After spending more time with it today:
+ Seamless city. Once you do the initial load and do a few story missions, the whole city becomes available to fuck around in and explore with no more loading screens (until you get your ass killed anyway). Can go inside buildings, into underground tunnels or cross the whole city with no roadblocks.
+ Enemy guns are lethal. In AC3/4, guns kinda turned into something that you could just shrug off entirely. Enemies with guns in ACU become high priority targets because they can cut half your health in one hit, which also discourages just plain running away from combat if you're on an enemy crosshair cuz ur gonna get shot.
+ Slower paced combat. Related, but the combat doesn't feel as button mashy. Taking out single enemies and pairs is still super easy, but mobs of guards (specially with some brutes thrown in) can easily overwhelm you with no easy way to take them all out due to no more chain killing. Very animation-heavy, though you can still interrupt most actions to do a parry.
+ Character customization. Lotta cool options that change up your stats and the potency of your abilities, can change up your weapons, headpiece, chest, forearms, waist, legs and colors. Or just wear our of the legacy outfits which look real good in the ACU engine.
+Sidequest variety. So far I've done murder mystery investigations, joined a devil worship cult, helped hype up the use of Dr. Guillotin's new method of execution, helped Madame Tussaud recover some death masks she made, and had a story assassination where I had free reign in how, when and where I killed my target with no repercussions if I had just waltzed in and bludgeoned everyone to death. Really satisfied in this regard.
+ Arno. Main character is pretty cool. Then again, it's not hard to be a better main character than AC3's Connor.
+Free Run tuning. Really like how they made it so holding R2 and X makes me free run while actively trying to go up, while holding R2 and circle makes me do the same but down. Saves me a lot of time trying to find the nooks and crannies needed to either climb shit or drop down without leaping to my death.
+ Eagle Vision on the triangle button again. It only took three mainline games before they realized moving it to R3 was a terrible decision.
+ Time. Can change the time of day anytime you want with no repercussions.
+ Ez screenshot mode. Can hide the HUD by holding R3 for a sec.
= Co-op. Still haven't done any. Planning on playing with SpeedStats this weekend, so we'll see how that fares.
= Skill "tree". It's nice to have, I guess. Really linear, basically reminds me of the competitive multiplayer skills modified to work in ACU's co-op.
= Bugs and glitches. I've yet to experience any of these damning happenings that people keep berating the game for. Outside of the typical silly NPC fare that you can find in every AC, all I've had are some minor technical issues, which I'll mention in a bit.
= Companion app chests. Easily ignorable and they don't count for for completion percentage. I HAVE downloaded the app though just to give me something to do when bored. App itself is a really basic "send assassins off to do things and wait until they come back" fare just like the AC4 app and previous in-game brotherhood missions.
= Graphics. Definitely the best character models and texturework in the series, but its a bit of a shame that the game doesn't run at 1080p like AC4 did. Would really shine otherwise.
- Technical issues. Despite being a minus, I've so far been spared awful stuff like the game outright crashing. The most I've had to deal with is the occasional framerate dip and this one recurring thing where the game will skip forward every second while doing anything, but restarting the game fixes it immediately.
- Microtransaction store. This is always an eyesore, although still easily ignorable. It's all time saver packs and credits you can buy to get stuff earlier than you normally can, but nothing that you can't get just by playing the game. I was just wondering how they'd monetize a single player game after they'd monetized the hell out of AC3/4's multiplayer.
- Uplay. I generally don't mind Uplay as a service cause i can get additional goodies out of it, but this is yet another time where the whole backend goes to shit upon a game's launch. I've redeemed a bunch of stuff for the game already and am doubting I'll ever see it.
- Locked chests. I don't mind adding a lockpick skill to unlock stuff with, but they really could have done a better job if placing them. It's really annoying to have level 3 chests in the starting area when your lockpick skill is only level 1, since it just makes you want to avoid them entirely.
- Cockades. These are this game's banners/feathers/notebook pages/abstergo shits. Easily collected, but just like the feathers post AC2, and AC3's notebook pages, they're never validated or given a reason to exist in the story and are just there to have another thing to collect. Really wish Ubi would cut it out with these.
All in all, still really enjoying the game. Don't know where the hate is coming from, there's actually a decent game hidden under the glitches where AC3 had a shit game with shit design buried under it's gamebreaking and progression breaking bugs. ACU is mostly standard AC fare.
Edit: Right after this I got destroyed in one on one combat. Guess I need to change that.
