★★★★☆
ACO is one of the best games in years, the best Assassin's Creed since Brotherhood, and the best Greek/Spartan simulator of all time. But its still borderline unplayable, because of rubbish level-gating, and graphics that can't hit 30 FPS on a 1070.

+ Pretty world
+ Interesting story
+ Climb everything
+ Engaging combat
+ (This. Is. Sparta!) people off cliffs

- Level gating
- Poor performance

+ Float a Boat
+ Auto-pilot Unicorn
+ Freely respec at any time
+ Screenshot sharing on the map
+ This! is! Sparta! people off cliffs
+ Equipment vanity system/collectibles
+ This Greek open world is a unique joy to explore and take in
+ Interesting story, though the dialogue and voice acting could be better
+ Climb anything, and fall damage isn't fatal, but the animations have gotten lazy
+ Eagle Vision is a literal eagle, and a nice alternative to constantly pulling up a "paper" map.
+ The inventory system is pretty intuitive, dynamically expanding as you collect stuff, but it would be less confusing if it didn't show a row of empty slots by default
+ City guards have more or less been removed, and replaced with a steady stream of semi-unique mercenary/bounty hunters that come at you bro(!) if you commit crimes
+ There's an infinite amount of side quests. Basically those generic quests you could send your followers on in previous AC games, which would AFK complete in the background after 10 minutes, are now actual quests in the world.

+- Barely feels like an AC
+- Do horse skins effect stats? Confusingly, no.
+- Artistically, the graphics are amazing. Technically, they're rubbish.
+- Menus are driven by a mouse cursor, even on controller. It works, but its a bit strange
+- You can kidnap everyone in the world to join your crew, but can only use 4, and those 4 do practically nothing, so its kinda pointless.
+- There's some kind of conquest mode, where you can change ownership of zones between the Spartans or Athenians, but it seems pointless.
+- By default, quests don't actually show you where to go, they just give you vague directions. In an attempt to encourage exploration? But you can turn on normal quest markers.
+- There's technically a crafting/gathering/scrapping system, but the best way to handle it is to just sell the equipment you find and buy the mats from the vendors that do the upgrades
+- You can tame an animal, but its kinda pointless since they just die the first time you get in combat with anything. I went out of my way to tame a level 20 elite/rare bear, and it got killed by a regular level 18 bear in a 1v1 while I was busy fighting bandits. Nonsense.

- Lacking the bonus objectives and replayability of ACB
- You can't use a shield, even though enemies can, and its quite Spartany
- Every assassination animation involves punching a guy in the balls. Weird
- Level gated nonsense. Do 0 damage to, and get 1shotted by random enemies, because numbers
- Poorly designed stat based gear. Find an epic legendary weapon of doom. Level up once. Find a gray trash item with better stats. What?
- Not enough hotkeys for abilities. Forces you to manually swap them between stealth/combat, and most of the ranged ones are wasted. You can unlock a 2nd bar, but its like 20 hours into the game, and its clunky.
- On top of the level gating, and poorly designed stat progression, neither of which is necessary to begin with, the world levels up with you, so you never actually get stronger, only impossibly weak.

* Controller recommended, and use the alternate controls option, because the default is nonsense. A to run? Triggers to attack? GTFO