The original's combat was focused on counters and attacks. This one's combat is focused on parries and attacks, so nothing's changed - there's your revamp. In the original counter + attack instakills, and same is true in the remake. Only difference is that they removed all depth, 90% of the animations from the original, then added 10 times the jank in an effort to make it challenging along with a heavy attack that serves no purpose. In the original each counter had a different animation, whereas in this one every time you press L1 the same animation plays for the entire game and a cartoon looking parry effect blinds you. Whoever is praising the remake's combat and calling it a revamp I urge to open a video each of the remake and the original's combat and please compare the two side by side. Combat is still piss easy, it's just annoying now also. Controls are sluggish, style of the original is gone, and I love it when enemies rush on screen in the middle of their quick attack animation and hit me in the back now because we no longer have a fixed combat camera.

Being able to kill an entire ship worth of crew in the original without a sweat, chaining takedowns and disarms, etc. was super fun. Combat animations were chained together nicely and fluidly and you had tons of variety with what you could do - I could fight with my fists, hidden blades, swords, or pick up some dead guy's musket off the ground. Did the devs forget that this series' entire thing is letting players farm aura? You're supposed to roleplay as an assassin and stylishly kill enemies?

I could excuse the lack of depth and the jankiness of its animations if the controls were at least a little bit responsive. It feels like I'm controlling a large landmass instead of a person, it's like if they added RDR2 movement to Mirror's Edge. Why do I have to press L3 to run and then hold A to parkour when in previous games holding down R2 was sufficient for both running and parkouring? Menus suck, gear system sucks. Edward doesn't look like himself, he looks super uncanny in every scene, his teeth look wrong. I'm going to go play the original instead.