Assassins Creed Unity Review
Assassin’s Creed: Unity is, without a doubt, the best entry in the series since the introduction of Ezio Auditore. The massive Ubisoft development team have seemingly stripped every aspect of the series down to the bone, in order to find a way to improve it. Those improvements, alongside the new technology the game is running on, make Unity an absolutely staggering experience. However, that same technology is also the games downfall.
Unity, this seventh edition in the Assassin’s Creed lineage, tells the story of Arno Victor Dorian. Having been framed for the murder of his mentor, he is locked in The Bastille where he meets a member of the Assassin Brotherhood. This begins his rise up through the ranks of the Brotherhood to find the real killer, along with taking down the Parisian branch of the Templar Order - who are key figures in the occurring revolution. In true Creed tradition, you’ll be bumping into familiar faces from history including Napoleon Bonaparte, the Marquis de Sade, and Maximilien de Robespierre.
The original characters Ubisoft place into revolutionary Paris are instantly more likeable than any from AC 3 or Black Flag. Arno is a jack-the-lad sort -- loveable, quick-witted, and suitably passionate. His love interest, Elise de LaSerre, is his equivalent in every way. They bounce off each other incredibly, making their scenes together some of the best in the game. The other assassins, and their templar opposition, make a great supporting cast. However, in the attempt to make everyone sound European while still speaking English, all the non-player characters sound like they’ve been pulled out of a bad Sherlock Holmes adaptation. It’s either upper-class English accents or cockney scumbag with the occasional merde or mademoiselle.
Paris also has its own personality. There are tight city streets and wide open gardens as the city ranges from the poor to the rich. Each district has its own unique landmarks, back alleys, and rooftops. The city itself is massive. You can stand on top of the tiled Parisian rooftops and see every detail, from the smoke seeping out of the chimneys to the bridges on the Seine and far out to the buildings and towers you’ll be climbing at the end of the game. Of course, it’s easier to travel by rooftop as the city streets are rammed with people, this time more than ever. Unity is the first game I’ve played that really takes advantage of the hardware it’s running on; it finally seems that Ubisoft have built the huge, bustling city they wanted to back in 2007 with the first Assassin’s Creed.
With the changing of the generation, Ubisoft have tweaked the many of the gameplay systems. Unity still feels exactly as you would expect an Assassin’s Creed to feel, but the tweaks to the mechanics are refreshing and make the gameplay far better than it’s predecessors. Traversal now has a parkour up and a parkour down button. Up allows you to leap longer distances and down allows you to make controlled descents down the sides of buildings, essentially giving you a way to stop yourself leaping from a rooftop and killing yourself in the process. Swordfighting has too been improved with a better parry system and an easier way of firing sidearms and dropping grenades mid-combo. The series has finally implemented a decent stealth system, devoting an entire button to being quiet and a cover system to help hide Arno more successfully. It has to be said that the way I usually like to fight has been removed entirely from the game - no weapon in hand, disarms, and counter-attacks - but it’s not missed.
All the new systems, together with dozens and dozens of new animations, lead to the actual playing being easier while making you look like a complete and utter badass while you do it. The easing up in the moment-to-moment gameplay is fine, however, as it makes less of a difference than you’d think thanks to more of an emphasis on an increase in difficulty. Arno can supplement his skill set throughout the game thanks to a newly fashioned upgrade system. Points earned throughout missions are used to purchase new melee, ranged, traversal, health, and stealth skills. You can further customise the way Arno looks, including your assassins robes, equipment, and weapons from a wider selection than ever before, to complement your style of play. Each mission and individual enemy have their own difficulty rating and without upgrading you will barely stand a chance against the bad guys and the mission itself. Before the upgrade trees, you would rarely have a reason to finish side missions apart from your own completionist obsession, but now every activity in revolutionary Paris is vital on Arno’s path to becoming a master assassin.
The competitive multiplayer from previous entries has been stripped in favour of co-operative play. Players can join together to take on a number of two-to-four player missions and heists. While they are not exactly much to write home, about they do have a few awesome set pieces and lead to some amazing emergent moments that you wouldn’t get on your own. I am far more impressed by the instantly memorable moments in the single player. The mission design for the assassinations have been adjusted giving you just an objective. It leads to moments where everything goes right, and it’s almost scientific in it’s execution, and moments where it all goes wrong and you get out by the skin of your teeth, which is just as amazing. Of course, Unity also has numerous scripted moments in the form of not only main missions, but Paris stories and murder mystery side missions. Most impressive are the Time Anomaly sections, but ruining any of them would be criminal.
This all sounds pretty great, and it was, but my experience was sadly riddled by bugs, glitches, and control issues. A decent number of broken AI routines, multiple instances of getting trapped on or in the environment, and one hard crash back to the Playstation 4’s menu. They are frequent enough to be noticeable but not enough to be excessively annoying. More prevalent were the control issues. It’s a problem I have with every Assassin’s Creed game. With so many actions tied to only a handful of buttons, it’s no wonder that the game doesn’t always do what I want it to do, but I do expect it to be somewhat responsive in fast-paced moments of action and perfectly timed moments of stealth.
Looking back on my multiple hours with the game, Assassin’s Creed Unity is fantastic. While some of those bugs and control issues are annoying in moment, when your plan comes together perfectly, there is no feeling like it. It’s the familiar Assassin’s Creed experience that you’ve played half a dozen times before, but with new, better mechanics, a bigger, more lush world, an upgrade system that perfectly combines with the difficulty curve, topped off with scripted and emergent moments that will leave your jaw on the floor. One of 2014s absolute must plays.
