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I honestly think you probably made the right choice. I ended up playing BP for about 20 hours and I thought it was good-ish but nothing amazing throughout. I'm enjoying RoboCop about as much. It's not as good as the good parts of BP, but it's also never aggravating, so it evens out.

Assassin's Creed Shadows It's been a while since I played one of these at launch. Overall, I really enjoyed it and I think it might be my favorite AC game so far (keep in mind, my only modern point of reference is AC Origins since that's the last and most recent one I played) but ultimately it's still Assassin's Creed. The setting is great, the visuals are gorgeous and the parkour is the most polished it's ever been but that AC jank still shows up every now and then. The "modern day" story is limited to text entries in the new AC launcher and a handful of glitchy sequences in the actual game. The actual story starts out really strong but then it sort of just goes away. After a brief intro with Yasuke, you play as Naoe only for the entirety of Act 1. That includes an opening sequence that features some Tarantino-ass musical choices. It's almost like Prey 2017 where the opening is so freaking awesome that the rest of the game struggles to reach the same height again. Basically it sets up Naoe's motivation and the group of enemies she'll be hunting down for the rest of the game. If you're like me and do a lot of side-content alongside the main story, it might take you close to 20 hours before you unlock Yasuke. When you do, you'll get a bunch of flashback missions giving you more of his backstory, including one that's basically a 30mins short film with the occasional interaction and that might actually be my favorite part of the entire story. Naoe's story is perfectly fine (and she also gets some flashback to flesh out what happened to her prior to the destruction of Iga at the beginning of the game) but Yasuke's story is just so freaking good. Once that's out of the way, though, you're mostly just going after your targets one by one. Which is fine, don't get me wrong. I'm all for the lack of padding. It was just weird to see the story almost taking a backseat after such a strong opening. After a while you go through your entire list of targets and then some more personal quests are introduced for Naoe and Yasuke that pick up where some of their respective side-quests left off. And then the game just sort of ends. Like, when the credits rolled I literally said "What the fuck?!" because it was so out of nowhere. I'd literally just finished a fairly pivotal boss fight/scene that seemed to be setting up the next bit of story and then it just... ends. I have to assume it's setup for the DLC because if not then I don't know what the hell that was. The story isn't the only thing that's uneven. Both Naoe and Yasuke are incredibly fun to play as. Naoe has all the cool parkour moves and tools to go stealthy and Yasuke is for when you just wanna cut down everything in your path and burst through big wooden gates like the Kool-Aid man. The problem is that stealth as Yasuke is treated like a joke. When he does a leap of faith, he immediately bounces out of hiding and the pile of hay is destroyed. When you do a "stealth kill" with him, he screams as he impales the enemy and lifts their corpse over his head. He's really fun in combat but since this is supposed to be a stealth game you end up favoring Naoe most of the time. The game is at its best during main story missions where you alternate between both of them in scripted missions: e.g. sneak in as Naoe to open the gate, Yasuke fights his way in to create a distraction, switch back to Naoe to use the commotion to get to the target and take them out. Having some agency over that kind of stuff to come up with your own strategies could've been great but as it is you can only swap between them either at pre-determined moments during story missions or from the menu when outside of combat/hostile areas. One thing I really liked is that there is no quest log like in AC Origins because, well, there are no boring quests like that game had. When you get a quest from an NPC, 90% of the time it'll just add a circle on your objective board and on that circle will be targets for you to take out. Imagine that, most of the gameplay (both main and side-content) has you just getting lists of targets to... assassinate. In an Assassin's Creed game! I'm surprised it only took them like a dozen games over almost 20 years to figure that one out! (I have no idea if Odyssey and Valhalla were also like this lol all I know is Origins sure as shit wasn't...) So yeah, overall I thought it was very enjoyable but if you don't like Assassin's Creed (or care for the Japanese setting) then YMMV. Oh and another thing I appreciate is that the achievements list doesn't require an insane amount of completion or grinding: I was able to get all the missing ones fairly quickly after finishing the main story. The only annoying thing was some stuff required specific time of day/seasons to be doable. If I'd known earlier I could've planned around it, but since I didn't I ended up having to sit around waiting for in-game time to pass because for some baffling reason they removed the option to "medidate" to fast-forward the day/night cycle. Even though there's literally a meditation mini-game for Naoe... There's technically a mechanic to skip ahead to the next season but it's kinda unintuitive and useless. Oh and another thing they removed for no reason whatsoever is the ability to sell more than one piece of gear at a time. This was a solved problem all the way back in AC Origins so idk what the fuck happened there. They patched it back in like a couple weeks ago but I guess it was buggy cause they already patched it out.

I've just hit another boss and once again I'm asking if it's worth it for me to continue on playing on 'normal'. Save yourself.