Assassin's Creed Unity review

Recommended

by Graham Kaletsky

OVERALL REVIEW - RECOMMENDED BUT GET IT ON SALE

This game was getting absolutely panned in the early days by some reviews for its host of technical problems and glitches. I actually avoided it for several years because of this. When I saw that it was on sale and heard the bugs had been worked out, I decided to check it out and was glad that I did. There's a significant break from earlier AC games in regards to hiding, taking cover, and luring enemies to your position. I would say that pretty much all of these changes were for the worse, despite them all being generally playable and fine. The exclusion of the series' classic whistle mechanic to lure guards and its replacement by revealing your position and then hiding again is somewhat baffling to me. Did anybody actually enjoy this change?

Other than these issues, the game is fun, pretty, and introduces quite a few interesting changes to the AC formula. I really liked the more open ended assassination missions that often had a secret, more elaborate and challenging assassination method for players willing to explore and find it for themselves. I also enjoyed the crime solving missions despite the tedious backtracking they would often require. The City of Paris is of course beautiful to explore as well, making hunting for collectibles a generally enjoyable time. Overall, it's a decent game. It's definitely not the best of the first era of AC games, but its not nearly the worst either. It also has some of the most interesting and unusual gameplay mechanics of any game in the series (they really tried to change up a lot of stuff and then kind of reversed these changes with Syndicate). I'd overall recommend playing if you're a fan of AC or want to check out what I would probably call the most unusual and idiosyncratic of the AC games. 

This game takes pretty much all of the previous Assassin's Creed gameplay, and turns it on it's head, for better, or for worse. Control schemes are wildly different than previous incarnations, multiplayer is now an essential part of the game if you want to progress fully, character customization. The list goes on and on. For all it does good, it does a lot wrong unfortunately. There were two specific things that I really was turned off by. The first, is that the last several entries in the series (III, Black Flag, Rogue), you had a very interesting environment to explore, and huge at that. This game was a huge regression in that to me. You basically have a city to run around and do things in again and that is it. It gets very boring quickly for me. The other thing is that the story just kind of.... sucked. Which is very unusual for a Creed game. Other than the beginning, there was little to no ties to the previous games, and no real progression of the main storyline in the series. Also the whole Animus TV stuff SUCKED, and it was weird and not done correctly. That's the real problem throughout the game, is it is not explained well enough, I felt lost in the story the entire game through. The DLC was a real treat, introduced a lot of awesome features we have never before seen in a Creed game, but even then, the story was just not implemented correctly. Okay, that's the bad. The good, is surprisingly enough, the multiplayer. I was very skeptical of this at first but the more I played it, the more I enjoyed it. Something about coordinating with team-members to plan an assassination just gives you a serious badass feeling. The combat is super fun and varied. The new items are great too. Basically, all of the gameplay elements are great. Everything else is just kind of meh. I would recommend this game for people who are fans of the series, but only hardcore fans.

This game is terrible. I was excited for the next entry in the Assassin's Creed franchise after Black Flag. Since Black Flag was the first Assassin's Creed game on the next gen (PS4 and Xbox One), I was anxiously waiting to see what other visual and technical feats the next gen consoles would be able to further improve upon for this franchise. To begin with, sure, the game looks good visually. But with that beautiful aesthetic and graphics, come a plethora of bugs and glitches that lead to frustration and even game crashes. The voice work is largely competent and yes, the Animus does translate the native language of the ancestor whose memories the player is experiencing, but it's odd and distracting to have a cast of characters that all speak with British accents in 18th century France. The story is so superficial and irrelevant that it hurts. The setting of this game is the French Revolution, one of the most important moments in Western Civilization and Ubisoft butchers it like a brain dead hog. There is nothing substantive or enthralling in regards to the story. It seemed that in previous Assassin's Creed entries there was some understanding of characters and a narrative. When Assassin's Creed's story works, it is when there is a clear grasp of a historical event or events, a clear understanding of character and writing and a perfect way to use characters and historical events to convey something about these characters and their relationships with others or the world in which they live. It is also appreciated when creative liberties are taken with historical events. The entire premise of this series is that history has been "rewritten" by the Templars so with that premise, you can almost literally have free reign with what you can or can't do that is historically accurate or inaccurate. But the narrative team on Unity do nothing. The story seems to desperately scramble to hit historical events just for the sake of presenting historical events and with no regard to doing anything interesting with history or characters. Oh, if you are looking forward to some compelling "modern day" story beats, look elsewhere. I don't even know who the game is centered on for its modern day elements (the game directly addresses you in an already tired and unclever way that was presented in Black Flag and Rogue). But you as a character have no interaction with the world outside of the Animus. There's also some stupid Animus glitches that pop up. But they are useless and serve no purpose in the game. The gameplay mechanics are absolute garbage. I have never played a game with such unpolished gameplay. The fighting mechanics are terrible and feel so out of place in this franchise. The running and parkour elements are atrocious, you can find yourself flailing to your death due to a bug or shitty game design. There are too many collectibles and side missions that kind of overwhelms you as a player. The leveling system is so surface level and stupid that it's pathetic. Forcing a character to play multiplayer and buy gear to increase their level and therefore increase their efficiency in the game is a poor excuse of an idea for progression or leveling up. The leveling system doesn't even offer a wide range of options to help either. There are so many physics inconsistencies that ruin this game. A flintlock or even a rifle from the 18th century is NOT going to be accurate nor will it have the range that the game likes to portray it having. This team should have done their homework on 18th century firearms. But that's just one of many places where they should have went back to the drawing board. At the end of the day, this game pisses me off due to frustration and just an overall bafflement on how a major developer can have such a terrible misfire with this piece of shit and at the same time it really upsets me that out of all of the time periods Assassin's Creed fucked up on, they had to chose the most interesting and important.

 Rating- ⅕