Assassin’s Creed Unity wasn’t the train wreck that I was expecting, given the uproar we all witnessed on launch day, but a renewed focus on cooperative gameplay and ACU’s handful of interesting campaign segments fail to offset the many, many flaws evident throughout Assassin’s Creed Unity.
There are certainly moments in Assassin’s Creed Unity that will make you wish every game could benefit from an army of artists equal in size to the one that worked on ACU. At times, the visuals in Unity can be absolutely breathtaking and there were moments when I was blown away both by the game’s scenery and its recreations of iconic French landmarks like Notre-Dame Cathedral.
It was during these moments, like watching the fog clear from the gardens at Luxembourg Palace, when it was easy to see why some at Ubisoft believed so strongly in this year’s Assassin’s Creed. Return trips to Versailles also offer an excellent look at the Assassin’s Creed Unity that could have been, had Ubisoft Montreal had managed to get the game’s frame rate issues under control.
But the occasional postcard-worthy panorama can’t justify the monotonous game design baked into every layer of the Assassin’s Creed Unity experience and ongoing performance issues with every version of ACU regularly make the game’s graphics as much a burden as they are a benefit. And the less-than-stellar frame rate present throughout much of the Assassin’s Creed Unity experience is only one of the many issues I have with ACU.
Truth be told, for the first time since the series debuted, I actually regret spending money on an Assassin’s Creed game. I just hope that, like the original Assassin’s Creed, Unity is paving the way for something substantially better.
In Assassin’s Creed Unity, players assume the role of Arno Dorian; a young assassin hell-bent on revenge against those responsible for the death of his adopted father. Unlike previous games in the Assassin’s Creed series, which have occasionally spanned numerous decades, Unity focuses on a surprisingly limited slice of Dorian’s life.
Thankfully, Ubisoft Montreal managed to pack more than a few marquee moments into what has to have been one of the action-packed lives led by any 20-something during the French Revolution. Those who’ve read any of my previous reviews will know I prefer to steer clear of spoiler territory but let’s just say that Arno has a good deal more logical progression in his back-story than your average AC protagonist.
You’ll actually experience most of Dorian’s formative moments yourself, but those not especially interested in playing Assassin’s Creed: The Sims Edition will be happy to know the campaign skips a healthy chunk of our hero’s adolescent and teenage years.
Some of those enjoyable bits were even positioned closely enough together for me to occasionally wonder if Assassin’s Creed Unity might redeem itself at some point. If I’d finish wading through the minutiae leading up to Sequence 6 or 7 and then suddenly find myself in the political thriller that Ubisoft Montreal tried to create.
For what it’s worth, I did eventually take an interest in Arno’s story … but not until about 30 seconds before the credits rolled. Ubisoft has given themselves a number of possible paths forward, which has me hoping that whatever comes next could take astronomical leaps forward similar to Assassin’s Creed II.
But the mere possibility of a better tomorrow isn’t enough to justify a higher score today.
Assassin’s Creed Unity’s storytelling and narrative components are designed for a game that offers a great deal more freedom over the direction of the protagonist’s story than what players will find in ACU. By the end of Unity, Arno feels like a blank slate still awaiting input from an outside party, but the game never gives players a chance to make their own impression on what I found to be the least-interesting environment in the series.
It’s kind of stunning to see how incredibly Ubisoft Montreal failed to give Assassin’s Creed Unity’s recreation of 18th century Paris any semblance of life, despite the fact that you’ll rarely find Arno onscreen with less than a few dozen other residents of the crumbling French capital. Even the game’s city-minded side missions, collectively referred to as “Paris Stories” in ACU’s progress tracker, fail to offer any meaningful connection between Arno’s actions and the daily life of your average Parisian.
Even most of the missions follow the same incredibly tedious formula employed for most aspects of the ACU single-player campaign. You’re still escorting NPCs from Point A to Point B, jumping down from rooftops to stab bad guys in the head and the handful of other tasks that various Ubisoft studios have been regurgitating for the last seven years.
Ubisoft Montreal has absolutely flooded Assassin’s Creed Unity with this uninteresting fluff content, immediately killing any chance that Unity would become the first game in the series worth earning the platinum trophy. Instead, the implied promise of boring mission design made it relatively easy for me to forego most of the side-content in Assassin’s Creed Unity in favor of finishing the game’s equally disappointing campaign.
Ubisoft Montreal certainly doesn’t make it easy to take that approach, though.
Rather than offering any meaningful sense of progress, every action in Assassin’s Creed Unity feels as if its somehow increasing the list of tasks currently taking up room on Arno’s metaphorical “To Do” list.
Want to spend some money on upgrades for your HQ?
