WHAT PLAY YOU!? Version 3.0

[BomberPat]

I'm playing the London one at the moment; I watched my ex play most of it on release, as she used to be massively into the series. I'm finding it dragging, and really easy to meta-game - I've basically done all the side-quests and maxed out all my upgrades while barely progressing in the story. It gets very samey very quickly, and the story hasn't really grabbed me. Black Flag I remember being brilliant, though.

[waters44]

Funnily enough I’m slowly working through these games at the moment. I finished all the Far Cry games a while back and now working through these

I play games to relax so going through something like Elden Ring does not appeal to me at all. Janky Ubisoft collectathons are perfect to sit there with some garibaldi and a podcast 

I’ve just finished Liberation so Black Flag up next and I’m really excited to jump in.

So far AC3 has had the best story and feel by far. Running around 18th century New York and Boston was great fun and it was pretty cool to be rubbing shoulders with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. 

3 gets a lot of stick for being buggy but I don’t think I encountered one single issue and I would say it plays better than the Ezio trilogy. Actually the more I type the more I love it, so please accept this as my official recommendation to play AC3.

[Ironic Indie Lad]

I really enjoyed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla for what they are.

They are beautiful games to look at and the movement / combat is pretty slick. I could not even begin to tell you any of the story lines in these games as I pretty much ignore them. They are the type of games I tend to play while listening to a podcast.

I havent played one since Valhalla (which is somehow 5 years old already!) but I am considering the Switch 2 port of Shadows which seems quite impressive. 

[LaGoosh]

I think I've enjoyed pretty much all of them. The mechanics are solid, the world's are beautiful and no matter how many times you do it, assassinating someone with the hidden blade is always satisfying. The earlier editions were a lot more adventures and creative with the missions though. Every one since Origins onwards every mission is pretty much identical. Black Flag is probably my favourite one overall.

Like @Ironic Indie Lad I also couldn't tell you a single thing about the stories. Kassandra was easily my favourite person to play as though.

The newer games seem to have ditched most of the modern day/alien elder god storyline stuff. I kind of enjoyed that stuff just because it was so mad and confusing. My current understanding is that something terrible is happening to the environment in the modern day due to a solar flare and now a reincarnation of Loki (who is in fact an ancient alien) is now also in the modern day for some reason. I have no idea.

Edited December 16, 2025 by LaGoosh

[gmoney]

I think 2 is fantastic, and IV deserves it's reputation as well. I got bored of that style, but then really enjoyed Origins and Odyssey. Something about Valhalla bored the shit out of me though. Probably because vikings are shit for cunts. 

[FLips]

I think I've mentioned this before but I thought Assassins Creed 1 was so bad when that came out that I didn't play another single game in the series, other than a slither of IV when my flatmate bought it in Uni, and a single puzzle section of Odyssey to help my Brother. I'm sure some of them are enjoyable if that's what you're after, but whenever I see them they're all interchangeable Ubisoft open world slop.
I was actually a bit gutted when I played games like Breath of the Wild and Final Fantasy VII Rebirth and it had me activating checkpoint towers. Lazy dogshit.

[Merzbow]

4 minutes ago, FLips said:

Ubisoft open world slop.

They didn't invent it but they sure made the idea of the modern "gameplay loop" a bigger thing, both lazy but oddly ingenious ways of hitting those serotonin receptors. The only thing worse in that regard is the Gatcha mechanic, which I'm sure Ubisoft has used at some point in one of those Division games.

[SpiritOfTheForest]

5 hours ago, waters44 said:

Funnily enough I’m slowly working through these games at the moment. I finished all the Far Cry games a while back and now working through these

I play games to relax so going through something like Elden Ring does not appeal to me at all. Janky Ubisoft collectathons are perfect to sit there with some garibaldi and a podcast 

I’ve just finished Liberation so Black Flag up next and I’m really excited to jump in.

So far AC3 has had the best story and feel by far. Running around 18th century New York and Boston was great fun and it was pretty cool to be rubbing shoulders with George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. 

3 gets a lot of stick for being buggy but I don’t think I encountered one single issue and I would say it plays better than the Ezio trilogy. Actually the more I type the more I love it, so please accept this as my official recommendation to play AC3.

You seem to be on the same journey as me! I just finished Rogue. Fully agree that 3 was really fun and I also didn't understand the stick it got. By the way, my next one is Unity. When you get there, you fancy doing the online trophies together? I haven't started it yet because of those.

Like you, I also don't mind switching off my brain and doing a collectible sweep while listening to a podcast. Relaxing! 

[Mr_Danger]

I started with Odyssey and had a cracking 30 or so hours island hopping on it then put it down one day and never went back to it. Similar with Valhalla but didn’t give it as much time. They look good and play well but they’re just so gamey and mechanical that I don’t get sucked in to the world which is my favourite thing about big open world games.

