assassins creed origins

When the last game in the series came out, I said that one of the next possible locations I was looking forward to was Ancient Egypt, and with Assassins Creed Origins, I got my wish.

Just as a side note, I'm going to be using a lot more images in this review than I normally do, and all of the image are ones I've taking using the rather addictive in-game camera mode. Which isn't always perfect, but does occasionally produce some stunning images.

And, as always, there will be some partial spoilers, but I'll try to avoid anything truly major. But proceed at your own risk.

As with all Assassins Creed games, it revolves around the protagonist, in this case Bayek, the last of the medjay (a kind of "elite paramilitary police force" according to Wikipedia, but more like a kind of sherrif in the world of the game).

Bayek is lovely.

He's also probably the closest we've been to Ezio in terms of characterisation... with a little more angst and seriousness, but still a very likeable protagonist. Like all AC heroes, he starts off with very little in the way of skills and gear but it ramps up fairly quickly, provided you do a few non-story missions early on.

I also loved the weapon choices, which I'll talk about a little later, but it's possibly handled in the best way so far in the series. I'm slightly torn about the outfits in this game though, since none of them provide any kind of boost to your stats, so you could play most of the game with Bayek in a towel if you liked (and I'm sure that there were at least a few people who probably did exactly that), or just keep him in his starting gear throughout the game (which is what I did).

And plus, as per the above image, he's not hard to look at... at least once the early scruffy haircut and beard gives way to the shaved head and clean shaven look.

But while I enjoyed Bayek, the game did have some issues around character. Specifically the character of Bayek's wife, Aya.

Most of the time it feels like Aya is given to you as some kind of unearned punishment.

When she first shows up, you discover she's already murdered two of the characters that Bayek has been searching for. And then doesn't give you the opportunity to play as her in those assassinations. So within minutes of meeting her she's already taken game play away from the player.

Secondly, the next two or three times she shows up, it's in pure ship-to-ship combat sequences. Now, I enjoyed AC Black Flag quite a bit...  but I feel like the developers took the wrong lessons from it's success. We didn't need more ship combat. Possibly ever again... we had none in the last two games and they were just fine. Especially since those sections could have been Aya's assassinations instead.

Then in the late game, you're forced into Aya again, and made to fight the main boss of the game. As Aya, who has no additional weapon choices, none of the additional skills you've spent the whole game working to acquire, and it's a fairly brutal final fight.

Why do you hate me Ubisoft Montreal? What did I ever do to you?

That final fight, amongst other things, made me put the controller down for quite a while before I went back. I'd had the snot beaten out of me a number of times and wasn't eager to go back to it. Of course once I did, I figured out the rhythm of the fight almost immediately, but still, it was a slog rather than a victory moment.

Also the entire end section of the game is about Aya... Aya and her relationships with contemporary historical figures, including Cleopatra and Julius Caesar. Anyone who knows their ACII lore should know what that means about Aya (which I won't spoil here, but to be honest, I worked it out completely on my own while playing the game).

Even the last shot of the game is of Aya, not Bayek (or at least the last memorable shot).

So why wasn't Aya the main character? She could have been. I think they could have easily meshed the two characters storylines into one and had it turn out the same.

They could also have very easily gone down the AC Syndicate route, and had two playable main characters. I'm guessing that the game was already too far down the development rabbithole for them to change to that model at the stage where Syndicate came out, plus they probably didn't want to be accused of just rehashing the previous game. They could also have just given you access to all of Bayek's abilities when you were playing as Aya, which would have been infinitely better.

None of which is to say I disliked Aya... I really liked her, she's a great character, it just felt like the game was punishing me every time I had to play as her. Which is bad game design.

Let's talk about combat.

Even though this was a completely different system from any AC game thus far (under the hood), the combat felt like AC Unity to me. Perhaps that was because, like Unity, I spent the whole game wielding a spear... but at the same time, like in Syndicate, I was also the master of the ranged stealth kill thanks to Bayek's predator bow (ranged headshots for the win). It was much the same as the way I played Evie to be honest... sitting high atop spots, sniping out various guards until I could just walk through a totally empty fort or stronghold.

