I think that Assassin’s Creed: Unity is quite frankly the most infuriating game I’ve played in years.
When I’d gotten a PS4 I decided I was going to get one of the AC games that was on PS4 that wasn’t Odyssey (because I already had obtained it and loved it). And I got Unity because I’d heard the free-running was better, and that when played well it was quite good. And while traversing Paris is fun, this game also sometimes plays as garbage and I’m kind of baffled about some of the decisions they’ve made designing it.
You see, this is my experience in playing just about every Assassin’s Creed game: try to be sneaky around the guards, but when that inevitably fails I kill them all. I was starting down this path in Unity when the game stopped me.
“Hang on a sec, you can’t do that,” the game said.
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because we’ve designed the combat to be utter garbage!” the game joyously exclaimed, laughing maniacally. And it wasn’t lying. The combat is utter garbage and I got killed pretty quickly. The parry is too clumsy for the careful timing it sometimes requires, you’re practically defenseless against guns, and counter kills have been removed. I get the point, of course: the game wants you to try more stealthy approaches, and so if you get detected you’ve got to retreat and rework your approach. But it was just completely at odds with how I played these games. I felt as if the previous games went out of their way to make you feel like a badass warrior and then Unity goes out of its way to make you feel as weak as possible. And for a game that makes you want to avoid combat like the plague, it keeps putting you in it.
“But stealth!” the game and its fans reply. Which doesn’t work for me, because the Batman: Arkham games had amazing stealth sections that rely on not getting caught, but the combat isn’t utter crap. If there’s a part of the game you’re hoping people will avoid, maybe you should realize that it’s because that part of the game is terrible and need reworking, not that you’re clever for designing it so.
“I actually really liked the combat,” says Unity fanboy #463 on Reddit. Alright, but you do know you are admitting to enjoying something deliberately designed to be unpleasant? It’s a bit like telling everyone you enjoy the smell in gas station restrooms. It isn’t something you should really brag about.
Unity fanboy #149 scoffs haughtily. “Well I want my games to be challenging, unlike a casual gamer,” he says. Good for you. But that defense doesn’t work with this game because I’m not just being challenged by the game’s combat difficulty, which is aggravating by design, I’m being challenged by the fact that the game doesn’t work. What makes the stealth and combat so aggravating is how glitchy the game is. At one point in a story-scripted fight Arno wouldn’t attack, block, dodge or shoot, and the only actions he could perform were walking around and dropping smoke bombs. Sometimes Arno refuses to shoot when prompted, as if the targeted enemy was just too cool to die. Sometimes enemies aren’t hurt by being shot. Once Arno refused to start sneaking. I accidentally got into conflicts because I shot guards in the back of the head and instead of dying they turned around and saw me. Every so often, a civilian will walk in front of the barrel of your gun because he or she is suicidal I guess. I bumped into a guard on the other side of a wall. Guards spawned from nowhere to fight me and then when I hid they went back across the street on the other side of a wall. A guard with his back turned saw me on top of a rooftop. Sometimes when you’re detected you have to fight the one guy who saw you, and sometimes you have to fight all of his buddies who also apparently know where you are as they run from all over the block. And on some occasions the guards on the first floor won’t notice if you fire a gun on the second. At some points smoke bombs work to make your enemies lose track of you; at others they won’t. Frequently I’d aim to air assassinate a guard only for the game to switch which guard I was targeting as I’m pressing the button.
In short, even if the stealth and combat were fun, the fact is that when you begin either you never know what exactly you’re signing up for because it doesn’t work. And not in a good way, like the game surprising you with extra fun; it’s exactly the wrong sort of way, where you think your mission is to defend an army officer against royalists and because you make too much noise fighting the royalists then the army soldiers decide to kill you too.
[Also, you’re encouraged to use smoke bombs a lot. Which doesn’t really sound that stealthy, if you think about it, because a giant cloud of smoking spontaneously erupting around a group of guards is the exact opposite of stealthy.]
I’m sure some fanboy will try to assure me it’s my fault that the game doesn’t play well, and that it’s actually pretty well designed. To that, I answer: Cherry Bombs. See, the game gives you this stealth tool called the ‘Cherry Bomb’ which is essentially a firecracker that acts as a noisemaker--you throw it somewhere, it’ll make sparks and noise, and the guards will be distracted and go investigate. This replaces the ‘whistle’ function the past two games had to draw guards over to where you are. What the game doesn’t tell you is that the Cherry Bomb has to be within a guard’s line of sight. Which means if you’re hiding in a hallway and are trying to lure a guard from an adjacent room into the hallway, then the Cherry Bomb won’t work unless the guard can turn around and see it from his position. Otherwise, they may turn around in the direction of the noise, but won’t move towards it. It doesn’t matter if it’s right behind them, or right around the corner; if they can’t see the Cherry Bomb, it won’t work.
