Not a pirates' life for me...

Admittedly I'm not a huge fan of the Assassin's Creed series. The storyline has been fairly laughable, and I just never felt the various systems at work jelled very well. This new one however, promised to be a very different take on the series, focusing more on the ship battles so highly praised in the previous entry and on exploring the open sea as a pirate, building up an awesome ship and a fleet to take down other ships and forts and whatnot. Sounds fun right? I wouldn't know, as the part of the game that is most definitely vintage Assassin's Creed ruined the game for me before I could even get very far with it's atrocious "combat" horrid enemy A.I. and glitching (including one guy who was stuck in rocks), the mildly buggy free-running and myriad other issues (like having to go to eagle points to "synchronize" an area so many times in the first hour I never wanted to do it again). Is the ship combat awesome? Probably, but if I have to deal with this awful other stuff I don't really care. Maybe this was excusable way back in the first AC, but since then there have been a ton of open world games with far better close combat and ACIV pales in comparison. If like in GTA it wasn't a major part of the game I wouldn't care but it's a pretty damn significant one here.

Ah, Sonic, you got me again. After the fairly decent Colors and your awesome racing games, I had some hope. And from every preview, your Wii U (and 3DS) exclusive looked great. Sure it liberally borrowed from Mario Galaxy, but considering that was easily one of the best games of this generation, that's hardly a bad formula to copy from. But then maybe that was a poor idea to begin with as the spherical level designs are awful and rob Sonic of his defining trait of speedy platforming as you have to really slow everything down. The homing attack, your primary offense is pretty spotty as well, which leads to cheap deaths and hits, especially in a boss fight. I guess if you were absolutely starved for an even haflway decent platformer this might do but you should probably just wait for Mario 3D World which will be out in just over 3 weeks (or if you have a PS3 get the cheaper and far superior Puppeteer).

That's it for today, not completely sure when my next post will be but at latest I'll most likely have a new gamer cinema up by Wednesday.