It's just the best way to do things... I mean why stealth through the middle of a group of enemies when you can just wait far out of their reach and take them all out one by one.

The AI enemies felt a little smarter in this game, but honestly, not by a great deal. They at least reacted to and tried to track Bayek down if he killed someone at range when there was a guard nearby, but they also don't seem to care a whole lot if they don't see the kill, although they do pick the bodies up and move them to a different location.

One thing that did bug me at the beginning was the fact that you have no way of doing the "beserker poison" at range. If can only be done via melee stealth, which meant that I never did it at all in the game. But the sleep poison made a welcome return, which I didn't often use, but I like having it around anyway.

The other thing that felt very AC was the crafting of your gear. It was mostly an AC3 and Black Flag mechanic, find animals and other resources in the world to allow you to upgrade stuff. In this case it's defence, combat strength, ranged ability, quiver and pouches. And it never felt like a total grind the way it occasionally did in previous games.

What I really liked was the way they handled the weapons themselves. Its always a real pain finding the weapon that does exactly what you want it to do, but then levelling up past that weapon and having to trade to something else is always much less fun. Thankfully Origins gets rid of that by having upgradable weapons. So I think I used a total of three different spears through the whole game, since I was able to keep them tracking with my level.

And the weapons seem to be randomised, so you never know what exactly you're going to get... which annoyingly meant that I saw a lot more high level swords through the game than spears.

For me, the best weapons are some combination of "Bleeding on Hit" (10-40% chance to make target bleed), "On Fire" (chance to set enemies on fire) and "Health on Kill" (recovers 15% health after each kill). What I never really used was the Adrenaline system which is supposed to do a massive hit... but I usually forgot about it, plus the L3 + R3 button presses were hard to get right when I did, so I just swung away like a maniac instead.

They also definitely got the skill tree right this time around... it's divided into Hunter, Warrior and Seer (or range, melee and other skills) and you can definitely pick up a lot more skills this time around. In fact I ran out of individual skills I wanted about halfway through the game, but thankfully you can spend points on the three tree title options to give you a 1% better ability in that area, and given you can take that option multiple times, it's not a bad way to spend extra points.

The world of Origins is definitely what I'd call a "guided open world"... once you're actually let loose from the starting area into the whole map anyway. Sure you can go straight from there to the area designed for Level 40 characters, but you won't even be able to see the enemy levels, they just show a skull icon indicating that this is a Very Bad Idea.

The story itself mostly moves you through the areas, but as always, I wandered away from the story fairly early on to start trying to gain some levels and gear so everything just gets a little easier.

In previous AC games, the distinction between story missions and non story missions felt very cut and dried... the line is a little more blurry in Origins. It's still fairly obvious, but there are a lot of "bonus missions" in this game that seem to have been given much the same weight as story content, but less rigidly arranged than they were in Syndicate. And a lot of the missions you pick up are multi-part quests, so it's easy enough to either work all the way through something or just pick and choose whatever might be nearby your location at any moment.

As far as the quests go, they're mostly standard AC fare... go here, speak with this person, assassinate that person, steal this object, follow a crazy man around the map until he finds the person he's been talking about the whole time who turns out to be a camel. That kind of thing.

I did do essentially every single possible thing though... with the exception of the war elephants (big, high level, non-story related boss fights), the god battles (even bigger and higher level than the elephants) and the battle arena and hippodrome (because it was just irritating but fortunately not compulsory). I mean the map was basically cleared once I was done.

The "modern day" sections are back much more like some of the earlier Desmond sequences, with an interesting new protagonist, Layla Hassan, a "researcher at Abstergo's Historical Research Division". Most of her backstory is told through text items on her in-game laptop, and even though a lot of it ties in with the very lackluster liveaction movie, Layla is a character I look forward to running into again in future games.

