![]() ![]() It started out with the confusing saga of Desmond - and I suspect I was in a minority by actually liking Desmond himself, if not his story’s coherence - milked him for five games, moved on to the self-referential disaster of being a developer at Ubisoft self-insert Abstergo Entertainment in Black Flag and Rogue, and has now reached a new low by having my modern day avatar be… a guy (or gal) playing a video game. There’s the usual framing guff about magical precursor artifacts and super DNA memories, but I think the thing I’m going to save most of my opprobrium for is the modern-day metaplot, which has always been a way for the Assassin’s Creed series to plumb exciting new depths of awfulness. He falls in with the Assassins and starts chewing his way through a series of Templar stooges yadda yadda yawn I have played this game literally ten times already and the only thing interesting about Unity’s plot is that there’s a tenuous truce between the Templars and the Assassins that you spend all of your time actively sabotaging (firmly against the orders of the Assassin Council, which further reinforced the “Arno is a fucking idiot” impression I had). The game tries to play him as the same sort of carefree rogue that Ezio was, except it’s not nearly as well executed and he comes off a smug asshole instead – when combined with the terrible decision making mentioned above, it’s a toss-up between Arno and AC 3’s Connor for “Most Unlikeable AC Protagonist” 1. He’s young, orphaned by the Templars, and full of ill-advised rage and fury in his first (and in all likelihood) only outing that causes him to make some amazingly bad decisions during the course of Unity’s baffling plot. It switches the relative freedom of the Caribbean/North Atlantic for a single city – an 18th century Paris that’s caught up in the epic convulsions of the French Revolution – and introduces a new protagonist in the form of Arno Dorian who is trying so hard to be the French Ezio. Unity adheres almost slavishly to the formula that the Ezio trilogy already beat to within an inch of its life. It’s less fine when you have a lead with all the charm of a particularly smart-ass 12 year-old a locale that, while not inherently dull, is something that Unity summarily fails to do anything even remotely interesting with and an additional half-decade on the clock that means your game comes across as a relic from the very historical time period it is supposed to be set in. ![]() This was fine when the star of the series was Ezio and the games were all set in Renaissance Italy (and Constantinople) and abused the historical elements of that setting in a particularly egregious yet crowd-pleasing way. It turns out there’s a hundred little things about Black Flag and Rogue - from the ease of the movement to the speed of the combat (even if it is a bit button-mashy) to the sheer sense of freedom that having a ship gives you - that you don’t notice until they’ve been replaced with clunky, regressive mechanics that take the AC series back at least five years to a time when it was far weaker as a game and was coasting largely on the strength of its history porn and a charismatic main character. Rogue is a great game, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t until I experienced the series debacle that is Unity that I realised I’d been taking a lot of the good stuff Rogue was doing completely for granted. So I guess it’s admission time: I would not have had anywhere near as positive an opinion of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue as I did if I hadn’t immediately gone on to play Assassin’s Creed: Unity afterwards. Complete achievement/trophy unlock guide.08/02 – I’m halfway through the XCOM 2 review and it’s shaping up to be a monster, so I’m postponing it to tomorrow so that I can a) finish it and b) get some screenshots that aren’t of the late game. Hunting/Harpooning/Crafting - it's all in here Takeover every Fort, Settlement and Gang Headquarters. ![]() All secondary memories covered (Assassin Intercepts, hunting challenges, legendary battles etc.). Every story mission (and how to get FULL Synch for each one!). In our extensive Assassin’s Creed Rogue guide, we'll take you through the game from beginning to end, show you how to handle all those secondary memories and just about everything else the game has to offer! This time around however, things are a little different for the series as we'll be taking on the role of an assassin turned Templar and get to view the clandestine war from a fresh set of eyes and a different viewpoint. Assassin's Creed Rogue takes us to 18th Century North America where we'll be braving the icy waters of the North Atlantic, the bustling streets of New York and the greenery of River Valley. ![]()
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