Assassin's Creed Unity is mostly fixed and not a bad game.

Assassin’s Creed Unity was a famously broken game at launch. There were the ubiquitous shots of characters with eyes and lips floating in midair while the skull was missing and the hair showed through the empty space, and all kinds of other issues like floating NPCs and bugged pathing. Playing it in 2021, most of that stuff has been fixed, especially on an Xbox Series X where the higher processing power and loading speeds minimize many of the issues. I still encountered a few minor bugs, including some floating NPCs, plenty of bad pathing, and three crashes to my Xbox dashboard, but no more than usual in a sort of janky open world game. It has now been fixed enough that stripped of the context of its launch and its famous technical issues the underlying design can shine through. And that underlying design is surprisingly solid. Assassin’s Creed Unity is not some hidden work of genius unfairly spurned by the masses, and it’s not the best Assassin’s Creed game, but as a shortish open world game with an absolutely gorgeous setting, it’s a decent time.

Assassin’s Creed Unity starts with a bang. It opens with a short, but thrilling, chase sequence where you play a Templar tasked with hiding sacred items from Assassins who are assaulting your temple. I put the game on a couple hours after completing Freedom Cry, and all I could think was that the graphical jump they achieved in a single year and on the same hardware was absolutely mind blowing. AC IV is clearly a scaled up 360 game, with relatively low polygon environments and flat lighting. Unity is fully 8^th gen, and even by those standards it’s a good-looking game, especially with that intro. I’ve played a bunch of 9^th gen games at this point, and played this soon after the Resident Evil VIII demo, and it still blew me away. Once the game moves into the open world there’s a bit of a downgrade, with the brighter light of daytime areas illuminating some lower polygon assets, flatter textures, and very questionable hair on the character models, but it’s still a huge jump from AC IV. I was consistently impressed by the gorgeous detail and popping colors of the streets and buildings in revolutionary France, especially given the number of characters the game puts on screen. Assassin’s Creed Unity may famously be a technical mess but in a lot of ways it’s an artistic triumph.

Character and story is a decidedly more mixed bag. Assassin’s Creed Unity is clearly trying to recapture the magic of the Ezio trilogy. That whiz bang opening I mentioned reminded me a lot of the opening of Revelations, which was also both linear and graphically superior to the main game. Unity’s protagonist, Arno, is clearly bargain bin Ezio. In fact he is kind of a mix of the three Ezios from the three games, his youthful brashness tempered by loss and tragedy. He even has a romance with a red-headed woman, though she’s much more age appropriate for Arno than Sofia was for Ezio. What he does not have is Ezio’s charisma.

Arno’s tale takes place during the lead up to the French Revolution, as well as the revolt itself and a bit of its aftermath. To lose one father figure is tragic, to lose a second starts to look like carelessness, and young Arno is nothing if not careless. His father dies when he is a child and then he man who takes him in is murdered before his eyes as a young adult and he is framed for the killing. Imprisoned in the Bastille he meets an Assassin and soon finds himself inducted into the order. Unlike Connor and Edward, Arno spends the majority of the game as an actual honest to goodness Assassin, though he’s more of a low level flunky and less of a high ranking badass than Altair or Ezio before him.

The actual story is typical Assassin’s Creed stuff. There are Assassins and Templars and betrayals and unsurprising twists. It does the “interact with random people from the historical period” thing so you meet Napoleon and Robespierre and the like. There are also a few interactions with the Marquis De Sade in the most toothless incarnation of him I’ve ever seen in any media. He makes a couple tawdry jokes, hits on your love interest, and kisses a woman’s hand and that’s about it. It’s a perfect encapsulation of how Ubisoft treats these historical figures, robbing them of any context or edge and just turning them into sanitized versions of themselves, except for the ones who get drafted to be vicious villains, usually in ways distinct from their actual historical villainy. It’s not that I wanted to see De Sade sodomizing some poor scullery wench, but rather that there’s really no point in using him in this way except for a little hit of “oh I’ve heard of that guy” recognition. Assassin’s Creed Unity is a typical video game in that it revels in brutal bloody violence, showing fields of skulls and multiple severed heads, and it likes to titillate with mentions of sex but avoids depicting it. De Sade’s inclusion feels cheap and shallow.

