November guarantees us colder weather, longer nights, the unveiling of the John Lewis Christmas advert and, most inevitably of all, a new Assassin’s Creed. In fact this year we have two: Rogue for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Unity for the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Unity is the one Ubisoft really needs to deliver, as they look to launch their most popular triple-A franchise into the current generation with a game built from the ground up to take the series forward.
Assassin’s Creed has become stale in the eyes of many, with last year’s Black Flag a surprise hit because of how it embraced its piratical theme rather than because it took the core mechanics of the series forward. Unity is far more rooted in the traditional Assassin’s Creed formula, with a huge city to explore and a bounty of assassination targets to take down. This back-to-basics approach is intriguing because of how it focuses on the series’ core concepts and ambitiously seeks to escalate them. This ambition helps to make Unity admirably open-ended, and it comes with glimpses of evolution. Unfortunately, there are too many aggravating pitfalls to make Unity a recommendable purchase amid such fierce open world competition this holiday season.
The focus for creative director Alex Amancio is on what he describes as ‘the three pillars’ of Assassin’s Creed gameplay: traversal, combat and stealth. Free-running mechanics have been tweaked to allow for greater mobility when it comes to traversing the environments. Its most obvious and welcome benefit comes from the fact that you no longer have to seek out a hay stack each and every time you wish to descend from atop a building, as a button combination now exists to make your way down just as easily as you made your way up.
At its core, though, bounding around Paris isn’t a markedly different experience from making your way around any of the other cities the series has visited in the past. It’s important to consider a game for what it is rather than what it isn’t, getting around in Unity’s Paris can feel a little archaic compared to the freedom of movement afforded to you in other open-world games.
It doesn’t help matters there will still be occasions on which you’ll find yourself accidentally scaling a piece of set dressing or leaping from the wrong angle of a rooftop because of the sheer number of climbable surfaces the game is trying to decipher you wish to interact with. It’s an unfortunate case of ambition producing problems that go hand-in-hand with the system’s new-found potential, and it’s something that permeates much of what Unity attempts to do.
Combat is one such area, and also another with which it’s hard not to draw comparisons with other games. Shadow of Mordor unashamedly riffed on Rocksteady’s patented free-flowing Batman combat in order to guarantee that players were capable of leaping from one foe to another with ease, and Unity’s offering feels restrictive in comparison. Despite claims that the combat system had been overhauled, it doesn’t feel all that different from Assassin’s Creed titles of recent years. There still isn’t that much to it – you attack, you dodge, you counter – and it can feel slow and unresponsive when moving from one enemy to another. The ability to chain kills together has also been removed, which only exacerbates the fact that Assassin’s Creed’s combat is still a far cry from the empowering sense of awesomeness you get from The Dark Knight.
One area in which Amancio’s team has delivered on the promise of a big stride forward is in stealth. There’s nothing groundbreaking about having your character crouch when holding down one of the trigger buttons, but what it does for Assassin’s Creed cannot be overstated. After seven years of being bound by stealth mechanics that didn’t exist beyond contextual stances (despite a plethora of mission objectives insisting that you remain hidden), being able to crouch at any time is an extremely welcome addition. The ‘last position’ silhouette employed in Shadow of Mordor is also present, and remains a clever and thoughtful idea. It’s rather baffling to see whistling taken out, though, which can make some sneaking sequences longer than they really should be as you wait for enemies to make a move.
Central to the motivation behind reworking the mechanics is the aforementioned freedom afforded to you in how you approach assassinations. Whilst Unity still harbors plenty of story and side tasks that it would very much like you to complete in a specific way, the assassinations themselves allow for a far greater degree of player choice and creativity. Your first assassination takes place at Notre Dame Cathedral, and you’re immediately told by your accomplice to ‘devise your own plan’, as if to hammer home the point that you can approach these scenarios however you wish. The inherent unpredictability of an open world makes this freedom both a blessing and a curse, as the most meticulously well thought out plan can be brought to its knees by a spasm in the AI (enemies are, as usual, pretty busted).
