It was the best of games. It was the worst of games. It was the age of progress. It was the age of regression. It was the ok that’s enough of that. I couldn’t sit through it in high school and I can’t do it now.
The ironic thing is that Assassin’s Creed Unity can very much be described in the way that Charles Dickens opens up A Tale of Two Cities, which, for those of you that slept through British Lit, is a story that takes place during the French Revolution. And, you guessed it, Unity takes place during the French Revolution! I just spent a pretty good chunk of time playing through the game, and it was very much a technical contradiction, to the point where at times I literally had no idea what was happening on the screen.
To anyone that wasn’t lucky enough to experience the wonderful launch that Unity had, it was the one that sailed directly into infamy as probably one of the most ridiculously broken games that Ubisoft had ever released. I wasn’t there, but my friend was. Ubisoft even gifted him another game, it was that broken. I luckily wasn’t into Ass Creed much at the time, so I missed out on all the fun. The copy of Unity I just experienced was actually pretty playable. That’s not to say it was all that great.
I’m about to tear this game a new one, but before I go full-on Negative Nancy, I figured I’d list a few things that I liked about my time with Unity.
The game is gorgeous. Notre Dame cathedral alone was pretty damn breath-taking. Too bad they center a lot of the early game around this area, so by the time you move on, you’re pretty tired of climbing that ridiculously detailed facade. The rest of the game is equally nice, and the ever-growing crowds of people that begin amassing in the streets is impressive. There’s a ton of detail to take in, especially inside some of the palaces and churches you run through.
Arno is a great character. Despite coming off as that stereotypical “dashing rogue” hero at the beginning, he actually becomes a likeable guy throughout your time with him. He’s driven by the need for revenge, but manages to not come off as a one-note piano like Connor did, and thank goodness for that. Connor was insufferable. Arno at least shows moments of vulnerability and humility, especially when Elise is involved. Speaking of which, Elise was also refreshing. Her stubbornness equaled Arno’s and I enjoyed the dynamic between the two, in a Fox and the Hound kinda way. I almost felt like the ending was a bit too projected and predictable, but I also give Ubisoft credit for sticking to its guns and not pulling a “just kidding.”
The story is… okay. Honestly, I was having flashbacks to Assassin’s Creed III where a lot of those people looked relatively similar, and it was getting pretty difficult to discern one white guy in a gray wig from another. Especially when there is so much double-crossing and conspiring going on that I have to keep track of who is who multiple hours apart. Oh, and it also helps to have a decent understanding of the events of the French Revolution, or else a lot of these names and dates will just be names and dates with little relevance to you. I’ll admit, I always found this part of history class a bit dull and never paid much attention. I needed to hit up the wiki and give myself a quick refresher on the events that took place, just so I would understand their historical relevance when I played through them, in addition to a familiarity with the characters I was interacting with.
Okay, now that I’ve got the pleasant part out of the way…
I hated everything else about this game. When I say hated, I mean loathed. This game was a monumental fucking chore to play. I can’t even imagine what state the game was in before it was patched, because the underlying combat and control system in the game was borked to begin with. For whatever reason (likely the new engine) Ubisoft decided to ditch everything that made the previous games fun and completely revamp the combat. The result was a game that played less like Black Flag and the excellent Ezio trilogy and more like the very first Assassin’s Creed. You remember, the shitty one?
I felt it from the very first time I played the game. The movement felt weird. The running and climbing felt off, the jumping physics were floaty, and the overall animations of everything had a very motion-captured feel to them. It was much less like you were playing as Arno and more like you were holding down a button and watching a movie of Arno play out on the screen. While the movement was wonky, it was nothing compared to the combat.
The fighting in Unity is by far the worst combat in the series since the first game. It’s actually eerie the similarities the two share. For one, much like the first game, fighting multiple opponents is a frustrating and laborious process, as they completely tore out the fluid combo system that Ezio employed and replaced it with a canned three-animation combo for killing people. You will watch the same three-hit combos play out ad-nauseum for the entirety of the game. Also like the first Ass Creed, it’s entirely possible to get caught in animation and stun loops. This is exacerbated in Unity by the addition of firearms. You will get shot at, a lot. To make matters worse, when Arno is in stance, his feet are glued to the ground. With the exception of rolling and sprinting, Arno is very difficult to maneuver in combat. Nevermind being selective of who you will dispatch first, you’ll have a hell of a time even positioning yourself to not get surrounded and destroyed.
