4/5 ★ – zappinzues's review of Ghost of Tsushima.

Usually when I play open world games, I feel like I am giving up story for gameplay. In Ghost of Tsushima, it swings the other way for me. I would not put Tsushima’s story in the same realm as God of War and The Last of Us, but it is a compelling story that really comes to its own in the end. There’s also a handful of major sidequest storylines that are also fairly good. I haven’t seen any samurai movies before, but I can tell that the story takes a lot of inspirations thematically and aesthetically from the classics. The gameplay is also generally pretty good, especially the combat. It is exhilarating to be overwhelmed by enemies and taking them down one at a time as you switch stances and gain the upper hand with your arsenal of gadgets. There were a few moments of frustration when I accidentally hit the wrong order of buttons. Tsushima has one of the more complex control schemes I have seen, but the ramping up of the skill tree does a good job of easing you into it. I think I would be a mess if I jumped into this game a year from now though. One of my big frustrations with the game is traversal. Being that it is 13th century Japan, there aren’t a whole lot of roads. This means that you will be spending most of your time running or riding through forests, hills, and mountains. I will take a moment here to agree that the game is beautiful, no doubt about that. Since there is fall damage and most things are not climbable, I felt like a lot of my time was spent trying to figure out how to get from the top of a cliff to the bottom without dying. Sometimes that meant taking a minutes long detour to find the backway down the cliff, or just tracing the edge the of the cliff until a button prompt came up alerting me there are handholds below me that I can use. My woes with the traversal system were exacerbated by the excellent Guiding Wind system. Instead of minimaps and GPS lines, *Tsushima* has a constant breeze that points to your objective. A quick swipe up on the touchpad will send a gust of wind pointing you where you need to go. The Guiding Wind means that most of the time when you are traversing through the world, there is 100% no UI, which makes the game absolutely breathtaking. As I alluded to, the Guiding Wind does bump up against the traversal. Since it just points in the direction of the objective, there’s been plenty of times where the wind tells me to jump to my demise or to scale up an unclimbable wall. Being in such situation is as frustrating as a GPS unit yelling directions to you that you have to ignore because it doesn’t know about the construction causing a detour. One other big gripe that I have with the game is that it does not do a good job of communicating where objectives are within an area. Mongol encampments are pretty large, which does make them a lot more interesting to take on. But often you’ll get prompts like “Defeat Mongols” and you have no way of knowing that there’s just a single enemy left, hiding on the other side of the village. In one instance for example, I spent 10 minutes looking for the last enemy, not realizing that the far end of the beach was part of the encampment. This happened often enough that it added friction to my experience. The final point that I will make is that stealth is not the best. I am the kind of player that tries to stealth as much as possible but expects to get into a firefight regardless. A lot of the stealth weapons in the game function better as actual weapons than as gadgets to make a sneaky escape. In the few stealth missions of the game, the level design is clearly assembled to have One Good Solution, giving just an illusion of choice. Since I am not a stealth player to begin with, this didn’t bother me too much. Overall, the game has got a great core, but I feel like it is a bit rough around the edges in the execution. A follow up to the game is likely, and I expect these friction-causing nitpicks to be better addressed. But as a first take at the formula, this is a great game.