izigame.me

I played the game for the first time at the beginning of 2024, during the Ubisoft free week. I then bought it on Steam for £20, only because it was on 60% sale. The game is not worth £50.

Online only

The game is online-only. It’s like taking all the bad things from the MMO and adding them to a single player game. There is a lot of grind, crafting taking a real time (so that you have to log in to the game every 12h to restart your factories), and a lot of various popping timed events. But there are no big battles, nor a player-controlled market. In fact, you rarely even see other players. The lack of ability to pause the game really hurts.
Add to it server side issues, desyncs, disconnects, kicks due to “inactivity”, and long loading times. Fast travel between two outposts frequently gets you stuck on the loading screen for 1-3 minutes.
After playing the game for almost 200h, and observing all the different problems, I think that the game is fundamentally flawed by design. Every single action requires talking to the server - nothing is cached locally. So you open an inventory, and wait 3 seconds for the items’ icons to load. Or you open a map, and the background is all black with icons in front of it. Even when you press RMB to aim, you won’t see a crosshair until the game actually downloads it from the server. Conversations with NPCs get stuck between lines and cannot be skipped, probably because it downloads the text and audio from the server...
And the servers? Each of them is messed up in a different way. On one you cannot complete a certain quest, on another enemies spawn in hundreds, on another chat doesn’t work, on another you get a half second game freeze every 5 seconds, and so on...

Step back from Assassin's Creed

A lot of people compare it to Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag, but I actually haven’t played this one. However, I put 250 hours into Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and my first impression was that it’s pretty much the naval combat part only. Seriously - take out the on-land combat, add some ship customisations, and that’s it. Bracing, holding the right mouse button to shoot, ramming, boarding - everything feels identical.

Poor UI/UX

In terms of UI/UX, the game is really poor. For example, the map is an absolute disaster. Cluttered with tens of flashing icons, no filtering, and different things shown at different zoom levels, you can never find what you are looking for... Some icons are not clickable, so you have no idea what they mean. Your currently tracked task is often not highlighted, or just gets lost in all this mess...
There are at least 15 different currencies in the game, and you can only see their symbols. No idea what they are, how to get them, and where to spend them. Except 2-3 most obvious and basic ones, none of them are explained in the in-game knowledge base. Even Ubisoft on their help page doesn't even mention most of them. Pretty much every trader I talk to uses different currencies...
And the gem on top is how the inventory interface works - there can be two items selected at the same time. One selection is what you clicked, and the other selection is what you are currently pointing at. And now you use a keyboard shortcut to move the item from the ship cargo to the warehouse - which one gets moved? It took me a really long time to understand and get used to this interface.

Hundreds of bugs and issues

And there is a lot of other issues, and bugs, including game breaking bugs:

a lot of unskippable animations, also in the middle of combat
combat music turns on out of combat
console-like interface - you cannot type in a number of how many items you want to move/buy/sell
sometimes the interface becomes unresponsive and you cannot open a map, inventory etc. - the only way to fix it is to exit the game
no quick way of unloading loot (no marking items as trash or favourite)
blueprints add and remove themselves from the tracking list
very low maximum number of active contracts (on one occasion I couldn’t continue the main storyline, because I apparently reached the limit, even though the main quests are supposed to be beyond this limit).
when you die and pay to respawn nearby, there is a chance you will respawn right onto an enemy ship that sunk you
despite ships having a weight limit of how much cargo they can carry, there is also a limit on how many different items you can carry - 50 (it’s pretty low!)
warehouse has a limit of 250 different items (it used to be 200, which was very easy to reach; but still - what’s the point?)
very often your ship doesn't show on the map
chat icon constantly blinking, as if there were unread messages, even if the chat is disabled
ships spawns within visible range instead of actually sailing from afar
frequently during plundering the settlement you get a message than plundering ended, and a progress bar disappears, even though the plundering is still ongoing
ship's sails are fixed and don't rotate towards the wind
cannot scroll the info panel of the item you are pointing at
after moving items from ship cargo to warehouse, the list of cargo can no longer be scrolled
the game almost never shuts down properly and has to be killed through the task manager
there is no rowing, no moving backwards (even at minimal speed), but you can turn your ship in place just fine
same contracts show in random categories, depending on the (random) server you join
items descriptions often lack details and e.g. say “increase damage” without any details of by how much
some equipment cannot be salvaged
chat sometimes doesn't work and is spamming messages "chat services unavailable"
some missions that require to "swap ships" in the open sea, delete the inventory of the ship you were in
manufacture defence missions sometimes have no attackers spawning, so you just wait for 10 minutes to “win” the “event”
some equipment is missing from the codex
rejecting invitation to the group still adds you to the group (leaving your current group)
chat interface sometimes breaks and prevents you from typing W - it goes up with message selection instead
there are discrepancies in items description vs the effect shown
the seasonal main quest line is bugged - the objective cannot be interacted with
“mature language” filter, enabled by default, is so aggressive that you cannot communicate with others, it will change words such as “so” into "**" or “something” into “so****ing”, so you can often see people adding dots/dashes in the middle of words - because "soMETHing" is a bad word, but "me-th" is all fine...
game sometimes freezes to the point it has to be killed - often in the middle of combat, which often leads to your ship being sunk
some missions are broken and target ships don't spawn in the objective location
icons on the map sometimes don’t load, or the map background doesn’t load, or the map takes 10 seconds to load
sometimes crosshair doesn't show when aiming
enemy ships sometimes spawn into your face
items are in different order in codex/traders/crafting; in traders items reshuffle if you keep browsing for too long
items stats shown in the codex are affected by furniture equipped on your current ship
sometimes your active mission gets changed, because you go through a location of another mission
sometimes your compass is not displayed