Reviews

Genuinely has the most annoying starting cast out of any open world gacha I've ever played. A bunch of children and a goofy animal mascot that's basically Groot from Guardians of the Galaxy. Except this is if Groot was in EVERY scene. The obsession with children in gacha games is just annoying and dumb.

The "art style" of the story's cutscenes are in the "omg so wacky!" anime style and they are so busy and hyper it's seizure-inducing and genuinely naseuating. The game tries to have a realistic, beautiful overworld with some scary moments, but its all ruined by the cartoonishly over the top and loud cutscenes. I know I can skip the story, but I don't want to. I actually found the general plot interesting, but the way it's presented is unbearable. 

Despite the game taking place in an urban landscape that has graffiti, R&B music, and rap, there's somehow not a single black NPC in sight. Even Hoyoverse did slightly better on that front. 

Hoyoverse also did better with character integration with the world. As in most other open world gachas, in NTE there's a subtle but clear seperation between your character and the environment. Can't do any action in elevators, most menu functions are disabled in domains, you can't jump, switch characters, or even look up when swimming. You also can't climb onto something while you're swimming either like you can in Genshin. The sound effects are very samey. And the climbing being a weird "half wall run and half regular climb" is just really annoying, both on animation and muscle memory wise. 

*TL;DR: Nothing has tooltips and the gameplay is basically just button spamming and collecting drops.* Putting the Gearbox and privacy situation aside, I surprisingly found this game pretty boring and beginner-unfriendly. 

First and most grievous in my opinion is that not A SINGLE ITEM has a tooltip. Items are basically all your upgrades. At first this isn't an issue because most items come from chests which are random anyway. But then there will be stations where you can buy an item from a list of other items, but you can only buy one item and you basically have no idea what any of the items do. Apparently the items used to have colored outlines which showed their rarity, but this feature was removed at least for items in the shop stations, which is weird because thats when knowing what the item is actually matters. There's also trading stations where you can trade an item you have for another, but again, you have no idea wtf you're trading for the first time you play. Once you get an item it's recorded in your logbook, which you open by pausing and selecting it. And if you ever forget what an item does? Yeah, you have to open the pause menu, go to the logbook, and search for the item from the list instead of just hovering over the tooltip like a lot of other roguelites implement. I don't know if "no tooltip" is a thing in other games other than Binding of Isaac, but it does not feel good in this game. Before an update you couldn't even open the logbook during a run. 

Second: environments are bland in the way that there's no variety in them, despite there being different biomes. Monsters don't look interesting or varied. This is especially annoying when you're trying to search for a teleporter and you're basically walking around in circles because everything looks the same. 

Third: gameplay is spammy and dull, your goal is basically to just kill monster hordes. it's like those zombie games in fortnite or a wow-like mmo where you just hold trigger and click something whenever your cooldowns are off. 

Fourth: the effects on screen get really intense really quickly. To the point that you can't even see enemy attack alerts. And if it's a boss, you can get caught off-guard really bad.

 Fifth, and I know this is more of me being dumb, but my first run I spawned next to a blood alter. The blood alter's icon was shaped a little bit like a teleporter and it has the exact same color, and that combined with the fact my first task was "find a teleporter," I thought the blood alter was the teleporter. When it didn't do anything teleporty the first time I interacted with it I thought maybe it was some special thing where I had to interact with it enough times and it would turn into a teleporter (like basically an alter that always spawned closed by where you could sacrifice your health to get a teleporter more quickly, instead of searching for one out far). This was not the case and I didnt die, but the fact that teleporters and blood alters don't have different colors (and more differently shaped icons) doesn't make much sense to me. 