Essentially, one of the key stealth tools you start out with is a noisemaker that only works if enemies can see it.
A noisemaker that works by line of sight! No one can tell me that a competently-designed game would include that!
What makes stealth and combat even more difficult is that the game has what it calls “Crowd Events,” which are things that happen in the streets of Paris that you can interfere with, like someone getting robbed, or mugged, or bullied, or whatever. But in crowded areas this happens every minute or so, and even if you don’t interfere in the Crowd Event then the surrounding guards might take notice of someone in the street getting run through, and then a fight will break out and your stealth will be ruined because if you go anywhere near it the guards will detect you and the game will act like it’s your fault for not being sneaky enough. During one stealth mission three or four Crowd Events occurred within seconds of each other, with two spawning at once. They’re optional yes, but call me a moron because I always try to help when someone’s getting gutted on the pavement, which often leads to me being gutted on the pavement.
There are times when the game doesn’t tell you what to do in specific situations and then acts like you should have known it all along. In Assassin’s Creed III it gives you specific instructions on what to do in combat when someone points a gun at you. Unity gives you no such help. I didn’t learn until I looked up combat tips for the game that you’re supposed to hit the dodge button at just the right second. Sometimes the game doesn’t give you enough time to realize that someone is shooting at you. If Arno is not in combat mode and someone’s aiming at you, you’re just out of luck, as the dodge button isn’t an option there. There’s an eye that appears next to the minimap, I think to tell you that you’re in a guard’s line of sight, but the game never tells me, so that’s just a guess on my part. The boss fight with Bellec has him disappear with a smoke bomb, and then he will try to jump on you and stab you, which the game doesn’t give any hint as to what you’re supposed to do about and it sucks because if he hits you then you die in one hit.
There are skills and abilities that you have to unlock that you really shouldn’t. Double assassination is an ability that takes much too long to unlock; wisely the following game made this unlockable in the tutorial section. Guns have to be unlocked with skill points, which is downright weird; no other game in the series gives that limit, except as being a point of story progression. That you have to spend skill points to use one of the game’s basic weapons is downright offensive.
The most infuriating thing is the admittedly rare occasion when the game punishes you for being smart. When you go to assassinate Marie Levesque, for instance, it took me a couple of tries, but I managed to sneak into the palace and take out key guards, noting the escape routes as I went. Only when I actually performed the assassination, all the open windows had been closed and all the guards I took out had respawned. Essentially, I had carefully planned an escape route and the game slammed that door in my face, saying, “Nope! For all our talk of doing it your own way, you have to get out of this situation the way we say you do, okay?” What kind of game punishes you for doing your homework? What is that supposed to teach me?
Customization is cool, in theory, but it’s also a major hassle. Because I just wanted to look cool, but instead I’m constantly juggling a bunch of statistics on how to be stealthy but also carry enough ammunition and supplies. It’s not helpful that if you want to be stealthy, the way the game wants you to play, the outfit most suited to that is the stupidest-looking one of the bunch.
I didn’t experience any of the horrifying glitches of people missing faces, the way a lot of people did at the game’s launch. However, NPC bystanders would often walk through cutscenes, including duels and chase scenes, leisurely waltzing right through running characters or in front of enemies as they’re getting shot. There were a couple of scenes where the camera is at an extremely odd angle of someone’s face, with the corner of someone else’s character model in the way.
Traversal is far better than previous games; at least, in theory. Most of the time it works, but when it doesn’t, it does so in the most rage-inducing way possible. Often Arno will climb up when you tell him to climb down. It’s not uncommon for Arno to refuse to climb up for no reason at all. If you’re running and you happen to dash past something that would realistically bump him in the shoulder, Arno will start climbing up it and refuse to get down, hopping from table to barrel to chair, including chairs that there are already people sitting in. More than once I was perched on a ledge and then Arno would just fall, arms flailing as he descended into a horde of angry enemies. When sneaking sometimes he just refused to take cover where I tell him to, and will instead just sort of rock back and forth on his heels like a moron or stick to a surface further away from him than the one I told him to take cover behind.
“Just wait ‘til you see what we did with Eagle Vision!” the game says, clapping like a madman.
I am very tired at this point. “How did you screw up Eagle Vision, that one button that makes it easier to see enemies and detect important elements around you?” I ask.
