at an unreasonable speed. A shipmate glitched out of the ship and just hung there in mid air while I sailed.
Major rant. Back in the day it was cool to collect stuff because you would usually get something cool out of it and it was mysterious but with the internet now, it's just not mysterious so it doesn't work as well, so why not tell people what doing something will reward you? Especially if it sounds boring like "Animus Fragments" which are nothing more than balls of light. I ended up looking it up when I was around 75% done with the game which means I could have collected at least half of them right? (there are 200!) I'm not a completionist but alas the reward is too good...a skeleton crew! I wanted to end it as decked out as I could because I'm not usually one for post game content either but I did a nice big roundup of these fragments, but not quite all of them...I looked more into it and apparently you need to do challenges and the fragments are just a piece of the bigger picture...so alright, a lot more work but I WOULD still do it in order to get the skeleton crew. It even involves online missions I believe and I'm not up for that. But then...I figured out all of this requires you to more or less 100% the game which means you don't get it UNTIL POST GAME. So you finish the game and you don't even have it for the end, it doesn't even show up in cut-scenes (which wouldn't be a big deal but given the circumstances-) It's just not worth it, you can't even save after the main missions are done apparently so you get to just roam around with it for a little bit. I would rather it not be in the the game at all than tease me like it did, what a let down, what a sham! I was going to say how GREAT this game was but this made me mad because of how promising it was. There aren't even mods or bypasses or anything because it's an AC game.
The overall. It outdoes Brotherhood in the gameplay but the story for BH was better. In the end, I had more fun with this one for sure but I'm going to dock it for the misinformed skeleton crew, save yourself the hours of trying to get it. I will however say that if you are into pirates then check this game out! Like even if you're only slightly into them or have some sort of soft spot, try it! I played KH3 in the Caribbean and while I liked the world, I never thought I would be so giddy over a bunch of pirates like I was with this game. However this apparently connects to AC3 in some way, so I didn’t understand it, I might or might not try that one, not sure yet, I hear it’s sort of weak but if you want to understand the ending to its fullest then you should probably plan on playing AC3 either before or after or just look it up and spoil it, whichever you prefer. If there’s anything I’m wrong about or you want to convince me to play AC3, everything’s welcome, be my guest.