Sixth, character build doesn't seem to matter and is too dependent on RNG. You just open as many chests you can find and get whatever item it gives you, with the goal of getting the Most Items and the occasional shop/trading station. Usually I like hack-and-slash games, and roguelites, but something about this game is almost too simple for me. I think it may have to do with lack of needing positioning (enemies just charge at you the same way). If there's a something deeper than that that I'm missing because I haven't played much, then that's my mistake. But this game really does not have that initial hook or addiction like other roguelites do that I've played (Hades, Binding of Isaac, Slay the Spire, Gungeon, Dead Cells, freaking Splatoon 3 Side Order, etc). 

I haven't played RoR 1 but I can definitely see this as a game that works for 2D but not for 3D. The good: I like how items appear on your character. 

Only started playing this because of a Steam Family, and I recommend it, but only very tentatively. 

I've always been wary of "early access" games. More and more developers have been doing that lately and it usually results in a product that is buggy, a product that is never finished, or a finished product that isn't even different from the early access version. With the latter, you have to wonder why even call it early access, and just call it "live service" or something (if there's continuous updates). While I understand its for funding reasons, it's always been a bit of a red flag to me. Palword is set to finally get out of "early access" this year, yet the game doesn't feel like it, and I really worry about their promise of 1.0 having "so many changes."

Palworld fun and addicting, but probably only for the first 15 hours or so. It's one of those games you play non-stop for a week but then never touch again after that. The gameplay is fun, but gets repetitive. The world is visually lackluster, with very sparse architecture, and the architecture that is found usually isn't unique or interesting to look at (a lot of the same-looking huts and stone shambles). The environment is pretty, but so "realistic" that it's boring and looks like every other generic fantasy rpg. 

The NPCs are of mobile-game quality, and Palworld does that thing where interesting lore can be read via long pages you find scattered across the map. This can work, but you have to make the visual environment/characters unique/stimulating enough to motivate players to want to read MORE about them. The game does not do that. Pokemon wins on worldbuilding by a landslide. Palworld has made zero cultural impact for a reason.

The Pals are cute, but I don't think they go well with the environment. Their flat, overly cartoonish features (the human characters also have this) against the very detailed, realistic environment...and guns...just doesn't look right, and people made fun of how palworld looked for a good reason. A more stylized environmental art style would have done wonders for this game, but even then it wouldn't have fixed the fact that there's nothing really to do on the map except fight players of pals, and build and collect stuff. 

It also gets to a point where you kinda just...auto everything? All the pals have all these attacks/skills but you can't actually control them in combat, so I don't really understand the point of them. Maybe later on a deeper combat system is unlocked. But something like that should be available from the start.  

Despite being visually much more similar to Pokemon, I'd say Palworld's mechanics lean a lot more towards the crafting side, and the main gameplay is more similar to Minecraft or Factorio. While I would recommend Palworld to anyone, you'll probably stick with it longer if you're someone who is into base-building/factory games and the type of repetition they have.

Finally, I just don't know if I trust that the devs have truly upgraded Palworld, because they've really given no proof that they have. Once 1.0 comes out I may change my review.

TL;DR: Bad QoL, white as hell, middling dialogue/NPC interactions, unplayable without a gazillion mods.

I want to preface this with the fact I've never been a fan of the sim genre, so keep that in mind. I actually find the farming gameplay fairly fun. But my overall experience has been meh. A lot of my issues come down to QOL, dialogue, and the general non-farming elements of this game. It feels like it's trying to do too much and ultimately gives a "jack of all trades, master of none" experience. Every feature except for the standard farming feels mediocre. 

