Thoughts on Assassin's Creed Unity

I finally got around to writing about Assassin's Creed Unity, which I actually finished a few months ago; family matters left me no time to write a post while the impressions were still fresh.

The game starts with a rather vague prologue about the Templars and their Grand Master Jacques de Molay. As everyone knows, he was burned at the stake, but the prologue itself is not particularly connected to the game's plot. Somewhere they mention some grand plan of the Grand Master that the French Templars are supposedly going to carry out centuries later, but overall it makes for a pretty unclear opening.

The game itself follows a young man named Arno. His father was murdered when he was little, and the head of the Templar order took him in. One fine evening that man is murdered, and Arno, who happens to be at the scene, is accused of it and thrown into the Bastille. Then the revolution begins, and his assassin cellmate invites Arno into their Brotherhood. Along the way Arno tries to find out who was behind the murder. On top of that, he is in love with the daughter of his murdered adoptive father, who, ironically, is also a Templar.

The locations and scenery in the game are, of course, beautiful. Paris is gloomy, but beautiful, with many landmarks.

You can climb every landmark. Quite often, you can even get inside. It's always interesting to explore familiar places you've seen in real life.

They changed the gameplay quite a lot in this installment. Unfortunately, they completely removed the assassin brothers I liked so much: you can no longer mark a target and sic an assassin on it. There are many places to run and jump, you can enter a lot of buildings and pass through them, go up floors, and pick locks. Parkour and running feel a bit clunky in places and slow in others, but overall there is nothing fundamentally new; compared to the Ezio games, it feels more simplified, where you could jump or pull yourself up with the hookblade.

The city has several districts, each with its own difficulty, scenery, and inhabitants. In some places there are riots in honor of the revolution, while others are still calm.

During the story there are certain glitches in time (after all, we are still reliving an ancestor's memories through the Animus), where we hide so the system cannot track us. As a result, you get to run around Paris in other time periods. Climb the Eiffel Tower or see the Statue of Liberty before it is sent to the USA.

The combat system changed a lot. Now it is not so easy to stand against a crowd of enemies. In the early games you could just hold block and nobody would touch you; you only had to counterattack in time. Here everything is harder: it is easier to defeat the hero, every enemy has a power level (difficulty), and fighting even a couple of strong opponents is already pretty hard.

There are many different locations. Besides districts, there are lots of interiors. Palaces, for example. Lots of catacombs and dungeons.

I really liked the new investigation mini-missions. You arrive at a crime scene, collect clues, question witnesses, and expose the murderer. Great stuff.

There are a ridiculous number of missions in the game, by the way. All sorts of completion-meter stuff like collecting every chest, and there are several types of them. Rebuild your headquarters, buy and open taverns, increase their profits; all of this is also split into districts, so you can tackle it district by district. In general, you can spend more time on that than on the story itself. Many of them are rather repetitive and even routine. I liked the ability to buy weapons, clothes, and armor, of which the game has plenty. Changing the character's look and leveling him up through weapons and armor is always interesting.

The key story missions are certainly interesting. What sells them is that they can be completed in several ways: go in head-on, use some trickery, enter one way or another. You can also fulfill extra conditions so that, for example, people will help you by rushing the guards, delaying them and giving you a chance to escape.

Overall, I liked the game more than I disliked it. But somehow it does not reach the level of part II, Brotherhood, and Revelations in terms of story. They stuffed it with a lot of grindy completionist fluff. The plot is vague and the storytelling is not built especially well. Of course, the graphics are beautiful, the gameplay changed a lot, and in some places it became better while in others it became questionable. We'll see what happens in the next entries.