[waters44]

2 hours ago, SpiritOfTheForest said:

You seem to be on the same journey as me! I just finished Rogue. Fully agree that 3 was really fun and I also didn't understand the stick it got. By the way, my next one is Unity. When you get there, you fancy doing the online trophies together? I haven't started it yet because of those.

Like you, I also don't mind switching off my brain and doing a collectible sweep while listening to a podcast. Relaxing! 

Yea definitely! Are the online trophies completely separate or part of the main story? If it’s completely separate I’ll download the game soon and just get them done (I did that with Black Flag, already got the multiplayer trophies sorted)

[RedTwoster]

Some more ‘Tales from the Playdate’ from me. I’ve been playing with a few store-bought games - or at least, I intended to until I got hooked on two of them…

Mars after Midnight

From Lucas Pope of Papers, Please and Obra Dinn fame. And for me, it’s the best game he’s ever made. It’s lighter and sillier, and all the better for it. The premise is, you run self-help classes for aliens on Mars, and you have to help everyone who needs helped in your Martian colony. You manage a budget, organising the events and theme and then decide whether or not to let the aliens in. It could be, for example, a session for windproof aliens, and you determine whether or not they’re allowed in by trying to blow them away with a giant fan. Or maybe it’s a gnat knife-throwing class, and you check whether or not they’re wielding blades with a magnifying glass. You also attempt to earn tips by catering for them, so you can afford the tapes to run new sessions. It’s really silly and really fun - I love it. It makes great use of the crank too, and while he could port it, it wouldn’t be quite the same on a different device.

Rendsword

I might have mentioned this one before, but I’d only played it briefly. Now I’ve played…erm, let’s just say considerably more of it. It’s Scrabble meets Vampire Survivors meets a Dungeon Crawler. At its simplest, you kill enemies by spelling out words from a set of tiles. Each enemy has a set letter which causes damage to them, and that changes as you gain hits. The tiles also get replaced as you use them. Like Vampire Survivors, you get to power up after each round by choosing special power letters. This could be a vowel that scores an unusually high number of points, a letter that stops your enemy from attacking this turn, a letter that poisons the enemy or increases your health…there are a range of options that keeps it very strategic. Each time you play, you get that little bit further as you figure out what strategy works best for you, and when you complete the normal run, a new, harder mode is available. I bloody LOVE this game. It could easily work on other systems, and I hope the developer ports and enhances it so that a wider audience gets to experience what it has to offer. It’s stupidly addictive, and if this sounds like it’s your kind of game, go buy a Playdate and buy it on day one. You won’t be disappointed.

My verdict on the Playdate as a whole, is that it’s great. It’s packed with fun, creative games and real passion projects. The season pass and weekly release of two free games for the duration of the season is a great idea. My Monday morning routine at the moment is to get up early, check my Playdate and try the two new games released before I start work. It’s like a mini-Christmas as I’ve no idea what’s coming next. The games I’ve bought separately have all been excellent, and given that they’re so cheap, the console ends up paying itself off very quickly. 

Like the original Gameboy, the games are all very accessible and my dad - a non-gamer - ended up ploughing hours into Rendsword, much against my expectation. Disappointingly, he started on hard mode and did far better than I ever did on normal in only his third run. We’re all chipping in to get him one of his own for Christmas, courtesy of CEX (by far the easiest - and quickest - way of getting one in the UK).

I’d been mulling over buying one for a while, but I’m so glad I did. It’s a joyful little system, I absolutely love it.

[FLips]

Larian Studios are getting shit because it turns out they’ve been using AI and their CEO is pushing heavy for it.

I’d love to say I’m surprised but I’m not. 

 

[BomberPat]

On 12/16/2025 at 9:55 AM, waters44 said:

3 gets a lot of stick for being buggy but I don’t think I encountered one single issue and I would say it plays better than the Ezio trilogy. Actually the more I type the more I love it, so please accept this as my official recommendation to play AC3.

I've only ever encountered a couple of bugs in any AC game, and rarely a game-breaking one - there have been a couple in Syndicate where it's crashed on completing a mission, though. I think it's because I always play them years and years after they were actually released, so the worst of it has probably been patched out already.

[Jazzy G]

I've seen that Cyberpunk 2077 is pretty much half price on the switch eShop. How many distractions are there from the main story? My ADHD brain likes trying to pick up all the side quests which in an Elder Scrolls or a Fallout leads to me getting very overwhelmed and giving up after a couple of hours, but in something like the Outer Worlds with its "while you're off doing this, could you also do this?", or Fable's "off you trot to do your thing, we'll tell you when it's time for the next story mission." structures managed to keep my attention the whole way through. Which of those experiences would Cyberpunk be closest to? 

[LaGoosh]

3 hours ago, Jazzy G said:

How many distractions are there from the main story?

Lots. Loads of side quests both substantial and minor, collectibles, races, any kind of thing you'd expect from a modern day AAA open world game Cyberpunk has it.