Dialogue/Interaction: Dialogue is painfully dull and only becomes kind of interesting when you become a LOT closer with the townsfolk. This is fine I suppose except you're also supposed to *marry* someone, effectively making sdv a dating sim as well. Except, because of this lack of personality from npcs, none of them really "hook" you or are likeable/interesting enough to keep you pursing them. When you first meet them they're all just kind of meandering around and kind of just say hi to you or are just plain rude. One of them is straight up misogynistic (like around the second and fourth time you talk to him) and the other straight up tells you you're ugly (like the second time you talk to her). Again, I don't mind if npcs dislike you. But why would I try to even befriend someone who tells me I'm ugly or is misogynistic? And the male npcs have vastly different ways of speaking and beginning dialogue while the female ones really don't except for Haley and the older women. This immediately makes the male npcs more unique and fleshed out than the women ones. Decay system sucks, which is where if you skip talking with a character for a day or two, their friendship decreases and you have to work to build it back up. There were days where I didn't feel like walking across the map and just wanted to farm in near my house, but no, I HAD to walk to talk to a character so I wouldn't lose progress. All this really turned me off the marriage system and I wouldn't have tried to do if a marriage partner didn't help you around your farm. I get that all of this this is probably to emulate real life dating, which is a long process of searching and getting to know multiple people until you find "the one," but in a video game with a lot of walking, npcs, and bedtimes, this doesn't translate well. Other annoyances with the npc system is that apparently there are cutscenes you can trigger, but you have to be at specific places at specific times, but you're never told when or where and there are a few you can PERMAMENTLY miss. These cutscenes help flesh out the world and characters but you probably won't see them unless you have the wiki open 24/7. Also with most npcs when you give them gifts they literally just say the same thing, this isn't bad but for example if you give Sebastion the exact same thing and he loves it, he will always only say, "I love this, how did you know?" it just makes the dialogue feel that much cheaper/less immersive, and would have been nice if he said something like "I love this, thanks for getting me this again." This isn't hard to code at all and feels like an oversight. When you enter a cutscene, which usually involves entering an area, your character moves around automatically. This is fine of course but when the cutscene ends you're transported immediately back to the entrance of the area, signifying that cutscenes are more like just separate videos that the player watches and not experiences that actually happen in the world/with the characters. Again, not a big deal, but it's multiple, small things like this that build up and break the immersion/vibes. There's also a lot of cute and interesting things in buildings, but you can't interact or do anything with most of them, to the point I don't even understand why they're there. It'd be interesting if you could go into a store, go to a shelf, and actually buy stuff off of it but you can't.  

Saving: You can't save without ending your day. It makes the game feel tedious and stressful in early/mid game where you have you really be efficient with your time and make the most out of your day. No clue why it was designed like this. This combined with the fact that most events are one-day only, basically makes the game feel like mini-fomo. This also relates to...  

Time: Places closing early REALLY annoyed me at the very beginning of the game, basically forcing me to manage my money and time extremely well just so I could buy the beginner materials. You also literally can't stay awake past 2 am, and this would be fine except I chose the wilderness farm, which spawns monsters at night around your base (except it's not that much), and bc of the 2 am thing I never got to fight that many monsters so I don't even understand the point of the wilderness farm. Monsters also apparently don't really give you any necessary upgrades/materials while mining/chopping/foraging, etc. do (or the monsters drop them but at EXTREMELY low rates). So you *have* to spend your time doing those things while combat is something you put on the backburner, or is tied to mining. And since the wilderness farm doesn't have a mine close by, this effectively makes it completely worthless.   

The wikia problem: You basically need to always have the wiki up while playing, especially to know where to find mats and npcs (they should make it where their location gets tagged on the map once you get enough hearts). You can download qol mods, but my belief is that you shouldn't HAVE to. While I like mods, you shouldn't HAVE to get them just to have basic things like "where I can I find this material so I can progress? Where is this npc since I need to literally talk to them everyday?"  

Permanent things: There's rare fish you can NEVER catch again, so if you accidentally sell/trash them you're screwed. You also get a fairy later on, but its color is random and you can't change it. And [i]every other fairy you get will also be the same color.  

Combat: Not very deep but is fairly fun. 

Music: Very bland.  

