The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed Unity + DLC

Context

Assassin's Creed Unity and Assassin's Creed Rogue were both released on the same day for the previous gen (PS3 and equivalent) and next gen (PS4 and equivalent) consoles. Having played the series in order so far, I was happy enough to play Rogue initially and then wait a little while for Unity. A decision that soon evidently became a wise one as widespread reports of serious graphical and game breaking bugs came out shortly after Unity's release.

I completed Rogue, and I thought it was okay, but with Rogue being a copy and paste of the Black Flag engine, and Black Flag not exactly setting me alight, despite its initially great seafaring gameplay, I was starting to get a bit lukewarm about the series. It seemed to me at this stage that Ubisoft was really starting to treat the Assassin's Creed franchise as a cash cow to keep churning out the games and rake the money in from mugs like me.

But Unity couldn't be like that, because it was reported that Ubisoft had developed a brand new engine for the next gen consoles and in fact they'd been working on it from around the time Assassin's Creed III was in development. So with a brand new engine, it couldn't possibly just be more of the same.

I had high hopes for Unity, I stayed positive about the numerous bug reports as teething problems with the brand new engine. Ubisoft were churning out the patches so the hope was that with Unity having been out for 6 or so months, that the main issues would be fixed and the game could be enjoyed as intended.

This one is a very lengthy review, and unfortunately not for good reasons.

Thankfully most of the bugs in the game at launch have now been patched.

The Setting

Unity is set mainly in Paris during the time of the French Revolution (end of the 18th century). With the return of the series to a capital city, it is a return back to the kind of scenery and adventures we last saw when romping around as Ezio, with a very high density of buildings often pressing together, and canopies, balconies, tethered ropes and historical churches and architecture. It really is a return back to the start of the series, and a very welcome one. Running around the streets and across the rooftops feels very similar to the kind of adventures Ezio used to have.

A "real gameplay" shot of Paris. It's a lot more detail than previous AC games!

With the time being of the revolution, this is, of course, a major point of French history and therefore there is a wealth of interesting events and historical figures to be seen and met. Content wise, our cup should runneth over.

The final interesting point about the time and setting is that Unity literally begins at the ending of Rogue. I won't give away spoilers by explaining what happens, but at the start of Unity you see the same events that happened at the end of Rogue from the point of view of Arno Dorian, who is the main character in Unity.

The events just described have a huge impact on Arno, and likely his slack cavalier attitude he has as a young man is him compensating, or rather, failing to come to terms with what happened in his childhood. Of course, this is an Assassin's Creed game, so the cliché of series events happening to Arno when young, ends up changing his course in life and cementing him into the Brotherhood.

The Gameplay

The very first thing that strikes you with Unity is the graphics. I thought Rogue was a pretty decent looking game, but Unity renders Rogue a sad relic of previous generation consoles. The amount of detail in Unity is amazing compared to its predecessors, everything looks better, just everything! People's faces are much more lifelike and expressive, people's movements more fluid, environments much more detailed, lighting much more dynamic, and there are way, way more pedestrians and bystanders. The citizens of Paris form literal crowds of 100s of people, with all the noise, chatting and shouting, Paris feels alive!

A real example of the level of crowds you'll see in Unity!

Maybe it is getting used to playing through all the previous games again as I have, but I felt that even though Unity is 6 years old, the graphics blew me when from the very first moment I started playing.

Purely from a visual perspective, very little lets down this new level of graphics. Texture or model pop-in is a minimum, it happens infrequently enough that it is very noticeable on the fairly rare occasion it does happen. The detail of the environment never lets up. Same goes for the lighting, now when you step out from the catacombs under Paris into daylight, the screen goes bright as if your eyes are adjusting to the new light levels.

The sound effects live up to the graphical environment, although the audio doesn't stand out itself. The music in the game is fairly generic as well with typical but forgettable battle music and other background jingles. As with Black Flag and Rogue, there are songs of the era as sung by the commoners, but whereas Black Flag's shanties were particularly catchy, again, most of Paris's songs are forgettable (although to be fair, it's not a fair comparison with Paris's songs being, of course, in French, and me not speaking a word of it).

