I've recently re-downloaded this so that I can play through the DLC, it is quite generic open world stuff but it's done very well, and I think the fact I've not bothered with mostly all of the Ubisoft open world games means it wasn't too tiresome for me.
For anyone new to the game I'd advise not to overlook the Legends mode and making sure to try it out at some point, for a game that's clearly built around a single player experience the multiplayer works surprisingly well and might actually be the most fun I had with the game. Not sure how populated it is these days but if you can still matchmake with others it's worth playing.
- It's a shame the Japanese dub isn't lip synced, I'd have preferred to play it in Japanese with subs for the authenticity but not like this - You can't skip cutscenes, what the hell? - Love the combat and challenge on lethal... - ...but the checkpointing is really frustrating me
The autosave/checkpointing is very frustrating because you can't reset to how things were before an encounter starts if you die during it. One side of that is in the random encounters around the map - these are basically one shot encounters you can't retry, because if you die and reload from checkpoint the enemies won't be there a second time. The other side is when doing a map event like liberating a location partial progress gets saved over death. The first place I came to required me to collect three flags to liberate it, but when I died after collecting one flag and reloaded it would stay collected, so I felt cheated out of doing it properly. This extends to collecting anything like supplies - you can just run in, grab whatever, die, and still have it all. Compounding that annoyance is that where you respawn to retry the encounter seems to be based on where you die rather than where you previously started it, so I might approach from one direction, die, reload from checkpoint, but find myself starting on the opposite side.
It's frustrating because these seem like such simple problems to fix but are significantly impacting the whole experience. Story missions are much better for having deterministic restarts.
Just finished this in around 26 hours. Absolutely loved it - strong 9/10 for me. Didn't do an OTT amount of side stuff so felt fairly streamlined to me.
My main annoyance was the lack of being able to influence outcomes. At times I would spare people who I didn't want to, or vice versa. Was frustrating to me.