Diversity: I want to preface this by saying that when I heard people talk about SDV having a diversity problem, I thought they were overreacting. I don't really care if a dating sim just has white people. But when I actually started playing, I realized they were right. Aside from the people, the game's vibes, setting, and culture are just blindingly white; and there's a lot of subtle microaggressions. The white NPCS usually wouldn't be a problem but it's feels bad this time because they all already feel very samey. Only 2 main POC npcs and only one of them is dateable (and she's half-white). Later on there are a few other POC, but you can't date them and they fall into the "strange exotic merchant" trope. The desert trader says "your coin has no value where I can from," really trying to highlight how they come from such an "exotic+mysterious" place (despite literally just being a North African person). There's also some drama with the local shopkeeper and the big Joja corp. Shopkeeper tells the corp guy that he doesn't want his "products imported from who knows where." Yeah, I don't want any products from those nasty other countries like slimy tofu or curry, just my homegrown american potatoes!!! 

Also no nonbinary option. 

Tbf, none of this is really that bad, but it really bogs down the setting and almost makes it feel like racist small town full of crotchety old people. All this combined with the fact that many of the white npcs are initially rude to you, hit a little too close to home for me, a non-white person who grew up in a white suburban town and had to deal with always feeling like the outsider, hearing similar negative comments, and being told to get over it because they're still "nice people." So yeah, small problems build up and the gameplay isn't fun enough to make me overlook them. Will probably only play with friends.

I want to preface this by saying that I love Hollow Knight. It's probably my favorite game of all time, and I have done virtually everything it has to offer. With that said, I can't actually suggest it to the majority of people unless they were really wanting to try it anyway. I find SS fun in the same way I can find a Marvel movie fun, but I wouldn’t tell people to watch Marvel movies. I have so many hours on it bc I take my time and I'm trying to 100%. But anyway, let’s start. 

In Silksong, you take more damage because lore-wise, Hornet was apparently very frail before she got all her powerups and training. However, this is not offset by more damage like most glass cannon setups. Normal enemies take 4-6 hits to kill, and needle upgrades and health upgrades are incredibly sparse. You’re just genuinely weaker in every ways. Every enemy flies, and does so at a very awkward height where they're too high to hit with your needle but too low so if you jump up, you jump into them. Arenas are a lot smaller so you can't pogo on them well. 

EVERYTHING costs rosaries and a lot of tools/powerups are bought in shops rather than found in exploration. I was incredibly choosy with what I bought and I only lost maybe 300 rosaries total to dying in my playthrough, but I was still constantly poor. I had to spend 80% of Act 2 without any tools because you start going through shards quick. You can get more shards easily without grinding, but guess what you have to do? Buy them with rosaries! The Architect's crest, which lets you build more tools on the fly, feels super useless since it costs silk AND shards, and the game does not give you nearly enough shards for this crest to be useful. There's no chests full of goodies after boss fights and rosary/shard deposits are few and far between. 

The service where you can string rosaries together feels useless. Every time I was at a point where I was actually at a risk of losing a lot, I was usually very far away from a shop or far from a fast travel that could get me to a shop to string the beads. I guess you're supposed to string them every time you pass a shop, but whenever I was near one, I usually wanted to SPEND my rosaries because it's a SHOP where you BUY things. Feels like stringing would be more useful if stringing stations were at select benches instead, rather than shops. 

Agility. Oh man, this is going to be controversial but I don't feel agile in this game. If anything I felt more agile in Hollow Knight. I had a dash with i-frames in that game, I had a dive, I had upgrades that could extend my nail to make pogoing easier. I was smaller and I had big, wide, tall arenas where I can do all sorts of stuff in the air. None of those things are in Silksong. The glide is useless in 99.9% of the fights, the running is virtually useless in fights, and whenever I try to be cool and do some acrobatic maneuvers in the air, I just backflip into the enemy or the enemy dashes away from me. I have been having infinitely more success just poking with the needle and staying on the ground in literally every single fight than trying to take advantage of the so-called "better agility" Silksong advertises itself with. While this is definitely a skill issue on my part, I’d argue the game doesn’t teach you well enough at how to become skilled. and imo, the clawline should be given to you MUCH earlier. 