And cheap and shallow is also a fair assessment of how Assassin’s Creed Unity deals with the French Revolution. It utterly avoids taking sides in the underlying conflict, focusing it more as a fun tourism opportunity and a chance to make a city teeming with protests and where bloody conflict and thick police and paramilitary presences make sense. One of the Assasssins makes some “both sides” comment and the Templars manipulate various parties to create chaos so they can step into the vacuum and none of the actual historical content matters at all. Tens of thousands died in the revolution and there was terrorism and mass execution and it feels a little gross to have it boiled down to “exciting playground for Assassins and Templars” even though a lot of time has passed. Ubisoft is committed to keeping politics out of their games, except when they can exploit political events for the purposes of salacious entertainment. Heads on pikes. Wow! Big Entertainment! Such fun!

If the main story for Unity is pretty paint by numbers then the modern element is barely there. This is the least “real world” Assassin’s Creed content there has been in a mainline game. Like in Black Flag you’re a nameless faceless person in an Abstergo Animus, but unlike in that game there is literally no real world gameplay. Series staple Rebecca Crane breaks into the game a few times to contact you and Shaun’s voice is heard in the background, but the only time you leave the Animus is to view a short video on Abstergo. Instead the “real world” portions take the form of server migrations where Abstergo’s search protocols find you and the Assassins and destabilize the server so you have to “jump” through another, introducing instability into the simulation and taking you through Paris in a few different time periods. I really liked this stuff. Instead of boring wandering around an office picking up Post It notes it gives you thrilling, focused, parkour levels with novel obstacles like lightning strikes and fighter planes. It reminded me of the challenge tombs from the Ezio series, which are probably my favorite parts of the whole franchise I’ve played so far. As someone who couldn’t care less about the Isu and Abstergo plots I much prefer the de-emphasized modern day stuff. This version actually focuses on things that make the series good (polished spectacle and fun climbing) rather than reading boring emails or wandering around an office.

As for the main game in Paris, I found it surprisingly compelling. After a couple games that were focused on horizontal areas in the new world it felt great to be in a giant city with tons of stuff to climb on. Paris is absolutely gorgeous, especially the numerous interiors, which are often opulent and gilded and absolutely jam packed with gorgeous details. You do skulk around a few sewers and crypts but much more of your time is spent around historic buildings and beautiful palaces. Thank you! This is a video game fantasy, it’s nice to be in some places worth fantasizing about being instead of just skulking around endless sewers.

There are also some changes made to the standard Assassin’s Creed gameplay. Parkour is a little more involved, with a focus on descending as well as climbing, and a lot more complex routes that involve going into and out of buildings than in the recent games. Combat, however, has seen the biggest changes. The timing windows for counters have gotten tighter, enemies have gotten more adept at blocking, and there is much more of an emphasis on firearms, which are a serious threat. No longer can you just grab a random dude when you’re targeted and let him take the bullet for you, you need to roll out of the way. This also means that whenever you’re faced with larger numbers of enemies you are actually in danger, since some of them will stand back and shoot at you, and it’s very easy to get overwhelmed with multiple attacking enemies and shooters. You can’t just make a stand against enormous odds like you often could in prior games; the best thing to do when faced with large numbers of enemies is often to run.

In theory these are all positives, but they come with a lot of problems. One of those is the camera, which really can’t handle these fights, especially in close quarters. It’s extremely common to find yourself doing battle with a group of enemies and have some of them be off screen so you can’t see their attack indicators or what they’re doing. There’s an icon that shows when someone’s targeting you with a gun, but not where it’s coming from or who it is, and that means you don’t know how much damage you’re going to take. Also, later in the game enemies will throw flashbang grenades that can blind you and…this is an awful mechanic. For one thing it’s impossible to roll out of the range of these grenades even if you start dodging immediately, so you have to break off combat and run, which may result in you taking a hit or getting shot or whatever. For another, being blinded is not fun and doesn’t work well in a third person game. Overall combat is better than it has been when you’re fighting a small group in an open space but a massive pain when you’re fighting a larger group or fighting indoors and dealing with the bad camera.