There are also the usual enemy encampments of varying levels, treasures to discover and, given that this is Classical Antiquity Egypt (as opposed to actual Ancient Egypt), tombs to explore. The tombs are the real puzzle set pieces, although they're not quite as arduous as some of the puzzle locations from earlier games, they're also the places with the most AC lore dumps. In addition there are also animal lairs which are basically small enemy encampments of animals.

Speaking of animals...

Senu the Bonelli's eagle is Bayek's constant companions throughout as well as the game's replacement for the Eagle Vision of previous versions. Instead you get the actual vision of an eagle.

I like the mechanic, you can fly halfway across the map if you really want to to scope things out, but pinpointing entire enemy encampments from the air is really where Senu comes into her own. There were times I missed the Eagle Vision ping to show up enemies, but that still exists, it just shows gear and coins you can take instead. And if you leave Bayek standing idle for too long, Senu swoops down and perches on his arm, which is sweet.

The other animal based ability I like is the ability to set a waypoint and have your camel (or horse, but really, it's Egypt, why aren't you using a camel) run there on it's own... which is fantastic, especially for places you haven't already fast travelled to yet. Or if you need to get up from the couch and get a drink while nothing is going on.

There's also an ability in the skill tree that lets you tame any wild animal you come across... which is fun, for about five minutes. I mean if you're a melee focus character it might have advantages, but it never kept my attention, plus I think it stops working if you hit a cut scene, which is unfortunate.

Also, you can pet the myriad of cats that are running all over Egypt... because why wouldn't you want to do that!

Origins really is a beautiful game. The weather isn't quite as dynamic as say London or Paris (as in there's no rain, unsurprisingly), but watching a sandstorm roll in across the desert and reduce everything to a golden haze is amazing. And the deserts are full of weird mirages if you stand still long enough.

In fact the lighting in general is gorgeous across the game.

And as you can tell from these screen shots, they really have put a lot of work into making the desert, pyramids, mountains and river valley feel alive and unique. Depending on if you're in the more urban areas, out in the mountains or down along the coast, NPC dialogue and looks are completely different (a little like London).

To be honest I think I expected a much more desert focused game, but it does a great job of dividing the map up. It's a really large map... the biggest of any of the AC games from what I understand. It definitely feels it. And while you can find a spot with a lot of people (nowhere near the London or Paris crowds though), you can also find spots with nobody at all, which feels about right for this map.

They also kept the ability to hold your breath and swim underwater from earlier games, which leads to some really pretty moments as you explore underwater ruins (provided you take out all of the crocodiles in the area first).

When I was finished the main game, I decided to pick up the first of the two DLCs for the game, The Hidden Ones.

As far as the lore of the start of the Brotherhood of Assassins is concerned, this is much more about that than the main game was (although it was interesting in the main game to discover exactly where the assassin's symbol comes from).

Because this takes place a few years after the end of the main game (like both the Syndicate and Unity DLC that I've previously played), Bayek finally gets a prototype of the assassin's outfit we know and love from all the other games. And Aya returns, in a much more dominant outfit (although she looks amazing).

There are also moments in both games where you find characters that seem like they'll be the founding members of the brotherhood, but the DLC is a little more explicit about it.

The DLC shifts the location to the much smaller Sinai Peninsula (which makes sense) and also provides the opportunity for a much more vertical game, with a lot of rocky terrain and climbing.

As far as the story goes, it's not hugely different from the main game (I think they're saving that for the other DLC, The Curse of the Pharaohs, which is much more mythological and fantastical), the interesting part for me was aforementioned start of the brotherhood.

I very much enjoyed my time in Egypt with Bayek, and it'll be interesting to see how they develop the storyline going forward... I still want a feudal Japan version, as well as a 1920's New York game though... but we'll see.

Current Mood:

movies: assassin's creed

Since they announced that they were making an Assassin's Creed movie, I'll be honest, I've had an equal measure of excitement and trepidation.

