Reviews// Assassin's Creed: Unity

From here on out, the game plays like most AC games before it - you wander the city taking part in adventures that either form part of the core game story, or you take part in side missions that earn you points of three kinds, each of which can be spent in different ways. You’ll need these in-game currencies to renovate properties, which gives you access to further missions. To buy weapons and supplies, and to upgrade your skills.

Upgrading your skills is key to progressing through the game. One very obvious example is the Lock Pick skill. Many of the treasure chests that are scattered around the city are either locked, or located behind locked doors, and you must pick the locks to gain access. Locks can have one, two or three tumblers, and if you only have level one lock picking skills opening the more advanced locks is possible, but extremely difficult. Time to upgrade.

As well as locked chests, there are also Initiate and Nomad chests, one of which requires you to increase your initiate level - done by signing up to a UPlay account online. The other requires you to play Nomad Mission in the Assassins Creed Companion App. It’s all micro-transaction and upscale bait, which while it is central to publisher’s revenue strategies moving forwards, still pisses me off on a game with a £50 price tag!

There is also an upgrade path for your combat and stealth skills, and how you choose to spend your scarce resources will affect how you can tackle each mission.

Completing missions is a matter of combining stealth with combat, and different players will favour different strategies. Mission difficulty changes drastically with each approach, and it really is one of the most rewarding parts of the game. You are playing in a post-ranged-weapon world - your opponents have guns. So scaling a building is not always a guaranteed escape, as snipers can take shots at you while you are doing so.

Some missions require that you play in multiplayer. These missions are not vital to completion of the single-player game, but are there for when you have a friend around or wish to play online. Each player brings their skills from their own game and plays co-operatively to complete missions that would not be doable by a single assassin working alone.

Because, for many players, Paris would not be Paris until the recently new Tour Eiffel can be seen on the sky-line, the game introduces a MacGuffin to introduce it. When one of the VR servers you are in de-stabilizes, you are forced through a rift to another server, and the intervening temporal destabilisation allows the Eiffel Tower to make an appearance in pre-revolution Paris. It’s a blatant cheat, but it delights nonetheless.

Expecting Assassins Creed Unity to astound and delight as much as the games did four years ago is asking the impossible of Ubisoft, and predictably they have failed. But they’ve made an admirable attempt, and while this may not be amongst the best Assassin's Creed games, it’s still among the best games of the year.

Pros:
+ Huge and immersive (as always)
+ Incredibly beautiful and familiar Paris game world
+ More from a winning formula

Cons:
- Long load times
- Those framerate issues
- Not innovative enough

SPOnG Score: 8/10