So having gotten over the graphics, the next most important thing in an Assassin's Creed game - what's the parkour like and, in particular, have they finally fixed it?

Well, it's not a yes or no answer I'm afraid.

Some of the parkour mechanics are definitely better. The biggest improvements are essentially in relation to free flow running and parkour once you are off the ground. If you are climbing up buildings, running across rooftops, or jumping across buildings at speed, then in general, the gameplay has returned to being pretty good fun and, as with the setting and all those densely packed buildings, it feels like it did with Ezio.

The other improvement is that the ascend and descend buttons have returned. These features were last seen in Assassin's Creed: Revelations when we were playing as Ezio, and let you generally indicate if you want to generally be moving up or down when bounding across balconies and rooftops. It is a welcome and long overdue return, when it works. But what it definitely has solved is that Arno doesn't make completely daft decisions about where to jump next like Edward and Shay did. With those two, you'd be running along a rooftop expecting to bound to the next, but instead they would drop to a low beam that you didn't even know was there. Arno does not do that, and that is a huge improvement.

However, running along the ground still suffers a lot of the same problems previous games did. Arno will randomly hop up on barrels, building corners and other obstacles rather than run around them. If you go to run under a low rope, like a washing line, Arno will jump on top of it rather than run under it, which is just daft, and he'll do that every single time.

The other mild frustration is that Arno unfortunately feels very sluggish to move around. This sluggishness also applies to combat, but in the case of parkour, you often feel like you are jamming down the button commanding Arno to move, waiting for him to do what he is bloody told. Sometimes you'll even feel like mashing the button in the attempt to get your point across. Arno frequently pauses and stops when you are trying to move him around, and there are occasions when he outright won't follow the command you are issuing to him. I've had several cases of Arno refusing to jump back off a wall on to the wall behind even though it should be a perfectly valid move.

But that is not the worst thing. The worst thing about the parkour in Unity is that whilst Arno generally does well when in full flow, moving him around when you want to make finer adjustments is terrible. It's so bad it actually seriously impacts the stealth elements of the game. You can be hanging on a wall, trying to work your way up to the top of a ledge so you can ledge kill the enemy above you, and instead of edging up, Arno will flip up 2 metres and completely expose himself to the enemy, alerting the enemy and all surrounding enemies to his presence. I hope you didn't want that mission challenge of not raising any alarms!

Which brings us to stealth, it's bad in Unity, to the point where it is about 25% as usable as previous installments. Stealth in AC games used to be something you could actually rely on, but they broke it badly in Unity.

• Whistling to attract guards is gone. This renders the immobile cover in the game, namely the haystacks and the cupboards you can hide in, mostly useless, as you'll be lucky if even one guard walks close enough to these things for you to stealthily kill them.
• There is no cover you can move around in. No tall grass or crops you can creep around in.
• You can't pick up bodies at all. The enemies stay where you killed them, until they just disappear after a while.
• Enemies that see dead guards do not behave like before. In previous games they would come to investigate, in Unity, they often just stand there and stare at the body.. until the body randomly disappears after a time, then they'll return to their previous routine.
• There is a new cover mechanic in the game, where you can press a button to hug a building corner or wall next to an open door. Most of the time this works, but if you are trying to cover next to, say, a square crate, Arno may decide to take cover round the side of the crate rather than behind it, and in full view of the guard you are trying to hide from. Other times you'll press the cover key, and Arno will do nothing (that sluggishness of controls again).

Parkour has its improvements and new failings in Unity, Stealth is just generally nerfed all round. So what about open combat?

Stealth has been rendered almost useless in Unity.

Generally, open combat is actually better. The block/parry mechanic is now much better and reliance on timing is now much more important. You can block a move such that you avoid damage if you get the button press in, but if you block at just the right time, you'll actually parry and counter and leave your opponent open for further attacks.

Another improvement is the realism of being ganged up on. Previous AC games would have the enemies almost queuing up to attack you, you might have 4 around you but they'd politely take it in turns. In Unity, if you get a few guards around you, you stand a high chance of being overwhelmed. Also, enemies with guns are much more likely to shoot you several at a time if they surround you, and you can die very quickly as a result, because there's no ability to dodge or counter gunshots as seen in previous games.

