Assassin's Creed Unity

Overly Dramatic Review in One Sentence

The actions of Assassin's Creed Rogue unfold into the French Revolution with a buggy fighting system that helps you die more than an accidental parkour movement.

The Actual Review

Game time:

PC: 20.4 hours
Xbox: ~15 hours (Based on the achievements compared to this time)

Gameplay

///Mod Note///The only mod I add was for Ultrawide support. No others were needed.

We have to start with talking about the fighting system here. It’s very flashy and movement based, however there’s a significant delay between the actual button presses and the activity that happens. You get to this point where your button mashing just trying to get it to work more than you are about doing the actual activities that you wanted. A specific instances when there’s a power attack you can do where you hold down the button to do a stronger attack that breaks guards, however it takes like a good two seconds for it to be recognized.

The parkour the changes from Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed Black Flag and Assassin's Creed Rogue, which are all really based off the same system to unity is night and day different. You can move up and down with much more fluidity than you ever did, and you actually feel like the parkour system that you pictured from way back in the day. I did have one issue with going down where I would get stuck in the air if I didn't go down at the right way, and nothing I did could correct that.

What really hurts this game for me and what I think kind of started giving me the Assassin's Creed fatigue is the map. There’s a picture below that just shows how convoluted how much noise there is in the map. You can’t really figure out where you’re going you end up having to rely on the mini map to identify what direction your main mission is. Even then you’re having to do all this fiddling to find it on the map so that way you know which direction to head or how far away it is. Working to identify if you should fast travel there or if you should run there. It is just an overwhelming amount of information.

This picture was after I beat the game and cleared some things out.

One of the other issues that I ran into is I accidentally in an effort to fast travel back to kind of the main hub. I accidentally fast travel to a DLC area, but I didn’t even know I had for one. Two it really just threw me into this DLC takes place after the game so if you’ve never played the game, it gives some pretty decent spoilers. Plus you are stuck there. You can’t leave till you beat the DLC. It’s about 2–3 hours if you press only the story missions.

The fancy armor you have to hunt for has you doing these riddles. They are super annoying poems to tell you where to go to get the next item. These required so much effort that it was not an effective use of time or fun.

Graphics and Sound

Remember, when this game came out, there was a huge complaint about the graphics. The voices in the face is not matching the heads missing in some cases. I never had issues when this game first came out. I was lucky and in this one they’ve obviously made some corrections and updates because I had zero issues with that. The only issues I did have were mainly due to the ultrawide monitor that I play on. Combine that with the inability to put it in window mode, it was constantly stretching and things like that. However, thanks to Bink, there was a mod available to correct that issue.

As for sounds, I really didn’t find anything in here that felt good or bad. There was a ton of noise with the crowd. This was nice cause there was this constant kind of background level of noise, that you would expect in revolution. But at the same time, I felt like I missed some of the subtlety that you got from previous games to indicate different things of what’s going on around you or maybe even picking up errant about the world.

Story and Characters

I am not sure how I feel about this story. Arno is raised by a Grand Master of the Templar order. His dad was killed by a Templar for being an Assassin. His best friend, the daughter of the Grand Master, knew that her Dad was a Templar and that Arno's was an Assassin, but he had no clue. In Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed Black Flag we learned that Haytham was raised by a Templar, one in Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and became one himself. Why didn't they attempt to do that with Arno? The start of the game makes the least amount of sense to me.

The rest of the story is fine up until Arno is removed from the Assassin's. He had already been working pretty independently without them so why did him getting kicked out make him stop what he was doing when he had a team to support him. It is a weird bit of story diversion that felt unneeded.

I did enjoy the relationship that he had with Elise and the way they fought together. I think there could have been a great kind of dynasty between the two if their own selfish ambitions didn't constantly get in the way of each other. Most of the other characters, are annoying. You have this snootiness that comes from the council of the Assassin's that really weighs on Arno. The Templar's are also a group of grungy people except for a couple so it feels more like a group of the downtrodden than a group built on world dominance.

My Rating

Seeing the evolution of the parkour system is the best thing about this game. However, the last 3 games have been crap from a story perspective with this being the better one. The modern day section is even more lackluster from a story, with these animus rifts that are fun-ish, but don't do anything to push you forward. The map was so overwhelming that I skipped so much just to finish this game. I did very little of the side stories, didn't get the fancy armor, and only grabbed the chest in the DLC area because they were giving 30k per box vs. 300 per box. If you are playing through the series, it is worth a playthrough. If you are looking for a game to play just because, I'd skip it.

Two additional things came to mind after I wrote this, but before it published. Almost all the main characters have an English accent, so that is stupid. I am not talking about US English, I am talking deep English from the UK.

There was also so much tied into the online and coop missions that you can't even finish a good portion of the game. If it wasn't for the Dead Kings DLC, I would have struggled to have the right armor level to survive the final fights.

Parental Rating

Weirdly enough, all the swearing is in French. Speaking they don't speak French, I'm sure they'd recognize it, but the game running in the background wouldn't be too upsetting. The violence though is a lot. It really does escalate in blood spray from kills to a point I am not sure is real or needed.

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