Assassin’s Creed Rogue was always going to be a weird game. Released in 2014 as probably the last AAA exclusive for the 7^th generation of consoles, it is a sequel to Assassin’s Creed IV and a prequel to Assassin’s Creed III. It completes the Assassins Creed New World trilogy at the same time that the series was pivoting the back to Europe and its Ezio days with the simultaneously released Unity. That’s right; Ubisoft heard fans complaints that they were releasing an Assassins Creed game every year and responded by releasing two Assassin’s Creed games a year after the last one. Unity turned out to be a game so infamously broken that it threw the entire franchise into chaos and led to a radical retooling just a few years later. Rogue was overshadowed by its shinier 8^th gen cousin and the storm of controversy surrounding it, but at the time many said it was quietly the better game and that by following the formula from the well-loved AC IV it avoided many of the design pitfalls that befell Unity beyond its myriad of technical issues.

I started the Xbox One X remastered version of Rogue just a couple days after finishing a heavily patched version of Unity and just a few weeks after finishing AC IV. This is not the ideal way to play the game. The graphical downgrade from Unity to even the Remastered Rogue is striking. That’s not to say that Rogue looks bad; in fact it scales up to 4K quite nicely and looks way better than the Xbox One version of AC IV. This is thanks to the resolution boost and presumably bringing in high definition assets from the PC version that was released in 2015, and it gives the remastered Rogue a visual crispness that I wish more remasters could match. The issue is the level of detail and the lifelessness of the world. AC Unity bustles with activity in a lovingly rendered Paris full of gorgeous stonework and hundreds of NPCs. AC Rogue, by comparison, feels very 7^th generation. It returns to the ocean and island structure of Black Flag, and the scaled back and sparsely populated cities and settlements with small mostly wooden structures of AC III and AC IV. In some cases the areas are literally the same, since the game’s main city is New York from AC III, retrofitted and modified to fit into the 20 year earlier time period when Rogue takes place. This all makes sense, since the game had to fit into the tiny half a gig of RAM that the 7^th gen consoles had, but it makes the world feel so much less immersive and grand than Unity’s and the game suffers by comparison. This is especially clear in the game’s short forays to visit Ben Franklin in Paris itself, which looks like a totally different city than Unity’s version, even though the timelines are roughly contemporaneous.

It also suffers in comparison to AC IV, a game that it draws the vast majority of its gameplay from. Assassin’s Creed Rogue feels like an expansion sequel to AC IV; kind of like Uncharted Lost Legacy or Spider-Man: Miles Morales. It has a new map and a different story, but it is structured and plays so much like IV that in some ways it feels closer to that game than Freedom Cry, which actually was a piece of AC IV DLC, did. Its protagonist Shay moves like IV’s star Edward, his ship controls like Edward’s Jackdaw, he does the same kinds of side activities that Edward and Connor did (though he doesn’t do underwater diving, and there is a territory control metagame similar to those from the Ezio games) and his enemies act like Edward’s did, with one major change that I’ll discuss a bit later. Graphically the game distinguishes itself by being set in the Northern colonies, with much of it taking place in and around the state of New York, but many of those art assets have clearly been pulled from Assassin’s Creed III, which also featured the same setting. There’s a mechanic where Shay will take damage if he swims too long in ice water, and there are ice bergs that act as hazards on the sea and can be broken up with cannon shot (which produces a wave effect that damages smaller ships) but it’s just an AC III graphical gloss over AC IV’s gameplay and it feels more like a remix than a true new game, especially if, like me, you played both of those titles within the last year and a half. Strangely Rogue feels a little buggier than AC IV, especially in its parkour where Shay has a tendency to leap off walls to his death instead of jumping to the next handhold, probably a result of this being a lower budget B-tier game with fewer resources for testing and tweaking than the mainline Black Flag game received.

Where AC Rogue tries to distinguish itself is in its story. This time you play as a Templar. Yes, Ubisoft has pulled that trick before, but here they fully embrace it. Going ‘full Templar’ is an intriguing choice for a series that has created such a mystique around the Assassins and the brotherhood. It’s too bad it was written by the same guy who penned AC III, and it shows.

