In the beginning, there were words...

Protip: No spoilers whatsoever here! If you care about story, you are safe.

Okay, okay, I know. I'm turning into the @yummylee of Assassin's Creed: Rogue but! I'm here with the final entry in what I have to say about Rogue. No bullshit this time. I get down into. For the last time.

The reason I made another one of these is because my shitty "not-review-but-kinda review" didn't really get too deep into what I disliked about the game, and truly, it's because it didn't really hit me until earlier today. I wanted to try and do better. (Also, yeah, I know I kinda sorta did a "review" and all and that should have been the final thought, but as I go through the collectibles and side content(Which is just more collectibles), I see the cracks in the mechanics start to show, and hey, if this helps someone make an informed purchase, all the better. And if you disagree and want to call me out for being an idiot, I'd recommend it. I am not a professional.)

The negatives(So, everything)

I've put aside my shame(I have no shame) and I'm going for the Platinum Trophy in Rogue. I've now spent the last 10 something hours collecting and fighting and running and hiding and I feel as though I have no soul left inside of me. This game has sapped me dry. But, it has rekindled and sharpened and refined and clarified and blah blah blah the reasons I don't like this game. I figure if anyone out there is still on the fence, or is just interested in knowing why me, a shameless(I still have no shame) Assassin's Creed fanboy dislikes this game, then I'm gonna boil it down.

I've already discussed why I think the story is Grade A crap so I'll skip all narrative and move straight to gameplay.

Unreliable.

The free-running navigation is the most unreliable and unpredictable I've ever seen. Ever. And this series used to have janky ass navigation. Nope, Rogue has outdone itself here and shines like the shitstar it is with a free-running system that will surprise you in every terrible way there is. Shay constantly clips through trees, falls off of ledges, flat-out refuses to jump or climb or free-run his way over a fence. You'll come to a full, dead stop. You'll have to wiggle around and try to climb over and over and over again as he just stands there holding his ass and not doing anything. And again, just for clarifications sake, this is not typical Assassin's Creed jank. This is beyond anything I've seen in previous entries and it's made my blood come to a boil so many times today it's not even funny. In fact, it's kind of sad.

Personally, I thought they pretty much fixed the free-running in Black Flag. I never seemed to jump anywhere I didn't want to go, most of the time(I seemed to constantly jump everywhere while on The Jackdaw, but never anywhere else). I felt like I was in total control. I have no idea what happened, but it's one hell of a shame. You're going to be running and jumping and climbing more than you will do anything in this game so the fact they fucked it up is pretty bad.

Combat sucks now more than ever.

If anyone remembers AC3(Aside from how terrible everything was) they will remember fast-paced and easy combat. Responsive. Enabling. "Layered". You were near constantly overpowered. Combined with your huge arsenal of weapons and Connor's crazily brutal combat animations it was a total blast to get into fights. Then, they did something to it in Black Flag and made it kind of suck(Okay, really suck). They took away enemy health bars and turned it into more of a rock-paper-scissors simulator than anything I've ever seen. And I've seen a rock-paper-scissors simulator!! The only way to kill enemies anymore was get them into ridiculously long and fucking stupid combos and then you'll begin your killstreak and THEN you can kill enemies with ease. And due to the often close proximity of being on a ship, it could make things easier. But it was still frustrating and unnecessary. For example, if you dropped the combo due to being hit or just not hitting the enemy fast enough, you'd have to work the combo back up all over again.

You couldn't just hit or fight enemies anymore. You had to combo and combo and combo. It was lifeless and boring. The only thing that made it ehhhh, "great" is because Edward had 4 pistols and you could lay waste to a whole group of enemies in just a second. It made up for it sometimes, provided you have ammo anyway.

And just to be absolutely clear while we are on the subject: Shay's animations are an exact copy and paste of Edward's from Black Flag. I have seen all of the animations and not a single one is new. Connor got new animations, I'm pretty sure Aveline got new animations. Adewale had some new stuff too. Not Shay though, fuck that guy(And yes, fuck that guy).