As for deliveries, even with the updates I can get more rosaries in less time if I just stay and slap enemies in Choral Chamber rooms, and I don't have to worry about trying not to get hit. 

The challenge rooms don’t feel well-integrated into the world. Why are there so many random rooms that suddenly lock and a bunch of bugs ambush you? If it was just in Hunter’s March it would make more sense (since it has ANTS), and it would give the area a unique feature. But the fact there everywhere just makes it feel like the game shouting “look look! Combat! Here’s your Hard Enemies!” Also, your ghost still spawns trapped inside the rooms unless you die towards the edge. 

The silk system feels sub-optimal. The game throws out spool upgrades like candy but there’s very few ways to get silk faster, and they always give like the tiniest bit. And imo the natural silk regeneration buffs need to be given earlier on. I was stuck in Mount Fay for a while because I kept dying, and every time I died I would have to farm silk from an enemy for clawline before I could start climbing again, because while your silk does naturally regenerate, it takes a second to do so, and that second when I couldn't get clawline out fast enough kept making me miss jumps during the platforming segments. 

This isn't related to the gameplay, but the bosses and NPCS feel so...flat in Silksong lore-wise. Most of the bosses are just kinda "what if this big random flying bug was blocking your way for no reason?" and most of the npcs are just "what if this pilgrim just wanted to blabber at you or sell you something." Hollow Knight's worldbuilding, bosses, and npcs, felt tight and well-developed. There were less NPCs, but they were better connected with each other. Sly the shopkeeper knew the npcs that taught you new nail arts, iselda the shopkeeper knew the mapmaker. The Last Stag was your friend. You save Zote and “fight” him, then Bretta starts crushing on him and he gets his actual boss fight. Quirrel was the student of a Dreamer, and Hornet was the daughter of a dreamer. All the characters were familiar with this close-knit kingdom. But in Silksong, nobody seems to be familiar with anybody except for a few npcs that make you search for their oneliner buddy, after which nothing else happens except maybe a new shop is opened. In Hollow Knight, NPCs traveled through the world in a way that made sense and interacted with you a lot. Meanwhile in Silksong, you run into Grindle the master thief a couple of times, but then he just kinda randomly goes back into his hideout in the middle of nowhere on the Blasted Steps and doesn't talk about it, and he even acts like he’s never met you before. Even without comparing it to Hollow Knight, the world and its characters feel less dynamic. I think a big part of this is because many SS NPCS are introduced to you a lot later, in HK you met most of them pretty close to the beginning of the game so you had many more dialogues with them throughout. 

Silksong feels like the opposite of Hollow Knight. Hollow Knight is kind of slow during beginning but starts picking up after that, while silksong is very enjoyable in the beginning but starts becoming frustrating once you hit Greymoor. Nothing in Silksong feels rewarding. Every time I completed a hard boss, instead of thinking, “wow, that was fun! And I became better at the game too!" I think, "ok, another boss checked off. I really bummed through that one, huh...and no reward again." 

All in all, SS is a robust game for a very specific niche, but I would not recommendable it to most people, including most Hollow Knight fans. 

Side note, the HK fanbase has become annoying as all hell and can't handle any criticism towards their game. They incorrectly mention "developer's vision" when players really just want a more forgiving economy and slightly less health damage. I don't know how to explain to them that developers sacrifice a little bit of their "vision" ANY time they develop a game for the public. Games are constantly changing through development, and developers ALWAYS include changes that they think would better benefit their intended playerbase. Games are NEVER published as the exact "developer's vision" or exactly what the developers want. The assumption that Team Cherry never made any change they didn't "want" to their games is absurd.

