A little more than a week ago, I bought my first video game. Before that I had relied on the kindness and generosity of others to furnish new games that I couldn't get for free. I either played games that my brothers or boyfriend had or asked my brothers to buy me games (thank you for Portal, Portal 2, Walking Dead, Tearaway, and LittleBigPlanet, guys; you're the best).
It was kind of an impulse buy and kind of not. I had finished Tearaway and Call of Duty and was looking for something to do, especially for my Vita. (I really enjoy the portability.) So my sister and I walked into GameStop looking for nothing more particular than a Vita game. I had looked at a few of the lists of Best Vita Games and nothing really stuck out. But this was on at least one that I remembered, it somebody's Vita game of the year. Plus, my friend Kate had just been talking about working through some iteration of Assassin's Creed. So I took a chance and bought the game.
There were things I liked about the game, but it was also full of headaches for me. Somewhere dumb like this one:
See those vines? Those were my sworn enemy. I could not figure out how to cross them. I tried over and over. I consulted the internet, which was honestly no help. Some people complained, but then they inevitably replied to their own posts with "nvm, got it." I couldn't jump from the end because dropping means dropping straight down to death. I jumped to a side ledge which was also certain death or being trapped there forever. I finally figured out that in order to "climb across the vines like monkey bars" one need not only direct Aveline across, but also hold the R trigger so she will swing across the gap.
Another similar frustration was this little hiccup:
You're supposed to swim through caves and not get cut up by these booby traps. It's nearly impossible. Most of the time, I saw that I was not near them but swimming seamlessly through, yet there was a ripping sound and blood filled the screen as my life faded away. Eventually I guess I just got lucky, missing getting hurt one or two times so that, bloodied and near death, I finally climbed out of the caves.
This game definitely had bigger problems too:
I tried out one of the business side missions on a whim, and got extremely frustrated. I would sneak onto the plantation, kill my target, and be left standing there next to a body with a yellow diamond floating above it. Apparently I was supposed to loot his body, but the command never came up and I was unable to perform the action. When I got further than 30 m from my victim, the mission got desynchronized but didn't seem to reset to the main story. After reloading the game a few times, I gave up on this memory all together and have not tried any business missions since. I read about other people having this problem as well, so I don't know if these missions are worth my time.
There were smaller issues....
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| I'm holding this parasol with my voodoo magic |
And other large ones.
This was a pretty bad glitch. I was buying up all the dressing chambers for the trophy and then I got to this one. Every time I bought it the screen just went black. Not the whole screen, as you can see, but I also couldn't get Aveline to walk very far this way. I tried reloading the game, restarting the memory, etc. When I pressed start I would see the world for one second, but inevitably it would go dark again. Eventually I just bought this dressing chamber last, got the trophy, then started at the last checkpoint. According to the map, I still haven't fixed it up.
In general, I enjoyed playing the game. I liked finishing assignments and making it through the story, but that was the problem. I was slogging through the story. The story made little to no sense and was often boring. Ultimately I didn't care about Aveline very much because I didn't know what she was trying to accomplish. One day she's teaming up with smugglers and killing fake voodoo followers (weren't they just misguided? I don't know.) and then she's killing a former slave that she had helped to freedom because he's a Loyalist (I don't know. It just felt weird.). The story just didn't flow for me.
Neither did the ending. Ten seconds after she swears her allegiance to the Templars, she's killing everyone in the building. The Citizen E thing was weird too....
So, all in all, not perfect, definitely frustrating, but fun enough that I miss playing it. I've still been working on some of the side missions and trophies, but those provide their own frustrations, especially a seemingly unresponsive map.
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