Rogue takes it a step further with its unreliability by making it impossible to even attack people at very rare intervals. At times you'll have to wait for an enemy to go into "combat mode" before you can fight him, which will again cause you to come to a full, dead stop as you wait and wait. Sure, it's rare, but you'll be fighting a llllllllot in this game and so it really stands out when you're trying to sneak kill a guy and his buddy sees you and now you suddenly can't stealth kill this guy or fight him because he's not ready yet. You just have to wait. Goddamnit.

Couple these things with the INSANE AMOUNT OF COLLECTIBLES IN THIS GAME, and you've got one hell of a cocktail. But wait! This cocktail has a special ingredient! It's... shit. The ingredient is shit.

I have had so many instances of running away from enemies and attempting to jump over something, anything, it really doesn't matter, and SHAY STANDS THERE. Or when he jumps he won't jump over, but jump at the fence, hitting it like an invisible wall and falling back to the ground and standing there again.

It has happened many times. It is never a "one off, rare occurrence" I can very rarely do anything correctly the first time. I have to keep trying before I am actually able.

I started my other post by saying I will explain why I love this game, and also why I hate it, but I don't think I ever loved this game, or even liked it. I saw the naval combat and fell in love with Black Flag again. It's like that scene in Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty where Raiden meets "Solid Snake" on the bridge to Shell 2. Solidus Snake introduces himself as Solid Snake, prompting "Iroquois Pliskin" to reply "NO! That is NOT Solid Snake!". This game is an imitation of Black Flag 2.0, but it is not Black Flag 2.0.

Hunting is useless!

Black Flag made an interesting change to crafting armor and accessory items by allowing you to either hunt the animals needed, or just buy the pelts/skins/hides from the store and craft the items yourself. It was fun deciding to spend all of your money on animal carcases to make yourself better so you didn't have to go out to the high seas and look for the animals, then hunt the animals, then look for more animals. I mean, it was fun too, but if you're lazy like me it can make all the difference.

Problem with Rogue is, and I've noticed many other people talking about this as well, is that you find these designated places on the map where these specific animals are supposed to be. Issue? They aren't there. I know I went through the whole game without seeing a single animal in one of those zones. Aside from the sea creatures you can harpoon out in the ocean(They are always there and easy to find), I bought all of my upgrade materials from the store. Those animals just weren't there.

I personally spent about an hour or so of my total gametime searching for specific animals that I needed to, say, upgrade my health, or how much ammo I can carry. And every time, there was nothing there. I don't mean "Not enough to craft the item", I mean "Not a single animal in the entire area". It's funny though, because some time after I beat the game, as I was going everywhere to get collectibles, that's when I started seeing animals everywhere. I know for a fact it's not random, there are always supposed to be animals in those designated zones, but it just didn't take until a while after I had already finished it. It's very frustrating, but I guess that's what Rogue has going for itself.

BUGS!

That's a popular topic for Assassin's Creed recently. While I haven't had any crazy framerate drops(Aside from that one time I had a crazy framerate drop, but that was only once and has never happened again), I have not frozen one time, and I certainly haven't fallen through the world, there have been some bugs.

I am going to consider the whole free-running mechanic to be a bug because it always seems to freak out and Shay ends up falling off of everything which causes you to have to go around and try whatever you were doing again, which is problematic during areas where you have to climb a series of trees and other objects to get to a new area. And I mean "falls off". You could sit on a tree branch for like 2 minutes with no issue, then you start to move him and he slips off and he's somewhere else now. It's the worst.

The gas mask is not only entirely useless, it also borks your game right up. I used to try to use the gas mask pretty heavily in the early game where it seems like every enemy has a gas grenade and maybe you want to use your Air Rifle to throw down some gas of your own. You know, using the tools the game provided you to succeed. But nope. The gas mask always bugged out for me and caused things like this to happen:

What happened before the video was this Assassin saw me coming and popped out with a smoke grenade. I saw the prompt for the X button(PS3), to put on the gas mask and negate the effects. And then... that happened. I had to restart to a checkpoint because Shay decided that interpretive dance was the way to go.

It happened a few more times and that's when I decided the gas mask had to go. To be fair though, after a couple of days passed and I began using it again, nothing terrible happened. But that anxiety was always with me.