“It’s on a short timer!” Unity is cackling now as it practically explodes with malicious glee. “And it has a cooldown period!”
Yes, that staple of the series, Eagle Vision, is now only meant to last a few seconds. Certain types of gear will enable it to last longer and give it more range (WHY WOULD CHANGING YOUR CLOTHES ENHANCE YOUR SIXTH SENSE?!?), but it’s still on a timer, so in order to know where everyone is, you have to keep switching it on. You can see enemies through walls though, which is new and actually good.
Optional objectives are back, and aren’t quite as bad as they were in previous games; they don’t have ridiculous conditions in order to get full credit, usually just things like “Do two double assassinations” or “Stun three enemies.” They’re still not great, because again, any idea of freedom is limited in that you won’t get 100% on a mission unless you do it a certain way. The worse is always “Don’t get detected” because this is always followed by throwing you into large spaces filled with half a dozen guards and no cover. You’re better off ignoring them.
Hey, did I mention that the game never shuts up? Notifications float up in your face on the right side of the screen, and there is no way to dismiss them; you must wait for them to go away. Black Flag had this too, but those were always small enough that they didn’t get in the way of gameplay, and you could check the past few messages in the pause menu. In this game they’re constantly popping up to tell you tips, location, and useless information, along with a quick sound that pings every time to make sure you stay pissed off. They’ll often pop up on top of each other, so if you’re working on one of the Murder Mysteries and you look at a clue, a notification will pop up on top of the clue information to tell you information you already know and you just have to wait for it to fade away. And when you break a lock in the lockpicking minigame, the popup will helpfully tell you that if you don’t want to break locks, press the button at the correct time. Or, in short, if you don’t want to mess up, then don’t mess up. Thanks, Unity.
Speaking of lockpicking, who’s bright idea was it to make it so that of the treasure chests littered across the map, two-thirds of them are locked? I get that in theory it means that there are collectables that you can’t unlock until you’ve progressed, but what it means is that not only do you have to wait to a certain part of the game where you can buy that skill, you have to do an annoying little minigame every time you just want some treasure. It turns the task of collecting into even more of a chore.
There are also collectables called “artifacts” which are coats of arms on the walls in random places. They’re not so bad, except in the Helix Rift sections, in which whether or not they show up in their place depends on the alignment of the stars or something. It makes it difficult to even care about trying to collect them all if the game sometimes refuses to let you do so.
“So you hated this game?” you, the reader, asks me.
That’s the thing though--I wanted very much to like it! There were parts I liked very much, in fact. When the game worked (and I must emphasize it wasn’t often), it was incredibly cool to feel like a stealth Assassin, taking out enemies and disappearing without a trace. This was utilized well in the missions that the game called Black Box missions. Basically, the developers realized that the assassination missions of the past games were too scripted, so they put in situations where you’re given a target and a location and you’re given much more freedom on how to take them out.
The Murder Mysteries were, for the most part, excellent and allowed you to use your deduction skillz to put together the clues you’d been given and point out which person was the murderer. They were stressful, but not in a ‘wow-this-sux’ kind of way, more like the rewarding sort of way when you got it right. I liked them a lot. But they were frustrating when popups kept getting in the way of the clues.
The Nostradamus Riddles were similarly excellent! They involved solving riddles by finding glyphs all over Paris, given clues that refer to the history of the places. The only criticism I had was that it would have been better if the in-game database had a search engine, sort of like the one in Carmen Sandiego: Treasure of Knowledge to make it easier to find what you’re looking for instead of scrolling through dozens of location entries.
But yes, I think I hated it, at least a lot of the time I was playing it. I never thought I’d say that about an Assassin’s Creed game, but I cannot in good conscience tell someone that I liked this game or recommend it to anyone. It was not fun to play. The more time I spent with the game the less I liked it. Often enough I’d have fun, but that would soon be dashed by something stupid like being spotted by a guard through a building or Arno falling off a ledge. This should have been one of the greatest games in the series, and instead it’s undeniably the worst. Do not play this game, do not spend money on this game; every other game in the series is a more rewarding experience than Assassin’s Creed: Unity. Maybe some morbid curiosity is driving you to picking it up, but I urge you: do not listen!
I had this whole section planned to talk about the story too! I had a thesis that Assassin’s Creed: Unity is trying to tell the story of France! I was going to talk about character models and history and all! But it doesn’t matter because nothing I say will change the simple fact that this game is not fun to play. Not even in a ‘If you like a challenge’ sort of way. This game is a broken mess that doesn’t work as intended. No. Don’t play it.
