Assassin's Creed Rogue

Overly Dramatic Review in One Sentence

If the prequel section of the Star Wars Skywalker Movie Series was put into an Assassin's Creed game and told in roughly the same number of hours.

The Actual Review

Game time:

PC: 10.1 hours
Xbox: 18 hours

Gameplay

///Note About Mods/// The only mod I used was to support my ultrawide monitor, which in turn provided me 240 FPS. However, that FPS created another issue which required me to disable "Full screen optimizations." This is a known issue with this game so not too crazy after this change and easy to do. The high frame rate also caused an issue with it appearing to get you stuck in the elevator. You can move back and forth real quick to move it, but the better option is to manually limit the FPS in your Graphics card to 60 FPS. That corrects that issue.

On to the review. It will be very hard to talk about this game without comparing it to the re-release of Black Flag, but I do think it is important to talk about since this sits right in-between Assassin's Creed Black Flag and Assassin's Creed III. You meet people that had a huge role in the latter, but it is part of the story from the former. So with that, one of the biggest things that I noticed quickly was that the ship was so maneuverable. Like drifting a car in Forza Horizon 6 maneuverable. It was fun and made for some random wins in the naval combat sections, but didn't have the weight of Black Flag.

The fighting was much like I remembered it and feels very close to III. There is some fun to it with some new weapons, but we aren't breaking ground here.

One of my biggest issues with this game that I remember from back then and feel like it hit home even more this time was how unorganized the world was. There were 2 different naval areas and a large city. If I compared New York in this to New York in III, it might be bigger, but the overwhelming amount of icons made it a burden to even want to expose the whole map. The "River Lands" were so much back and forth that it look the fun out of the possible naval combat. There is one fight that I had to do where I died twice because I was trying to shoot the guy with my cannons and ran into a random mountain. You also have no organization to the map there. Near the end of the game, I randomly came across a set of armor that I could unlock, but I had YET to find any of the pieces. There was nothing so far that told me it even existed till then.

One of my favorite missions is in the video below. I VIVIDLY remember this mission because it was one of the parts of the story that really brought home a piece of obscure knowledge I had to this plot point that was obviously made up, but was a cool point. That plot point leads you to this escape mission running through Lisbon and just moving. It also had you moving through a house, which got a little wonky in the video below, but it is a part of one of the cool parts I remember so well from Assassin's Creed Unity

One of the things that always felt weird was the fact that British ships would attack me. I'm DIRECTLY on their side against the French. Why?

Graphics and Sound

We have to rewind time with this. This came out in 2015 and still looks pretty good. We have some good voice and mouth syncing that was a huge complaint in future games, but you are tied to III's graphics engine since this came out for the Xbox 360 initially.

As for sounds, they are all taken from Black Flag and III. I do not think there is a single new sound here other than the accents you get from the characters.

Story and Characters

This actually is one of my favorite storylines from the AC games. It isn't long, but tells a rich story with very light characters. I mentioned that this was the Star Wars prequels in the AC world, here is why. Just like Anakin, if the Assassin's had listened to the brash trainee, Shay, and set aside their arrogance, they wouldn't have lost to the bad guys. Shay is right the whole way through. He tries constantly to help others make the right decisions and even attempts to spare the life of all of his former allies. He is disgusted with being asked to kill the old, and grieves at being responsible for catastrophe. However, once he is forced to do what he never wanted to do, he leans in. You also have the assassin's basically planning on killing innocent people for some reason, it isn't really spelled out so it could have been a dupe by the Templars. However, I don't think it was, I just think it wasn't explained well.

I also really appreciated how they layered in the events in Paris. It is one of the COOLEST endings to a game that leads straight into another one. Much like the end of John Wick Chapter 2 rolling right into John Wick Chapter 3, this game ends at the beginning playable time for Assassin's Creed Unity.

I was really upset with the removal of the modern day in Black Flag Resynced. Having it back in here reminded me of how much I did enjoy it. I really like the story of Berg trying to mentally karate chop the Assassin's with providing them of recordings from the Animus. It was a great piece of propaganda and a good psyop. It did a great job of blending the memory to the modern day.

My Rating

It is relatively difficult to go from the Resynced version to this which is basically a DLC for Assassin's Creed Black Flag. The story is substantially better, but coming from resynced, it feels empty or fetchy. If you try and 100% this game, you are running back and forth over and over and over and over again because there are so many collectables. So many things unlocked later in the story. Speaking of the story, being forced to be a pirate in a game where you are not a pirate (Attack ships for their resources) seems dumb. There are 2 naval combat missions that I had to leave, go gather a bunch of resources since the game doesn't really give you a good idea of your "ship level" compared to the ones you are fighting. Even then, I barely survived when I went back. I do like the anti-hero that you play, trying to write the wrong. His counterparts feel empty and completely devoid of morals. If you are playing through the series, it is Worth a Play-through. If you aren't, you can skip it as nothing new is added to the overall story.

Parental Rating

There is a significant amount of language and conversation about being drunk. You first mate just doesn't shut up about it. Between that and the violence, this probably wouldn't have been allowed at the house, plus the "Father of Understanding" mythology being a bit more religious in this than other games.

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