...Some good, some bad, some that kill

I already gave what I consider my "professional"(I am nota professional!) opinion by giving the game 2 Joakims out of 5, but if I had to say anything on top of that, the game functions, it's just shit. You could totally pick this game up and go to town and play it and complete it. Who knows, you may not even experience some of this. They might even patch some stuff. The issue is a collective of things. The animations being ripped straight out of Black Flag, the combat fucking up, the free-running constantly doing anythingbut what you want it to. The fact that there are several giant sections of the world only for the collectibles that no mission will ever take you to(And therefore is totally useless). It works, just not very well. As I said above, I think "cash grab" is too unfair and maybe even a little vitriolic. I'm good with calling it a shitty game and moving on(I say that but here I am, talking about it again...)

It's not going down in the history books as the worst game ever made, or even the worst Assassin's Creed(That belongs to Liberation. Now THAT'S a fucked up game!), but it's bad. "Buy or rent?" I don't recommend you play it. At all. If you did like Black Flag it will warp your memories and replace the good with the bad. If you didn't like Black Flag, you will most certainly hate it with a vitriolic passion. It's a lose-lose.

If you have more questions, say, about the story, I do answer some of that in my original blog(Spoiler alert: I think it's terrible) as well as in the comments but feel free and ask. I've beaten it once, went through and picked up all of the collectibles and side missions and I'm almost done with the Naval Campaign stuff. I'll be going back through the story for the rest of the 100% synchronization as well. Because I hate myself, I guess.

And that's it. The final nail. The finail, if you will. I'll stop now.

Its weird to me that a game that seems to be this like integral connective tissue between 3 and 4 could be handed to a low-tier team. Like, from the QL I saw, its practically a Black Flag mod so with that foundation how is it every change they made makes the game worse? idk man, this review bummed me out but I still enjoy the process of taking over forts and commandeering ships, I might be able to overlook that the story is dumb bullshit cus the story in most AC games is dumb bullshit. That doesn't surprise me really. Like, ask me anything about Brotherhood's story I couldnt tell you. The Italian dude is mad cus someone bombed his house or something so he murders a bunch of people. The series was never super subtle. But some of the gameplay changes, geez.

Like Achilles and Haytham are the best characters from 3, and out of the dudes who didnt get murdered Adewale is the dude I'd want to see again. Mary wasnt bad either. But you got Haytham, Achilles, and Adewale swimming around in this garbage C-team game making cameos instead of running shit, what the hell Ubisoft get a rating system for your characters.

I'm not sure what happens to me when I play an open world Ubisoft game, but I find myself in some sort of drug-infused trance where my brain turns off and I'm left as a mindless husk left to run around and collect random paraphernalia.

When Im in this state, I feel like things like the terrible game mechanics, which you're absolutely right about, for some reason don't bother me, like I'm immune to it.

The combat is a mess, stealth just doesn't work, those fucking stalker enemies show up every ten seconds, the voice acting/writing is pretty flat, the economy stuff is useless, but I...can't...stop.

I need every single item on the map. And I will get them.

Great read @N7, I'll certainly check out your other Rogue blog once I wrap up the main story.

@bargainben: That's actually a very succinct write-up of your own there! I chose not to talk about the story anymore because the op would have probably been 10 times longer and filled with more nerd-rage than a Trekkie at a Lucasarts convention so I decided it was best to talk about it once and give it up.

I somehow wrote a huge wall of text, so I'm gonna spoiler tag that to conserve space and look neat and all.

@mustainium It's because, and I know I'm going to sound like some sort of"down with the man" nutter, but it's because they pad their games out with so much shit that when you start looking at it or going after it you can't stop. You have to collect the next Animus fragment. You have to get the next shanty, because if you don't, what will your men sing? You don't want to be bored while playing the game. It feels good to unlock that stuff, to hear that ambient noise play when you pick up a collectible, to see that text pop up saying "Keep up the good work!". It's just human nature. But Ubisoft puts so much stuff in their games that there's way more side-shit than main-shit and so it's almost not even about the main-shit anymore. I say in my original blog that I had gotten a TON of collectibles and finished pretty much all side activities before I had even technically become a Templar! Before I got my actual "templar outfit", I had already earned the "Templar Master" and "Templar Enforcer" outfit. I just couldn't turn it off, man. It's like Rambo. They created, built and bred a collector and there's nothing anyone can do about it.