There are many people who will defend AC III’s Connor as a protagonist, saying that he’s not boring, it’s just an accurate reflection of the stoicism of his Native American culture, and he opens up more when he’s with his tribe than out in the lands of the invading white people. Shay Cormac has no such excuse. He’s an Irish white guy and he has all the personality of the stone and lumber he loots from French ships on the high seas. AC IV’s Edward Kenway was not a great protagonist, and Unity’s Arno Dorian was just a bad photocopy of Ezio, but both had at least some personality. We’re told at the beginning of the game that Shay is rebellious and chafes at the rules and hierarchy of the Brotherhood (which immediately puts his underlying character at odds with the Templars in a way the game never explores) but we don’t really see it in his actions. Instead of building up his rebelliousness over time until it explodes, or having him seduced by a charming Templar who promises him everything the Assassins won’t let him have, he acts like a normal AC protagonist until there’s one big event that makes him turn on the Brotherhood. Logically the turn makes sense and Shay has a point, even if his subsequent actions are misguided, but emotionally it comes out of nowhere and just does not land. It’s supposed to be this big moment where for the first time an Assassin you’re controlling turns against not just the Brotherhood in general but Achilles from AC III, arguably that game’s best character, but it just feels like a video game character following the required plot. Shay spends the rest of the game angry, except when he’s conflicted by an apparent deep affection for characters he mostly didn’t like when he was an Assassin, and repeating his catch phrase of “I make my own luck” over and over again, an assertion that has no content and is not enough to actually give him a character.

The story itself feels rushed compared to most Assassins Creed games. It has only 6 memory sequences, as opposed to the usual 12 or so, and while they’re a little longer than average for the series you can still complete the main campaign in less than 10 hours if you focus on it. This quick pacing clashes with the story the game is trying to tell, where Shay is tracking down and killing his former associates in what are supposed to be emotionally fraught encounters against formidable opponents. Instead they come off as less developed than most villains in the series, who usually get a few chapters to establish themselves and build out their character. On the plus side the game seems to have mostly cut the missions everyone hated, like trailing and eavesdropping, while focusing instead on mission types that are actually fun like assassinations and naval conflicts. This means that the reduced length at least comes with the significant benefit of cutting out much of the fat, while managing to serve up almost as much of the good story mission stuff as the full length games do.

The game also brings back the office stuff from AC IV and so, strangely, this little side game for people who hadn’t upgraded their consoles yet has more to say about the Templar and Assassins conflict than Unity, which stayed away from present day events. Walking around the same office from AC IV, hacking computers and picking up collectables is still bad gameplay, though it’s de-emphasized enough that it’s mostly harmless here. I do think that removing the Assassins from the modern day gameplay altogether benefits the game because it highlights the Templars and their goals and motivations, which is a side of this world we don’t often see. It doesn’t make up for the boring gameplay but it at least makes the story bits here more interesting. The Templars can be real jerks (your boss calls you ‘numbskull’ to your face) but at least they’re not the tedious team of Rebecca and Shaun.

Assassin’s Creed Rogue ultimately feels like leftovers. For people who loved Black Flag it offered more pirate raiding and ship combat on a new map with a few new wrinkles. For people who love old school Assassin’s Creed it offers plenty of viewpoints to sync, animus fragments to find, and other random busywork spewed across a smaller than usual but still pretty large map. There are three major areas in the game; New York, the Hudson River valley, and the Northern Atlantic. The River valley and North Atlantic have large amounts of water and smaller islands where you can leave the ship and explore a settlement or a cave or a shipwreck or whatever. All these places feel like AC IV areas dressed up in AC III assets, though they are smaller than the areas in AC IV. In some of the areas you can raid warehouses or supply camps in order to get supplied to upgrade your ship. You can also do the piracy stuff from AC IV, with a slightly tweaked version of ship combat that now includes burning oil, a “puckle gun” that basically upgrades the swivel guns to a machine gun and allows you manual control, and the added wrinkle of the ice bergs. There’s no real reason given why Shay takes up piracy, and it’s a very strange activity for a Templar to be involved in, but people would have been mad if it hadn’t been included so it was.

The puckle gun trivializes ship boarding because you have like 25 shots and can generally reach your kill targets without even going on to the enemy ship unless it’s a Man O’ War, whose decks are too high to be able to hit. You can still use captured ships to repair your ship or send them to your fleet for the same real-time fleet trading minigame AC IV had, but you can no longer use ships to reduce your wanted level, nor can you bribe officials. You have to wait for the wanted level to decay over time or defeat hunters to reduce it. You can, however, sell ships for cold hard cash, and you no longer use gems in the fleet minigame, instead just using money. These changes mostly feel like change for change’s sake, but I can’t imagine anyone who enjoyed the AC IV ship combat or fleet minigame not enjoying these tweaked versions. If you didn’t like those aspects of AC IV then you also won’t like this.