TLDR; ToF excels at few and is bad at many. *I do not believe that powercreep was what killed the game,* since it started dying even before powercreep, and other games have bad powercreep and are still popular (like HSR). What is killing it is lack of polish and devs that don’t understand how small issues can break your game if they’re compounded. The warp server changes little and the issues that casual players feel the most are still there. Bc of this, ToF will continue to be unable to hook in new players.

So, I played at release, ~200 hours over a few months. But stopped playing bc of lack of polish. Imagine my surprise when they announced a soft reboot/global warp server, and none of these issues were fixed. This game died from a thousand papercuts when it first came out, and it’ll happen again. 

First, both systems are unoptimized. No dedicated keybinds for many of the buttons on pc, and all of the tutorials say “tap.” But the mobile port looks very bad. 

ENG voice acting is awful, and I heard it doesn’t improve. It’s clear the VAs aren’t shown what’s happening on screen. Sometimes delivery *is* good emotionally, but it doesn’t *match* what’s happening in the scene (most apparent with fight scenes). I don’t think they give the lines of the other char they’re supposed to be talking to, either, bc some back and forth dialogue just sounds super stiff/repetitive. One char is just text-to-speech. While I could tell ppl to use the CN/JP voice acting, the small text sometimes overlaps w/ each other so it’s unreadable, and gets cut off if it’s too long, so if you care about the story then ENG va is kinda required. 

Now I actually think the worldbuilding is strong compared to other gachas. But not how it’s presented, and that’s the snake eating its own tail. Bc the story is presented so poorly, ppl stopped caring about it, and bc existing players don’t care about the story anymore, Hotta doesn’t bother trying to make the story better. Thus, new players who actually DO care about story are turned off from the game. Rinse and repeat, and the story will never improve. Same thing with the ENG voice acting. 

Early character design was bad. It did that mecha sci-fi thing where chars just have mishmashed pieces of plastic on them and weird metal abs. Going from genshin—which basically *mastered* gacha char color palettes, accessories, and silhouette harmony—to ToF was painful. They’ve improved, but keep in mind that the early chars will be eyesores. There’s also legitimately zero dark-skinned chars. Even Genshin has a few. 

Char integration in the story is bad. Now that gacha is gone, maybe they’re trying to go for a Warframe-like story system, where side quests are where you learn about playable chars’ lore, and their involvement in the main story is kept to a minimum. This is fine, but it sticks out like a sore thumb for ToF’s genre (anime rpg). It’s just so hard to feel connected to any of the chars. Ex: the first playable char you meet in the main story (NOT counting Shirli bc she wasn’t playable at game release) was King, and his introduction doesn’t do him justice. He’s the announcer for a fight ring, and his only purpose is to explain the rules and who your opponents are. After this 1 minute of talking he never appears again. Instead of only making him the announcer, they should have also made him your final opponent, giving a story twist and making him look cooler. 

UI is still bad. You have to navigate through like three menus just to fish, the menu with all your options still looks bad even with the redesign. The buttons are in groups, except the group labels are tiny and tucked in all the way to the right of the menu. These labels don’t pop out and your eyes have to actively be searching for them. Settings is still disorganized and no borders/containers dividing each setting. After months I still didn’t understand how most of the menus worked/what they did. Maps for some areas are unreadable bc they don’t show elevation well. It’s worse when places overlap, so you end up tracking a quest and it’ll be miles above you with no obvious route to get to it. Map doesn’t show how things are connected elevation-wise, or where you can teleport to get to the place you wanna go to. 

Side modes are half-baked. There’s a housing and pet system, except you can’t customize the furniture in your house, nor can you interact with your pet beyond putting food in its bowl. It can’t follow you, can’t roam around the house, and will leave if you forget to feed it. Which, since you can’t do much with it, you will probably forget it exists. There’s also a “custom island” system in the gacha server, sort of like Genshin’s housing. Except once again, you can’t actually build any custom buildings/furniture. It’s more of a town idle game where you build a chosen set of uncustomizable shops in certain spots, and you can get resources from them at intervals. The warp server then removed this island gamemode. 

