Aside from the generic Ubisoft agendas of every good character being a black or white female which rambles on and on about how tough she is, especially annoying being the bow-packing ally who is almost useless and always gets killed, yet repeats the same badly written "tough whaman" lines constantly...
...It's a really fun game with gorgeous scenery and generally fantastic gameplay that doesn't get old fast.
The STORY is surprisingly bare-bones and dumb considering the great acting and cutscenes invested in it. It's all ruined by the fact people are being mind-controlled via a song or some plant drug, so there isn't a cunning, complicated human reasoning behind why they join the in-game cult of bad guys who have always murdered one guy while a female is of course alive and waits for you to rescue her so she can tell you how strong she is...
The AI you rely on to be on your side however is mindbogglingly stupid, gets in the way, blows your cover by waltzing infront of the enemies while you plan your sneak attacks, takes your helicopter and flies off 5 feet to only crash it... It's a mess.
Speaking of mess, it's a super buggy game. I didn't mind seeing a tree floating in the air, surely they're placed via some algorithm and not manually, so it didn't bother me, but clipping through the ground and falling into nothing like I'm playing Sonic 06, or trying to talk to people almost always resulting in them running away or taking off in a car before they tell me whatever mini quest they have... it's irritating.
Speaking of irritating, WHAT DO I DO AND WHERE DO I GO? The map is so useless, you see a building, you go there - there's nothing, you run to the markers, you get super stupid side missions about collecting baseball cards or finding a bottle of whiskey DURING A WAR WITH A CULT.
I don't know, it's a messy game, but the fun gameplay and its freedom outweighs all of its flaws. I think it was rushed, 2 years doesn't sound nearly enough to make such a large game properly. But Ubisoft be Ubisoft.