For people who loved Assassin’s Creed multiplayer, Rogue doesn’t have that exactly, but it copies some of the elements of that mode by introducing a Gangs of New York minigame where you take over territory by attacking gang hideouts and have to use your Eagle Vision to find the leader, following a combination of annoying whispers and a compass to suss him out. When in New York you are also constantly harassed by the game’s new form of enemy, the ‘stalkers,’ who jump out of hay wagons or leap off benches to attack you, just like in the multiplayer from prior games. To counter them you are supposed to use your Eagle Vision when you hear the whispers, which brings up a compass and points you towards the stalker’s hiding place where you can take them out pre-emptively. This gets very annoying very quickly, because there are a ton of stalkers in the game and they constantly harass you if you don’t stick to the rooftops, making open world downtime in New York a lot more stressful and less than then it is in most of these games. Most of the stalkers are women for some reason, which means that if Shay spots them first he is walking up to random women sitting on a bench and stabbing them in the neck because the whispers in his head tell him to. Shay must seem like a real psycho to random passerbys. These stalkers also appear in some other places in the game, primarily in the gang strongholds you’ll find in smaller towns on the riverbank or out in the ocean. Taking over strongholds allows you to build passive income, which you can supplement by using ship improvement materials to refurbish a few buildings in each zone, and if you do a few of these early on you will soon find that cash is no longer an issue as your coffers fill passively while you’re off raiding ships or doing story missions.

It's hard to talk about Rogue without getting bogged down in minutia because the changes from AC IV are so cosmetic in nature. Mechanically and in its environments this is the most direct sequel that the 3D Assassins Creed sequel ever made. Its compact size and short but more focused campaign make it feel halfway between a large DLC and a small sequel. It sits in the same place that something like Uncharted: Lost Legacy or Spider-Man: Miles Morales does; a sequel with different but connected characters that’s smaller in scale than its predecessor but long enough to be satisfying for someone looking for more of the same with a fresh coat of paint. In some ways the game is well-served by its reduced scope since it doesn’t fall victim to the pointless sprawl that make so many AC games into a slog; though there are lots of collectables to gather and side-objectives to complete if you want to indulge. I probably sunk 5-6 hours into side stuff until I had my fill and spent another 10 hours on the campaign. In 2021, when there are half a dozen further entries in the series this is a great length; enough to feel substantial but not so much that it ever really loses momentum. For someone buying this game at full price in 2014 it might have felt a little light on content, but if you hadn’t upgraded your console yet and wanted a new game to play you didn’t have many choices, and at least there was plenty of side stuff to do to keep you busy. The game may feel like it’s assembled from leftovers but that doesn’t mean it’s not tasty.

Assassin's Creed Rogue also has not been forgotten by the main series. The modern day Templars you interact with show up as antagonists later in the series, and it was ported to the Switch along with Black Flag, in addition to the release of the remastered version I played. Its acceptance into the series fold is another indication that this game was more than a quick cash in re-use of assets on obsolete platforms. It certainly was those things, but its narrative twist did enough to shake up the formula that it gave series fans something to enjoy besides just another map for that AC IV formula. Of course when the formula is good enough you don't need to change it that much to attract players back to it, even just a year later.

Is Assassin’s Creed Rogue better than Unity? At this point, now that Unity has been patched, that’s really a matter of taste. Unity is much prettier and feels much newer than Rogue. Rogue builds on a more fleshed out gameplay model and has the ship stuff that many people enjoy. Personally I got more out of Unity because I loved that game’s version of Paris so much, but I had a decent time with Rogue. The story feels choppy and underdeveloped but that’s the norm for Assassins Creed. The more compact map is convenient, the ship stuff is still fun, and the Templar spin on the modern day portions meant that even the series’ greatest weakness was somewhat engaging this time. But despite all that, Rogue feels inessential. It wraps up some stories from IV and sets up some stories from III, but they were stories I did not care about. Shay may be a Templar, but he’s motivated more by disillusionment with the Assassins than any attachment to the Templar cause, and I never really cared about his story. Ultimately as flawed as Arno’s adventure was, at least it offered something different. It’s possible that if I’d waited a year between the games I would have liked Rogue more, but I didn’t. I liked Rogue well enough for what it was, but I think Assassin’s Creed is best when it evolves and tries something new.