In fact, the combat could be considered excellent, if Arno's awful sluggishness didn't come into play again. Sometimes you'll press the block button in plenty of time, but Arno does nothing and gets hit. Sometimes enemies will string two or three attacks together, and if you miss the first one you should be able to block the second, but you'll get instances of Arno just deciding not to block at all whilst your health gets stripped off you.

In frantic combat, you can rely on medicine to restore your health back to full, and its instantaneous, which gives a nice flexibility to those who either rush in (not me), get exposed by Arno's dodgy stealth (that would be me) or foolishly decide not to run away and instead stand and fight a small army (also me). You can carry up to 5 medicines, and this can make very difficult fights possible or really hammer in the message that you should run away.... As long as it actually works, and you avoid getting stripped down to your last bit of health, press the heal button, nothing happens, then you get shot or stabbed and die.

Dieing because Arno's doesn't respond to using medicine happens all too often. You will die in Unity, more so than previous games, and probably at least 50% of that will be Arno just not doing what he's told.

So well done Ubisoft, you've improved the parkour so that it's not a constant thorn in the player's side that persists through the entire game, turning a fun game into a sometimes fun, sometimes frustrating game. In Unity, the player gets that experience with the combat instead.

And there's a lot of combat, because the stealth is so crap.

A Total Mess

We've covered the usual suspects of parkour, stealth and combat, which is generally what my reviews are about, but there's more crap to cover in Unity. We need to talk about the content and collectibles.

On the plus side, there is a lot of variation in the basic mission types in Unity. You've got the main missions, of course, and the collectibles. But there are also murder mystery investigations, Nostradamus Enigmas to solve (similar to glyphs in Ezio's time), clubs to renovate and club missions to complete to start building up steady income, a hugely expanded weapons and armour system (a lot more of each, and armour is now broken down into components like hood, chest, gloves, etc).

But there is the absolute horror of the multiplayer aspect that Ubisoft has shoe-horned into this game. There are now side missions dotted about that are intended to be played co-op with other random online players (or it can be your online friends, but for me it is random players). When I played Unity first time around I gave up on these, because frankly 80% of online players play like idiots and screw up the mission, dying several times on the way.

Now I give these a try today, not only do you still have that problem with the other players, but you'll be lucky to find other players in the first place. I am guessing Unity is not a widely played game today. Also, you'll go to start a particular co-op mission, you'll find other players and think "Great, at least I can play it this time." Then when the mission loads, you discover you aren't in the co-op mission you tried to start, the game has dumped you into a different co-op mission that the other player was in.

Why do I want to try and start a particular co-op mission, just to be shoved, without warning, into a completely different mission?

So, guess what, I'm not bothering with co-op missions this time around either.

Collectibles are also a huge pain in the arse in Unity. There's Tricolore Cockades dotted around the city. It's not clear what relevance they are, but I think collecting them adds to your ongoing revenue stream. They only appear on the map once you get close to them, which is a bit of a pain actually, but you can buy a map of cockades and maps in the online store using Helix credits. Helix credits are Ubisoft's micro-transactions for Unity (lucky us, we are invited to spend even more money on this game for some mild conveniences) but luckily you do earn some Helix credits in game as well, meaning you can buy the map without spending any real world money.

So, talking about the chests, they are dumb. They are partly dumb because you have white chests which are unlocked, and red chests which are not only locked, but locked to 1 of 3 different levels of difficulty. It's theoretically possible to pick the lock which is one level above your lockpicking skill, but a monumental pain in the arse to do so. The kicker is, you can only unlock lockpick level 3 when you have completed sequence 9, so you have completed around three quarters of the main missions.

A large portion of collectibles and even some main missions boil down to "find the open window"

So in previous games I like to scour the collectibles of every location as I visited them for the first time. Ubisoft force me out of that habit in Unity, you might as well just pick up stuff near you until you get to sequence 10 and you can get that lockpick skill, because a lot of red chest have enemies next to them you have to fight before you can open the chest, imagine the frustration of killing 4 enemies and then finding you don't have the lockpick skill for this one.

And occasionally, just occasionally, you'll go to a white chest location, only to find it behind a locked door! What the frick is the point of having an unlocked chest, marked white on the map, stuck behind a locked door.