Excitement because it's my favourite video game franchise and the director was responsible for 2015's very beautiful version of Macbeth. And trepidation because when have they ever gotten a video game movie adaptation completely right.

Having now seen it I can say that as an action movie and as a video game adaptation it ticks most of the current boxes... in fact I'd go as far as to say that it's one of the better adaptations that I've seen (but then I do have a fondness for the Resident Evil series, although I've never played the games, so take that with as much of a grain of salt as you like).

But as a movie... it suffers from the same problem that far too many action movies do currently... it supplies action in place of actual characters. I can't even say character development, because many of the additional characters are barely even more than a thumbnail sketch... like the main female assassin in the historical timeline. I have no idea what her relationship with Michael Fassbender's character was supposed to be... are they lovers, could be related, are they just friends... who can say! But worse than that, I couldn't have told you her name without looking it up if you'd paid me.

Likewise with the other Assassins in the present day timeline... "thankfully" they picked a black man, and Asian woman, a bearded man and a young pretty man... otherwise they would have all just blended into each other... because beyond the fact that they exist, and do some stuff, they have no identifiable characteristics or discernible names (I'm pretty sure the Asian woman doesn't even have any lines).

The only character with an actual arc is Marion Cotillard... yet once again, I couldn't tell you what her name was. Even though Fassbender plays two different characters, neither of them really develop or have much of a personality (whether that was helped or hindered by the fact that director Justin Kurzel, Cotillard and Fassbender had a go at a version of the script, if something I read earlier is to be believed)... so while he certainly learns some things, it doesn't really have that much of an impact on his character.

And without spoiling anything very much, neither side, the Assassins or the Templars, is really presented as being "right" or "wrong"... which is something that a few of the more recent games tried to do with varying degrees of success... but, to be honest, if I'm a fan of the Assassin's Creed series, I'm a fan of the Assassins, and I want them to be the heroes, or at least to be present as less wrong than the bad guys.

As far as this movie is concerned, the only character you really empathise with is Cotillard. And even then, not very much.

It does look beautiful though... which I fully expected from Kurzel and his cinematographer (the same one from Macbeth), Adam Arkapaw... even though I often felt like the 15th Century Spain sequences where just half obscured by smoke and orange light and a lot of really fast cutting.

I'm also not sure if it was just a really, really loud movie or if the cinema I saw it in just had the volume jacked up way too high. Yes, I was in the fully surround sound cinema with all the sound... but it made it hard to hear a lot of the dialogue.

There were more than a few nice moments, especially thing that harken back to previous Assassin's Creed games, but it all felt a bit rushed and a bit shallow. The strongest impression I actually had was that it felt very much like the couple of hours you play in the games before the title screen comes up... it's all about getting you working with the mechanics and tease out a little bit of story, but all the actual character development will happen after that point.

I think at the end of the day it's was either as good or as bad as I was hoping/expecting.

yani's rating: 3 hidden blades out of 5

assassins creed syndicate

I am a little bit obsessed with Evie Frye right now. And by little bit, I mean she's currently my favourite character from the Assassin's Creed franchise (sorry Ezio).

I can also safely say that I haven't enjoyed an Assassin's Creed game as much as Syndicate since... well probably ACII/Brotherhood to be honest.

I'm getting ahead of myself though.

When Assassin's Creed Syndicate was first announced (as AC Victory... which I kind of wish they'd kept, although I suppose that "syndicate: a group of individuals or organisations combined to promote a common interest" is more indicative of the game than "victory: an act of defeating an enemy or opponent in a battle, game, or other competition"... because that's all games ever... but I digress) I was so into it. Victorian era London as a time period is totally my jam. And all of the rather minimal information in the original leak was exciting to me.

So much so that I pre-ordered the Charing Cross edition (the one with the Jacob statue and all the extras). I saw some gameplay footage with Evie early on, and was very excited about her "hide in plain sight" ability. But then I avoided all spoilers and game play footage and reviews when the game came out, I didn't want to spoil the experience.