Psycho-rant over, look at an open world game like GTA. There's some side activities, even some collectibles. But they don't put thousands of little fragments or shards all over the map, five feet away from each other. They very easily could. I mean, they did put like 500 pigeons in GTAIV. But those were non-intrusive and cleverly. Ubisoft makes their collectibles big and shiny and show on the map so you can see them at any point and go "Hmmm... I can spare 5 minutes to pick up the Animus fragments around that island", and before you know it, you've spent the last 3 hours frothing at the mouth because you keep getting database entries in the Animus. And it's good.

Also, thanks for the read. The other thing was written in the span of 3 or so hours at around 5AM and it might not be the best worded or very clear, prompting me to get off my ass and actually get into the nitty gritty with this post here, but nonetheless I hope you enjoy it. It's even got more pictures with funny captions! And you know how much kids love funny captions these days.

Wow, isnt Freedom Cry more sequences than that? Like 10 iirc. So this game is smaller than an expansion for Black Flag. Im beginning to wonder if it was originally an expansion idea that came out so longer after BF they went "fuck it call it a new game"

@n7:

Haha, you know, that must be it!

I never bothered to go out and find those UFO parts in GTAV, but had they been marked on the map like a Ubi game, I would absolutely seek out every single one, without hesitation.

I do have to admit, they've got me in their grip. Despite being nowhere near finished with Black Flag, I picked up Rogue and Unity, and in a few hours I'll getting Far Cry 4. That's a whole lot of collecting.

I've never played Rogue, but regardless of how good it is, it's had a massive influence on the design of many indie games this gener -- oh, you mean Assassin's Creed: Rogue.

@bargainben: Woah Freedom Cry had 10 sequences? 0_o Now, I'm curious...

For some reason, this mutiple dev cycle for Ubi is kinda making it clear who the clear best AC team is now.

The ''Yummylee of Assassin's Creed: Rogue''...??

@gaspower: @bargainben: Freedom Cry only had like 7 missions total. It was definitely very short.

You are the Revelations 2 forums. I'm basically all of the Rogue forums. We can be Yummylee together.

Honestly, even AC3 sucked but the story was good. If we have to choose one or the other, well, I'd rather have another Black Flag - in terms of narrative and tight gameplay. Definitely not another AC3. And if we're gonna get another Rogue, I say commit to being a Templar and let us do evil shit and stop being the good guy for once. This is the most Assassiny "Assassin's Creed" game I've ever played. By becoming a Templar, you are more of an Assassin than ever. How crazy is that? Oh, and, you know... make it not shitty. That'd be nice. But I guess with a devcycle that ensures you only have a certain amount of time to make a game, how much should we expect? If they are happy releasing Rogue and Unity in the broken states that they are in, then we probably shouldn't expect much.

It's okay man. The first part of getting better is admitting you have a problem. If you need help from other addicts like myself, all you have to do is ask man. We're here for you.

EDIT: I am reading through the collectibles I got yesterday and it's actually funny - they tie Liberation, AC3, Black Flag and Rogue together. Basically, every Assassin from those games were in contact with each other. And so every Templar from these games were in contact with each other. Funny how that never came about in the other games, but these guys were well "in" with each other. It's a shame this wasn't actually shown in Rogue but rather shoved off into collectibles.

@n7: Man, I'm glad I missed out. I've played and finished every main AC game released on PC/consoles and considering that I was in a tighter budget and there was a new Dragon Age coming out, I'm glad I hedged my bets on DA: Inquisition. :D

On a different topic, I really have some bad choices when it comes to games at times. Last year, I decided to buy COD: Ghosts knowing that it had problems just because I wanted to try out a new COD game considering that the last Treyarch games were good and maybe Ghosts wasn't that bad. Boy oh boy, was I wrong. Now I'm kinda bummed that I didn't choose this year to get back into it.

