Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India

Completing all I could of Assassin’s Creed: Odyssey encouraged me to go back and finish the only unfinished game in the series Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India.

The game follows the story of Abaaz, an Indian assassin as he goes on another 10 missions of side scrolling, assassination fun. Now, the thing about the Chronicles series is that they are actually proper assassin games where the main objective is to get through the level without being seen and without killing anyone that isn’t a target. Essentially, it’s what Assassin’s Creed should be rather than the ‘get seen, kill everyone’ that the main series has become (and has been since Assassin’s Creed II).

There are two types of level in Chronicles: India. You have your normal ‘progress through the level past the guards to the end goal,’ missions. These missions will usually have a secondary objective which you don’t need to complete but if you do, it will net you points. The more points in a level you get will determine what extra abilities you unlock for Abaaz including carrying more items, more health and more damage. The health and damage upgrades are totally pointless if you play the game as it’s meant to be played as you get the higher scores for completing levels without being seen – so no combat.

In addition to the sword you will never use, you have the ability to whistle to distract guards, chakrams which can be used to cut ropes at certain points of the game and kill guards if you hit them right, noise bombs which are whistles that don’t originate from you, and the auto-win smoke bombs that once you can carry enough of, none of the other items matter. Except for the chakrams which need to be used to progress past certain points.

This accounts for half of the game and the other half are speed run levels of which there are 4 – more than any other Chronicles game. I was happy for this though, as I’m generally better at these types of levels. Anyway, you score points here based on the speed of completion.

Looks wise and music wise, I personally think it’s very good. My only criticism and I think I mentioned this in the Russia review, is that when you are trying to go quickly, which is most of the time, the way the buttons are configured caused to slide into the back of guard’s legs a lot, totally ruining my stealth approach. This is because the stealth button is the same as the slide button when you are running so if don’t stop running quickly enough, you will knock into a guard and then be hacked to pieces.

Achievements – 1,000 Points – 18 Achievements

The achievements are mostly straight forward and can be broken down into groups. You only get two of the achievements for playing through the main game.

The next set is for getting golds in the three styles, shadow silencer and assassin, 30 times across all playthroughs. You can rinse and repeat checkpoints to get these, though I don’t see the point between silencer and assassin as choking someone out and not killing them is pretty much the same as slicing them up real nice in terms of the result.

The next batch are obtained by performing certain actions in certain sequences and there are 4 of these. 3 involve speed running certain levels and the fourth is for clearing a section in sequence 8 without taking any damage. All of these can be done with a little practice.

Penultimately we have the biggest batch of the lot with 6 achievements for doing the same shit over and over again. The most painful of these, and the last achievement I unlocked was for multi-killing 200 enemies, so essentially 100 multi-kills. There is a good place to grind this out in the last sequence of the game but it’s overly grindy in comparison to the rest of the list as multi-kill opportunities are few and far between when you play through normally.

The last two achievements are for completing the game in certain ways, namely without killing anyone and without being seen while playing on Plus Hard mode. Plus Hard Mode doesn’t show you the enemy’s vision areas essentially making it harder to not be seen. And it only unlocks after completing the game once, so you have to do two full playthroughs no matter what.

These two are a lot easier than they sound though as the game tracks which sequences you’ve met the criteria in, meaning that you only need to complete each sequence meeting the condition and not the whole game in a row. The only issue is that the game doesn’t tell you which sequences you’ve done so if you don’t remember then this could become more complicated. Although, as a pointer, during sequences 9 and 10, you can kill everyone and it doesn’t invalidate the achievement so if you are missing one for the not killing anyone achievement, it’s not these sequences.

Downloadable Content – N/A

I have mixed feelings about my time with Chronicles: India. I really struggled to get up the enthusiasm to play it but now I’ve done it, I do look back on it fondly. I think it offered the right level of challenge, where it’s not overly difficult but not straightforward. I would certainly recommend the series if only to experience what a true Assassin’s Creed game should be like.