After years of having MW2 and then pre-ordering MW3 and buying skins and participating in the beta, and then quitting the game for the most part only a month after MW3 came out.. I have been heavily focused on my career so rarely come on Steam anymore. I just logged in and 26 days ago appearently I got a game ban from Activision. I have not launched the game since March 10th. I have never touched a mod, script, cheat, nothing. Even in theory IF I did I would not even think about doing it anywhere near this Steam account which I have had, and has been clean for over 10 years now. I have NEVER once cheated in a game, and I never will because I always have valued my account and never even saw the point in cheating.

This is absolutely INSANE and I am extremely pissed off. Activision is an absolute joke, and I hope they dissolve soon. I went ahead and reported them as a company and I suggest staying clear of all of their products as they are trash money grabs anyways.

To go even further, I cannot even try to appeal the ban on their website because every time I go on there, click log in with Steam, then click Sign in, it just gives me a generic SORRY, AN UNEXPECTED ERROR OCCURRED. page.
What an absolute joke. Thanks Activision for ruining my Steam account, and I hope you enjoy all that money I have spent on your trash games, and skins over the years.

Quick Notes
First off, I want to say I really appreciate Blizzard making moves to bring games onto Steam. I hope they bite the bullet, and just bring most of, if not all their major games to Steam, including World of Warcraft, and Diablo.

Secondly, let's get it out of the way.. this is NOT Overwatch 2. This is Overwatch 1.5.
Or honestly, we could even say .5, seeing we took a significant step backwards in some various areas.
Their marketing of calling it Overwatch 2 was a pretty good attempt at racking in new players, and bringing back old players though, I'll hand it to them.

Thirdly, I want to preface this by saying yes I do play this game, and I enjoy it to an extent. But that does not mean the game is anywhere near where it should be. And I find myself really wishing I can just go back to Overwatch 1 more often than not.

As a Overwatch 1 player, I completely understand the hate this game gets. It is perfectly justified.
Their switch to the pay to win model absolutely sucks. It is scummy, and not what we need in the gaming community. It is getting sickening. Removing stuff such as the ability to earn coins by playing the game, and loot boxes, and basically forcing users to pay for skins, collectibles, and items, gives players less of a reason to want to continue grinding.

Can I suggest you play this game? Sure. I am really mixed on it. But the fact that it's "free to play" to an extent, just try it.
I just don't suggest spending a lot of money on DLC or content. Don't support that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The game is definitely pay to win now unfortunately.

Gameplay
As far as the changes to gameplay, I was mixed when I heard about them removing a tank. However, Blizzard assured us that tanks would actually feel like you are tanking. I dislike it, a lot. I do not feel that playing tanks do anywhere near the amount of damage they should, for only having a single tank. It makes the game significantly more difficult when solo queuei-ng especially, because if you have a poor tank, you basically lose. If you are the tank, if your other teammates are doing poorly, then normally you and a tank who is playing reasonable with a healer who is doing reasonable, could generally carry. It overall felt more balanced previously. Not anymore. In my opinion, stuff feels incredibly unbalanced.

I figured there would also be small changes to stuff such as the practice range. I mean we got some bigger bots, and shields, but how about different areas or some Easter eggs? Design overhaul?

Character Balance
I have previously mentioned my gripes with tanks in general.
However, some of the characters currently feel so insanely overpowered. I feel this is a bit intentional, as it plays perfectly with this pay to win model.
Lifeweaver currently does WAY too much damage, on-top of already doing insane healing, that he absolutely rips through tanks. It makes the entire match feel so unbalanced, again especially if you are solo queuing and your healers aren't keeping up. You can play hog, but then your DPS don't have a shield to work around, and you do barely any damage as hog. It is simply ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Lock a character behind a paywall, and the people who pay get a overpowered character. I'm sure some time will go buy, and he will be nerfed, but there will just be a new character out who is locked behind the paywall and is overpowered. Works perfectly to make money. So ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ scummy Blizzard.
Also I want to say, I absolutely hate how they nerfed Mei. She feels fairly useless now, unless you are right ontop of the enemies, except for her ult. Bring back the ability to freeze toons!

Leveling
I do appreciate that they put a bit more into the leveling and experience aspect of everything. More stats, overhauled UI and system.

