✅ Very close 1:1 representation of late 18th-century Paris.
✅ Beautiful graphics and soundtrack.
✅ The story takes place during one of the most fascinating periods in French history.
✅ The city feels alive, and the buildings, such as the Notre-Dame Cathedral, are breathtaking.
✅ Best parkour in the entire Assassin's Creed series.
✅ Don’t expect an Assassin's Creed II/IV level story, but it’s still decent.
✅ Co-op is very engaging.
✅ Achievements.

❌ Game is quite broken on Windows 11 (what worked for me was changing the game’s .exe compatibility to Windows 8).
❌ The game starts to break when played above 60 FPS.
❌ Even with the latest patch, you'll still encounter a lot of bugs.
❌ Playing the Dead Kings DLC will glitch your diamond status.

PROS:
+ interesting story
+ beautiful Paris
+ cool parkour
+ murder mysteries
+ FREE Dead Kings DLC
+ FREE Underground Armory Pack
+ companion app and Initiates stuff unlocked

CONS:
- uPlay
- bugs, glitches, errors
- awful mission challenges
- forced repetition (co-op, helix rift)
- equipment clutter
- too many currencies
- lock-picking

Special review section for Ubisoft games:
Should you play? Yeah
Should you BUY??? On a good sale only

Comment:
This is a tough one just by the HUGE amount of issues at launch. Though they fixed a lot of it, gave the Dead Kings DLC away for free. And even the game itself was free when the Notre Dame fire happened, so people could go look at it in-game. This was supposed to be the crowning jewel - the story finally getting to France, where Ubisoft HQ is located.

Paris looks really great, like you can see so much time and effort went into making it look good. And it even looks better than some of the AC games that came after. I liked the character art style as well. The devs liked it so much the pre-rendered cutscenes are unskippable. Which in a combination with no menu at first launch really commits you to playing before settings things up.

The gameplay is a mix of stealth and combat. Plus good (though not perfect) parkour. Lots of stealth gadgets though phantom blades berserk blades and smoke bombs rule supreme. Much more gunshots, you need to zig zag into alleys quickly or use smoke bombs. Multiple enemy fights are mediocre, just parrying and chasing whoever is pointing a gun at Arno, again smoke bombs are king.

But to be honest unless some mission constraints are introduced you are better off going the violent route - quicker, less annoying. And yet I clinged to the assassin ways and oh did the game punish me at times. Examples: Did the Confession mission without being seen or hurting anyone, but the mark, and at the very end got shown I should do two hidden spot kills for absolutely no reason. That took all the fun I had until that point. Second assassin mission showed challenges at the very end when I did not have the resource needed to complete it.

Story was nice, I actually liked the pacing and characters. Possibly not for everyone but for me best since AC2. Would have been nice to take more time with side characters to flesh them out even more. Co-op and assassin missions have stories too actually and are a good mix. Helix rift missions let you look outside the revolution era too. Unfortunately, Co-op missions you have to do 3 times each, same with Helix rift missions, to unlock all the rewards. And you CAN do them all solo, although they can feel harder than intended.

Luckily, dumb companion app is no longer online and same for initiates web site. They were dumb ways to take you out of the game to unlock things in the game. All the stuff is available normally now. Still, there are too many currencies: Money - to buy equipment; Skill points; Assassin points - for colors and equipment upgrades; Hack points can speed things up with the upgrades but are real money micro-transactions so I did not touch them.

It is not possible to delete your save from game. It has to be done by going into folders and disabling cloud saves. Also there is a First vault open bug if frame rate was too high, needs to be 30, otherwise the pillars will not shift properly!
Lock-picking is terrible. It locks away things that are only available after sequence 5 or 9. Real "great" to discover you need level 3 lock-picking in the middle of a quest.

I want to recommend it - the interesting story is there, game is beautiful and missions/quests can be cool. But dumb challenges, stupid unlockables and still present crashes/glitches make it hard to do so. Too bad it is drowned by SO MUCH busy-work. If you got it for free go ahead and play. If you do not care about the full completion go ahead and get it on sale. They do have a fantastic core game which unfortunately they muddled with tedious ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥...

Dead Kings DLC:
Right away - you can accidentally start this DLC, which is basically spoiler-y endgame, and cannot cancel it until the end of the first sequence. I started it by trying to click on my base icon but the DLC icon was right next to it. The story itself is corny at times but manageable.

The new map is far more dim and rainy. Difficulty is about 4 out of 5 so even though you can access after sequence 4 I really would not. Wait until you finish the main story and then enter this sort of side chapter. I also got weapon upgrades reset on a bunch of weapons and the reload of some pistols did not work right.

While heist here is okay-ish, it has the worst co-op mission. Just a bunch of random enemies butchering the paper thin guards. And even though the prompt says you have three it fails when only one goes down.

Underground Armory Pack DLC:
You get a low level hood (Leipzig Regiment Hood) and chest piece (Prussian Waistcoat). Then two outfits that actually look nice (McFarlane's Master Assassin and Arno's Fearless). And finally three pistols (Arno's Dueling, French Cavalry, Silver-Plated) and two swords (Arno's French Rapier, Spanish Cup-Hilt Rapier) which are fine to start with I guess.

uPlay unlocks DLC:
Addorsed Eagle Belt (waist); Bracers of Candia (forearms); Golden Bec de Corbin (long weapon); Ubisoft Connect-Themed Equipment (colors) ... all low level items, barely used.
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Save files randomly corrupted on a 10 years old game that I paid for.

You don't hate Ubisoft enough.