In the early goings of the game it’s not so bad. It’s easy to get over-powered and lay waste to any guards you come across. Later in the game though, when the playing fields are leveled and you’re surrounded by guards that are all at a five-diamond level, you’re going to get your ass handed to you, repeatedly, no matter what you do.
A lot of times combat isn’t necessary, and can actually be avoided, if you find out just what the game wants you to do. See, the level designs give the illusion of freedom, and you’ll be very hard-pressed to succeed in an area until you understand what the developers want you to do. I spent an extremely frustrating hour replaying a late-game mission over and over and over, completely at a loss as to how I could possibly succeed, until I wandered around, came in to the area in a very specific spot at a very specific time, and was able to slip into the area I was needing to get to. Multiple attempts trying multiple methods resulted in failure after failure until I found that one very small window of opportunity. I know that makes me sound like a shitty gamer, but after playing six games practically back to back, I’m getting pretty adept at being an assassin. The game was just extremely unclear on its expectations.
Adding to the frustration was the fact that the game constantly breaks its own rules. Sometimes killing a man in the street won’t even make people do a double take, and other times you’ll send a mass of people stampeding away from you. Sometimes stealth-killing a guard walking behind another guard will go unnoticed, and sometimes he’ll turn and fight you. You never know which reaction you’re going to get, therefore it becomes extremely difficult in planning your next move. Other times a man will kill another man, and no one bats an eye, but if you kill that man, all hell breaks loose. Which is it, Ubisoft?
The Red guys (I think they’re revolutioners? or extremists?) will pick you out of a crowd. You’ll literally alert them everywhere you go, and if you don’t keep walking, they’ll attack. These guys are fucking everywhere, and after twenty hours of running around Paris, they start to wear on your nerves. The Blue guys (loyalists? guards? French army? I don’t fuckin’ know) are the ones in uniform, and will also attack Arno, but really only if Arno pisses them off. These guys, the Red guys and the Blue guys, are on opposite sides of the fight. Sometimes you’ll see them fighting in the street, sometimes you’ll see them walking side by side in harmony. Sometimes you’ll fight the Red guys, only to be attacked by the Blue guys, for fighting the Red guys. Again, Ubisoft, WHICH IS IT?
As you can probably guess, I was pretty confused by the whole damn thing. I couldn’t understand why I was being picked out of the crowd constantly by the Red guys, despite having done nothing wrong. Sometimes I couldn’t even perform an action like talk to a guy or open a chest because I needed to become “anonymous” first. Why wasn’t I anonymous? Because I accidentally walked too close to a Red guy and even though I kept walking and he was 200 yards behind, he decided I was worth picking a fight with and the game considered me in a fight. It was all very irritating.
Look at how long this has gotten already, and I haven’t even started on the progression system! I’ll try to keep it short. The progression system sucks. Your player level is tied to your gear. Better gear costs more money. So what do you do when you begin the game? That’s right, grind for money. That way you can get an easy leg up on your enemy, for the first few missions of course. Then after that, shit starts to get real expensive. In the end, it paces itself out anyway, and the game is giving you better gear than anything you can probably afford in the last few sequences. In other words, you see that piece of equipment you just grinded for two hours and spent 150,000F on? Yeah you just got something better, for free. Congrats.
I still believe Assassin’s Creed II did it best. New sequence is available, there’s a new set for you to upgrade to. Go spend a moderate amount money on it and get up to speed and go out and enjoy the damn game. Unity has its head so far up its ass with all of these hoods and bracers and boots and all this shit that cost an ungodly amount of money so that you’re constantly just grinding to get your Theater income up so that you can not only buy new gear, but actually be able to play higher difficulty missions. It’s all very contrived and actually consists of two other currencies that could (originally) only be earned by using the Companion App (a mobile app) and by playing co-op missions. Lucky for us, that was also a train wreck at launch and Ubi just ditched it and made that shit available from the start. Thank goodness for small miracles.
Okay, wow. If you can’t tell, I really needed to get that off my chest. I’ve been suppressing an unhealthy amount of nerd rage for the entirety of my playthrough of Unity. I even refrained from writing a mid-game update because I wanted to lay it all out at once.
Man. This feels good. It’s nice to bitch about something other than my job for a change.