PvE
I was also excited to hear they were going to put a lot of efforts into PvE. I was however, disappointed when I realized the total lack of content available. Now, they released the Invasion DLC. First of all, 3 short missions for $15? That's all we get? The entire game being based around a pay to win model, and the DLC you pay $15 for only gets you 3 short missions? While I admit I had a sense of enjoyment playing them, I cannot recommend them.

Now here is the kicker about the Invasion DLC: You can unlock skins from playing the DLC, but ONLY if you get the DELUXE Invasion DLC. So if you only bought the $15 DLC, you unlocked them for completing the missions, but you can't actually use them (they are still locked) until you buy the DELUXE Invasion DLC, basically just for the skins. Now if that isn't absolutely ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ scummy, I don't know what is.

Maps
Really don't have much to say. Honestly, I feel most of the new maps feel incredibly constricted, or poorly mapped, and just are not fun to play. I simply can not say I find any joy in any of the new maps, and find myself wishing I was playing on the old map pool all the time. Also give us cool, interactive, unique maps, not these boring copy paste cities.

Graphics
Not really upgraded much from the original.

You spend $15 for 3 missions, and you get rewarded with skins that you can't even use unless you buy the $40 ultimate bundle (or upgrade for an additional $25).

Edit: After seeing that all the events the Invasion bundle comes with, are literally the same exact map but just different modifiers, and you play as different characters, I can advise against this even more. Go ♥♥♥♥ yourself Blizzard. Scummy.

Crashes on TOS screen.. Can't even play the game.

Cool concept, terrible execution.
First of all, the actual optimization of the game is terrible. That alone makes it unplayable. There is also no proper controller support. Runs terribly on Steam Deck as well.

Secondly, the powers ruin the game. Making things extremely unbalanced. It would make more sense for the main game to be vanilla chess, and then the powers to be an arcade mode or something. The pieces aren't very recognizable as well.

I was expecting this to be like the old 3D Chess games where it had cool up close video animations on executions and stuff. It has the first part but it's executed poorly concept wise.

This is my first Assassin's Creed game since Black Flag (which I also did not enjoy much).
I was a huge fan of the original Assassin's Creed games, especially II. If you are looking for that experience, this is not it. I knew this going into it based on reviews, and readings, but I was open to giving it a try. I enjoy it, but I also hate it. The hate outweighs the enjoyment. I want to enjoy it. Very hard to do.

First off, I'd like to get off my chest, Ubisoft & uPlay are an absolute mistake. I really cannot stand it anymore, it makes the experience just significantly worse. It's absolutely insane how all DRM does, is make the game worse for people who actually pay to play the game. But people who pirate the game, don't have to deal with that ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. GET RID OF IT. Nobody uses your platform for anything besides launching the game and collecting their free rewards. It's a waste of resources, a major annoyance, and just restrictive to players who want to just play a game. Also privacy unfriendly, and just mines your personal information.
I really do not support it at all, and am getting to the point where I do not want to purchase any further games from Ubisoft due to it alone (And they are not the only company).

Now, I have only played the game for 20 hours, and am level 14. I'm at the point where I launch the game, with the desire to have a good time and progress in the story, and then 10 minutes later am closing it because it is so ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ boring and slow. I don't want to do a bunch of side quests. Just feed me the story. Most other games with an open world, do this very well, Ubisoft on the other hand does not. I do not have an issue with side-quests in general, however I feel absolutely ZERO reason to do them in this game, compared to other games.. besides level up so I can kill more things.
This game just feels like an absolute chore. The RPG system is an absolute mistake, and does nothing but take away from the immersion of the world and game. Side quests are extremely bland, and repetitive, and you get such little reward from each. You spend more time on side quests, that by the time you get back to the "main story", you forget half of what happened, and who the characters are, until they start talking more. The side quests are all very errand oriented, "Talk to this person", "Go kill this person". They rarely lead to anything rewarding.
The main story itself, honestly feels like a series of side-quests, poorly pieced together. There's also been many missions where when you have to go to an unexplored location, you travel all that way, and then it is just a cut-scene where the character is just wandering and literally just says "Now meet me here", and he disappears and you have to travel a massive distance in an entirely other direction. WHY? No dialog? Can we not just walk there in the cut-scene? Or ride a horse together?

