By Vanessa Castle
The latest Assassin's Creed installment takes us to Revolutionary Paris.
It drops the naval combat of Black Flag, instead offering a huge, gorgeous, fully explorable open-world city environment, recreated in 1:1 scale that is visually without equal.
The game takes far too long to get going. For the first three sequences, it's like a really beautiful 18th century Paris simulator with a touch of combat, basically a glorified two-hour playable backstory disguised as the world's longest tutorial.
Only after they're done the RPG-style customisable skill tree and the co-op options open up.
You play as Arno Dorian, a man prettier than most of the ladies in Paris but he and his majestic ponytail only have eyes for Elise, the Templar Catherine to his Assassin Heathcliff. Their dull story starts as they are children, and if you make it to the point where Arno becomes a trainee assassin without strangling yourself out of pure boredom, you'll be rewarded by finally getting to do what you came here for: stabbing Templars, lots of Templars.
The open-combat controls are slightly different; your only options are to attack, roll and parry, doing away with the counter strike button. I didn't miss the counter strike, the roll is effective enough to dodge most attacks.
The other movement controls however aren't so great. The separate buttons for climbing up and down as part of the improved parkour mechanics make moving around the rooftops of the city a lot easier but the Assassin's l'appell du vide is still there and I may have accidentally jumped to my death one or ten times. The most frustrating control was the trigger to launch into windows, which only seemed to work half of the time. I must have spent more than an hour, collectively, trying and failing to launch myself into windows.
What does work in the game is the customisable skill tree that lets you choose your upgrades, giving you a chance to level up Melee, Stealth, Ranged and Health skills with points you earn from completing sequences in the game. Co-op, side-missions, treasure chests and in-game events earn you Francs that can be spent on buying new weapons and gear.
Each wearable gear option comes with inherent skill increases so no matter how amusing it is to put Arno in something like the Red Riding Hood outfit, you're probably going to upgrade it quickly for something that has higher Health or Stealth advantages.
All weapons and gear can be upgraded with Assassin Points, which are rewarded for pulling off stealthy moves. Microtransactions are available as well if you want to skip all the side-missions and go straight to a more powerful weapon or gear, but it's hard to see why anyone would want to do that, unless perhaps they were only playing co-op in the future.
Leveling up doesn't take long and the weapons available in game seem to be more than powerful enough. In fact, if you focus on upgrading your stealth skills, your mighty sword can go unused for entire missions as most of the time a nice little knife in the neck is all it takes to take an enemy down.
One of the best weapons is the phantom blade, a silent ranged weapon that's built in but requires trips to one of the many shops to refill. You can also restock your other supplies at the shops, but vigilant looting of the corpses of your enemies tends to make that unnecessary.
The AI is slightly improved but hasn't made any great strides. Your enemies will investigate a corpse or suspicious behaviour, and once they've seen you do something you shouldn't have they will mark you and chase you down until you disappear. But they often forget that their buddy is lying on the ground dead next to them and simply continue about their day.
Either way, a quick murder of the alerted party takes care of that, unless there are too many of them and then you're going to have to run and hope your movement controls don't fail you while you scale that wall to get away.
Look, I may be a powerful assassin but I still got killed sometimes, usually when flanked by a large group of enemies from behind, or being shot down trying to escape, but generally taking down enemies once you've upgraded your weapons and health is about as challenging as slicing through a stick of soft butter.
Assassination missions are supposed to be more fun and do give you at least a couple of options on how to approach the target. Usually I took the option of whatever was the closest one, so it didn't make a huge amount of difference in single-player.
I played three missions during co-op. The first was a lower level mission and a far-too-easy murder stroll around Paris while swapping quips with the guy I was playing with.
Playing on a higher level mission was far more satisfying. Not only did it get us both killed a couple of times, it forced us to actually strategise and plan out our attacks.
I'm not completely sold on Unity as a single-player experience, but that last co-op mission was challenging and a lot of fun. It was my favourite way to play this game and I'm very keen to play more of them.
Assassin's Creed Unity is an aesthetically stunning game, but tightly stuffed with incongruous sequences and often boring side-missions. It's a beautiful hot mess that won't be for everyone.
The storyline is fairly insipid but there is a lot of open-combat and stealthy thrills to be had. The seamless, explorable interiors and responsive crowds mean, despite the often choppy frame-rate, it's easy to lose yourself in 18th century Paris.
You just might want to close your eyes and think of England during the cutscenes.
Three-and-a-half stars.
3 News
Assassin's Creed Unity
:: Publisher: Ubisoft
:: Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
:: Format: PC, PlayStation 4, Xbox One
:: Rating: R13
source: newshub archive
