I will never understand why they decided to make this game, seeing how The Two Thrones was a success. Perhaps because many of PoP3's features ended up being spun-off into a more realistic Assassin's Creed, and now Ubisoft needed to make PoP even more fairy-taliy to distinguish it from its new cousin. But I can only guess.

In practice the completely revamped combat and platforming systems are just inferior to the ones that came before. Platforming is kinda fun from a tactile perspective, but involves less intellectual engagement, and is occasionally a bit awkward, especially with the camera angles. But it works, and is probably the best aspect of the game. But the combat has become extremely simplified. It is true that now you have more combos to play around with, but having to fight with one enemy at a time removes the strategic element that was present in the past games, where you had to avoid being surrounded and choose the right moments for attacks. Not to mention the stealth system in the last game gave you options to avoid battles by putting more effort on platforming, thus adding more variety to the gameplay in general. Variety that is now severely lacking.

The biggest problem here though is the non-linearity, or rather its implementation. In the past games every level was carefully designed for the most engaging flow, but here you have to break up the flow a lot, because you're no longer moving in one general direction. You have to backtrack the same areas that clearly weren't designed for an engaging backtracking. This becomes even more exacerbated by the bizarre decision to make the player collect blue orbs to progress, which are only available in areas you've already cleared. And their placement absolutely does not encourage any flow whatsoever, forcing you to awkwardly traverse the same obstacles back and forth just to reach the orbs on each side of them. It wouldn't be a huge problem if you only had to collect a small number of orbs to progress, and the rest was for unlocking bonuses, but the amount required just to progress through the story will ensure you spend a few hours of the gameplay aimlessly running around these practically empty areas. This feels like a chore and ruins the rhythm of the entire game.

I will say that the story is pretty okay. At least from what I've seen, it doesn't seem much better or worse than the previous entries. But the presentation is gorgeous, and is probably the only reason to play this game. However, once you get used to it, the magic wears off and you're left with a pretty flawed, albeit somewhat fun casual action-platformer.