But then, like with Unity, I'd put the PS4 and the game away for Christmas, because I'm totally an adult. And then I needed to finish Unity before starting Sydnicate. It was definitely worth the wait though.

A little like the difference between ACIII and AC Black Flag, the second game after they debut a new direction/engine/approach, Syndicate vastly improves on many of Unity's flaws. From properly unlocking  areas of the map to the movement system to getting rid of all the multiplayer elements... it's a much better game overall.

One of the things I wish Syndicate did have though was the in-game stats that detail how many people you've killed, what your preferred weapon/method is, and because you play as both Jacob Frye (who's supposed to be the default character) and his twin sister (the aforementioned) Evie Frye, how long you've played as each of them. Although I did get an email from Ubisoft after I finished the DLC saying that I'd assassinated 321 people (not sure if that's just "assassinations" or everyone I killed though).

I can almost guarantee that my time spent as Evie was at least triple that of Jacob (in fact, I only did missions as Jacob when the game forced me to, everything else was Evie)... and my preferred weapon, without doubt, was the throwing knives. I've said before that in AC games (well, all games really with some form of shooting) my preferred play style is "sniper". Sit somewhere up high and out of the way then snipe all the bad guys without them ever seeing me. And because Evie is the master of both throwing knives and stealth, she was the perfect character for the way I play.

Evie's skill build has added stealth items that unlock over the course of the game, so playing as her just feels much lighter and quicker than playing as Jacob (who's skills favour face-to-face melee fighting). By comparison, Jacob feels slower and heavier, although I think that some of that is just in my mind.

So, getting back to Evie and my sniper mindset, I cleared whole zones of the map just sitting on the tops of buildings or in the rafters and flinging knives at people's heads (headshot for the win... it was my first achieved perk without even trying).

I much prefer Evie's personality too... she's smart and more measured than Jacob and his brash manner (although to be honest, that's all about the way they present in cut scenes, I played them in exactly the same way barring their main weapon choices). I do kind of wish that you could have chosen to play the sequence 8 missions as Evie though... I get the point of them being Jacob, it's much more part of his storyline, but the option would have been nice.

Evie's voice actor, Victoria Atkin, brings so much to the character too... and I could honestly listen to her all day long.

This was also the first game since AC Brotherhood where I've cleared every single chest, collectible and side mission in the main game. The map has been picked clean of everything but the recurring items. I even bought additional DLC, which I've never done in an AC game before, I either have played it because it was free with the game, or I haven't bothered.

When I realised I could just start unlocking sections of the map at my own pace (and could afford a number of the maps that show you were all the goodies are) I started clearing out zone after zone and finding all the collectibles as I went. I wish I'd realised earlier that the free downloadable content was available for the PS4, I could have worked that in as I went instead of doing it all at once just before the final mission.

This was also the best ending mechanic in an Assassin's Creed game as far as I'm concerned.

The final mission ends, then there's some denouement chatting between characters, and our two heroes just run off into the proverbial yet not literal sunset. And instead of having to endure about half an hour of credits that you can't skip, the game just drops you back into the world, shows a brief info screen that explains that you can keep doing the non-story missions (all of which I'd already done) and that there are now some new missions to complete, and then you're back in your chosen character.

Such a nice change from the endless crawl of all the previous games. Bless you Ubisoft, please never change this mechanic in future AC games.

While we're on the topic of the way the story fits together, there are minimal "real world" sections this time around... and these are presented as cut scenes where you as the gamer within the game are watching recurring AC universe regulars Shawn and Rebecca complete a mission to recover the Piece of Eden you discover. It's slightly more memorable then the Unity sequences (and finishes on an interesting note for the ongoing series), but it's still mostly unobtrustive to the overall story.

Gameplay is very much what I've come to expect from Assassin's Creed... that is, except that this game has two protagonists.

