Assassin's Creed: Unity (2014, Playstation 4) Review

REVOLUTION FOR DUMMIES

Also for: Stadia, Windows, Xbox One

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Only two stars, huh? Let's try to disregard the average review score for a moment, because if you cherrypick it, Assassin's Creed: Unity can be quite a cool game. In this eighth installment of Ubisoft's popular franchise, the main storyline is dramatic and emotional. It's spearheaded by Arno Dorian, a Parisian anti-hero driven by carnal desires and a sense of self-entitlement. He is an Ezio (the Assassin's Creed II-protagonist) for the new generation, a dark and vengeful young stud with a British accent, and the occasional seductive French term sprinkled on top.

After a brief playable introduction, which depicts the assassination of his father when Arno was a kid, the player takes control of him again as a playboy in his twenties. He's become the ward of a distinguished gentleman named Francois de la Serre, and finds himself in a steamy love affair with de la Serre's beautiful daughter, Elise. It's the late 18th century, and the French revolution is about to take place.

When Francois also gets murdered, and Arno gets falsely accused and imprisoned for the crime, his life changes course completely. He swears to avenge the old man. With the aid of a fellow prisoner - who happens to be an Assassin - he breaks out of jail and joins the Parisian brotherhood in their quest to unravel the conspiracy behind the French revolution. He gets motivated further by the fact that it's connected to his foster-father's murder. And as usual in this franchise, along the way our hero meets some local celebrities of the time, like Marie Tussaud and Marquis de Sade.

To end the conspiracy, you must assassinate a number of Templar agents. These missions are varied and somewhat open-ended, supporting a number of different, creative approaches. Some of them allow you to unlock alternate ways to reach your target. How about firing off a fireworks display to distract a bunch of soldiers guarding a gate you need to enter? And then, maybe you'd prefer sneaking into a crowded party and putting poison into the assassination mark's goblet?

A few sequences end with amazing, brief escapades into alternate timelines, a really cool concept that turns out to be the game's crowning achievement. How about visiting "La Belle Époque", if only for a moment, and try to escape a tornado? Or how about climbing the Eiffel Tower in a World War II-setting, while the German Luftwaffe tries to shoot you down? The main mission designs are by far the best ones yet, and I hope this becomes the new standard going forward.

Overall, the world design is marvellous. The French revolution of 18th Century Paris is the liveliest setting yet, its streets teeming with poor, hungry and angry protesters, all demanding to see the aristocracy hang. From the cafés you can hear "La Marseillaise" and other sing-along revolutionary hymns, uniting the peasantry and bourgeoisie against the ruling nobility.

Each district has its own unique atmosphere. The rich Parisian history is on full display through the different landmarks like the Bastille, the Louvre and all the different museums, cathedrals and market squares. And of course you can read up on their significance in the entertaining database.

Unity was the series debut on the eighth generation of consoles - i.e. the PS4 and Xbox One - and it remains visually impressive to this day, even as it approaches its 10th anniversary. Looking down from the rooftops upon the masses, and the scope of it all, is breathtaking, and an indication that Ubisoft knew how to make good use of the new hardware. If this franchise is about immersing the player in a historical setting, Unity is, alongside Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, its most successful entry yet.

It also adds a bit more customizability to your assassin. By upgrading your armor, tools and weapons you can increase your combat prowess. Completing main quests rewards you with experience points to invest in skills that can steer your playstyle toward stealth or combat. Weapons come in a few different categories - like one-handed blades, long weapons and rifles - which lets you try different fighting styles. It's the baby steps towards the full-fledged leveling mechanic that Assassin's Creed: Origins purportedly gave rise to (I haven't played it yet), and it can unlock some game-changing skills.

In most other regards, Unity resets the franchise to its core values. You're stuck in one city, and can only traverse on foot. It attempts to refine the gameplay mechanics and evolve them a little. You can now easily traverse upwards and downwards by holding different buttons as you parkour. It is still not rock solid, with automated control assist interfering with your intentions every time you get close to anything but flat, open space.

Upon release, Unity faced a lot of ridicule for its flamboyant glitches, most of which has since been patched out. What's not been patched - and now I'm gonna unleash the vitriol - is the pointlessness of the sandbox surrounding the main plot. Just like, for instance, the more recent open-world RPG Cyberpunk 2077, Unity reduces the side activities to cookie-cutter filler-bloat - and there's a lot of it.

Even the most elaborate side missions consist of little more than the core gameplay mechanics, with only a few brief sentences functioning as placeholder mission briefings. These missions all play out the same. Approach your target, assassinate him and maybe loot his corpse. Fulfil some optional objectives - avoiding detection, for instance - for a slightly higher reward.

