AC Rogue was a game I played almost 10 years ago and I didn't think very highly of it even at the time and playing it again around the time of release hasn't improved my opinion on it. I was very antagonistic towards the franchise around that time and I thought me being a bit softer on it now might improve my opinion on this particular game, turns out it didn't. I mainly just played it because it came with the AC Rogue Collection on Nintendo Switch.
Speaking of the Nintendo Switch version, I can't speak for it on other systems, but compared to Black Flag's Switch port, Rogue's isn't very good, there is constant stuttering and even frame rate drops from time to time and the game even crashed on me at one point. I don't know if the remaster is better on other systems but Switch isn't the ideal way to play.Anyways as for the game itself, I would never consider Rogue to be an awful game, I've played a couple of bad games over the years despite not being a connaisseur of them, however I can say that I'm that for painfully average games and AC Rogue is very much that.
The story is a bit on the messy side, I wouldn't consider to be absolutely terrible but not good either, but as a whole I'd say it gets more wrong than right. Shay Cormac is an okay character since he talks and sounds like a guy who wants to do the right thing and the mission in Portugal does a decent enough job at making the player the feel the weight of Shay's actions while the character himself is slowly horrified by everything he did, this part of the story was handled pretty well or how Shay is pretty conflicted in general in how he doesn't want to kill any of his former Assassin friends minus him constantly saying, "I make my own luck" so many times, this part of the story I think is okay.
The rest of the story besides Shay's character is very messy. The Assassins in this game are portrayed as bloodthirsty power hungry maniacs doing whatever it takes to win against the Templars, this isn't terrible on it's own but the story doesn't really make clear whether or not if the Assassins are on the losing side of the war and would do whatever it takes to win.
The characters are pretty underdeveloped and not enough is done to make me attached to them, this could be attributed to the short length but the interactions never really do a good job at establishing multiple ideas or have anything "pop" out that makes me want to feel conflicted about eventually killing them. Characters introduced in AC3 and 4 like Adewale, Achilles and Haytham Kenway don't really have much to do or any interesting subplots, they just feel like they are "there". It's just hard to picture Adewale going full heel after AC4 and the story does a poor job at making it feel believeable too. Then there is just other prequel related issues like how Achilles never even telling Connor about Shay in AC3.
I've complained about the story but the gameplay is also once again on the painfully average side.
One thing I'll give Rogue over AC4 is that the number of tailing missions has been noticeably reduced and I'm very thankful for that, the missions in general have far more variety to them than AC4 did which is nice.
The problem is that everything introduced in this game, AC3 and 4 already did, I wouldn't mind this if Rogue just did the, "you played AC4, now let's just add to it" but it doesn't there's still multiple tutorials teaching AC players stuff he already knows and it still does stuff that AC4 already did, if you played it you pretty much know what to expect.
The only big innovations are ice bergs during naval combat, stalker enemies, the ability to throw fire from the back of the ship and your ships being able to be boarded. The ice bergs and enemy ship boarding are nice additions all though the ice berg only felt useful once and the enemies boarding your ships came in handy late game. Speaking of which, just be warned, the game never explicity states it, but you will need to grind and upgrade your ship to beat the penultimate mission since you have to might two really powerful ships and if you never upgraded the ship before that point, you are in for a hard time, luckily the requirements are steep and the game autosaves the resoruces you pick up and you retain them even after death but your milage may vary.
The stalker enemies are more annoying than anything, at first it was interesting since it was AC's multiplayer being repurposed for single player and I wouldn't mind a whole game revolving around this but all they really do is just get in your way. They pop up during some of the main missions and all they really do is pop when you want to complete a specific objective, want to kill or protect some guys? Track down the stalkers, kill them, then proceed. It's a good idea on paper but just feels half baked especially when all they do is impeed progress.
Overall, AC Rogue was a painfully average game 10 years ago and it's painfully average now, play out of curosity.
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