We've always had a bit of a hit and miss relationship with Assassin's Creed. Kind of like the Sonic Cycle, only with more cloak and daggers. Every year, a new game gets announced. Every year, we get ourselves caught up in the hype. And every year, we get bitterly disappointed, when the game turns out to be a buggy/awkward/inaccessible mess. Never were we more disappointed than with last year's game, Black Flag - a game that promised to be everything good and piratey, yet turned into be little more than a "hiding in bushes simulator", with guards that appeared out of nowhere, that left you with a general feeling you actually had no idea which way was up.
Of course, it wasn't long before a few months had passed, we'd got over the disappointment, and the cycle began all over again. A new game was announced - Assassin's Creed: Unity, set in a period of history that promised to suck us in all over again, in the midst of revolutionary France. It was a "next-gen" only game, on PC, PS4 and Xbox One, and looked set to put the consoles' extra power to great effect, showing great crowds of people gathering round guillotines, a gigantic Parisian landscape just waiting to be explored, and some incredibly polished walnut floors. And you know what? This time, it's actually not all that bad.
Despite having been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons as of late, Assassin's Creed Unity is one of the most accessible games in the series. Whether the game's actually better explained this year, or whether we've spent so many games getting totally confused about how everything works we've somehow just managed to figure it out through sheer bloody mindedness, we can't be sure - but we'd wager it's the former rather than the latter.
[Insert "I can see my house from up here" joke. Or possibly one about being careful not to slip...]
This time around, you're strapped into the hidden daggers of Arno (which we really expected to be spelt Arnault), an ordinary bloke-come-servant to an aristocrat who, as is often the way, finds himself in the wrong place at the wrong time. After attempting to sneak into a plush upper class party to meet a lady friend, things somehow manage to go spectacularly wrong, as not only is Arno all but forced out of the room by the object of his attractions, but he also manages to find himself wrongly accused of a murder. Worse still, it's the murder of his girlfriend-to-be's dad. Life now in tatters, poor Arno soon finds himself locked up in the clink, where he meets an old man with an unusually varied array of insults, and a penchant for whacking new inmates with his wooden sword (and no, that's not a euphemism). Before you know it, one thing leads to another, and Arno finds himself inducted into an ancient order of Assassins, being sent out to discover who really killed his woman's dad, and bring them to vigilante justice instead.
As with the previous games, Assassin's Creed: Unity is very open ended. Plunged into a gorgeously recreated Paris, complete with all the famous landmarks you'd expect - Notre Dame, the Louvre, the Bastille, and even at one point, the Eiffel Tower (no it doesn't make sense - we'll come back to it later), it's a bustling city full of people going about their business, and plenty of things to do. While there are a few glitches here and there - ladies randomly hovering up a wall, and the odd citizen who mysteriously duplicates when you run into them (both identically dressed, but only one sporting a lovely moustache), the issues here are mostly cosmetic.
Of course, this being a city in the middle of the revolution, there are plenty of people who need a helping hand. In fact, while the main story is actually a bit on the short side, there are so many side quests, collectibles and random "events" to get stuck into here that you can spend dozens of hours just exploring the town, and seeing a very different side of Paris. Whether you're hunting down treasure chests, collecting this game's version of Crackdown's orbs, the Cockades (stop sniggering at the back), or helping out old ladies that have had their bags stolen (no, really - there are a lot of crooks about, and as the friendly neighbourhood assassin, it's up to you to show them the error of their ways), there's never a dull moment.
It's himself!
As you'd likely expect from an Assassin, Arno is an incredibly nimble bloke. Tearing through the city like the floor's on fire, there's no building too tall to leap off, and no object too small to launch off, as Arno seems to prefer spending his time dangling by his fingertips from a building ledge rather than mingling with the plebs on the floor. As the birthplace of Parkour, it's probably to be expected that there's a traditionally Assassin's Creed level of free running going on here - and it all seems to work that little bit better than before. All you have to do is hold the right trigger when running towards a building, and like a human spider, Arno will scale it, leaping from street light to handily broken brick, to loose ceiling tile as he goes. A great way to escape a soldier - after all, how many people do you know who can scale a building weighed down with swords and rifles - it's also a great way to take in the sights of the city, and keep an eye on the people (and collectibles) down below. With fewer people to run into, and a lot less traffic to get in your way, leaping from the chimneys of Paris like a French Dick Van Dyke is a lot of fun.
Along with the collectibles to be discovered, there are several different types of mission to complete. There's a range of side quests called Paris Stories, which offer a surprisingly varied selection of objectives, whether you're collecting heads to take to a terrified Mme Tussaud, who needs to make death masks for the deceased, or following a crazy old "psychic" woman around Paris, assassinating people on her command (this was one of the weirder ones). There's a cafe-theatre you can run and renovate in a kind of minigame to earn extra dough, and even a few murder mysteries to solve, which see you investigate a crime scene, and piece the bits of the puzzle together to figure out whodunnit. It's a refreshing change of pace from an otherwise stab happy game.
The story missions here are a mix of the usual Assassin's style missions - get in, kill the target, and get out - although thankfully, most of them hold your hand that little bit more than in the previous games, most rely on stealth a lot less, and most make it a bit trickier to get lost. Giving you a very specific objective, with a very specific way to solve it, the missions in the main quest are, for the most part, highly story driven, and as such, rather linear - which is a good thing, as it's a decent plot. Where the game starts to fall down, however, is when the assassination missions start to open out.