If fighting is a mixed bag then fleeing is much worse. Enemies in this game, especially late game enemies, are relentless. They will chase you half across the map and they will shoot at you while you run, often accurately from great range (which isn’t historically accurate; it’s very hard to hit a fleeing target while you’re also running at a distance with an 18^th century pistol.) Assassin’s Creed has always allowed you to retreat and regroup when an encounter goes bad (except when it fails you through forced stealth, which this game fortunately does only rarely) and while you can do that in this game, unless you’re in an area where you can grab a lift to a rooftop or duck into a building or otherwise break line of sight you basically need to abuse the instant heal medicine item to do so, and then go buy more. It feels unbalanced, especially because it’s very hard to stand and fight against a large group so running away should be a better option, but that results in being chased by a huge pack of tenacious enemies all firing at you. Smoke bombs and stun bombs and the like can help with that, and I should have used those more, but we’ll get to that later. Regardless, the combination of tough combat and difficult fleeing pushes you towards the last pillar of the gameplay, which is the stealth.

I’m not a big fan of stealth to begin with, especially not in Assassin’s Creed, and even more especially not in this Assassin’s Creed game where it mostly feels broken. Enemies can see you from a long distance, can often see you when you think you should be concealed in a crowd or in cover, can easily alert each other, and are often placed in infuriating arrangements where you have multiple guards just standing around staring at each other and covering one another’s backs. It felt both way too finnicky and too stacked against you to be enjoyable, and while I wouldn’t say it is a very hard game I would say that it often feels unfair. I did not enjoy this game’s stealth at all.

That’s a shame because the game has some really good ideas that it just can’t execute on. Chief among this is the use of crowds as cover. This game puts an absolutely enormous number of NPCs on the streets in thick crowds of protesters and just Parisians going about their business. I can’t think of another game that has this many characters in so many scenes and it’s a technical achievement if nothing else. The idea is that your assassin can blend into the crowd the way that Edward did into bushes and other vegetation in the Caribbean (though the player could blend with crowds in previous games too). In practice it doesn’t really work.

I found crowd blending to be extremely unreliable. I can’t tell you the number of times I slipped into a party through an open window and tried to approach my quarry by blending in with the crowd only to have all the guards alert on me and have to immediately fight or run. Likewise I’d try to hide in a crowd and strategically use the phantom blade (a mini crossbow that replaces the blow gun from prior games) to stealthily kill a guard from within the group only to have snipers immediately start shooting at me. The crowds felt utterly worthless for stealth and I ended up relying on more traditional methods like sticking to the rooftops and hiding in hay wagons instead of what seemed like the game’s new stealth focus of crowds. It didn’t matter whether I was wearing Arno’s Assassin robes or some disguise, I felt like crowds mostly served as set dressing and obstruction rather than useful cover for infiltration.

Speaking of the disguise feature, Unity has a large number of unlockable skills, including the ability to put on a disguise with a press of a button. You earn skill points through doing certain missions and then invest them to unlock moves like the double assassination or the ability to distract enemies with money pouches. Some of these abilities are also gated behind story advancement (under the premise that Rebecca is hacking into Abstergo and giving Arno additional abilities) but you have to buy them, along with a dizzying array of equipment including armor for every part of your body, complete with tons of stat boosts and special effects, and various classes of weapons. It’s far more customization than an Assassin’s Creed game has ever had before, and it’s way too much. It operates like a pseudo RPG, and obviously the Assassin’s Creed games would go on to become full on RPGs just a few installments later, but requiring you to purchase your abilities greatly reduces your tactical choices for much of the game. You shouldn’t have to choose between stun bombs and double assassination in an Assassin’s Creed game, but you do, and I didn’t even unlock half the skill tree in the time it took to get to the credits.