The story missions are split into two Jacob missions and two Evie missions (which can be played in any order) per chapter. And the zone, or borough, unlocking I mentioned before isn't bound to those stories, which I thought it might be (since the first missions are actually tied to unlocking that area).

The borough tasks are pretty standard AC fare... sneak into this location, take out all the bad guys, free these good guys, etc.

There are four types of tasks... Gang Stronghold, Bounty Hunt (kidnapping), Templar Hunt (assassination) and Child Liberation... and then once you've completed enough of those per section, a Gang War appears. They've worked an interesting mechanic in between the Stronghold and War missions though... the leader of the strongholds shows up when you've cleared it and you're given a brief skirmish where you can try to kill them before they get away. If you fail, they show up as the boss in the Gang War task, if you succeed in getting them during the stronghold sequence then you just have to kill off the lower level goons.

It might have been interesting if they'd expanded that either across all four tasks... maybe each leading to the next somehow, or with the recurring "boss" character showing up in each spot and hightailing it before you can catch them.

But while each of the tasks is essentially the same thing repeated across the whole map (just with increasing difficulty levels and number of goons), they never felt boring (slightly grindy, yes... boring, no). Mostly that was because I was trying to complete each one by picking off all the goons without being detected. Each new task was an opportunity to either repeat or better my previous success.

Of the four tasks, the most different from borough to borough are the Hunt missions, especially the assassinations as they allowed for different optional bonuses (for example, "kill only the target", "kill the target from cover" or "use air assassination").

The missions are also connected to your various NPC allies (again, where the meaning of "syndicate" comes into play), and completing them gives you more "influence" with that ally which unlocks various weapons or gear.

One of these allies is Ned Wynert, a transgender man, which is kind of amazing especially since it's never even mentioned by anyone that this character with a clearly female voice is presenting as a man. So big tip of the top hat there to Ubisoft.

The new gear mechanic in this game is the hidden blade gauntlet. It includes a grappling hook that allows you not only to leap up the sides of buildings but also create your own ziplines between various points. It really does open up the city and I did love that ability, particularly going up the sides of buildings quickly when escaping, but the fact that you can't use it from the top of moving vehicles was occasionally annoying.

I found that it broke the flow of my travel much more than the freerunning did in Unity. Or at the very least, changed the way I travelled through the city. There was also often an inconsistency with which spots it would allow you to attached to, sometimes it would cover giant distances, other times only the next building over. It might have also been interesting if it could have been set up to yank enemies off spots or just used as a retractable killing weapon much like the rope darts from ACIII (although I never really did get them to work properly).

Not that I didn't appreciate the gauntlet, especially for traversing the distances between fast travel locations and objectives, or just getting the hell out of the way when things went south, but the grunting noise both characters make when they launch themselves into the air is something I could probably live without hearing again for a while.

It was also nice to see that the assassin's "whistle" ability is back after it was mysteriously absent from Unity (although they really need to let you whistle while hanging off the side of a building, mostly so you can throw people out of windows or off the top of roofs). Having said that, I didn't use it in Syndicate anywhere near as much as I have in the past, or needed it in the previous game.

One of the things I do very much miss though are the sleep darts/bombs from previous games. There were more than a few times when I would have liked to just knock out palace guards or policemen instead of killing them, but the game really doesn't give you that option beyond a much closer "knock out", and I'm still not sure if that killed the NPC or not.

The game also has the usual "optional" missions... starring none other than Charles Darwin, Charles Dickens, Karl Marx and (eventually) Queen Victoria... and the Dreadful Crimes, which are much like the Murder Mysteries in Unity.

In fact, all of those missions are very similar to the way the Paris Stories missions played out in Unity, although this time around they're grouped into four distinct storylines linked to the historical figures.

I think my favourite ones of the original three were Dickens, since there's a lot more rushing around in the Darwin ones and some of the Marx ones are a little irritating. Then there's the DLC missions, The Last Maharaja, which is centered around Duleep Singh (who I didn't realise was a real person until I started to write this... although given that the rest of the mission characters are real, it's not really surprising).

