I Needed a Revolution

Assassin's Creed Unity is the first AC game that I have liked since the first game. Unity is also the first AC game that I have actually beaten the story in. The original AC and Unity are not the only games that I have played in the series. In fact, I have played 2, 3, and 4 as well, but never even managed to get passed the too drawn out tutorial portions of any of those games. However, Unity grabbed me and for some reason I didn't want to let it go until I had finished what Arno had set out to do.

Now as anyone that will read this will be quick to point out, Unity is by no means a perfect game. It's not even close. I managed to get through the game with "only" three crashes, two that required my system to hard reboot. The controls are still frustrating at times, causing an abundance of swearing. And I still hate guns.

However, what Unity allows me to do, or at least allowed me to do earlier than previous games, is to set out to "break" the way it should be played. I'm one who will go and do a bunch of side stuff just to upgrade my character into a killing machine as soon as possible so I can easily get through the main portion of the game. I was outgeared before I had finished the second assassination, and I couldn't have been happier. I was buying legendary gear near the end of the game without having ever done any of the co-op heists. I could have easily brute forced my way through anything, but a lot of the time I didn't.

Knowing that I could just fight off almost anything allowed me to actually slow down and try to be sneaky. I tried to do the side objectives, I tried to go unspotted, and I tried to assassinate my targets using stealth. If things didn't go my way or stealth wasn't really the way to assassinate the target, Lord of the Rats I'm looking at you and your easily shot face, I could still finish the task and survive what was thrown at me. At the end of the game it did make me have to change my style a little bit, berserk arrows become a fun friend, but I didn't have to change too much.

I also enjoyed Arno a lot more than previous characters in the series, although I did like Altair too. He's not the greatest character in the world, but he was a fun character that as seemed to not care about killing people that deserved it, much like how I played the game. The story gets weird at the end, with Arno even saying what I said about the final boss's sword (except I said "fuck" while he said "hell"). But it was enough to keep me going throughout and made me happy to have finished it.

Maybe I just like the "bad" AC games. Maybe if I got passed the tutorial portions of the previous games I would have enjoyed them as well. But maybe that's a telling thing about those games that while Unity was able to keep me going through its tutorial portion, the other games weren't engaging enough to me to do the same. I've thought about going back to AC 4, but if I can't do the same thing that I did in Unity I will probably just give up again.

In the end though, and I may be the one in the minority, I hope they continue with what they did in Unity and that they make sure it's less broken next time.