Assassin's Creed Chronicles: Russia

Once upon a time in the gaming past, Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China was a Games with Gold title. Having played a lot of Assassin’s Creed games I dived right in and completed it over a few weeks.

This is how I initially thought it must have gone but then I looked up what actually happened. Chronicles China was Games with Gold in September 2016 and my completion was July 2015 – so I actually paid cash money for the game and was massively disappointed when it went Games with Gold a year later. At least I played and completed it before it was free.

Anyway, the point of the story was that I bought the Chronicles trilogy when it was cheap as I enjoyed China but then didn’t play the other two games for a further year and a half either. Chronicles India has been and gone on Games with Gold so I thought I best play Russia before the entire trilogy becomes another case of me throwing money down the toilet.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia follows the story of Nikolai Orelov and some girl called Ana. Nikolai rescues Ana and takes her back to the order as she has special assassin-like powers, somehow linking her to the girl from Chronicles China and everyone’s favourite assassin, Ezio. However, the Assassins want to kill her so he does a Shay Cormac (Assassin’s Creed: Rogue) and turns on his brothers to save her, destroys a tank and rides off into the sunset.

The gameplay is the same as Chronicles China in that it’s a 2D side-scrolling stealth game that actually makes you act like an assassin. You can survive combat but you are not scored highly for doing so and you are so cack-handed at it that stealth and assassination are, essentially, the way you are supposed to play the game.

Other elements of the gameplay give Nikolai the ability to use different gadgets to stealth your way through levels, most notably a rifle and smoke bombs. Ana is able to whistle and use Helix abilities to turn invisible.

My only real complaint is the controls. You have to be quick for certain sections and I was trying to be quick and stealthy but when you run as Nikolai and try to hide sometimes you will slide into the back legs of a guard only for him to turn around and shoot you in the face. This became pretty fucking annoying after the first three occasions and it was more down to the over reactiveness of the controls than me. It was very picky too as sometimes Nikolai wouldn’t slide at all and just get shot by guns on some of the running levels.

Achievements - 1,000 Points – 17 Achievements

Achievements wise, Chronicles: Russia is very forgiving and the checkpoints can be used to make a lot of this really easy.

There are 5 achievements awarded for various milestones you complete throughout the game and another 6 for repeating various actions. You need to get 100 headshots, electrocute 25 enemies, using Helix Blade 25 times and get 30 gold rankings in the three different play styles; Assassin, Silencer and Shadow. These last three are funny as you can get a ranking of choice in chapter one, get to the end of the section and then reload the checkpoint 29 times to get the respective achievement. This isn’t really necessary for all three achievements though as you will most likely get one of them, and progress towards the other two, just by playing the game normally.

There are another 4 for doing certain things in specific chapters, all of which are fairly straight forward and not too challenging. There is another one for completing a sequence without losing your score multiplier but this will come with another achievement in this section.

That just leaves the last one which provides a little bit of challenge and has massive trial and error bits – you need to complete the game in Plus Hard mode without setting off any alerts. Plus Hard removes the enemy’s vision cones so you can’t see where they are looking unless you active eagle vision – which can’t be activated while you are running. Despite this, most of these levels are easy to get through as you can just reset the checkpoint if you accidentally sent off an alert – or maybe I just found it easy after the stupidity of Outlast’s insane mode criteria?

The only exception to this is in sequence 7 where you have to shoot guys as Nikolai covering Ana. The guys come out in pairs and if you shoot one and someone else sees his body, it sets off an alarm. You have to do two things: Fire bullets that miss on purpose to distract certain guards to separate them from their partners; then you need to become Deadshot from the Batman series and take them all out before they have the time to turn around. It’s trial and error and is borderline ridiculous. There are also three alerts that you are ‘allowed’ as they cannot be avoided but I had to look this up when I couldn’t see any possible way of avoiding the alert – which was fucking annoying.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I found Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia to be a very solid and enjoyable game for the most part and I did enjoy the Plus Hard playthrough too – the Sequence 7 bit above as the only exception. The game took me 18 and a half hours to complete but it didn’t feel like that long which is testament to its enjoyability.