Tuesday, April 4, 2017

The Post-Game - Assassin's Creed: Unity

Assassin’s Creed Unity is the massively bloated sibling of Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood. One big city, run around, do stuff, occasionally travel to out-lying areas. Stunning graphics (and facial animations) can’t hide the huge amount filler missions / collectibles and awful implementation of the traditional Assassin’s Creed parkour / free-running system. Unity is easily one of the more frustrating entries in the franchise. Oh, and there are co-op missions. Not that anyone is playing.
Total size on my hard drive: 49.4 GB



+ Great graphics. The level of detail is superb. Facial animations are generally great too.

+ Loved the massive crowds. Blending into a crowd feels completely natural.

+ Co-op works well, though good luck randomly finding anyone to play with.

+ Well-optimized on PC in 2017.

+ Great soundtrack.

+ Ubisoft was clearly trying for Ezio 2.0 with Arno Dorian; he is charming one instant and grittily determined the next. A good character, even if his arc is something we’ve seen before from Ubisoft.


+/- The story is… odd. Someone brings a blindfolded Templar into the Assassin headquarters (seriously?!). Another has a traitor taking extreme action because – he wasn’t good at arguing, wasn’t able to convince someone of his point of view? Things frequently happen because the plot needs them to happen, not because they make any particular sense.


- Many story elements feel half-baked. A sword of Eden? Where did it come from? Who made it? How did wind up in France in the 14th century? What is its significance to the sage? No clue.

- Arno’s Eagle vision doesn’t function like Ezio’s or even Edward’s. It only serves to highlight enemies and objects of interest – it can’t trace the steps of patrol patterns.

- An attempt to introduce boss battles mostly fails. The final boss starts well, but ends as a joke as the exact same pattern can be repeated multiple times to win – the boss never adjusts to a particular tactic.

- Poorly designed assassination missions. Either too easy or too hard. I breezed through almost every 5-star difficulty mission, but died repeatedly on several 3-star missions. All offer alternate methods of completion, but several of those alternate methods are simply broken (*cough*La Touche*cough*).

- Edge-detection, so important in a parkour / free-running game, is some of the worst in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. There are some classic gifs of Ezio, Altair, and others randomly leaping to their deaths, getting stuck on merchant stalls, and the like. But this kind of thing happens so often in Unity it’s not funny. Worse, it creates issues when trying to stealth. Sometimes Arno will slip through a window when asked, other times he perches on edge of the roof like an idiot, twitching but not going through the window. Sometimes he’ll go in the direction the camera is facing; more often, though, he’ll go across the camera. I understand that optimizing a world of the size of Unity’s would require a titanic amount of work, but it doesn’t feel like Ubisoft even optimized their algorithm, formula, parameter, or what ever it is they used for the edge-detection.

- The delay before standing up from a chest, or taking off running, or getting back on your feet after being knocked down is programmed into the animation. I though it was input lag at first, but it’s not. I wonder who the idiot was who thought that was a good idea. Combine this with the issues with edge-detection, and AC Unity is easily one of the most frustrating games I’ve ever played.

- Combat is heavy-footed and clumsy. No more kill-chains. Or counter kills. You can dodge-roll, though...

- Too many collectibles. Most provide nothing except the satisfaction that comes from seeing a completely clean map.

- Many meaningless side-missions, if they can even be called that. Go to the Assassin icon on the map, get the briefing, walk around a corner, stab someone, voila! Mission completed.

- Meaningless street missions. Catch a thief, prevent a citizen from being killed, kill the criminals. It will all happen dozens of times.

- Accumulate money fast. Makes the collectibles even more meaningless.

- Paris looks flat and boring from the roof-tops. Few landmarks means you’ll be constantly referring to your map just to find your way around.


Assassin’s Creed Unity does feel like a massively expanded Brotherhood. But there is no Volpe, no Machiavelli, no Leonardo, and we’re not fighting the Borgias. The vendetta in Unity is on a personal level, and what made previous assassins (and Ezio in particular) special is that they found a way to rise above the petty grievances to work for a cause greater than themselves. In contrast, Arno joins the assassins in a fit of anger and spends much of the game seeking his personal revenge, only caring about the Creed in the final voice-over. Unity’s beautiful game-world becomes the backdrop to a blah story, a massive amount of collectibles and horrible parkour – all of which scream of a missed opportunity.