Assassin's Creed: Unity Review

I played Assassin's Creed Unity back in 2015 and I absolutely hated my time with it. Both this along with Watch Dogs 2 made me question how Ubisoft made games with well made stealth mechanics like Splinter Cell went on to made stealth system that never felt nearly as refined by comparison. Playing SC Blacklist a few years before playing Unity made me question how Ubisoft ever managed to reach such a whole new low even it's cover mechanics felt inferior to something like the first Watch Dogs game.

After recently playing Mirage and Syndicate, I started to slowly warm up to the series more and I decided to return to the game that caused my near 10 year long hate boner for AC. I always heard Unity was better than both and especially after the recent cult following Unity got, is it?

Kind of. ACU really could've been the best game in the series by a large country mile but it fumbles when it comes to moment to moment polish and mechanics that it is hard not to be frustrated by the game while also getting enjoyment at the same time.

The good things about ACU is that the story is surprisingly decent, I always prefered when Assassin's Creed aimed for grey morality compared to the boring edgy 80s cartoons of the Ezio games, and Unity is the former, I like Arno as a protagonist who unlike Ezio, the inciding incident that starts Arno's story is actually his fault as opposed to things being out of his control like with Ezio. Him and Elise share an endearing bond of being on opposite sides and them trying to do the right thing from their own points of view. Bellac steals much of the show and I really wished he got more screen time since I found him to be really interesting with his cynism.

ACU much like AC1 has Arno reveal more of an overarching conspiracy the more the plot goes on and Arno starts questioning a lot of it much like Altair.

This leads me to my next positive, you actually feel like a stealthy assassin in ACU instead of some generic action movie hero like many ACs. All the missions are either about gathering intel and performing assassinations which more akin to what AC1 tried to but didn't have the stealth reinforcement, mechanics or design to fully realize it. Combat in ACU isn't outright terrible and is doable but feels like you are better off doing thing steathily as opposed to how easy everything was in the Ezio and the Americas games.

The parkour and stealth kill animations look very nice and the latter I love for how fast they are, they aren't as stylish as Tenchu's kills but it fits the idea that you are supposed to be an assassin that moves quickly, gracefully and swiftly. It feels very satisfying to go into a room and quickly kill 3 guards while their backs are turned.

The Phatom Blade is a very satisfying weapon to get headshots and kill multiple unaware guards with.

The city feels more quick and easier to traverse than in Syndicate and unlike ACS, you can just do main story missions and the game doesn't drag itself out with pointless mandatory side quests. Unity also never crashed once on PS5 unlike Syndicate.

With all this said, why I did I say I kind of prefer it over Syndicate and Mirage? With ACU, it felt like Ubisoft figured out the Tenchu meets Hitman power fantasy that the series has been floundering on since it's inception.

There is two big issues: the AI and lack of polish.

I'll get two smaller issues out of the way first, the cover system and lack of toggle crouch can be quite bothersome but I got used to them both all though Syndicate and Mirage would improve upon them both. I also wish ACU had the whistle feature that Syndicate and Mirage had since it's a game with predator stealth and encourages you do corner kills but yet you can't.

The animations are fine at their best and get in the way at their worst. Arno doesn't always move with the most smooth of elegance. Sometimes, he'll get stuck sometimes, he'll like through buildings and at other times he will be confused on where to move while also getting stuck. Good luck trying to get him through a window since that is a 50-50 guessing on if he will go in or not. Some of the assassinations were hard to do since my target would run and the running assassination would not play.

The AI is really bad and is super inconsistent and not in an exploitable way like in ACS. In that game when I got caught it felt like it was my fault most of the time where in Unity, they can see me from super far away, randomly detect me, and the suspicion would just go up and down at random. I even got spotted while in a hiding spot just for the guard not to pull me out of it. One guard was just running up to a wall and refused to move. Other times I would get spotted instantly shortly after I resetted the alert. It's hard to tell what their line of sight and what would get an alert even was half the time. This aspect made ACU frustrating even though the game can be enjoyable but there was lots of screams throughout my playthrough.

Overall, ACU is what happened if a game had a few more months or a year to cook in the oven, it could've been good, but as it stands, the game can be equal parts frustating as it can be fun. 

Dead Kings:

Nothing special DLC, it's mostly the same as the main game but now there is the addition of being able to kill high level enemies that will scare off lower level goons and it's pretty underdeveloped stuff, since now you can get spotted by the former, kill him and every enemy nearby will run away. Combat as well as mission rewards are as brainlessly easy as the Ezio games since now missions will grant you so much money and the mortar gun is so powerful that it makes short work of most enemies.

Not a big fan of the lantern gameplay since it just adds a tacked on resource mangement aspect to the game and I don't recall many instances where I ran out of oil and I thought it was going to be like a Plague Tale where you need to do puzzle to get past bug swarms or you die but it just won't let you parkour. The addition of puzzles just slowed down the pace for me, then again I could be very impatient.

The story is okay and not as good as the main game since it's short but it works as an okay epilogue, not that it really matters since every victory in the past sections of AC games are ultimately hollow ones that don't lead to anything.

It's not a terrible DLC and I was looking for something short and easy to beat and this fit the bill pretty well but outside of fuffling that basic need, the DLC didn't do much for me. Good thing it was free too which is yet another reason why I tried it out at all. I'd be harsher on it if it wasn't.