Republished on Wednesday, July 13, 2022: Following July’s announcement of the PS Plus Extra, Premium lineup, I’m reviving this review from the archives. The original is below.
French publisher Ubisoft is at home with Assassin’s Creed Unity. A sprawling re-creation of his 18th-century Paris, the game ditches the naval angle of Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag and returns to a setting that evokes memories of Assassin’s Creed II and Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. increase. With the French Revolution erupting and thousands taking to the streets, Unity is perhaps the most chaotic entry in the series, but this chaos comes at a terrible price.
This time, you’ll be sneaking up and stabbing Arno Victor Dorian. Arno Victor Dorian is a brash but dashing rogue who is mostly fun to play. The surrounding cast isn’t bad either, and there are some really decent attempts at character setting throughout the story, but it’s the plot itself that tends to wane as the adventure progresses. We see a few scenes, but much of the story unfolds in decidedly predictable ways, and the worst part is, by the end, Arno’s edgy personality makes for a familiar tale of assassins vs. Templars.
Fortunately, there are few contemporary sequences that continue the series’ overarching plot, and are less invasive than before. You have to navigate the line. These sudden missions are linear but relatively exciting, with little real impact on the story, but just enough of an addition to provide a bit of variety.
Still, the plot progression is good enough to keep you playing, but the real star of the show is Paris itself. It’s often fun just to look at the Landmarks like Notre Dame Cathedral are spectacular in both scale and attention to detail, and it feels great to sprint through them with Arno’s agility.
Indeed, Unity easily boasts the best move yet as far as the series goes. Arno’s legs are noticeably lighter, and the former hero’s slightly hefty feeling is almost gone. Also, a number of new animations make the hero look more flexible, and for the first time you can easily jump down buildings while holding the circle and R2 button. In short, carving your way through the dense sandbox settings that Ubisoft loves to create has never been easier or more fun.
Elsewhere the formula has also been improved. In many ways, the game feels like an attempt to refine the franchise’s now predictable template, and it’s largely successful. Stealth has been given a slight overhaul thanks to an improved cover system and a new sneaking stance that allows Arno to crouch down to silence him, but it’s still a lot harder to fight. In my previous outings, I didn’t have to run away from my attackers at all. If you were cornered by a dozen guards who witnessed a not-so-stealth assassination, you would rather easily stand your ground, counter every blow that comes your way, and destroy an entire enemy army. You can systematically chop down what you felt like. resistance.
However, opponents no longer have to wait their turn to attack, and counter kills have been removed entirely. Facing more than one enemy can quickly put you at a disadvantage as they are defeated by successive attacks. By late in the release, you’ll be well-equipped to survive a few more hits without getting skewered. Overall, this is a relatively dramatic change. Especially if you’re used to playing as an overpowered and ruthless killer, but this definitely makes the encounter as intense as it should be.
On your side, on the other hand, you can no longer switch weapons on the fly. Your trusty hidden blade can no longer be used in hand-to-hand combat and is strictly limited to his one primary armament at a time. In addition to the gun of your choice, you must choose from his three types of melee weapons: one-handed, heavy, and long. One-handed swords are regular swords, heavy weapons tend to be two-handed axes and claymores, and long weapons come in the form of spears, tridents, and javelins.
As expected, each type has its own strengths and weaknesses, and while finding your favorite loadout is a fun process, it clearly lacks depth beyond modifications to combat itself. That stealth should come first. That said, the way Unity seems to encourage you to form your own playstyle contradicts the need to do things quietly. If you focus on melee combat in hopes of being able to approach situations, you’ll quickly discover that the majority of missions are designed to reward cunning players.
Again, Ubisoft has emphasized that this latest installment features a “black box” mission design. This basically means that you are free to work on your own terms, and to some extent it lives up to that promise. Unlike previous titles, if you don’t follow strict guidelines, you won’t quickly fail the task. It’s possible if you walk into a building full of guards in the middle of the day and try to dodge them all before you kill your target, but you’ll miss some bonus cutscenes if you don’t. Follow the structure laid out for
For a franchise that never allowed the gameplay freedom it always promised, this is still an undeniable step forward, and after all, the release has some great scenarios to sink your blade into. Coming up with and doing it while adapting to amazingly dynamic situations captures what Assassin’s Creed has always been, and along with the lovingly crafted game world, Unity truly shines. This is where it comes into play.
Ubisoft’s latest isn’t revolutionary, but it refines the formula in many ways, and I’d say it’s one of the best games in the series. Indeed, despite all its strengths, it’s no secret that this is a technical abomination.
Limited to 30 frames per second, this release rarely hits that point on a regular basis. Instead, it feels like a constant 20-25 FPS, especially when contemplating around a large crowd of pedestrians. Paris is packed and can sometimes feel like a living city, but looking down from a rooftop it’s impressive to see hundreds of peasants gathered in one place. , it is questionable what the apparent burden it poses. It’s worth it in the game engine.
There is an immediate and noticeable performance drop when stepping into a crowd, and it gets even worse when some action starts. As you can imagine, this leads to some serious frustration, especially since the release load times are also terrible.
Falling in combat won’t upset you too much with a competent checkpoint system in place, but you’ll remember how long it takes to restart the game. , you end up staring at a loading screen that lasts about 20 seconds. If not, you’ll be sitting around with your thumb for a minute. One problem is that it takes an inordinate amount of time to load the save file the first time, but there is no excuse for such a huge retry time. At the end of the day, you’ll fear a dreary black screen more than the Royal Guard itself.
And then there are the notorious glitches. It’s no exaggeration to say that if you spend literally 2+ minutes in Unity, you can’t help but see some kind of graphical cock-up. It doesn’t matter if the farmer digs into the wall or the enemy falls through the floor during the fight. Most players can undoubtedly be able to overlook these comical encounters, but they happen so often that it becomes difficult not to get incredibly frustrated. A particularly engaging mission, just before glimpsing the Faceless Man. Goodbye immersion.
These technical issues certainly aren’t game-breaking, but incredibly, the worst is yet to come. However, Unity is built on a framework that assumes you are always connected to Ubisoft’s servers. There are clan activities, dynamic co-op missions that appear in the game world in real time, and a few smaller features that make it the quintessential “social” experience. The only problem with this is that, at the time of writing, the game almost never stays connected to the server, and has a horrific tendency to crash completely if that critical connection is lost.
The release froze a total of 8 times during my playthrough, and each of these crashes resulted in a pop-up box stating “Lost connection to Ubisoft servers”. I then had to manually shutdown and restart the software. As far as gaming sins are concerned, software crashes are right up there with the very worst escort missions, and with Unity’s problems seemingly tied to the publisher’s increasingly pointless Uplay service, the issue is somewhat forgivable. not.
On the other hand, the title’s aforementioned co-op component is actually quite good – at least when done properly. You can walk around and complete co-op based objectives. Sprinting across rooftops with a horde of allies is empowering and effortlessly cool, and when everything goes according to plan, coordinating assassinations with your buddies is a true highlight. It’s a shame that even a fun co-op experience is marred by sometimes even worse framerates and glitch-filled combat where allies get stuck helplessly as they perform brilliant final moves on their foes.
Elsewhere, in terms of the visual side of things, Next Generation’s exclusive stings don’t always look as pretty as they should. It boasts a terrifying amount of pop-inserie that is otherwise a fascinating adventure.
