I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
I am currently paying through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. On the one hand the story, the acting, the visuals, … are all top notch. However, they also made it impossible to play as assassin - even more so than in Origins. The protagonist constantly reminds the player to stay hidden, but then none of the bigger targets are killable in one hit. Having to use an assassination hit once, and then hide until they forget you, is no fun. Especially if you need to do that 5+ times for one enemy. Some of the later game skills help, but it’s still more fighting than assassinating. In an AC game. It sucks.
Even worse, there are a ton of scripted fights, where you simply cannot do assassinations. Open a door in a cut scene and immediately get jumped by five guys. Kill a whole camp and sneak up to the boss, only to start a cut scene where you brazenly and openly challenge him. It sucks.
But then there’s an emotional reunion or a cool side quest, and it’s all good again. Until the next fight.
You just reminded me that I was in the middle of playing Odyssey and I just… drifted away from it again. That has happened a bunch of times.
I like sailing around in that game. It’s fun to discover new things. But, yeah, you can’t play it as an assassin, you have to play it as a warrior, and the warrior mechanics are frustrating to me. If I remember correctly there are 3 different skill trees in the game, one that’s stealth-related, one that’s bow-and-arrow related, and one that’s combat-related. But, you can’t really play the game as just a stealth-assassin. You can’t play the game as a ranged bow-and-arrow user. The skill trees reflect this because in the bow-and-arrow one there are all kinds of abilities related to using a bow-and-arrow while you’re in melee combat, and in the stealth tree it’s the same.
I still love climbing to the top of a high thing, unlocking an area, then jumping off. A lot of the little side quests are fun. Sailing around on a boat is fun – and sometimes the boat-to-boat combat is fun too. But, too often it becomes “fight these 50 dudes in melee”. And yeah, they telegraph their attacks, and give you plenty of time to dodge and counter. But, when it’s 50 dudes, sometimes the attacks line up in a way where you can’t deal with all of them, and so they whittle your health down, even if you’re doing the right thing 95% of the time.
Ooh, I just remembered another fun part of it, though it can sometimes also be tedious. There are the missions where you need to clear out an enemy base. You don’t have to use stealth to do that, but you can. And, it can be a really fun problem-solving challenge where you figure out which dude gets isolated at which time, and you stealth-kill him and hide the body before the nearby patrol sees. One by one you can eliminate everyone in the base, until there’s just one guy walking around in a base, all alone, every one of his buddies is dead. Clearing out a base like that can be really satisfying, although sometimes it takes too long. I just wish more of the game allowed you to solve it with stealth.