Without the firm guidance of directing hands and careful mission design, the gameplay simply isn't good enough. These side missions are functional, but nothing more, and grow repetitive all too fast. I should also mention that you can team up with other players online for certain contracts, but needless to say I never tried it (I'm a proud, born-and-bred single player).

 

And for some reason, you can assist the police investigating a few different murder scenarios. These - or at least the handful I tried - are all walking-sims; uninteresting and poorly motivated offshoots from everything that could make the game fun. Even as they represent something brand new, they're the bottom of the barrel.

Devoid of all the surrounding drama, the side distractions make the main game suffer, reducing its impact to a whimper. My average review score stems from dredging this stuff for too long, hoping to find something of value. I never did. "It's like butter scraped over too much bread", as Bilbo Baggins told Frodo in Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. If you focus on the main story, the game might actually deserve three stars. But once I realized this it was too late, and I couldn't get back into the groove.

I'll let world map (above) illustrate what I mean, as it is hidden underneath a junkyard of icons of different colors. It looks like someone ate all the Lego-pieces and barfed them all over the floor; layer upon layer of collectibles and generic sidequests with rewards so meagre you can hardly restore your ammo reserves afterwards. At one point I couldn't find the main quest marker, because it was buried beneath a pile of side quest icons and collectibles. I had to sort through the map filters to find it.

Equally pointless is the modern-day framing storyline. It has been part of the experience since the first game, and exists to connect the series' overarching lore (and possibly explain its fanciful graphical user interface). In this entry it gets almost completely sidelined. Here's a summary: "An 18th-century assassin named Arno once met a sage. We, the neo-assassins, want the sage's DNA. Enter the Animus (your console), play Arno's story and find the sage's last known location." Reduced to mere cinematics, the framing story is just there because something would feel amiss without it.

It's very weak, but you know what? Controversial opinion ahead: I'm glad to be rid of that stuff. Playing as Desmond Miles as a neo-Assassin was never fun. In fact, I hope that Ubisoft removes the Abstergo storyline altogether in future entries, like a burst appendix, because I've long since lost interest in that conspiracy crap. I don't need it to motivate the historical exploration.

Here's another point of contention: what happened to the controls? Why is Arno such an ungraceful slugger of an assassin? Why does he respond with such a delay as I'm fending off Templar guards? Why does he stumble as I try to make my way through the crowded alleyways?

I feel like he's the most unskilled of all the protagonists yet, which in turn makes Unity the hardest game in the series. Some missions are unforgiving as hell, with alarm bells everywhere, 40-50 enemy guards patrolling the premises and no checkpoints from beginning to end. You have to make every bullet, berserk blade and throwing dagger count, otherwise you might feel like a mouse in a crazy cat lady's home.

Nothing's inherently wrong with a good challenge, of course. But Arno's automated animations make him look like a parkour champ, which contradicts his clunky moveset. When he wants to, he can jump farther than anyone. He climbs faster than most of his predecessors and literally leaps up the side of cathedrals and castles. Without an effort, he can find his way down the smoothest surface. But when you're in full control, chasing a random fleeing assassination target down a street can feel like treading water.

The main flaws with the series remain. Assassin's Creed: Unity cannot get its systemic gameplay right - it needs the support of clever mission design and good writing. Otherwise it feels too clunky, as you keep stumbling around like a drunkard, accidentally climbing around window frames instead of through them, or assassinating one guard instead of the intended double-kill, allowing the other one to escape and alert the entire encampment.

And ever since Assassin's Creed II got the Assassin formula right, no tweaking has overshadowed the fact that we're essentially still playing iterations of ACII. No wonder, then, that my favorite Assassin's Creed game remains Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, the one that innovated the gameplay by turning it into an immersive pirate simulator. Maybe that's it; only revolutions can make this series relevant again. With an annual or biennial release schedule, that won't happen often.

An immersive, revolutionary setting alone isn't enough, which both this game and Assassin's Creed III (which took place around the American declaration of independence) demonstrate. The revolution also needs to be tied to the way you interact with the game.

Give me a Cold War-era paranoia thriller about an inmate in an insane asylum, who escapes into the Animus of his own mind. Or how about the fatigued psyche of an overworked farmhand in medieval times? 

How can you make assassin gameplay or plotlines out of premises like that, you ask? Well, I dunno, but I'd like to see Ubisoft try. Just don't make me repeat stale thoughts and old combat maneuvers again. The Assassins' ancient dream of freedom never dies. It unites every human being, and I'd be sad to see a game series about such a subject matter become a hostage to its old formula.