So systematically going for the chests until you have lockpick 3 is a frustrating business.

And that is not even the worst of the collectibles, oh no!

When Unity first came out, it used to have a companion app. You could download an app to your android or iOS device and play subgames in it, which used to unlock additional rewards in the main game. But the companion app was long since discontinued by Ubisoft, so they patched the rewards in the main game to be always available.

So now you have gold chests and blue chests that were rewards from the companion app, but you can treat these like white chests, no big deal.

But you also have Nomad points, which sometimes you can collect and sometimes you can't (no one explains why) and it doesn't matter anyway because they were only of use in the companion app. But Ubisoft didn't patch them out to avoud confusing new players.

And the missing companion app is still not the worst of the collectibles.

Unity has another mini game type called Helix Rifts. You get forced through each of the three basic scenarios once as part of the main story, but you can return to them to collect points, save assassins and unlock rewards. These Rifts have collectibles called artifacts, which are similar to the coats of arms you can "collect" in the main game. But the helix rifts are timed events where generally there is a bunch of crap going on around you whilst you do what you need to do to beat the level, or perhaps, try and find the artifacts.

But if the timed aspect of the rifts and the general chaos doesn't get to you, well Ubisoft has you covered, because the artifacts are in fixed positions, but may randomly appear or not appear based on no particular reason. So if you are trying to systematically hunt these down, perhaps using an online guide, not only do you have the difficulty of trying to find the exact position of the artifact amongst all the chaos, but you might even be in the right place but the artifact has decided not to show up. The online guides will tell you to just restart checkpoint and try again, but after restarting checkpoint and going to the spot that you think is the right spot 10 times in a row, it all starts to wear very thin.

This review is long enough by now. There are still failings in the game we haven't covered, but rather than continue to discuss them at length, I'll just summarise them as follows:

• The level design is appalling. Let's hunt for the open window or door for the 25th time, or find which of the 4 underground entrances goes to that last underground chest (clue, it's the 5th entrance not marked on the map). The developers seemed to think this kind of bollocks is a valid "puzzle" mechanic. It's not, it's tedious and boring.
• Arno and his story are never developed beyond shallow characters. We never really find out anything that motivates him apart from covering his guilt for the death of Elise's father, and Elise herself.
• All the content in the original release that has since been removed, such as the Companion App and the Initiates subgame, are still referenced in the game documentation.
• The later and most difficult side missions basically make themselves difficult by having you go point X and enter an area surrounded by 20 soldiers and snipers. With the broken stealth mechanics,you have zero chance to successfully take them all out one by one, so you *will* get spotted and there is a high chance you'll have 15 soldiers and snipers all descend on you, attacking and shooting you all at once. A stealth game with no realistic option for stealth... great!
• The cover system just randomly doesn't work at all. You can slip through a doorway getting noticed by a guard, and as the guard slowly approach and are pressing the button to cover, Arno will just stand there.
• Early in the game, the only collectible that might have guards would be the locked chests, and this is fair enough as being predictable and used in balance. In the most difficult areas of the game, the majority of collectibles are surrounded by guards and/or in restricted areas, meaning to get them now, you go from collectible to collectible having to chew through guards, get shot at, just to pick something up.

Broken stealth and areas swarming with guards doesn't leave a lot of options.

Summary

Even in Black Flag, which was the only game I didn't bother getting 100% sync in on the main missions, I did absolutely everything else. With it's shitty co-ops missions and shitty rift collectibles, it's just all too much. I played the the main missions without replaying any for the challenges, completely skipped the co-op missions and the rift collectibles, and did everything else. To be honest, even with doing everything else, like getting all the main game collectibles, I did this out of a sense of completionist duty (having done it in all previous games) rather than actually having any fun. I contemplated just finishing the main missions and then jacking it all in several times, but in the end persisted. I don't know why I did it to myself.

Unity, without any doubt at all, remains the absolute worst game in the entire series. It seems as if Ubisoft tried to be very ambitious with what they did in Unity, and they failed very very badly. Unity is a steaming pile of sluggish controls, broken multiplayer, cheap tricks to add difficulty and length to the game, an absolute mess of side missions and collectibles with no soul at all.

