Well I watched how to defeat King Alfred on Youtube and meh. Its just a talk scene. I'm not to going to wait for those Zealots to show up out of nowhere and its pretty much only way to find them.
Things I dislike:
This has the most crashes on my ps4 and it sucks because I paid full price for this. Compare to Watch Dogs Legion, that game only crashed once when I was playing. This one crashed more than ten times that I expect it to happen everytime I play it. Odyssey iirc never crashed on me, maybe once. If I'm playing it for hours, it would crash. But there were also times that I haven't played it for a hour, it still crashed especially in story missions. It is like broken that in any moment, it is gonna crash. In Ravensthorpe, it crashed so many times and there were barely any action there. Yesterday, the frame rate dropped during my last story mission.
The map is unnecessarily super large. The environment looks empty. In Norway, its mostly snow and rocky mountains. It is kinda sad especially when I went back there for a story mission and picked up things I left behind, the environment is a large empty space. Norway was wasted in this game. In England, its mostly plants and trees. If you don't use your horse, you will really walk/climb mountains for minutes or just press the fast travel which I prefer not to use so often but I used fast travel all the time here. There are communities/camps scattered around the map, but there aren't big cities compare to Origins and Odyssey. I think there are four locations that could be called as a city but they look pretty depressing. This game is less flashy compare to the last two. There aren't a lot of npcs in the big empty spaces as well. Most of the people you will encounter in the empty wide spaces are enemies and side quest characters. There's also a weird spooky/haunted vibe which I don't like especially those cursed areas - which plagued the entire map. You don't even get a special reward/item for clearing those areas. Most of the time, the environment is foggy. Its not easy to see while walking and while in the long boat. A lot of the locations would have looked better if they just let the sunlight hit those places and not cover the entire place with fog/clouds especially in daytime. You can meditate to change the weather but I prefer not to use it just to appreciate the environment. Its not fun to free roam here.
The mystery side quests (the ones with npcs talking) don't show the objectives. There's no obvious guide in what to do next after you activated a side quest. They made this hard to track those, and discouraged me to finish them. Plus two of those mysteries are bugged in my game.
I wish I know how many cursed locations, roman artifacts and mysteries I have already finished. They were categorized in 3 sections. But mysteries have like 5 different types, so as artifacts and wealth. I also don't know how many are left to find. The viewpoints aren't enough to activate all the glowing circles in the map. Bring back the progress tracker!
The raven is useless. Didn't help me and wasn't easy to use compare to Origins/Odyssey.
They removed a lot of features from Odyssey making the environment feel more empty. There are no more king animals, there are no sea creatures that will attack you, the boat has no weapons and there are fewer resources to pick up. All of those would have been fine if the 75% of the map isn't empty space. You can't even hurt civilians but we can do that in Odyssey.
Asgard looked terrible and imo, that part of the game got a graphics downgrade. Well other parts of Asgard look nice, but the rainbow bridge and the big tower, eh.
I don't like how they set up the abilities and skills. Leveling up to 400+ is too much, they could have simplified it in 1 tab. Most of the points for the skills aren't really noticeable when activated and used in action. You will still be killed if your enemy is twice your power level. While the stamina meter made the special abilities limited to use especially in killing legendary animals and zealots. Some of the abilities (the ones you need to find in the map) aren't really helpful. I wish they kept Odyssey's skill system as searching for new abilities just added to the grind.
There were a lot of looting of chests. I didn't mind that I have to find keys or how to open the door to retrieve the treasure. However, it is the most tedious thing to do in the game when clearing a region. Sometimes finding a jar of gas was frustrating as it isn't highlighted when Odin vision is used.
Ubisoft cloud saves made me weary. So I always manually saved.
Cutscenes could have looked better. I feel like Ubisoft got less creative in cutscenes as most of the talking scenes look the same. Like whatever happened to cinematography and theatrics.
I didn't really like the main story. I wanted to see more of the present day stuff with Layla, especially Shaun and Rebecca were there. The second time the game hopped back to the present, after a long segment, it was over. I'm not sure whether I like the twist at the end or not, though its quite interesting. I got the Layla ending first before the final region arc in England was activitated. So I also got the true Eivor ending as well and I wish I got those endings after finishing Alfred and the last region arc in England. I didn't really like that final bit with Eivor and his brother in Valhalla, I thought it was so tedious and long.
The last two region arcs in England were the shortest (Wincestre and Hamtunscire) of all region arcs. I thought they were saving the best for last especially given the high power level of those locations. I was quite disappointed how the game ended. All the hours and work put in the game just to get a meh ending.
Good things I like that:
This has the best graphics in the series, topping Unity for me. Its not the flashiest AC game but in terms of photo realistic graphics, this is the best for the series. The location of Layla looks so photo realistic especially with the lighting. The vegetation looks the best in the series as well. Jotunheim looks good as well even though it looks a film set studio with the bright lighting.
I really like that they brought back the hideout for the lead character. It really felt like the playable character has a home unlike in Origins/Odyssey. I like the different features in the hideout. Raiding is more worth it when building those shops and accessing their feature. I like that they finally added hair and tattoo customization. Plus adding decoration in the hideout.
Side activities like flything, stacking up rocks, rock puzzles and Animus glitch platforming. I didn't really catch fishes, but I like that they gave us the option to do that as an extra activity.
Raiding. At first I didn't like it, but in large areas, it is fun.
The database is back especially for characters. Origins/Odyssey only had a database for characters to assassinate.
This feels more Assassin's Creed than the previous games. The flying notes, the Assassins being introduced so early, social stealth. Though I didn't need to use social stealth here.
I enjoyed Vinland. I like how each region arc have their own set of characters/story and sometimes they reappeared in other regions. There's 22 regions over all. It is a lot but I like some of the npcs I encountered.
Over all, I'm quite disappointed in this. I don't like a lot of the changes and this isn't fun compare to Odyssey. While the things I like doesn't outweigh the things I dislike.