Overall though, the Dreadful Crimes were the most interesting, they weren't quite as obvious as the ones in the previous game and often hung on one small clue or noticing the discrepancy between two stories. And the clue text that hovers in the air in Eagle Vision mode is really beautifully done, especially when the game uses it to provide additional information or lead you from one place to another.

There's also a whole additional "memory sequence" outside of the main game, which I assumed was going to be like the World War II missions from Unity, but turned out to be a self-contained adventure with a new character. I won't say too much about it so I don't spoil it, but it just appears on the world map at a certain point, and it's well worth the time to go and play through... while I don't think they'll do a whole game in that time period, this definitely shows that it could work. And I was a little sad that the outfit from that time period doesn't become a playable outfit in the game.

As I said before, I bought both sets of DLC for this game, The Last Maharaja, which is just a set of in game missions, and the Jack the Ripper chapter which takes place 20 years after the main game.

The majority of the Ripper game place is focused on Evie, although it seemed really weird to me that she had lost all of her skills from the previous game, such as the hiding in plain sight ability. Surely that's the place you start from and then build additional skills on top of it, especially if you've just finished the game with all of those skills.

There are also instances where you play as Jack, but they felt compelled to add a visual demonstration of his insanity by shaking the screen and making the controller buzz, which was a little irritating. I know it's supposed to unsettle the player and make his view disturbing, but it was mostly annoying the way it was done especially when you're trying to line up a headshot on someone from a rooftop. It was also really jarring being thrown into Jack the first time, suddenly being given a whole new set of skills you have no idea how to control. But by the end of the game I did kind of enjoy it, especially his fear based ability to shout and scare people away.

Playing him also feels very heavy and solid. I think it's the sound effects they put in around him, the swish of his leather coat and the thump of his boots, but it makes the character feel quite heavy to control. Again, I think that's just the audio clues and he's not different from the others, but it's interesting that they can make me feel that with a very small change.

He also doesn't play in a significantly different way from either Evie or Jacob... yes, you can charge in, screaming fear into the hearts of those around you (which is possibly the way the game thinks you'll play him), or you can go the stealth route, or something in between, which is usually what I ended up doing.

Evie has some new non-lethal fear based skills as well, and new gear in the form of "fear spikes" and "fear bombs", but I don't think I ever bothered using the spikes other than just testing them out. And her fear skill-tree didn't feel like it really added that much to the game beyond amplifying the ability of the gear.

The story missions are focussed on Evie tracking down Jack, and make heavy use of the clue detection mechanic from the Dreadful Crimes missions.

There are also additional activities centred around killing off Jack's lieutenants, driving carriages as slowly as possible to save people suspected of being the Ripper (a great alternative to the usual time limit racing), as well as helping prostitutes either by rescuing a brothel from being held hostage, or finding a guy who is beating up a working girl and dragging him through groups of people to "shame" him (much in the style of the kidnap missions from the base game). These feel very much like the borough unlocking missions from the main game, and are really just there to bulk out what is a fairly short main game.

And playing as the same character 20 years later is interesting, not least of all because the majority of the game you play as Evie. And what was the last AAA game where you play as a woman over 40? The older version did look a little odd though... and she doesn't move or sound any different (but really, do we actually sound that different between 21 and 41)... which is weird when she's flying up the sides of buildings with the same ease she did as a much younger woman.

The image of Evie in the menu seems to show her holding two chakram, but annoyingly they're not a playable weapon, they just seem to be the bracelets she wears. Or those bracelets turn into weapons when she's doing a the new brutal takedown (it's hard to tell exactly what she's doing during those moves), but in either case, a little disappointing.

The other thing that was slightly disappointing to me (and here we stray into some spoiler territory) was that the game didn't follow the specific facts of the case, instead transforming the women of the real case into assassins and Jack into an assassin gone both rogue and insane.

