Summer’s gone and my AC spree finally dried up

So, first, let's go back in April. Eventhough I had promised myself after beating AC3 not to succumb to any other AC game too soon, I finally decided to play AC4 Black Flag. The fact Ubi decided to give away for free AC Unity (after Paris' Notre Dame burning) counts a lot in this decision, because it put another game between me and Odyssey in my quest to beat all the AC games I own until I can buy Odyssey.

I agree with those who say Black Flag is the least faithful to the series, but to me it's for the best : it's refreshing to get a bit away from parkour and espionage in big cities, the sunny Caribbean setting is exotic (especially after AC3's rainy New England) and the naval warfare is quite fun. I'd even say I preferred by far the naval parts ; the land parts of the plot ("follow that guy missions", "listen to this conversation", "get this gizmo", etc) started to tap on my nerves after a certain time but so did AC3's main missions after a while. All in all, I feel any AC game fails to keep me entertained and starts to feed me up after 10 or 20 hours playing : I dropped the game in the last episode, a couple missions away from the end maybe. I don't know my precise playtime since UPlay didn't deign to track it.

The pros :

• free roaming on the sea is great, listening to the shanties song (like Drunken Sailor and my favorite Lowlands away) : the colourful and sunny Caribbean are a nice setting

The cons :

• the main character (I already forgot his name) is not very charismatic although its craftiness makes a nice change from the usual SJW we're used to playing in AC.
• the missions are still way too directive.

Verdict on AC Black Flag : 7 / 10

While I was on a roll, I left AC Unity in my backlog and jumped directly to AC Odyssey , which I played more than 80 hours (I just checked Uplay's playtime because I thought it was only 50ish hours !). Unsurprisingly, having spent such a lot of time on it, I loved the game.
First of all, obviously, I didn't suffer the usual bore involved by any other AC, after 10 or 20 hours of repetitive tasks. That's a good sign, right ?
I chose Kassandra (what kind of monster doesn't choose her ?) and I liked her personality. Playing a strong badass girl freshen things up and I give Ubi credit for not saddling her with any cliché that usually plague woman image in video games (for example, no sentimentality and no sexualization).
The first 10 or 20 hours, and even after 30 or 40 hours, I was amazed by all the content the game was still pulling out from its hat : the main quest junctions, the huge map, the side quests (I liked the Daughters of Artemis' hunting quest, eventhough the legendary beasts are just damage-sponges), the soft RPG-like aspects (XP, personalization of the hero after every level earned…), the battlefields, the Cult, the bounty hunters, the Arena, etc.
The graphics were not as overwhelming as I expected them to be (it didn't look to me many steps up Black Flag) but the game is still pretty : some places are nicer than others and the people and animals are well rendered and animated. The game is not free from glitches and collision bugs, and I suffered a couple of crashes (that's not much regarding my playtime).
I am not very fond of the XP "levelling out" system but I reckon it's an efficient way to avoid farming and keep the player involved in the quests. Speaking of quests, the best ones are those few where I had to make real choice (basically who's guilty, who's gonna leave, who's gonna die) or those even fewer where the writers dare to show a real sense of humor, drifting away from political correctness.
Contrary to Black Flag's, the music didn't leave any mark on me.

The pros :

• lots of things to do, at your pace, picking what you prefer and leaving aside what you don't like. That's a huge step forward compared to the old AC tendency to excessive guiding in the quests sequence and also inside every mission.

The cons :

• There are lenghty parts and monotonous Fedex quests but the key for me was to alternate different tasks and types of missions.

Verdict on AC Odyssey : 9,5 / 10

This one was utterly relaxing. There's no challenge, you just play jigsaw puzzle with unconventionally shaped pieces of colourful stained glass. Easy to complete.

Verdict on Glass Masquerade : 7 / 10

I didn't like much Tropico 3 when I tried it for 2 hours a couple years ago and the next episode conveyed the same feeling : I'm usually a fan of management and city-building games, I liked the farcical dictatorial atmosphere but the graphics are old (I'd even say ugly in 2019 standards) and the management was again mediocre. Like a symbol, I got a bug preventing me to finish the first mission in the campaign, so I just dropped the whole game after a couple of hours (the history repeats…). Maybe I'll give a chance to T5 or T6 someday…

Verdict on Tropico 4 : 4 / 10

I completed all the levels except for the DLC, that I didn't buy yet. The game is funny for a while but in the bigger levels, finding some characters or objects became tedious, because of the vague description or because they were hidden behind or inside things that have to be clicked one by one. A better system of hint would be nice.

Verdict on Hidden Folks : 7 / 10

Generally speaking, I don't like serious gaming nor any entertainment (including movies or TV shows) about real world's atrocities. Because such topics makes so-called entertainment not entertaining at all to me.
TWoM falls perfectly in this category : one run of around ten days was enough for realizing it's not my kind of game. Even if it is gamified, the subject of surviving war as a civilian ain't fun at all to me. The oppressive music and gloomy shades of grey didn't help. Moreover, leaving aside the bleak topic, it's this sort of game where you have to miss a run or two before you understand well the mechanics, and I more and more dislike this process, sometimes feeling like artificially lengthening the game lifespan and often feeling like wasted time to me. I mean, I love XCOM games but they can be so frustrating when a mission messes up : when it happens, you can cheat a little and load a previous save but in TWoM, you can't do that and you have to start again from scratch.

Verdict on This War of Mine : Gloom / 10

With a perfect transition from TWoM speaking of game lifespan, we have Endless Legend where any run lasts between 5 and 12 hours : I'm OK with 4X (don't love, just like them) but spending an average 8-10 hours a game is way more than I can endure nowadays. Endless Space suffered from the same flaw for me.
That being said, Endless Legend is pretty and has nice mechanics. I made one game (lost BTW) of 11 hours and enjoyed it but I'm afraid I won't be brave enough to try another faction or another strategy. I've heard Amplitude Studio is currently working on another 4X game called Humankind, where you're not quasi-compelled to choose at the beginning of the game the kind of victory conditions you will pursue (scientific, military, diplomatic, economic…) : it should be more oriented toward global score victory conditions, something already existing in 4X but leaving you more freedom, and it's a direction I may like.

Verdict on Endless Legend : 6,5 / 10

Just another Lego game, in line with already played Star Wars, Batman, Harry Potter and Jurassic World episodes. This one is equally good and itches my (relative) need of completion because like the others, it can reasonably easily be 100%ed : took me around 40 hours however but it was not grinding. One grinding aspect I didn't like was the boss fights, where you always had to strike them three times in order to beat them.
I played the most of it with my kids, introducing them little by little to playing themselves in the NYC hub : they loved the Marvel universe, all the good and evil characters (Venom freaked them out a little though) and they loved even better afterwards to reproduce the game scenes with their real Lego !

Verdict on LEGO Marvel Super Heroes : 8,5 / 10