When such plans do come off, though, Unity is capable of producing the most satisfying moments of sneaky murder in the series to date. Utilizing the warring factions or aggravated peasants to your advantage in order to create a chaotic distraction whilst you lock pick an ornate window and dive into a building under lockdown is genuinely thrilling. Cornering your helpless target having picked off his guards even more so. If you prefer you can just go in all guns blazing/all swords waving and hope for the best, and this variability in approach is supported by the way you can deck out your character.
The character of Arno can be customized to your liking. There are a tonne of equipment, weapon and skill options, and it’s neat to experiment. Variables such as health bonuses, damage protection and mobility need to be considered, and each piece of equipment also has a unique visual appearance that can make your decisions as much to with aesthetics as they are with practicality. Your choice of tailoring can also receive a change of colour, which adds a further dash of your own personality to Arno. Equipment and skills are unlocked at a fair rate, although some of it will depend on how committed you are to looting chests and corpses. If you don’t have the required patience then you’re generously invited to spend real money on an in-game currency that allows you to purchase as much of the equipment as you like, which will undoubtedly rub some people the wrong way.
This ability to mix and match Arno’s loadout is especially encouraged when playing co-operatively, and there’s no denying the novelty of seeing four assassins crawling up Parisian landmarks in various different guises. There’s also something to be said for infiltrating Notre Dame in matching outfits, allowing you all to look absolutely fabulous as you go about whichever brutal murder you have planned for that particular session. Co-op comes in the form of specific missions, most of which task you with infiltrating a particular area and assassinating a target. They’re well designed and worth checking out, but you can also completely ignore them if you’d rather keep to yourself. Co-op is a neat addition, but it’s not built into the core experience. There’s no drop-in/drop-out open world co-op, just set missions that you access in the same way you would any other task in the game.
Whilst we’re on the subject of playing with others, there is no competitive multiplayer of any kind, which will undoubtedly disappoint those who had embraced the feature since it debuted in Brotherhood. I guess there’s Rogue if you’re desperate.
That’s not to say that Unity is skimping on content, as Paris is absolutely rammed with things to do. It’s actually quite daunting how rammed the map is with icons. There are the usual healthy selection of story missions, synchronization points, treasure chests, creed contracts, opportunities to renovate businesses and plenty of other collectibles, and Unity also introduces proper side missions for the first time in the series.
Proper in the sense that there’s actually a quest log, and you can pick up as many missions as you see fit and track them for completion whenever you feel like a break from the story. These side missions come in the form of investigations, tracking down clues, fetch quests, chase sequences and yet more grizzly murder. Each comes with their own little bits of exposition and it’s most welcome to engage in side content that actually feels fleshed out and relatively significant. Retrieving guillotine heads for Madame Tussaud is silly but does help to further dress up Unity’s world.
In terms of story, Unity spins a decent yarn. There’s a typically late title card that heralds you into your role as a member of the Creed, but even the hour or so of prologue exposition beforehand is fairly well done. Don’t worry, you won’t be waiting until the eighth story sequence before you actually get inducted into the order.
Despite the wealth of customization options, Arno isn’t the blank slate of a character that you may have suspected. The highly marketed relationship he holds with childhood friend Elise is quite well written, and there’s enough emotional investment to keep you going through to the end despite a number of leaps of logic and plot conveniences that don’t fully convince. It’s a little odd that everyone speaks with an English accent considering the setting, but the cast do an admirable job bringing life to the characters on show.
Unity’s narrative also isn’t helped by the inherent issues posed by the game’s more open-ended nature, which can leave the story fairly muddled and lacking in urgency. It remains impressive how Ubisoft’s writers are able to weave historical figures into their Assassins vs. Templar backdrop, though.
