Assassin's Creed Chronicles is not a great subseries, but its ambition made it much more interesting than I expected.

When I set out to play all the Assassin’s Creed console games I wasn’t sure that I’d actually play through the Chronicles side-series of stealth platformers. For one thing, most people say that these games are not closely connected to the broader Assassin’s Creed story and so can easily be skipped. More importantly, though, they have a terrible reputation as quick cash-grab tie in titles developed out of a cynical desire to milk even more money from the AC fanbase. It didn’t help that these three games came out in quick succession over the course of about six months, nor that China was the first AC product following Assassin’s Creed Unity, a broken game that angered the fanbase and launched a thousand memes about the series’ technical deficits and Ubsioft’s insistence on annualizing the franchise.

I decided to try the games both because the Vinnyitis runs deep within me and also because I had them already from Xbox’s Games With Gold program. What I found was not what I expected. In the broadest outline Assassin’s Creed: Chronicles are what everyone thinks they are. A series of three stealth platformers that play similarly to one another and are all set in the Assassin’s Creed universe. They have some design issues and none are quite as tight as you’d like them to be. The stories are basic and mostly uninteresting. There are some technical issues around the edges. All those expectations are borne out by the games themselves. You can tell the team put them together quickly and on a contract. But while I thought the games would be dull and kind of mindless, instead they were often fast paced and kinetic. And while I expected them to be redundant and formulaic they did some very smart things to change up gameplay and aesthetics between the titles and differentiate them from one another. I had this whole plan in my mind of how I’d slog through these games by splitting them up in time and playing other games between them, but it turned out to be totally unnecessary because I played through the three games over the course of about a week, finishing each 4-5 hour title in 2-3 days and having a generally good time doing so.

I’ve already talked about AC: Chronicles China in a previous blog, and also outlined the basics of gameplay there, so I’m not going to retread that ground. These games are 2.5D stealth platformers where you control a different Assassin, each of whom is getting the spotlight as a playable character for the first time, though they have popped up in other AC media like animated videos or comic books. You guide this assassin through 10-12 levels; parkouring, killing fools with a hidden blade, and accomplishing various objectives. Your basic Assassin’s Creed stuff. The AC action translates surprisingly well to the 2.5D platformer genre and you can do all kinds of complex actions ranging from using gadgets like smoke bombs or noise darts to distract and sneak past guards to intricate assassinations involving slipping into and out of windows, hanging from the ceiling, and hiding in elements of the background like doorways or bamboo.

In addition to starring a different protagonist, each game has a very distinct look. Shao Jun’s adventure in 16^th century China looks like a watercolor painting. Arbaaz Mir is the star of ACC India, which has a bright, painted, look with colors that really pop. Russia stars Nikolai Orelov as the Bolsheviks are consolidating power, and it looks like a communist propaganda poster, with dark gray environments offset against some very bright reds and oranges. They all clearly share an engine and have a basic art style in common, but the differences are enough to make them visually interesting and feel like different games despite the similarities and the fact that they were developed in tandem.

More surprising than the visual differences are the gameplay variations. Each game has the same basic control scheme and feels similar, but again there’s significant differentiation that makes them feel like different parts of a series rather than just one long game broken up into chunks.

China is the most vanilla of the games, with the first few levels serving mostly to introduce the series’ basic concepts and moves and the back half focused on upping the challenge a bit and offering some basic variation. I had a decently fun time with it and was surprised at how well-designed many aspects of the game were. I especially liked the timed running levels where the focus is on getting from right to left as quickly as possible rather than careful stealth assassination. China also has the heaviest emphasis on combat. Shao Jun can take on the majority of the enemies in the game without too much trouble and only dies if she is seriously outnumbered. That makes China the least frustrating title because you can afford to be a bit sloppy and still muddle your way through.

India changes things up both by slightly shuffling your equipment load out by adding things like chakras, which can ricochet off walls to cut ropes and open paths, and by focusing on larger areas with multiple paths. Much of the India game involves relatively expansive areas where you either have to assassinate a large number of enemies or accomplish some other task and are given relative freedom in how to approach these challenges. These types of areas also existed in China, but they were less frequent and tended to be smaller. India’s stealth levels consists mostly of these more open arenas and smaller connecting areas.

Unfortunately this also makes India the most frustrating of the games because it can be extremely demanding. Not only do you have to plot out a viable route but you have to carefully execute it while dealing with a lot of moving parts around you. This can lead to situations where you have to either repeat lengthy chains of actions to get back to a point where you made a mistake or slight variations in your timing can cause a previously viable strategy to unravel (because you get spotted or leave a body in the wrong place that might get noticed some time later) and the game doesn’t give you good tools to improvise. It’s frustrating in a bad way, especially with controls that can be a little clunky and unresponsive, failing to duck you behind cover or fire off a smoke bomb because your prior animation hadn’t finished or you were a few pixels off in the wrong directions.

China had some of the same issues, but the fact that the sequences between check points were shorter and linear, coupled with your ability to fight your way out of many situations, meant that these were less problematic. The games all grade you on each subsection and you might drop down from a gold to a bronze for a subsection if you got spotted or took a hit, but that didn’t matter so much. In India losing a grade actually matters more because you build up a combo of golds that boosts your score further, and maintaining a combo longer is necessary to get a high score for the level and thus unlock the additional equipment or health or whatever you get for doing so. The fact that the game is so much more demanding without being more precise drains a lot of the fun from it.

