Assassin's Creed: Unity (2014) - Review

 The Assassins Creed franchise has been actively lingering in the back of my brain ever since the first one was released in 2007. For some reason I never really got into it, even though the gameplay looked like something that I would enjoy - stealth and parkour. Since the first game came out the series has grown to a veritable smorgasbord of games and maybe it's taken me so long to get into it because I didn't know where to start. My hesitation has only added more games to the list.

Do I start from the beginning? The first games can be full of dubious gameplay and game design choices that make them difficult to enjoy with modern eyes and quality of life-wants.

50 shades of brown

Do I start in the middle? Where did they iron out the most kinks, where did they nail the story? 

Do I start with the latest? Who knows what good games I miss jumping the line all the way to the end? I could've made the smart thing and checked some list of "best games in the Assassins Creed series". But instead I did a pick of a handful with cool sounding names from a Steam sale a while ago, and decided to start with the oldest one out of that bunch. That game was Assassins Creed: Unity.

While I didn't know much about the game going in, I knew enough to have a general idea and expectation. The game largely fulfilled those expectations. The game is mostly about stealthing and parkouring. What I didn't expect however were how badly designed the game would be in those core areas specifically.

It seems clear that Unity expects you to be a returning AC player as it doesn't explain much about the premise of the AC game series. Because of this I can't really say much about it either - you play as a guy named Arno during French Revolution Paris. From being a sort of nobody you somehow become part of an assassinations guild, it is never explained where Arno gets his superhuman capabilities of climbing buildings. In actuality however, you're some guy in present time, hooked up to some machine that allows you to control Arno in a sort of virtual reality time travel. Some evil corporation is after you in this virtual world, though during my 20 hours with the game that never came to matter. Some of the quests and stages are centered around this fact that the world you run around in is actually inside a computer, or something like it, but that's the most you'll ever notice. Mostly you spend your time running up and down the streets of 18th century Paris, scaling walls and trying to complete different quests and tasks given to you.

And this is both one of the best and the worst things about AC: Unity. I love the detail of Paris and as someone who is quite interested in history it was fun to just run around and pretend to be there. I've heard that Ubisoft overall has tried to be as historically accurate as possible, while also trying to make a fun game and on one of these things I find that the game excels. Even though the game is now 11 years old it's beautiful and feels alive. They've made a lot of nice little scripts running throughout the city that make it feel like all the NPCs moving about are minding their own business, or mostly reacting appropriately to your often weird behaviour.

The story also has the potential to be interesting. It starts with a sequence about the Templars in the 12th century (or something like it) and this is continued in a struggle between the assassinations guild and somewhat unclear antagonists in the 18th century. There is a lot of optional information about things you come across and they were always a delight to read, with in-depth texts about characters, locations or situations. Some of the quests are quite interesting, like the murder mystery ones where you have to figure out who is the culprit and accuse the right person to receive the best reward.

A lot to do, not much of it fun though.

Combat is serviceable, with a possibility to block or dodge enemies and use different tools like smoke bombs and arrows to increase your advantage. Being able to jump people from above and stealth kill multiple targets is fun and useful.

Unfortunately it is all ruined by the one thing that needed to really work, the controls. If you're going to make a game that is so much about handling yourself, jumping from one building to the next, climbing up the side of clock towers and hiding from evil guards, those things need to not constantly be what you fail to do.

After having played other games that have some element of climbing, stealthing and jumping through hoops (Shadows of Mordor, Dishonored) I can say this game is by far the most poorly executed. In fact so bad that after 20 hours of playing, and a particularly frustrating sequence trying to kill the Beggar King but having to restart the mission around ten times because Arno wouldn't do what I wanted him to, I decided I didn't want to play this anymore.

It is clear that Ubisoft bit off more than they could chew. Or maybe the game was just exceptionally poorly optimized to my setup. I played it with keyboard on PC, and I toyed with the idea of trying to use a controller. But the problems I had with the controls didn't seem to stem from the control scheme, but how Arno interpreted my input and interacted with the world around him. It seemed almost arbitrary whether he would jump on to the next object or just randomly hurl himself off the wall and onto the street. Hiding behind objects to avoid being discovered I often ended up being stuck. Don't get me started on trying to get through windows, which was practically impossible. This quickly gets extremely frustrating when you have a handful of guards behind you shooting you in the backside.

And it doesn't end there;

• The menu system is incredibly obtuse, trying to find information about the quest I was on was way harder than it should be. 
• The minimap is littered with symbols indicating things you can do, but the overview map doesn't always correspond or contain the same symbols (I am aware you can filter), making it confusing to use. 
• It's way too unclear how you gain currency to unlock skills or improve your weapons.
• Even though it is supposed to be a stealth game, it is in no way clear how visible you are at any given time. While you get a good tool in the "hightened senses" that allows you to see enemies through walls, it was impossible to judge if someone was going to spot you based on light sources or distances. Some times I crept around in a fully lit church having absolutely no idea why some guards spotted me and some didn't.
• I really don't like Ubisoft Connect...

I just felt like for every moment I got to enjoy, the game had to give me two moments where I was extremely annoyed. That is just not a good enough ratio. It also doesn't help that a lot of the side quests got repetitive and I decided to try to get through the game quickly by focusing on the main story. But after the above mentioned harrowing experience of a complete communication failure between me and Arno I knew that it wasn't about me getting comfortable with the controls and it wasn't going to get any better.

This doesn't mean I am giving up on the AC series however, I still have a few games from that sale to check out eventually.