No problem. But the 30 thousand-plus Livres needed to complete renovations on your base will only get you halfway there. You’ll also need to complete a set of five missions, one for each paid upgrade to the theatre that doubles as Arno’s base of operations, and you’ll find similar quests waiting for you at each of the social clubs that can be renovated throughout Paris.
Don’t forget about the dozen-plus Paris Stories, the multi-stage Nostradamus Enigmas, randomly-generated Crowd Events or the hundreds of treasure chests, Nomad points and other collectible items strewn throughout Ubisoft Montreal’s digital recreation of Paris. Or the “murder mysteries” that don’t actually require much more than the occasional use of Eagle Vision and the patience not to accuse the first NPC you encounter after rounding up some evidence.
If reviews were nothing more than a quest-to-dollars-spent ratio, Assassin’s Creed Unity would easily be a 5/5 and a contender for the 2014 Game of the Year. But, as someone concerned with quality AND quantity, I still see ACU for what it really is: An impressively large mound of crap.
In fact, the only non-campaign content I enjoyed in ACU were the roughly two-dozen cooperative missions that can be unlocked as you explore the game’s digital recreation of 18th century Paris.
Ranging in size and scope, from relatively limited two-player assassinations to sprawling four-player heists, the co-op missions give Assassin’s Creed Unity players both an extra source of income and an opportunity to demonstrate of just how effective an assassin can be with assistance from his/her brothers and sisters in the Brotherhood.
While your objectives in cooperative missions don’t vary much, from what can be seen in ACU’s single-player campaign, new arrangements and overlapping fields of vision force players to work together if they want to avoid raising alarms and earn the most-valuable reward(s) for each mission. While most of the cooperative missions in Assassin’s Creed Unity won’t net you much more than a few thousand Livres, some do offer up additional equipment that may or may not be of use to Arno.
But even these, what should have been the game’s headline-grabbing missions, offered up a variety of obvious failures in place of anything that might restore faith in Assassin’s Creed Unity. Without microphones, it’s almost impossible to communicate with your teammates, making real coordination next to impossible in many scenarios.
Ubisoft was mercifully lenient when it comes to earning bonuses for coordinated kills, and other core Assassin actions, but it would have been nice to see a basic command wheel of some kind for those players who don’t have PS4-compatible microphone.
There were also multiple occasions (on a weekend, no less) when, despite matchmaking working as intended for every other cooperative mission in ACU, I couldn’t find so much as a single other teammate for either of the game’s five-diamond heist missions. I’d queue up, and Unity would spend 10-20 seconds searching for other players, only to drop me into an empty game. Rather than fend for myself, I backed out of the mission and tried again, only to find myself sitting in yet another empty server.
After failing to find a party on several consecutive attempts, I queued up for (and completed) a four-diamond co-op mission, but returning to the queue for the game’s five-diamond heists yielded the exact same results as before.
Given that a few people have already earned the trophy for completing all of the game’s cooperative missions, I know that there are other players who have purchased/earned enough top-level gear to tackle the game’s toughest challenges. And there’s a very real chance that early discontentment with Assassin’s Creed Unity could make it difficult for players to ever find random groups of players to complete what might be the most interesting content in an otherwise incredibly dull video game.
Assassin’s Creed Unity Review – Final Verdict
Though far from unplayable, I think there are a number of arguments to be made justifying the position that people shouldn’t play Assassin’s Creed Unity.
For starters, ACU doesn’t look or run as well as Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, despite having a larger dev team and being developed for half as many platforms. Even at its best, the drab environments and lack of color in Unity feel like a step back for the series and I regularly found myself wishing this year’s Assassin’s Creed would find some excuse to show me the lush tropical forests and beautiful blue waters we loved in Black Flag.
While I’ll admit to being curious about the future of the franchise, and that of new protagonist Arno Dorian, I don’t feel like I gained anything by experiencing what appears to be the first chapter in a new story arc for the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
The only thing that really gave me hope for future Assassin’s Creed games were the new cooperative offerings included in Unity, and even then only a handful of the cooperative missions offered the sort of experience that I’d want to complete with others. An ongoing lack of microphone ownership in the console community didn’t do much to alleviate my frustrations during segments that required precise coordination, either.
Whatever comes next may eventually be worth the growing pains but the potential of a brighter future doesn’t make me feel any better about the fact that Unity failed to offer an experience that was even comparable to last year ‘s Assassin's Creed. If you absolutely must play the latest entry in the Assassin’s Creed franchise -- for whatever reason -- do yourself a favor and at least wait until the game inevitably winds up on the budget rack.
It shouldn’t take more than a couple of months.
Score – 2/5
What did you think of the Assassin’s Creed Unity? Disagree with Scott’s take on the first next-gen exclusive iteration of the Assassin’s Creed franchise? Hoping to see Arno return in next year’s Assassin’s Creed game(s)?
Let us know in the comments section!