What saves India to some extent is that about half of its ten levels are running levels where your goal is to get to the end as fast as possible. These do away with the finnicky open areas and some of the other new mechanics that India introduces (such as sections where you have to “trail” a Templar without being spotted, which is even more annoying here than in a main game) and allow you to just go through linear levels killing and parkouring and using the new equipment and skills in fun ways. I didn’t enjoy any of India’s stealth levels as a whole, though there were sections that were okay, but I liked all of the running levels, so there were at least substantial segments of the game where I was having a good time. Unfortunately the stealth levels take much longer than the running levels so on the whole I did not like the game, but a bad game with some good parts is much more tolerable than a game that is all bad, and so India wasn’t a horrible time. I also respect that it’s a game whose ambition for creating large open stealth mini-sandboxes in 2 dimensions were greater than its execution could comfortably handle, rather than just being a monotonous cash grab that offered more of the same. It was clear that the people who made India wanted to expand on the ideas in China and take the game to the next level, they just didn’t have quite the skill and resources necessary to make the stealth parts enjoyable.

After I didn’t like India I was worried that Russia would be another step in the wrong direction, but it ended up being my favorite of the three games. That’s partly due to the aesthetics, which are absolutely wonderful. I liked China’s watercolors, and India’s painted visuals, but Russia’s scenes are composed like a Bolshevik propaganda poster, with lots of grayscale images contrasted by bold reds and some yellows. It’s a striking art style that is rarely used in games, and though the game’s story and characters are nothing special the setting of a divided Russia right at the beginning of the Bolshevik revolution is also very different from most games I have played. Guard conversations and rumbling automobiles in the background give the sense of a society on the verge of exploding and playing an aging Assassin trying to pull one last job before fleeing for America only added to the tension.

Russia changes up the gameplay even more radically than India, but goes in the other direction, offering tight, linear, stealth challenges that make it more of a puzzle platformer than either of the prior games. Some situations may allow you to take multiple approaches, but large portions of the game clearly have one or two “correct” ways to get through them, and if you find yourself in a fight with multiple opponents in this game you are almost certainly dead, especially because in some parts you have no way to defend yourself. The introduction of more modern technology like better guns and electricity allows the game to mix the stealth sections up in fun ways. You can use telephones to distract guards in other rooms, and you have a winch that you can pull things with or send electricity through to disable security systems or turn off the lights, making it harder for guards to see you. There are landmines that can only be passed over with a magnetic key and you either have to quietly follow the guards that have them or somehow steal or loot it from them. It feels like a fully evolved sequel to India and it’s incredibly impressive given how few months there were between the games, though development must have been going on concurrently.

There were subsections of Russia that I found frustrating, and it does have some of India’s problems with requiring you to act precisely in a game whose controls aren’t quite up to the task, but the more focused levels made it clearer what I was supposed to do and there were many fewer frustrating situations where a body that I’d left in the wrong place a couple minutes earlier triggered an alarm that killed me. Instead I was focused on figuring out exactly how the designers expected me to pass through a section of a level and executing that properly, and it was mostly fun. There were some optional objectives like completing a level without triggering an alert or getting through two consecutive sections without killing anyone (checkpoint restarts are permitted for both) and I found myself doing them because I enjoyed the challenge, even though I could have finished the game quicker if I’d just ignored them.

Russia also does a good job of changing things up. It has the running levels from China and India, but also a sequence where you hitch a ride on a train and have to sneak past enemies at the stations, and segments where you cover a companion with a sniper rifle, which is something that India did a little bit but Russia expands into lengthy sections that could have been their own levels. Russia is also the only game in the sub-series that lets you play as multiple characters, giving you a few levels where you play as Anastasia Nikolaevna, who your assassin has taken it upon himself to protect. Her story takes some turns and is ultimately connected to the rest of the series, but also allows the designers to create levels that are focused more around pure stealth without all the gadgets and abilities that Orelov himself acquires, including his winch and his rifle, which allows him to kill enemies at range. Playing as Anastasia strips things back to the very basics, and its refreshing to approach a level with such a limited toolset, stripping the game back to its stealth roots and allowing the designers to really focus on the game’s core mechanics rather than Orelov’s more complex puzzle-like level layouts.

The Assassin’s Creed Chronicles games are not great games, and are skippable even if you’re going through the series since they don’t contain a lot of plot or connection to the main games. They are not, however, the utterly disposable experiences I expected. Each of them has genuinely creative and interesting ideas, and iterates on the base formula in ways I could respect. They’re rough around the edges, not quite as precise or well tuned as you’d like, but they have a level of creativity and heart that I did not expect from this kind of spin off product. Looking at their scores on Metacritic I think both China and Russia are underrated, Russia especially so, since it was my favorite in the series. India is ultimately a bad experience, but it is at least ambitious, and it has its moments.

And ultimately it’s the sub series' ambition that I liked the most. Rather than churn out a trio of uninspired and boring platformers with Assassin’s Creed trappings the teams involved tried to make distinct, interesting, games on a budget, that transposed the Assassin’s Creed open world style into focused 2.5D linear levels. That they succeeded to the degree they did is very impressive, and while the games are frustrating at times they are not boring. If you love Assassin’s Creed or you love 2.5D stealth platformers these games are worth trying out, especially China and Russia. They did not get the time or budget to fully explore their ideas to their potential, but they have interesting and novel ideas that are worth exploring. I’d rather play a game that goes for something and falls short than a boring and soulless but competent title, and this trilogy pleasantly surprised me with its ambition.