Style wise, I WANT to love this game, I love the history, the theme, the locations, the ideas, the mythology... However it does an extremely poor job at capturing any of it. 80% of the locations just look like a cheap re-skin of one another, there is not much that sets them apart from one another besides a few monuments and statues that are different. The landscape, people, models, caves, everything is all insanely similar to one another. You really would not be able to tell where you are without looking at the map. Even the main characters are hard to remember visually. They however also have little that sets them apart personality wise. Each character feels exactly the same, the only thing that sets them apart is the occasional annoying ones, or the overly stoic ones.
This whole game just feels like a rushed, cash grab.

Movement and controls feel very forced, and clunky. I feel as if I cannot do what I want my character to do. I just do not feel as if I have control. Climbing down is terrible, as is climbing up. Horses walk so slow in cities which is understandable, but when I'm outside city walls on a path, I should be able to run or at least gallop. But Ubisoft says nope.
Parkour and Combat, now that's what I really expected to be improved upon, it's been many years since the original AC games. Surely there has to be more cool moves, epic finishers, more new awesome parkour transitions, right? Yeah no. It's WORSE. Like.. by a lot. Assassin's Creed Unity had the BEST parkour system, not only naturally but the more you trained with it the better you could get. And although I did say I stopped playing at Black Flag, I did play a bit of Unity but not much. I know how fun the parkour was in it.
Odyssey on the other hand, it's the same 4 parkour transitions, it feels so insanely clunky, and I have no control. I feel so very forced to take a single path. There's also just not much to climb in this game. Ladders, houses only a few feet bigger than you? Boring. Combat is also extremely boring and repetitive. The finishers are all the same. Dodging is absolutely necessary, and I can't stand it. All she does is roll, and with the already clunky feeling movement, it feels so forced and un-intuitive. I can't stand it..

Stealth/Assassination's.. the MAIN theme of the franchise.. feels impossible, and unenforced. Most places are so wide open and enemies are placed in such a way where one spots you and it's over because all other 50 people run to you and now you're stuck in a brute situation. At a lower level enemies are an absolute sponge, and you take so much damage. This not only reinforces the issue of grinding side-quests. The game forces you into a large combat style fighting more often, rather than offering the option of the two. If you want Assassination's, the most you get are climbing around the ledges of the cliffs and killing the enemies on the outside, then working your way inside. Sometimes you just can't though.
Also throwing a spear across enemies, then chain attacking them is not stealthy. but Ubisoft thinks it is.

Now graphically, while I have already discussed the issue of the locations looking like a re-skin of one another.. the quality of the graphics is very poor. It feels extremely unrealistic, but also very very unpleasant on the eyes. Foliage is 85% of the game, and it all looks like ♥♥♥♥. They look like thin, aliased lines, with twigs that point outwards with more thin aliased lines. Same with grass. Lavender looks nice until you take a second look and realize it's the same thin aliased line with small short purple aliased lines.
There's no sense of realism in the lands. The buildings are monumentally beautiful, but Ubisoft does a terrible job at capturing it. I want to be in awe when seeing each one, but they all just look plain and boring.
Everything has that typical, ugly "Ubisoft" look to it. Over smoothed, or over-sharpened, and re-skinned.

Audio is a whole other boat. It's the same as every other Ubisoft game I have played in the past 10 years. TERRIBLE. It is so insanely compressed sounding. I go from playing this, to Rise or Shadow of the Tomb Raider and Tomb Raider's audio sounds incredible. Then I come back to AC and I feel like my ears are taking a ♥♥♥♥.
Everything is overly compressed to ♥♥♥♥, it is very muffled sounding, it's just so un-immersive. It may go unnoticed to players using very low end speakers or headphones, or who do not have an ear for it. But for players experienced with high-end audio even the slightest, this game will immediately make you want to stop playing due to the audio alone.
It's noticeable not only in the game, but even just the menu sounds, and the loading screens of the fire crackling. It sounds absolutely terrible. This is an ongoing issue with every single game Ubisoft puts out. Their sound engineers do not have ears.

Performance wise, this game runs terribly. It runs just like another Ubisoft game. The menus feel insanely clunky, and extremely unresponsive (just like uPlay, and every other game they put out). Extremely low framerates.. etc.

BFG

Way too short, I expected it to be comparable to Act I. I am disappointed. Maybe for $5, but not $10.
I hope Act III is much better. I'll still recommend it though, because it was fun. Again for $5 though, not $10.

booba

HOOAH