Asssassin’s Creed Unity has way too much of almost everything. There’s an absolute ton of side content including investigations and Nostradamus symbols along with normal side missions. There are cafes to renovate for passive income. There are no fewer than four different types of chests to raid. There are even two sub-maps if you download the free Dead Kings DLC that they gave away to make up for the botched launch. This is a 12 hour game that would take you at least 60 hours to complete if you did everything, and I haven’t even gotten into the co-op that was supposed to be this game’s killer feature and which I did not even touch. Unity is a decent 12 hour campaign hiding in a sprawling open world game where much of the gameplay feels janky and much of the content feels too thin to sustain the time it asks of you. It feels like the team spread itself too thin making too much game instead of focusing on making a game that felt tight and good and always worked.

The mission design is one of the prime examples. Unity wants to be Assassin’s Creed Hitman Edition, and about half its missions are assassinations where you’re given a target, some “distraction” and “infiltration” opportunities (like opening a hidden entrance or springing some prisoners to fight the guards) and left to figure out how to get in and kill the enemy yourself. In theory these are really cool but in practice they’re frustrating because of the broken stealth mechanics. Also while the game gives you the opportunity for some “unique kills” (by, for example, poisoning a target’s wine or pretending to be a prisoner so you can kill an executioner) they are very limited, canned, and more trouble than they’re worth. I appreciated that Unity cut down on the tailing missions substantially from AC IV, and I think that going back to AC 1 with missions based on finding a target or assassinating them without much guidance and no instant fail stealth was good, I can’t help but wish that more time was spent making the core missions stronger rather than spewing random crud all over the map. I realize that the game was made by a decentralized team and maybe icon vomit was easier to develop that way, but the mission design promises a lot more than it delivers and I couldn’t help but wish more of the main missions were as creative as the “server jump” missions that see you moving through time and climbing unique courses to get to the exit.

Because of these mediocre missions I didn’t even bother trying the multi-player, which is still active on Xbox thanks to the recent FPS Boost for Series X owners. You can also play those missions solo and most people say that it’s pretty doable, but I just didn’t feel the need for more content. There’s a ton of single-player bespoke side stuff too, including random assassination missions and investigations where you collect evidence and accuse the right culprit and additional rift missions where you are supposed to rescue ‘trapped’ Assassins from the same glitchy areas you encounter between chapters. I sampled some of that but didn’t find it compelling either. What I liked about Unity was exploring the city, collecting chests, climbing on things and unlocking viewpoints, and enjoying the tremendous art direction. The missions themselves never reached either the heights or lows of Assassin’s Creed IV, and were mostly decent, but I had my fill of them with the main story and wasn’t looking for more.

It’s easy to criticize Assassin’s Creed Unity for everything it gets wrong, especially given its genuinely unforgivable launch. It’s easy to see it as a cheap attempt to rehash the Ezio series and churn out an uninspired “multi-player focused” uninspired game in a series that had already seen 6 main installments and several spinoffs from 2007 through 2013. That’s fair. It is those things.

But it’s impossible to explore 18th century Paris and not see that a lot of love and effort was put into this game. The story has more emotional heft than most in the series, the game’s critical path is nicely lean and devoid of repetitive trailing missions and meandering go nowhere storytelling. The Abstergo stuff is actually fun to play and exciting and the game focuses on its actual characters up through the end instead of pulling back to focus on dumb alien stuff. It’s not the best game in the series but it’s also not the worst.

I first played Unity a couple weeks ago and after getting through a chunk I put it down, unsure when I would pick it back up. After the news dropped about the departures from Giant Bomb I wanted a game that I could just get lost in for a while that evening to blunt my emotional reaction, and since starting a new game is always a pain I gave Unity another try. Getting lost in revolutionary France and focusing on scampering over rooftops to get to chests and hitting dudes in the face with a flamberge and having those dumb post assassination conversations with the targets was just what I needed. It was all so familiar it was almost comforting, and the visual detail was distracting and I managed to get absorbed in the game and not think about anything else for a while.

As flawed as Unity is it’s good enough for that. It’s good enough to provide an escape. And its familiarity and disinterest in pushing the boundaries made it even more effective at that. It’s decent comfort food gaming that’s not quite long enough to wear out its welcome. Games like that have their place. I won’t say that Assassin’s Creed Unity is a must play, and it’s very skippable from an Assassin’s Creed metastory perspective, but if you’re just looking for some Assassin’s Creed low impact fun or a gorgeous open world to clamber around in it’s worth checking out. I thought this would be the lowest point in my Assassin’s Creed series playthrough and something I’d have to force myself to finish, but it turned out to be the right game at the right time, and I enjoyed it.