@gaspower: Yeah I know how you feel. I was excited for Alien: Isolation and was dreading The Evil Within. I ended up disliking Isolation and love-love-loving The Evil Within. Then I was hyped for Rogue and ugh, it let me down too.

Thankfully Inquisition is getting good buzz so I can get into that and start having fun again! (:

What do the animus fragment give you?

Are Nostradamus fragments in this game or in AC Unity? Do you pretty much collect his prophecies?

@n7: Don't mean to pull up a couple of months old topic but I find it fascinating that my feelings on Rogue are opposite of yours. I was reading your "review-not review" but stopped when you started getting to story spoilers, I'll come back to it after I beat the story beats of Rogue. I'm having just as much fun with this game as I did in Black Flag, it definitely feels like a glorified mod of Black Flag and not as polished up (I even find Shay likable! Although I feel his "turn" from going away to the brotherhood made sense, it felt like the process was sped up way too fast and it just feels like it came out of nowhere. Probably a by-product of the game only having six story chapters) but I'm willing to admit my impressions are being colored by two things.

One: I bought the game for thirty bucks three days ago instead of sixty on initial release. So even if something happens to make me cool on the game, I may not be hit as hard by virtue of not spending as much.

Two: About a week and a half ago I was making my way through Unity and generally not having a good time with it. I didn't hate it (but if I think about that game for a particular length of time I start to get annoyed, so maybe I actually did) but everything about it felt underwhelming, undercooked and straight up boring. Like yourself, I identify as a big AC fan, even when the series is not at it's best (Revelations, AC, Liberation and now Unity) I still manage to find something to enjoy. Either because I love the history angle, the convoluted and stupid yet occasionally goddamn intriguing bits and pieces you get from the modern day stuff, and because I love climbing buildings and neck stabbing dudes more then I probably should. It's a series by all accounts I should be done with, yet I just keep coming back and getting every damn collectible and doing everything in the game like a crazy person. I know I have a problem, but it's too late for me, I'm going to stab necks till I die!

Anyway back to point two, is that Unity is a bunk game and because of my weird dedication to the series I was going to go on and get the rest of the achievements and do everything. Until my External hard drive died randomly and sort of freed me from that game. For now. I was taken aback by the setback and couldn't be bothered to install all those gigs of Unity again, so I put the kibosh on the game (but I'll come back and do everything else in it, cause like I mentioned I have a problem) but it at least stopped me for now. Other then graphical fidelity and the city of Paris, Unity is probably the weakest the series has been. Even with all the patches the game still feels like it's tied together by string and I just don't give a damn about anything happening in it. It feels like a soulless game with a pretty coat of paint. I haven't felt so down on an AC game since three and Unity can't fall back on decent story like 3 did. The story and act of playing the game is just not interesting and they have even made some baffling removal decisions. Can't use hidden blades in combat, you can't whistle at dudes behind walls or in haystacks to draw them over, can't pick up bodies, and using a pistol in free aim somehow feels WORSE.

Buying tons of armor and weapons to make my Arno look like the most baller neck stabber on the block is fun though. Co-op is enjoyable and interesting but it's still plagued by the game itself so is not nearly as fun as it could be. Not to mention tons of connection problems plague that game and would randomly decide if I could play co-op with friends that particular day. The frame rate is not as terrible as it was at launch but it still likes to dip and dive all over the place and I've about four crashes. The free running also feels jankier then usual, I remember having weird free running problems in Black Flag (like Edward just randomly falling off buildings and since Rogue uses that same engine, I get some of that to a certain extent too) but I don't feel very in control and the combat also feels a hell of a lot weaker. It's like they tried to take complaints of the games combat being too easy and decided to make the enemies tougher to deal with. That goal is accomplished I guess, but when I get into scraps with at least eight dudes, I feel so limited and freaking slow that I just go "fuck it" and throw down smoke bombs and either run away or stab people in the haze. Unity is the first game in the series where I have actively disliked fighting dudes, it's the weirdest thing. I mean fuck, in combat when a dude has a gun aimed at me, unless I keep missing the prompt I can't even use a human shield to absorb his shot, I just have to keep rolling around like an asshole until he either misses his shot or decides my crazy rolling is just too much for him and he holsters it.

