Reviews

The game has a problem with difficulty, at least the way I played it. I made a party of four of the eight characters, played their stories through to the end and then started playing with the other four characters. This resulted in me having very high level gear (and jobs) against very low level opponents, which trivialised all fights, even the final boss at the end of each character's story.
Regardless of this "mistake" I made, the game still is less challenging than I was hoping. I read reviews claiming every fight would be a little puzzle, and this may true at the very start of the game (and for certain bosses), but once you find a certain groove and have a decent weapon and elemental spread, fights are a cakewalk and the challenge merely comes from SP management for your magic classes.

Aside from the difficulty, most of the characters and storylines didn't really impress me. I liked Tressa the merchant, who is always positive and her story is a fun adventure, and I liked Cyrus the scholar, who bores people to sleep with his blabbering and who is unaware of his attractiveness. The more serious stuff, however, doesn't hit the mark, in part because of the decent but unimpressive voice acting.

I sound quite negative, but I think I would still recommend the game (though only just). It looks amazing, there are some very catchy songs and it feels exhilarating to immobilize a boss (and there are more than forty) by breaking their shield through carefully measured attacks, right before their big finishing blow! Just don't buy the game at full price, 60 euros is too much. Look for a 50% discount.

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