Sound design is fair except everything sounds slightly muffled/far away from the mic. Bc so many enemies have shields, you hear the same plastic-hitting sound for a while, getting bored. Relatedly, combat stales towards midgame, since so many enemies have shields and just tank your hits. Doing this over and over gets boring, and the visual effects/rewards weren’t enough to keep me hooked. There’s actually a fair amount of depth to combat; there’s a lot of combos each char can thread together. The issue is the content isn’t hard enough to justify doing anything beyond button-mashing, and I don’t really know if the endgame modes have enough depth to make you learn combos instead of simply getting/upgrading better chars. Genshin was similar—it feigned combat depth by putting timers on everything and made you “learn combos” that would kill enemies faster. In reality, it just made you hug the enemy, press the same buttons but faster, and tested how much rng you were willing to put up with. 

Gacha: I might be dumb but the new server still has gacha—it’s just streamlined. You farm rift shards which let you pull for a char/weapon, and the one you get is random. The banners aren’t timed, but rift shards can still be *BOUGHT* with real money. This is literally gacha, and the only gacha they completely removed was for matrixes (genshin artifacts). 

Finally, they removed the daily feature where you could hide a device on the map for resources and other players could steal it. Not a big deal, but it was cute. 

Positives: ToF mastered *scale.* Every environment truly feels vast, like you *are* exploring an unknown world, but not so big that it’s overwhelming, and not too empty it’s underwhelming. This is a very hard thing to get right, and even though Genshin/WuWa/BotW does this very well, there are many times in these games where areas feel smaller than they should be (like Genshin relies a lot on the same lighting tricks to give the *illusion* of far-ness). But I have never experienced this in ToF, and everything feels *vast,* without your char feeling small/invisible. When you start approaching Mirroria, you can’t help but stop and marvel at how you *are* actually stepping into a giant, floating city that feels size-accurate to when you’re also in the city itself. I don’t doubt other regions look equally as amazing. 

Worldbuilding. I actually think the worldbuilding is the best out of any gacha. It has a lot of outer space nonsense, but doesn’t have so many roaming parts that it becomes hard to follow (like HSR). It deals with a post-apocalyptic world, but the world does not look bleak or dreary. It’s similar to BotW in that it’s bright and beautiful, which actually makes you want to explore rather than creep around in a dark, broken environment. There’s a sense of emptiness to it, like after the disaster, nature reclaimed what were once civilizations. Ppl still live worrying about radiation and lack of resources, but everyone did their best to makeshift and go on with their lives. There’s a sense of hope and renewal that most similar games don’t have. 

Assassin's Creed Shadows is simply the best entry since Origins – and for me, it even surpasses Origins in some aspects. The story captivated me completely, the characters became virtual friends, and the gameplay is exceptional. Switching from Naoe's precise stealth infiltration to Yasuke's brutal brute force is a rare freedom, brilliantly executed. Ubisoft listened to fans, respected history, polished the writing, and delivered a finished game with no major bugs and top-tier optimisation. The historical reconstruction is a genuine, engaging lesson – you learn without realising it. The technical achievement is breathtaking: graphics, dynamic weather, lighting, animations, cherry blossom petals floating in the air, fireflies in the marshes – every detail feels refined. The soundtrack, composed by Japanese composers, is memorable. I laughed, I cried, I shouted with joy after beating a particularly tough boss. Replayability is huge (side quests, challenges, lore collectibles). Only minor flaws: a few rare visual bugs, enemy AI occasionally a bit naive in stealth mode, and a crafting system that could be deeper. But none of this spoils the experience. If you enjoy stealth action, historical narratives, or simply great adventure games, go for it. It's a 10/10 masterpiece, my new favourite, and I'll be playing it again and again. Full French review: https://rogueh24.fr/test-du-jeu-assassins-creed-shadows/