Recent reviews by Acquire

Great remaster. It's ultimately the same game, but the UE5 upgrade is gorgeous and the gameplay feels a lot less clunky than the original. Wish there weren't so many load screens though.

A janky mess of mediocrity.

Nah.

This is just stupid.

Part 2 takes the original’s formula and fine tunes its gameplay. The ability to go prone and attack from there is a huge addition to the stealth gameplay. Melee is much improved with the simple additions of dodging. The skill tree is also larger with worthwhile upgrades significantly improving gunplay, crafting, and stealth. The rest of the experience, for better or worse, is the same. In some ways, the design feels like a PS3 game at heart. Seeing a rendition of post apocalyptic Seattle and Santa Barbara, which I’ve explored many times over the years is a treat. Visually, the art style is great, but the fidelity is a bit disappointing as this very much looks like a PS4 game vs Part 1 on PC, which is a remake.

As for the story, I was disappointed. The game has two simultaneous narrative threads that have little crossover. Half of the game is played as a new character. She is introduced as a very unlikable character and her part seems to be an attempt to make her more likable, but it had the opposite effect on me. People from her own community think she’s trash. The two threads do intertwine at the end, but it’s clear the story was relying on me liking the new character for its story beats to hit or make sense. It’s tragic, brutal, and bittersweet, but a bit confusing to understand the intentions of the writers. There’s too many playable flashback sequences for my taste too.

This is a great remaster of a hidden gem. Survival horror in the arctic with a simple yet effective squad mechanic.

This is a good Resident Evil style survival horror game. The gunplay feels even better. The chase and stealth sections aren't great though and need some work. I'm hoping they are minimized in later chapters. The devs should focus on what they've done well here and that's the traditional survival horror stuff of exploring, resources management, killing zombies, solving small puzzles, etc. The only instability I've seen is that it always crashes when I alt tab out.

Shadows has the best stealth gameplay of the series. You even play as a character that makes sense to be an assassin (a ninja) vs prior titles. The series gets a much needed modern game engine upgrade too. The visual tech is great.

Infiltrating bases and taking out enemies is fun. The grappling hook is a great aide in vertical exploration. Being able to go prone opens up a lot more areas to stealth and assassinations. Finally being able to use light (or the lack of it) to hide in is great. Your toolset makes ranged assassinations and daring escapes via ninja smoke bombs possible. This is where Shadows shines. The rest, not so much.

The combat is terrible. Enemies spam unblockable attacks or long combos from all sides. The lock on and parry system become a hindrance to try to use. It’s more effective to constantly dodge. It’s a sloppy mess. Upgrades for Naoe end up making her overpowered, trivializing combat and stealth, but at least combat can then be ignored mostly. Yusake is so overpowered to begin with that he can brute force his way through the bad combat.

I don’t understand why Yasuke exists as a playable character. He is the anti Assassin’s Creed. He can’t stealth. He should’ve just been an ally. Luckily, he can be mostly ignored. Some missions require him, but his gameplay is so straightforward and easy that his parts can be plowed through quickly. He can literally plow through walls and enemies.

Character progression is a grind and was designed for a game a third this size. Mastery points are easily acquired, but spending them requires upgrading your knowledge level to unlock extra tiers in the skill trees and only boring mini games spread throughout the world will give you knowledge points. You’ll accumulate dozens of mastery points as you wait for your knowledge level to increase. The last two knowledge levels in the skill trees also provide a very limited amount of upgrades to choose from. If you’re an explorer, unlocking the full skill trees can be achieved with only exploring about a third of the map too. You’ll have so many mastery points that your characters will be more or less maxed out for your playstyle by then (except for a few story locked upgrades). The majority of the game will then be played with minimal character progression to look forward to.

The loot system also doesn't make sense. Early on you get full sets of legendary gear. Nothing, other than legendary gear, can best legendary gear. The entire loot system is a waste as all you do with it is dismantle loot to upgrade legendary gear while you wait to see if you find other legendary gear. You can even buy legendary gear with real money.

The base building, scout, and ally system are half baked ideas. You’re quickly able to build all the main buildings and upgrade them. Scouts are used for three arbitrary tasks (find objectives, pick up large resources, or clear your wanted levels). These tasks used to be doable directly by the player in previous games. Why introduce a middleman gameplay mechanic to do these? The first one can at least be disabled in the options. I've yet to see the need to use an ally during combat.

I hoped the world would at least be fun to explore, but it is not. Most of the world cannot be climbed. Exploring off the main roads is a no go as you’ll immediately run into impassable obstacles. It’s frustrating. There is no exploration then. Drop a marker on the map, set the horse on auto pilot, go make a sandwich, come back and continue. Parkour works well enough, but it feels like it hasn’t improved in about a decade. Expect to get stuck, move in the wrong direction, or throw yourself into oblivion unintentionally. The world is also too big. It’s full of the same handful of activities to do over and over again. Combined with a progression system that stalls too soon and other half baked ideas as mentioned above, it really gets boring before even exploring half of it.

Cutscenes are bizarrely capped at 31 fps with terrible stuttering despite all being real time. Other than this, it’s a great PC port and it runs well on the Steam Deck too.

It's a decent open world game with some very fun ninja stealth gameplay, but it’s got many bizarre design decisions and ultimately collapses under its own weight. I don’t see a reason to continue playing.

Terrible outfits.

The cat content is barely anything, the outfits are weird, and the price is ridiculous. I only got it because it was on a deep discount.