Assassins Creed Origins

I just finished playing Assassins Creed Origins ("the one in Egypt"). I've spent 40 hours on it, and the last 8 hours of that were a race to get the thing finished, because the story was Just Not Great.

The Good

The game looks gorgeous on an Nvidia 1080. It has great landscapes and the loading times are bearable. The in-game performance is great, and the sneaking/murdering gameplay is really fun. The other Assassins Creed game I played was Assassins Creed II, the one in Florence.

The Bad

The story. Oh god, it is bad. The story in the outer world is random filler, eating up loading time. The story in Egypt dredges on too long. It is about a failing marriage and two parents on a trip for revenge.

The gameplay in the open world is largely forgettable. There is little to discover and it is not fun to just ride around, discovering the landscape. The gameplay in fights is no fun either and most of the missions are not fun either. They take themselves mostly serious and there is no connection to the quest givers and their plight. Better writing could have helped there. The only good gameplay is the one you make for yourself by clearing out the military installations, sneaking around and killing people.

The world is large but boring. It is no fun to seek out (and potentially clear) all the question marks on the map.

The ugly

The game is connected to the UbiSoft launcher, even when you buy it through Steam. That launcher updates itself every time you launch it through Steam. It also requires a (burner) email address for launching the game.

The game is single-player but wants to be online all the time, to tell you about Assassins Creed Bucks and other microtransactions.

Monster Train 2

A fun strategic deck building game, Just like the first game. Different mechanics, different challenges. There is some kind of story.

The first Monster Train made me realize what people like about Magic the Gathering (the strategy and deck management) and does not have any of the downsides of Magic the Gathering (the lootbox money sink).

The story is nothing spectacular but has at least one good reveal.

On Monster Train I have 1.100 hours logged, so here's to another 1k hours .

Last Saturday, I played through Senua's Sacrifice, a game first released 2017 to critical acclaim.

The game was rather disappointing - the story is good, but the gameplay is a mix between a walking simulator, cutscenes telling a story, some small puzzles and boring melee fights against the same set of five enemies.

Luckily, the game was also quite short, because I don't think I would have spent a second evening with that game.

If you want to play, I recommend getting it on discount and playing it on easiest difficulty. The story is OKish and might entertain you for an afternoon or evening.