"Esperança não é um peso que nos atrasa. É uma base sobre a qual construir."

Dito isso, eu ainda continuo tendo a esperança que a Ubisoft irá se reerguer algum dia, e são jogos como esse que nos dão uma fagulha dessa sensação de que é possível. Para mim, os últimos lançamentos da Ubi (Outlaws, Prince of Persia e agora com o Shadows) foram jogos muito bons nas suas devidas proporções, o problema talvez esteja em escolhas de mercado que atrapalham o que já se encontra numa situação complicada.

Tirando o fato do Shadows ter a mesma base dos anteriores, ele é um jogo bem polido (quem diria que dar um tempo maior de desenvolvimento surte efeito, né Ubi?), e isso com certeza contribuiu para uma melhor percepção do público em geral. Os meus pontos favoritos nele foram os protagonistas - amei os dois!! Tanto a Naoe, quanto o Yasuke possuem histórias e relações interessantes quanto ao próprio credo - e de vez em quando é bom lembrar que o game ainda é um Assassin's Creed kkkkkk Eu só não achei tão boa a forma como foram guiadas as missões principais: não só algumas pareciam um pouco jogadas e para apenas aumentar o tamanho do game, como o ritmo atrapalhava minha relação e entendimento geral da história, e não achei legal essa parada de ficar investigando tudo até encontrar os alvos, visto que foi feito de uma forma mecânica, que logo me cansou e me fez desativar a função. Num âmbito geral temos um bom enredo.

Sem dúvidas, além dos personagens principais, a maior valência de AC Shadows é a jogabilidade! É de uma variedade imensa no combate, sem contar no ótimo parkour e movimentação. Ainda existem momentos em que pular de um cantinho pra outro se torna um caos, mas nada grave. Curti também o menu de organização de missões que pelo que sei foi algo aprimorado do que fora apresentado no Mirage.

Como os anteriores, ainda é um bom RPG de Ação com pitadas de Assassin's Creed, mas que diverte o suficiente, veremos agora que rumo a franquia tomará após esse ter sido o provável último AC deste gênero. Vamos Ubi, eu ainda mantenho as esperanças em você!

Nota Final: 75/100 - "Como você acredita na minha causa, nós nos unimos apesar de tudo. Para trazer a mudança, para trazer a luz." 🌸⛩️👺

Lista dos meus AC favoritos

Blue prince is easily the most disappointing game I’ve played this year. Not because it is bad, but because it has such flashes of brilliance only to be bogged down by some very poorly handled roguelite elements.

Those flashes of brilliance are the “Oh, I get it now” moments. Moments that come after sitting down in one room for 5+ minutes and slowly uncovering a puzzle before finally being handsomely rewarded.

But those are few and far between as getting to a location of a new puzzle takes a long, long time sometimes. I had a few periods of 10+ days where I made no real progress for a multitude of reasons. The low spawn rates of items, the more important rooms needed for story progress and permanent upgrades being frustratingly rare and the overall lack of gems and keys that are the most important resources in the game.

Lack of resources makes runs frustrating, one time I had 5 doors open on rank 5 and 6 but all were locked so because I got unlucky with key spawns I lost a very good run. Almost every bit of progression came after 5 or more runs of nothing. Another consequence of this is that steps are basically meaningless resource with your runs barely ending because your steps are reduced to 0. In more than 50 runs in this game I’ve only had three runs end because I had no steps left. Meanwhile I’ve had more than 10 runs ends mainly due to lack of keys and sometimes due to lack of gems not giving the option to pick the only room forward.

The room spawns are another very frustrating part of the design with you got what feels like the same 30 rooms in most runs and barely ever getting the rooms you want to complete a puzzle. This is even worse with rooms that require either another rare room or a specific item to progress. There are so many things I have noted down that I want to do but still after 50+ runs the game has given me what I need to do them.

I’ve used the word “frustrating” a lot because this game really didn’t need to be. But the combination all of the resource scarcity, rare room spawns and item requirements make progressing in this game slower than I would like.

One thing that I did enjoy about the roguelite stuff is the things you can save for another run. Certain rooms give bonuses on next runs, others help you retain things like gems, money and one of your items. This feeling of starting a run with a good advantage was nice as you are rewarded for accumulated a lot of gems or coins, or getting a unique item combo.

