Assassin’s Creed Unity

Game Info

There is finally an Assassin’s Creed game exclusive to next gen consoles and it has a mode that I have been waiting for since the start of the series, 4 player co op.  With the game’s setting set in 18th century Paris during the French Revolution, you will see the city evolve from beautiful to chaos all around you.  Unfortunately though,  this game also has a lot of faults and mishaps that makes this Assassin’s Creed entry one of the worst ones in the storied franchise.

You play as Arno, a man who lost his father by murder at a young age and was raised by the love interest’s family.  It then becomes a revenge tale where your love interest motivates you to keep going instead of Arno finding the strength to do it himself. There was no real compelling reason for me to even care about Arno’s story instead I had to try to make it fun for myself with the different missions, side missions or even just running across rooftops. I found the story extremely forgettable and could careless about what was going on. With me being a huge fan of the series I was really disappointed in the abysmal story.

There are side quests where you do missions from the annimus that will have you going into different times of Paris and make your way to a checkpoint with scripted events, which is a nice break from the main story.  To me where this Assassin’s Creed game shines is where you are in missions where you need to assassinate someone and you have to strategically do it by going in the underground tunnels to come up behind them or even causing a distraction and waiting for the perfect opportunity to go in.

Assassin’s Creed Unity features a deep level of customization so that you can play to your own style.  Moving Arno through the city was hit or miss for the most part. When it worked, the gameplay was great and felt amazing to jump from rooftop to rooftop because as you know in real life there would be no way in the world you can do.  There is still the annoying issue that shows it’s head in all Assassin Creed games where your character doesn’t do exactly what you want him to do. This is extremely frustrating as this was supposedly a next gen experience and that is one of the same gameplay problems that I’ve come across in every Assassin Creed game.

There is no question here when I say Paris looks absolutely phenomenal and is the most beautiful and the most full of life than any other cities from the franchise.  The city is very populated, almost too populated to a point and I found myself plenty of times not even wanting to touch the ground and just stick to the rooftops because it was a burden to run your way through everybody on the street.I did encounter a lot of frame rate drops and more glitches I have ever experienced in the franchise. I will say the sound in the game was great and I found myself stopping in the middle of the street to hear conversations random people were having.

At last there is finally co op in a Assassin’s Creed game and when it works, it really is a lot of fun.  There are different Co op missions ranged throughout the city to where you can play with up to 4 people and strategize your plans on how to complete the objective.  As awesome as this sounds there were a few hiccups while I was playing.  There were several times where I found myself in a fight with more people then I could handle and when my partner tried to come help,he wasn’t able to attack anyone.  His character would be right next to me surrounded by 5 people and he wasn’t able to swing his sword or anything.  Also at times I could see myself swinging a sword at someone and it would stop at mid swing and then the character I was swinging at would get hit without me even touching them.  Other than a couple glitches and frame rate drops the co op in this game works very well, it’s just not as expansive as I had hoped since they were advertising this as the main reason to buy this game.

The Recommendation

If you are big fan of the series and want to see what a good graphical setting for the franchise could do, then I strongly encourage you to pick this up but I warn you aside from the gorgeous environments, this to me is the worst one in the franchise.  Although it has it’s moments of epicness, it falls really short on story which is the main reason to play the Assassin’s Creed games.  The foundation of what they were trying to do is there but it was really executed poorly.  Hopefully the next title for the PS4 and Xbox One can fix the mistakes of Unity.