I can't really disagree with much of what you wrote here, but I do strongly disagree that it suffers from comparison with Black Flag; I think Rogue comes out the better in a comparison between the two.

Where Black Flag is this interminably laborious chore of a game, Rogue is a quick, breezy romp. All of what AC4 had going for it, in half the time. There it is: Black Flag in half the time.

Assassin's Creed but with snow.

Sold!

(Remembers III, which I like more than most but also was disappointed by)
(Remembers Valhalla, which you couldn't pay me enough money in the world to ever play)

Well... sigh.

Snow levels are the best levels!

@relkin: There are arguments for and against Black Flag over Rogue. Black Flag gives you more time with its characters and especially its world so they develop more emotional heft and feel more substantial. You don't really get a sense for any location in Rogue like you do for Great Inagua or the cities of Black Flag. I'm a sucker for New York in video games and Rogue's version did nothing for me. But Black Flag is certainly bloated in some ways and has a lot more horrible missions than Rogue does. So yeah, if you want a game that "just gets to the good stuff" Rogue is superior. If you want a game that makes you feel like you've lived the life of a pirate for a while then Black Flag is better because it gives those relationships and stories more time to breathe.

What I meant, though, was that Black Flag felt like a reimagining of what the series was and Rogue just feels like a very close sequel. That's why it suffers in comparison. If Black Flag hadn't been released then I think Rogue would have been incredibly well received, but the existence of Black Flag made Rogue feel like an expansion pack, which hurts its reception.

For example Game Informer ranked Rogue 5 lower than Black Flag on its list, even though it admits that Rogue basically just stripped out the worst parts of Black Flag.

@lapsariangiraff: It's kind of odd that the coldest Assassin's Creed games are also the most boring and laborious. I guess it's also true that the particular locations where those games are set are known for their no-fun austerity (at least in the modern descendants of the Vikings) so maybe it's just good storytelling?

Regardless, Rogue bucks that trend and is pretty breezey despite being set in a cold climate.

You can harpoon a narwhal in the game, which is kind of a dick move if you think about it. "Nice horn, but can you throw it? CAN YOU THROW IT? Humanz r00l!"

@bigsocrates: Ah, but despite their harsh surroundings, modern Scandinavians are quite fun to drink with.

Maybe I'd like Valhalla more if I drank copiously while playing it.

@bigsocrates: I thought the story in Black Flag was terrible, as were all it's characters, so it taking longer to tell just made it all the worse. That story didn't benefit from having room to breathe, but it sure as hell would have benefited from brevity.

I like to see shake-ups and experimentation as much as the next guy, but between a miserable new game and the decently iterated-upon sequel of that new game? I'll take the sequel.

@relkin: Yeah, more time to get to know people you don't like doesn't work out if the time isn't spent making them...likable. I really thought the end of black flag was gonna be you getting together the best pirates from the past to defend the armada attacking your secret base you constantly shuffle to after fights and said base where somehow no one can find you. They kinda did have a battle like that but it was short and silly. I wanted an almost real-time strategy game of defending the flaming city then hopping in a ship with ai controlled black beared and others as I manage their hp and take down a giant overwhelming armada then some final battle on the top of a falling ship. Not sure why the story instead was so...less crazy....felt it wrote itself.

I remember really liking how the presented the Templar side of things. It made a good argument for the greyer areas of the feud.

@relkin: Even if you hated the characters in Black Flag, which I'm not sure why you would since they were mostly dull and unmemorable rather than loathsome, it's really more about the world having room to breathe than the characters themselves. Like all Assassin's Creed games Black Flag's story is all over the place and characters pop in and out nearly at random, but revisiting areas many times gives them a sense of place and relevance that they just don't have in a game like Rogue where you pop into New York for a cup of tea and then never really have to spend any time there again unless you want to.

Whether or not you like the slower burn is a matter of taste, but Rogue doesn't do a ton to take advantage of its open world, while Black Flag's slower pacing gives its Caribbean a much more lived in feel.

The problem with Black Flag is that so many of the missions it uses to accomplish this are incredibly boring/frustrating tailing and eavesdropping missions, and then it further slows the game down with the real world stuff, so it somehow manages to be a pirate game with arcadey ship combat that is also, often, quite a slog.