Here I’ll just dump a lot of my miscellaneous complaints. Billiards room puzzles get too hard with there being more than ten different symbols you need to remember on top of the ones that appear from the beginning. The slow walk speed becomes painful when having to track back to the beginning for something. I’ve barely seen any of the item combos due to how rare it is to get more than a few items in a run.

The more I play, the more I realise this game is absolute bottomless pit of content. I have a lot of notes on my phone about certain puzzles I want to solve but there are still so many things here that I haven’t even got to, some of the locked gates outside of the house, unlocking every single room from the different room unlock methods and probably way more. The depth of content here is great but my patience for the slow rate of progression has basically gone.

I banged my head against the wall that is the game for much longer than I should have. The long, long stretches of no progress due the game’s poorly design roguelite elements frustrated so much mainly because I think this is a very well put together puzzle game. When everything goes right solving a puzzle you’ve had some of the pieces of is a wonderful feeling and completing the game did leave me very satisfied. But the journey there is mostly about banging your head against the wall until the games gifts you with the tools to solve a puzzle you want to solve. Blue prince is one of the worst roguelites I’ve ever played but beneath that there is a very good puzzle game.

Animal Well is a complete, compact game, in which level design is key. Coupled with the simple but heavily charming art, it's a lesson in how a metroidvania is built.

The open-ended progression is fun to fiddle with, and every item you obtain can be used in a myriad of different ways, which adds to the sentiment of discovery every time.

Iit's too easy though, specially with specific items that seems more important than others, and one chase sequence near the end is a worthy challenge, even if it breaks the normal difficulty curve.

The small-scope atmosphere and ambience fits a lot with the concept of the game, and the designs and presence of every creature, be it beneficial, agressive or neutral, adds to the sentiment of being a weak and fragile critter trying to survive in a surrealistic 'rules of nature' dynamic.

Soma Cruz, Soma Cruz, que um dia...

Oh wait, I've made that joke before. Whatever, if Konami gets to make the same game twice in a row then why shouldn't I get to recycle a gag?

I grabbed the Dominus Collection recently, sold mostly on Order of Ecclesia's artwork and the Haunted Castle remake, but there's two other games in here and I paid my money, so I'm gonna play all the Castlevanias. Unfortunately, I'm not starting very strong with Dawn of Sorrow, a game I think is marginally better than its direct predecessor, but which lacks anything unique about it.

Well, except for drawing runes, which you don't really do in this version. That's probably for the best as I couldn't even write my damn name using the Dualsense's touchpad. Came out looking like Homer drunkenly writing a postcard, getting to the end credits and seeing "Thank you for playing: YoKo YoU gOt A bUsT tHaT wOn'T qUiT." Much of the original's touch functionality has been offloaded to button prompts, which is welcome even if it does rob Dawn of Sorrow of some of its identity.

What you're left with isn't anything special. A painfully average search-action Castlevania that's still saddled with a dreadful soul system in place of actual subweapons. I hope you like grinding, because you'll also need to break down souls and weapons to get better equipment. Thankfully, the late game is nothing but halls full of massive, tanky, hard-hitting enemies in lieu of any actual level design, which is at least conducive to leveling Soma up quickly in preparation for the last few bosses. The worst part of this system is that it dampens the exploratory aspects of Castlevania, removing that desire to plumb the depths of the castle for all its secrets in exchange for running back and forth twenty times killing a clown so you can throw a card through a door that lets you get the true ending.

I'm clearly not a fan of this system, but I'll admit that it's something I gradually soured on rather than hating from the jump. In fact, there was a few days there where you'd catch me having a pretty good time with Dawn of Sorrow. That opening area had me hooked, that sleepy village with its snow blanketed cars, rickety bridges, cozy homes overrun with the undead and its banger theme. The problem is that Dawn of Sorrow struggles to maintain its momentum, losing it steadily over the course of the game, then shooting straight down a cliff with whatever's left the moment you hit The Pinnacle. At least I had a few hours where I was just happy to be running through a "new" Castlevania.

Of course, I'm in the minority here. As of this writing, Dawn of Sorrow - specifically of the Dominus variety - holds a 3.8 average rating on Backloggd dot com. You probably shouldn't take my harsh words or middling score as an endorsement to skip this game when running through the collection. To the contrary, reading this review is contractually binding and now orders you by law to play Dawn of Sorrow under penalty of imprisonment in the Abyss. You fell for it; this was all a rune of my own design! Now I get to become a horrible amalgamation of the flesh of the damned!