When I played this game first time around, it was Unity that caused me to chuck in the towel and decide that I'm not buying any more Assassin's Creed games any more. Ubisoft were cash cowing the franchise on the previous gen. With the next gen release Ubisoft could have done so much with it, but what they actually did was release a broken mess, which they then spent some time trying to fix whilst encouraging you to spend money on the micro-transactions, but ultimately it seems they just cut their losses, patched the game to unlock the collectibles you previously needed to work for, and just left it

So, back when I originally finished Unity first time around, I decided I'm not buying any more Assassin's Creed games.

DLC  - Dead Kings

Heaven help us, because there is a DLC that continues the story of Arno.

With the first mission, we're not off to the best start as far as glossing over the fundamental issues of Unity goes. You have to enter an area surrounded by guards, and the optional challenge is not to enter open combat. In any previous entry in the series this would have been a routine challenge, but in Unity with broken cover mechanics, sluggish controls and the inability to safely lure guards over to you, most of the challenge comes from wrestling with the minimal set of options available to you. The very problem with stealth in Unity is that more often than not, you end up in open combat because of its failings.

Apparently Arno is well known in Franciade, judging by passers by who mention his name in greeting the same as they do in Paris. However, I don't believe the lore in the game ever has Arno visiting Franciade before, so this is a nice little immersion breaking feature of the DLC that could easily have been removed with a bit of attention to detail, but I suppose hoping for attention to detail in this game is like hoping for a bit of peace and quiet in an aircraft carrier.

Newpaper clipping icons appear all over the map, and I assumed this was some kind of new collectible. However, after collecting about 15 or so and realising they all say the same thing, I confirmed one icon on the map that I already collected, so now we have the joy of there being 1 newspaper article scattered throughout the map in the DLC, which the game invites you to collect over and over again. I assume this is yet another stupid little bug wrought from lack of attention to detail.

The Dead Kings DLC is the best part of Unity.

Despite the issues, I was starting to enjoy the DLC. The side missions seem a bit more interesting and some even a little bit "tombraider-y" and the main mission stories weave some intrugue. However, upon completing sequence 2, a new side mission is revealed, the "outpost". There's no explanation for how these come about or what relevance they have to the plot, but basically they are just areas in the map with 3 officers you have to target and a whole bunch of guards. Because the stealth mechanics are so broken in the game, and the way they pack the baddies into relatively small areas, these missions are basically fighting missions, where the best approach is to try and take the guards on a few at a time, and if loads come at you, find a small space you can bottleneck them into. I don't know how these outpost missions are considered a good idea, and in my opinion, it is yet another soulless time consuming addon intended to just stretch the length of the game out.

So are there any positives with the Dead King DLC? Well, there are a few. For one, the side missions that have any actual plot (i.e. not the outpost missions) feel more stitched together alongside the main plot. Franciade is obviously a mysterious and spiritual places with its huge cathedral, tombs and catacombs, and the side missions all exploit this setting.

Also, the main story itself actually ties into the overarching theme of Assassin's Creed with the precursor race. Whilst that is good for the DLC, it highlights that the plot of the main game is completely separate from any relevance to the overall plot of the series. If it wasn't for the DLC, Arno has no impact on the grand scheme of things except the rise and fall of the local Assassins and Templars. It quite annoys me that Ubisoft reserve the story that is more impactful of the series to what was previously a paid add-on, but then that is how Ubisoft seemed to treat the series at this point in time, churn out the games, entice them back in with some paid-ons, move to the next one.

The DLC had a tough act to follow to lower the bar even further from the main game, it doesn't do this, and actually it's a bit better, albeit obviously shorter.

Review Score

Although the DLC is probably the best part of Unity, it doesn't "save" it. If you were ever going to skip playing any of the games in the series, this would be the best candidate. Unlike pretty much every other Assassin's Creed game up this point, not knowing what happens in Unity doesn't really leave you losing out on any of the lore or impact of the other games.

To summarise, I think Unity is a steaming turd of a game and symbolic for how Ubisoft has been using the series as a vehicle for extracting cash from idiots like me, who had been keeping the faith so far. A minimum score of 1 out of 5. Where does the series go from here? It literally can't get any worse.