"Mostly fixed" and it came out 7 years ago

Flippin heck

@sombre: I mean it was mostly fixed really soon after, it just never shook the reputation that its launch earned it.

@sombre: It's not like they're still working on it, and they haven't in a long time. They got it into fair shape and they moved on. I'm just not going to say it's "fixed" because I had 3 crashes, some minor visual bugs, and a whole lot of terrible NPC pathing. It's below average for an open world in terms of technical issues but not totally outside the norms anymore.

@efesell: I consider this game evidence in my theory that the worst kind of bugs for your reputation are bugs that produce goofy looking screenshots and videos. Nobody can get the image of those floating lips and eyeballs out of their heads. If it were "just" some progress wiping save bugs like Watch Dogs: Legion had then people would have moved on but those images circulated forever and permanently branded the game as a buggy mess. Which, to be fair, it was.

@bigsocrates: Yeah absolutely. In the same vein ME Andromeda was not a great game and was always going to disappoint but I think it would have landed with at least more of an "Eh." without weeks of meme faces and weird walk cycles on twitter.

I played this several years ago, and while I didn't have any technical problems, I just thought the game was boring and Arno was not a good protagonist. It was bad enough that I haven't finished an AC game since, and I felt it was the second worst game overall, behind AC3. I just wasn't able to find the redeeming factors in it that you did. I did, at least, appreciate the added side objectives to the main missions. They gave me something to engage with that spiced things up a bit.

The story was so so but I did find the city itself incredible, probably my favourite city from the franchise, plus the revolution powder-keg atmosphere created some surprising environmental tension. I think it suffers from a worse reputation that it deserves, though it does feel very bland in areas of its gameplay. Black Flag is still my favourite.

@redwing42: I think Arno is not a great protagonist. He's not terrible and unlikable or anything, just very bland. They want him to be Ezio so badly but he doesn't have Ezio's emotionality or charm. I won't really defend the game as not being 'boring' because the things I liked about it weren't really exciting. I mostly enjoyed exploring the city and some of the parkour and that's not exciting stuff. I don't really understand what you're saying about the side objectives. Are you talking about side missions or the "full sync" requirements like "don't get spotted in section X" or "sabotage all the alarms in section Y." If it's the latter they can be fun, but they've been in the series a long time. They're kind of a staple.

@deekyfun: It's a truly great videogame city. So incredibly detailed and beautiful, and with some of the liveliest streets ever. It's just a shame that the game launched so buggy and even when fixed can't live up to that location.

That map with all the icons is why I stopped playing. As someone who tries to get most things done, it was too overwhelming.

I still think Unit's story is more interesting, or at least more memorable for me, than any other AC game.

Arno doesn't really care about the Assassin vs Templar conflict at all, his entire motivation is his love for Elise. It made Arno a more human, mundane character, as opposed to most other AC games where the player character often plays a more heroic or more important role in the overall history of the assassins.

The main thing I like about these games is the open-world collectathon aspect, which in Unity is not significantly better or worse than any other AC game.

@omgfather: I can't imagine trying to do everything in that game. I think it's about 15 hours if you focus on the main story and do a little side stuff and like 60-80 if you try to do it all, and that's just too much. It's too much.

@warpr: I am glad the story worked for you, but I think pretty much every Assassin's Creed protagonist has some personal motivation for what they're doing. Ezio's family. Connor's desire to help his people/daddy issues. Edward's get rich or die trying focus.

Arno's initial motivation is pretty much exactly the same as Ezio's.

It's true that most characters come around to focus on the Assassins goals by the end of the game and Arno's motivations remain more personal, but personal motivations are definitely a major theme in the series.

I never finished Unity, largely because I was so sick of the map vomitus after about 12 hours that I couldn't take it anymore. But even while I was playing, I had a real love-hate thing going on with the game. In a lot of ways, Unity did some things a lot better than just about any entry in the series, but often paired it with things that were really atrocious.