Taking off the stabilisers, and letting you loose on your own, all of a few levels in, you'll be given a target to kill, but no instruction for how you're supposed to get to them. For a game that takes a slowly-slowly approach to most of the missions, suddenly having all the shackles thrown off and being able to do whatever you want may feel a bit intimidating for less confident players, especially as the game doesn't give you a tutorial for how to go about planning your assassination in the first place. It's all well and good to expect you to be able to plan an assassination on your own, but if you don't really know what your options are, yet alone what the components are for a decent assassination attempt, it can all feel a bit hit and miss - like you're only just managing to scrape by with a plan you've cobbled together, when the game's expecting you to do it in a much clearer way.
Just blend in with the crowd. Simple Steve on the left here seems to be doing a good job of it.
Unfortunately, there are still the usual Assassin's Creed problems here, too. With a city the size of Paris, you're not going to want to be slowly plodding the streets - yet holding the run button seems to instantly make you public enemy number one. Whether it's because it makes you look suspicious, or Parisian guards just really hate joggers, it quickly gets annoying to be sprinting through the streets, only to get that little bit too close to a group of nearby soldiers, who then chase you down, or worse, set off an alarm to warn all their friends.
Despite being a master assassin and free-runner, Arno also doesn't seem to have much in the way of a self-preservation instinct. While we may be the ones pressing the buttons, we don't know whether Arno can make the jump, and if he knows he's just going to fall to his doom, it'd be nice if he, you know, refused to jump, rather than just committing suicide and costing us several minutes of progress - something which happens far too often. And while every hero has to have their Kryptonite, it's those dastardly windows that are Arno's one weakness. If you're being chased and want to nip inside a building through a window for cover, you may as well kiss your progress goodbye, as Arno shimmies to every hand hold he can reach around the window - but refuses to go in.
But perhaps most annoyingly, the game still isn't as accessible to new players as it should be. At several times in the game, you'll end up coming a cropper because the game hasn't bothered explaining something to you - presumably because it reckons you'll already know what to do from the previous games. While developers may be worried about annoying the hardcore with regular tutorials, the glaring problem with this approach is that it makes it harder for new players to get in - and without new players, you're left selling to an ever smaller market. There's no warning in the game that you can't block/parry moves where your opponent "glows" red, for example - the first you'll know of it is when your opponent puts their sword through your chest - and there's also no explanation of what synchronisation does the first time you do it. Turns out that getting to the highest point on the map in each area and pressing circle will reveal the area below, and mark the nearby quests and collectibles on your map. It'd just be nice if the game explained. The map itself is also rather awkward to use - especially if you aren't familiar with 17th Century Paris. Rather than telling you the names of buildings as you hover over them, you have to specifically highlight a small marker on a building for it to tell you what it is. When some of the quests in the game have you solving riddles (which are rubbish, because they don't rhyme), and they usually have you searching for certain buildings (Notre Dame, or Sainte-Chappelle, for example), it can be a bit frustrating to have to go around the entire map, hovering over every single building until you luck across the one you're looking for.
Disappointingly, the whole "Abstergo" nonsense plot still features prominently in Unity, which is as uninteresting and jarring as it's ever been - although on the plus side, it does lend to some rather interesting scenes this time around.
For those who're unfamiliar with the Assassins games, the story goes something like this - rather than basing their entire series in the olden times, there's a weird kind of hacker plot running beneath the surface here, where some evil corporation, who are apparently a modern day reincarnation of the Assassin's mortal enemies, the Templars, are using people's memories to... somehow establish a New World Order. Or something. All it really usually does is distract you from the good bits - but, luckily, this time round, the whole idea of playing through someone's memories in a virtual world actually leads to some interesting gameplay. Around a third of the way through the game, you'll encounter a rift of sorts in the virtual Paris, as Abstergo start looking for you - head through it, and you'll be teleported not into the boring real world - but into 1890's Paris. Although it's a bit of a weird 1890's Paris - while the Eiffel Tower takes centre stage, the statue of liberty is also there, still being constructed, even though the French would have shipped it off by then. As the game points out, this paradox happens because there's a glitch in the system - so it even makes sense from a story perspective too. Still, being able to go through a city "through the ages", and see how it evolves is a really nice touch. Even better is that this replaces the oft awful "present day" sections from previous games - and there's even a WW2 Paris section a little bit further in. It has Zeppelins and everything.
OK, no Zeppelins in this shot, but still. Pretty cool, right?
So, while we've always previously been disappointed with the Assassin's Creed games, Ass Creed Unity establishes a new sort of paradox. While this is the first and only game to have been slated by the mainstream media as much as the specialist press, who've widely reported on its array of weird and wonderful bugs, it's also the first Assassin's Creed game we've actually got on with.
Perhaps it's because it focuses less on stealth, perhaps we just really like 17th Century Paris, or perhaps it's because after so many years of struggling to understand the Assassin's Creed games, something's finally clicked - but we could actually see ourselves coming back to this one to 100% it (or at least, collect most of the collectibles). While we're disappointed that some of the missions are co-op only (seems daft to lock things to people who don't have a friend who also owns a copy of the game), there's a lot to like about Assassin's Creed Unity. Here's hoping the next one builds on the steps this takes in the right direction.
Format Reviewed: Playstation 4