I now realize this just turned into a massive rant of my misgivings with Unity, sorry about that. Before I go spouting off more and more, Rogue is very much Black Flag 2.0 and I do agree it is not as strong as that game. But the time I have had with this game compared to Unity feels like opening up a bag of my favorite potato chips, it may be empty calories and bad for me, but I like the taste and it makes me feel like everything is gonna be alright (this is a really bad analogy) while Unity was the equivalent of opening that same bag of chips but it was filled with spiders. I do look forward to reading through the story stuff of your other post when I have completed the story of Rogue. Much of the stuff you take issue with in the gameplay either doesn't bother me nearly as much (I didn't ever run into the gas mask glitch, sounds like a pain in the ass) or Unity just hit me in the nards so hard that it's short comings don't register by virtue of not being Unity. I can vouch for the hunting issue though being whack, I've come across an area not having any animals it was suppose to, or animals being in a different spot. I would find rabbits in the fox hunting ground and vice versa, but when I never found animals fast traveling out and back seemed to fix it most of the time.

Yeah, I've talked quite a bit now, I tend to do that in the late hours. I'm curious if my feelings on Rogue will change once I complete it and do everything else. I've racked up a good twelve hours on it and I'm at the tail end of sequence 03 and so far I've been enjoying all of it. I haven't had as much twitchy free running jank (at least compared to Unity), and the combat doesn't bother me as much since Unity's felt worse and so far I haven't had very many bugs. Except one time after I took over a ship and salvaged it, I randomly turned into Assassin Shay, I turned back to normal after a fast travel back to my HQ. Sorry to hear your over all time with it was bad though my friend, maybe I would of felt the same if I haven't played Unity first. Thus far Rogue is doing a good job of making me forget about that game. Until I decide to reinstall it when I get a new External HDD and complete the rest of the story. Even though I really, really don't care about any of it, I'll still see the Unity story through because I'm a mark for this series.

In summation: Unity really pissed me off and Rogue feels like an old and worn cozy blanket. A little ratty and due for a mend but still feels comfortable.

@lost_remnant: I can't remember if I ever pointed it out in any of my talking about Rogue, but I really liked the game for a time. I can't say when, maybe a little under halfway through or a little over, I'm not sure. But the game takes a hard swing and I couldn't hold on anymore. I mean the characters basically change their entire personalities around the time you stop being an Assassin and that's a really hard pill to swallow. They want us to have these conflicting feelings of having to go up against your old friends but, 1, they don't do a good job at establishing these characters and why we should care about them, and 2, they are different anyways later on.

There were scenes in Rogue that made me almost choke on my drink as I could not believe the amount of nonsensical characterizations. I'm not going to spoil anything for you, but the people in this game are pretty stupid. And I don't mean "It's a video game, so of course they maybe won't do something that they'd do in real life", I mean... well, you'll see. There's one scene in particular that feels like a parody of villain monologues, and it probably would be if it weren't hilarious. It's bad in a "laughing at you, not with you" kind of way.

It was almost like I could see through the game when I began disliking it. I could see every decision that led to this being broken, or that being janky. It amounted to "Fuck it, they'll still pre-order the Super Assassin Templar Armor Gun Day One Gamestop Exclusive Edition". Whereas Black Flag was a game that was built from the ground up to push the series into new and exciting directions, Rogue is the direct-to-DVD sequel that'll sometimes air on TNT at 3AM.

It's cool that you like it, and I wish I could have liked it. I was pretty hype for it originally but I just couldn't. I never played Unity, but I guess in this case Unity makes Rogue look good by not being as ugly.

Get back to me when you beat the game, or maybe make a blog of your own and we can have a battle of blogs. Blog battle. Battleblogs, coming January from CBS.

@lost_remnant said:

Seeing all of my complaints about Unity's gameplay said by another person makes things feel right. As for Rogue, I feel like the story would've made more sense if we saw things from the Assassin's side, maybe in DLC or something. They do a lot of unexplained things that are just hidden by virtue of the player character's absence.