1. I think they did a really great job of rendering Paris and making it feel vast and alive. In a lot of ways Unity was kind of the last AC game to really take the time to try and create a sense of place and time by accurately modeling a real historical place. More recent AC games feel more like "a fantasy world inspired by a historical period" rather than feeling like the actual location (looking at you, AC: Odyssey and/or Valhalla).

Having said that, for all the detail, there are a ton of areas around the margins where the game world just kind of falls apart. There are so many buildings where the upper stories aren't connected to anything. You'll enter a window to fully furnished 2nd story room only to realize that there is no other way in. There are no stairs from the lower level and no ladders out back. Apparently everyone in Revolutionary France was Spider-man.

2. In terms of rendering crowds and mobs on the streets, the game was great and it actually looked and felt like shit was going down. However, I was super-disappointed that the game didn't involve you more in historical events. The game suffers from the same problem as AC3 in that The Revolution is kind of a thing going on in the background rather than something you are shaping as a player. This is compared to AC2, where you are often a central player in actual historical events, which was always more thrilling to me.

3. I thought the combat was really bad in Unity. For me, a lot of this comes down to animation design. Prior games, especially AC3, focused on looking good rather than being particularly skill based or challenging. However, the animations did look awesome and definitely added to the power fantasy aspect that you are supposed to be this master-assassin super-hero character.

Unity tried to slow down the combat and make it slightly more challenging. One the one hand, I appreciate the attempt at making combat more than "Press X to counter-kill." On the other hand, the animations don't read particularly well and none of the combatants ever look very skilled (seriously, Arno is capital-T Terrible at swordsmanship. As someone who fenced in college, there are things going on in the fighting that give me the Inspector Dryfuss eye-twitch). The consequence is that the game falls into this middle-ground where you lose the power-fantasy of prior games while not gaining any sense that the system is more skill-based.

I played this a couple months ago after a bunch of conversations about it being a secret highlight of the series. I thought it was solid.

Plagued by some microtransaction stuff—in the late game it becomes excruciatingly clear that in order to get fully upgraded armor and weapons, you'll need to drop some cash. I ended up putting a few bucks in to get there, which seemed fair since I got the game so cheap, but is still hard not to feel a tiny bit gross about.

I really like Arno and Elise. A romance plot that develops over the course of an entire game is pretty rare, so it was cool to experience their history and interactions, and the eventual fate. I could see it being divisive where that story ended up, but it worked for me. The whole game is about Arno overcoming his recklessness and to see Elise, and other people in his life, stuck in that cycle and sort of dragging him down was interesting. She's kind of an untraditional villain, a good person whose actions are bad for you.

Outside of the story stuff, I thought it was good enough mechanically. AC pretty much figured out what it was by this point, so nothing about the combat or traversal was particularly surprising. That said, it was a good reminder of all the problems with that traversal system. I don't know that modern AC's "climb anything" approach is the right solution, but there's nothing more frustrating than being in a chase sequence and your character refusing to jump to the ledge you want them to.

One tech thing I'll mention, the crowds, even by today's standards, are very impressive. Absolutely massive amounts of people, probably more than I've ever seen in a video game, and it's not a noticeable performance hit when they're on screen. Granted for all they do, they might as well just be plants, and I assume that's more or less how that works on the back end. Nonetheless, it actually feels cool when you run into a massive crowd to lose the guards chasing you.

I don't have much to say since I didn't play much of this one but I do agree its a good game. One thing I remember liking about it was these French history puzzles that had you following clues and uncovering the mystery while getting a bit of a history lesson as well. I wish there was more stuff like that in new entries instead of a thousand copy pasta quests like Odyssey was filled with.

I played it for the first time earlier this year on my series x and I agree, after all this time, the widely reported buggyness at launch is gone. The frame rate is a solid 60. It looks gorgeous. It plays... fine.

The story though. What a criminally wasted opportunity... the sheer squandering of potential considering the period (and the speculated templar involvement in the French revolution) is astonishing. Instead we get a tepid Romeo and Juliet tale. Templar and Assassin fall in love. Etc. etc.

Overall. Better than AC3. Perhaps better than AC4 even (just)... but that's as far as I'd go.