Assassin's Creed Unity (Xbox ONE)

Another chapter in the Assassin’s Creed universe sees us move away from the America and journey across the Atlantic to France. We play as Arno Dorian, a French guy who has a bit of a thing for his prepubescent friend, Elise.

The premise is that Arno is partly responsible for his mentor’s death and thus starts a journey of revenge to avenge the death he is responsible for. As expected, he gets caught up in a battle between Templars and Assassins and ends up joining the Assassins. I would say spoiler alert but it’s not called Templar’s Creed now is it.

Visually I thought the game was very good. The city is very nicely developed and intricately put together and the free-running is much improved from the disaster that is known as Assassin’s Creed III. You cannot climb all buildings though, which is frustrating but a little more realistic that being able to climb every building going.

The sound effects are an issue for me. Unity is a long game to play and after a while all sounds effects become annoying. However, several members of the community have pointed out that Unity is quite broken and I have to say, both the audio and visual components appear to suffer from lack of development. The first half, give or take, is pretty good (hence my comments above) but after that you get audio loop issues, graphical problems and cut scenes not displaying properly at certain points. That said, I didn’t think the issues were half as bad as people made them out to be.

The gameplay, on the whole, was pretty good too. Other than the occasional fuck up with Arno’s ability to behave normally, it was pretty clear sailing. I am basing this on over 60 hours of gameplay so it’s relative, but I will still point out the issues I had with it.

Having to reset my console because the character gets caught on scenery is simply unacceptable. I only had to do it once but there were several other times where it was touch and go. At certain times it was like Arno did not know what to do when he was in certain positions. It seems to be a problem with his programming in that the developers didn’t account for graphical black holes near some of their objects. My Arno got stuck on several occasions and even feel through the floor once (which leads to de-syncing and failing the mission) but this was at least better that having to manually reset because I can’t move.

The main bugbear I have with the actual gameplay is the shooting mechanic. To be blunt, it’s shit. To be more technical, they appear to have tried to make it simple but by doing so, have removed about 80% of its functionality. And I have taken the shooting tutorial, thank you very much.

Achievements – 1,300 Points – 57 Achievements

As with all Assassin’s Creed games, Unity has its own set of over-the-top collectibles. This time it’s chests and cockades for the win. There are so many – 128 Cockades and 294 Chests to be exact. This is not as bad as the first Assassin’s Creed, but still excessive, especially when you factor in that accessing the majority of the chests requires you to play a lock picking game. Also, there is no real reward for getting them all. Your hideout generates more than enough income to make getting all required equipment a breeze.

The other side of the main game achievements involves having to fully level your character and complete all of the co-op missions. I’ll cover the co-op missions in a bit, but for now I want to focus on how much of a ball-ache it was getting all of the other achievements.

Levelling up your Arno is a pain because, aside from all of the main mission sync points you can get, you also have to collect some points which are randomly scattered around the co-op missions. This can be a real pain because they don’t show up on the map, which is all well and good but when you are supposed to be working with other people to achieve a goal, moseying off for your own gain kind of defeats the point. That said, all of the sync points can be gained from starting private co-op missions by yourself, so they built in a way around a set up that was pointless to begin with.

Aside from that, let’s talk about glitched achievements. I cannot accept that now the Xbox One has achievement progress tracking (which I love) and all games are required to have 1,000 Gamerscore, that they would allow a game to fuck up its achievements. However, when trying to get the Know-It-All achievement for completing all training sessions, the achievement did not unlock after I completed them all. There is no argument for me missing one as you get a little tick next to the session you have completed. I looked it up online and found that when Ubisoft attempted to patch out a load of shitty issues from the release, they undid all of the progress gamers had made towards this achievement. This meant I was made to play though all the rubbish I had already done. Not impressed.

The rest of the game is fairly self-explanatory and not too taxing. Even the 100% sync of the main story missions was easier than previous games. One thing that does puzzle me though, is that you are not required to complete all of the side missions to get all achievements. I would have thought a 100% sync achievement would have been a guaranteed requirement.

Multiplayer

I’ve got to hand it to a developer that attempts to make a game’s multiplayer function redundant, especially when they were nearly successful in doing so. Unity has done away with Wolfpack and versus modes and only has the co-op missions and heists. There is an achievement for completing them all and all bar one of them can be done easily in solo play. There are also two achievements that required other players; one for getting 10 sync kills and another for reviving a co-op partner, all of which I managed to do without the assistance of friends (rare for me).

The biggest fuck-up with the multiplayer is that some missions require all four players to leave a certain area for the mission to complete. This poses a real problem as it opens the game up for total fucking pricks who will just stand around in the escape area to prevent the mission from completing. It happened to me on three separate occasions. During one of these occasions, I was actually able to witness a verbal spat between two such clowns and when one of the antagonistic motherfuckers quit out of the mission, the other one left the area. It was one of the most pathetic online displays I’ve seen (but I haven’t played a lot of CoD so that’s probably not saying much.)

Downloadable Content

There is one DLC for Unity and it’s the kind that I like that expands the single player story. As Arno, you visit the town of Franciade, gain a Guillotine Gun and try to uncover some more shit to do with the First Civilisation and stop Napoleon from being a massive dick whilst saving little boys and crying. While I like single player expansions, Dead Kings doesn’t offer anything new other than a new sequence and more collectibles. The DLC does require you to get 100% sync though, which is again strange when the main game doesn’t. Oh, it also comes with another two single player co-op missions to complete.

I enjoyed Assassin’s Creed Unity apparently more than most of the gaming community who still revere it as a buggy piece of crap. I admit that the co-op missions were poor in terms of loading and quality delivery and the story line got lazy towards the end but it’s a solid seven out of ten and I think that’s the best we can expect from the current generation of triple-A titles.