Assassin's Creed: Rogue

The latest game in the Assassin’s Creed series was released on Xbox 360 while Assassin’s Creed Unity was doing the rounds on the One. Incidentally, Assassin’s Creed Rogue is the better game by far with less bugs, less France and a bigger boat. Well, okay, it has a boat whereas Unity does not.

The story follows the Assassin Shay Cormack, until he realises that Assassins are evil and decides to run away and eventually becomes a Templar. The most tragic thing about Shay though, is not his moral code but the fact that he is supposed to be Irish but, depending on what he is saying, this really does come and go. I’ve never met an Irish Assassin with a worse Irish accent.

Shay is on a quest to stop the assassins from killing innocent people whilst annoying everyone with his accent.  To do this, he essentially travels around the North Atlantic being a pirate. It’s all quite fun and combines the gameplay of Black Flag with... the looks of Black Flag and... okay, basically it’s an extension of Black Flag but Black Flag was pretty good.

The framing story, as will all Assassin’s Creed games involves you having to once again dick around in the offices of Abstergo trying to fix a server crash caused by the Assassins.

It doesn’t look at pretty as Black Flag was for me, probably because I played Black Flag on the One, and the game makes the graphical superiority of the next generation evident when put onto a screen. The sea shanties are back with some new ones and the classics which makes all the aimless sailing more enjoyable.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 46 Achievements

The thing I like most about the achievement list for this game is that they are all offline which technically means you can still finish the game ten years from now if you have a television that a 360 will work on.

Outside of the main game, there isn’t that much else you need go out of your way to do, however the game is big and will take you a long time to cover everything. There are a couple of things I had to grind out though.

You come across enemies known as stalkers at some point during the game. They are basically assassins trying to assassinate your Templar ass. They will attempt to air assassinate you but you can counter this (the first Templar in history to do so) and by doing so 15 times you will get an achievement. There is another one for counter killing 30 stalkers which goes into the same grinding category.

The most grind-tastic achievement is What’s Yours is Mine for looting 20 ship convoys. This is actually quite difficult. You can find the convoys by visiting taverns and getting intel, however the taverns will stop giving out locations after a while which leaves you alone to try and find them yourself. However, they don’t show up on the map very often. A few people figured out you can trigger spawns by fast travelling through a series of locations but I didn’t realise this until after I’d finished the game which meant that this was the last achievement I got and I had to work hard for it.

There are also four achievements for actually using cheats which was new. They aren’t too challenging or time consuming and all they do is have you repeat the same action a certain amount of times, some without dying. Not too tricky if you have a fully upgraded ship and character.

The last one I’ll mention is the one you get for completing all the legendary ship battles. I managed to do three of them but, try as I might, I couldn’t do the last one quickly. Instead of bashing my head against a brick wall for a week, I found out that you can win the battle using the invincibility cheat and unlock the achievement. You don’t get the rewards for completing them by doing it this way though – cheap yes, but effective nonetheless.

Downloadable Content – N/A

It took me around 35 hours to rack up all the achievements but on the whole, it was an enjoyable time. Assassin’s Creed Rogue still offers a similar experience to the first game. There is no reason to change the mechanics, just the location, and Rogue is a welcome addition to the franchise.