Now Playing: Assassin’s Creed: Unity

Assassin’s Creed: Unity is easily the worst Assassin’s Creed game I’ve played. It’s even worse than the extremely dull Assassin’s Creed 3. The only reason I even played Unity is because Ubisoft were giving it away for free following the tragic fire at Notre-Dame. It seemed like a nice gesture, but I’m now wondering if they were only giving it away for free because who the hell would want to pay for this turd?

Unity feels like an incomplete, half-assed game compared to Black Flag, or even AC 3. AC 3 was boring to play, but at least it had a good variety of content and effort put into it. Unity, in comparison, feels like a shell of a game.

I quite liked Arno, the protagonist, but that’s about the only good thing I can say about the characters or story. It’s an incredibly dull and ultimately inconsequential tale set during the French Revolution. If there’s one thing I do always like about the AC games, regardless of their quality, it’s the historical settings. It’s just a shame Unity doesn’t really do anything interesting with it.

 

They’ve stripped the ‘modern world’ aspect of AC to an absolute minimum in Unity, but this doesn’t feel like a decision made based on feedback from players who didn’t like it, and more of a ‘let’s cut costs and push this shit out the door’ kind of decision. And a lot of Unity feels rushed and knocked together on the cheap.

The map of Paris is large and nice to explore, but there is a lack of variety in terms of environments and the vast majority of the map doesn’t even factor into any of the missions. And the missions of Unity are, overall, poorly designed and just not very fun. I found stealth to be absolutely pointless and it was far easier to just charge at my targets, stab them, and then drop a smoke bomb to escape.

Trying to plan, to use stealth and strategy is a waste of time when the AI is so bad you can just run straight at your target and kill them before they can react, and then escape before their friends can stop you. The main missions are bad enough, but the side missions are even worse and you really won’t miss out on anything by skipping them entirely.

 

Like previous AC games you have a home ‘base’ you can upgrade, but like so many aspects of Unity, this feels half-assed and tacked on. The upgrades you can buy are rather meaningless and don’t even change much visually. You can also purchase ‘social clubs’ around the city which unlock missions to ‘liberate’ the local area, although this doesn’t actually seem to do anything.

It’s a bit like the random ‘tackle the thief’ missions which pop up as you explore. You can tackle the thief, at which point they just awkwardly stand up and walk away. There’s no reward, no feedback that you returned what they stole, no thanks from the npc who called for help . . . just nothing. Like I said, so many aspects of Unity just feel tossed in and incomplete.

I only finished Unity yesterday but I’m already struggling to recall most of it, which gives you an idea of how dull and uneventful it is. I guess one positive aspect is the combat, which at least – early on – provides more of a challenge than AC 3 or Black Flag. The character customisation / weapon selection is also nice, but once you unlock and purchase better gear, it also totally kills the difficulty and combat becomes a joke.

 

Graphically, Unity can look very nice – particularly the main character models – and the city is nicely detailed, aside from the times the game randomly drops the resolution turning everything into a blurry mess.

Unity also has a lot of visual glitches and bugs. When you’re running through the city you’ll frequently see textures loading in on npcs. The size of some of the crowds is impressive, but their animations can go totally wonky and it’s not unusual to see people sitting on invisible chairs, talking to npcs which haven’t loaded in, or stuck in a loop, running on top of a box.

I certainly didn’t go into Unity expecting to dislike it. I was actually kind of hopeful. I haven’t played an AC game since Black Flag and I really liked that one. And at first, Unity seemed like it might be a pretty decent game, but the more I played, the more I realised how unfinished it felt. The missions became increasingly tedious and the story, ultimately, just went nowhere. The final few missions were a disjointed mess and the game ends with a absolutely terrible boss fight.

Overall, Assassin’s Creed: Unity is a bad game that’s just not worth your time. The only really good thing I can say about it is that it kind of makes me want to play Black Flag again. Even if you can get it for free, like I did, I’d still say it’s not worth playing and you’re not missing out on anything by skipping it.

4/10