The modern day exposition running alongside Arno’s adventure is completely superfluous and used only as an excuse for why the game exists. It was much the same in Black Flag, but here it’s delivered in a far more streamlined manner that lacks the same commitment to the tongue-in-cheek, fourth-wall-breaking ridiculousness that last year’s modern sequences so charming.
Like every Assassin’s Creed city before it (except the ones in III, obviously), the treacherous streets of Revolutionary Paris have been wonderfully crafted. The intricacy in its recreation is nothing short of astounding, and the increased draw distance really does make the sense of scale hit home all the harder. Being able to enter buildings seamlessly further emphasizes the city’s incredible scope. Once again the art direction is top tier, with the game sporting a soft look, great lighting and a splendid palette that makes it look almost like a painting come to life. Characters also look great, especially in cut-scenes. They’re well animated, and the detail offered to the period-appropriate outfits is as good as you’d expect.
So far, so Assassin’s Creed, and because of that it was never going to be for everyone anyway. What makes Unity so difficult to recommend at all is that all those fine visuals have come at a major cost to the game’s performance, something that completely undermines the rest of the experience. There are consistent framerate drops to the low 20s, sometimes frames are skipped entirely, and only interior locations manage to retain the norm without too much issue. Sections with severe lag can become close to unplayable, it’s consistently noticeable enough to be a deal-breaker for some – and this is with a 900 MB day one patch installed.
Having large crowd scenes is obviously something the development team were keen to include because of the revolutionary setting, and whilst the number of NPCs on screen is certainly impressive the first time you see it, it soon loses its luster once it becomes apparent that the engine is struggling to cope. It’s especially bothersome during sequences of anything approaching frenzy; it’s easy to lose your bearings during a particularly tricky piece of parkouring if the framerate is chugging.
Unity is a flawed game as it is, but certainly one that should provide enough enjoyment for what it still manages to be. It’s a real kick in the teeth that the performance issues are significant enough to make even the game’s best moments difficult to enjoy to their fullest. Thankfully the game’s audio stands up to scrutiny thanks to excellent voice acting and a typically brilliant musical score (there is no singing, and the game is very keen to point out that this is not the same French Revolution as that one with Hugh Jackman). Ambient sounds are also great, with choirs outside Notre Dame and demonstrations against the city’s police force making Paris feel all the more alive.
If it didn’t run so poorly, the streets of Unity’s depiction of the French capital feel so authentic that you could probably get away with using it as a teaching tool in schools. Who wants to read text books anymore, seriously?
Unity feels like Ubisoft’s attempt at answering a similar question – who wants to play Assassin’s Creed anymore? Well, nobody wants to play anything at 20 frames-per-second, but leave that to one side for now and consider that Black Flag resonated because it placed its focus upon a mechanic that was entirely new (ignore that ships were in III, just ignore III completely actually). To most it was a great pirate simulator that just happened to be held up by an Asssassin’s Creed engine. Plenty of people seemed done with the formula, which is why Black Flag was such a welcome and pleasant tonic.
By returning to its roots, Unity is a gamble. There’s a reason many claim to be more excited for Rogue than Unity, and that’s because it’s another game that embraces something so far removed from what ultimately makes the heart of Assassin’s Creed beat. Those seeking open world action adventures are finding themselves drawn elsewhere, looking for something new, or something that does better with Assassin’s Creed’s main tenants. Unity’s ambition has allowed Amancio’s team to begin improving upon the foundations so many have grown tired of, but it’s at an unforgivable cost to performance.
Those who are still invested in Assassin’s Creed may be encouraged by the steps Unity takes, but even these are undermined by the abundance of extreme technical issues. Those who have long outgrown the series are unlikely to find anything here to change their mind, either. Strange as it sounds, Assassin’s Creed Unity is a game that is held back both by its roots and its attempts to progress. Even without the performance problems it’s a game that doesn’t quite feel like the final form of some admirable ideas, and with them it often resembles nothing short of a mess.