I completely understand why they went that way with the story... it gives Evie a reason to get involved beyond just helping out Abberline, but I feel like they would have accomplished that with the kidnapping of Jacob, and that each of the Ripper's victims could have been a much more important plot point than they were.

I'm not completely sure it was worth $22.95 though... but it was an enjoyable end to the Syndicate experience.

Then we come to the visuals of the whole game.

I loved the way that Paris looked in Unity, but Syndicate's London just blows it out of the water. It's so incredibly beautiful, from the grubby slums of Whitechapel through to the opulent Buckingham Palace, everything looks so rich and detailed. And for the first time there's signage and advertising spread through the city that adds to the detail.

Locations like Big Ben, Picadilly Circus and (only sadly available in side missions) the Tower of London are all incredibly iconic and have clearly been created with a lot of love. And the fact that the whole of the River Thames is one long playable area which allows you to either run from one side of the river to the other using moving barges or (if you have enough patience) travel from one end of the river to the other using one of the boats is a definite achievement.

And getting up to the top of Big Ben and just looking out across the river and the city at the (admittedly smoggy) sunrise or sunset was just amazing.

Like with any game of this size, yes there are often repeated details, be it building interiors, rooftop details, layouts and the like... but like Unity, the range of different kinds of location throughout the city is fantastic.

There's also quite a bit of replication in the NPC characters... I think there's a mix of about a dozen body shapes, voices, faces and walk cycles which are mixed and matched in numerous combinations. However I did notice in more than one instance that often the character's location and outfit didn't always match up with their walk cycle or voice.

One notable instance of that was stopping in Hyde Park and hearing a very well dressed couple have a conversation in voices and content that would have been much more suited for Whitechapel. Or watching the heavy washerwoman character model walk like a duchess. And I think there were at least a couple of instances of misgendered voices and bodies (not that there's anything wrong with that).

But those are really very minor quibbles in an otherwise amazing game.

As for the next one, I'm hoping for one of three things... 1920's New York, 1800's Japan (Meiji Restoration period... think The Last Samurai) or Ancient Egypt... but we'll have to wait until 2017 to find out.

Current Mood:

assassin's creed unity and rogue

Assassin's Creed Unity

Given the general uproar about the bugginess of Assassin's Creed Unity when it first game out, I wasn't necessarily expecting it to be a great experience. But given that the game launched in November 2014 and I didn't get around to playing it until sometime after March 2016 a lot of the issues that surrounded its launch weren't present once I booted it up for the first time.

And as with Assassin's Creed III when the whole system was rebooted which made both combat and free running feel fresh and new (although in the case of ACIII's combat I hated the fact that medicine was gone and I couldn't use that while fighting, although I loved all of the updates to the free running), ACU has likewise had a seemingly "from the ground up" reboot. While the majority of the core gameplay remains the same, a lot of the way you approach the world changed significantly and many familiar things feel very different.

Not least of all was the fact that this was the first AC game I played on the Playstation 4. And while I generally don't get too overexcited when it comes to graphics, ACU is a good looking game (which I feel like I've been saying in one form or another since AC Revelations). Plus the sheer number of people in the crowds makes Paris feel like such a lived-in and full city in a way that Venice, Rome and Istanbul don't by comparison.

I liked ACU's reboot to the free running system with the "free-run up" and "free-run down" options (although the fact that it stopped me from flinging myself off the edge of buildings towards other buildings that I know I could have caught hold of was occasionally a little frustrating... granted that has probably been my number one cause of desynchronisation over the whole AC franchise). But the speed that hero, Arno Dorian, scales the buildings, as well as the little flourishes of parkour animation that he does when he reaches the tops of buildings or the group really add something to the free running.

One of the other things I really liked about the free running this time around was that the buildings seemed to be designed to more easily get from one side of the (very, very, very large) city of Paris to the other. The city is designed with many different kinds of architecture and differing building types, however a lot of the rooftops are flat and wide, and cables/ropes are attached between wider gaps making it really easy to get a decent run across the tops of buildings. In some ways it reminded me of a lot of the building design from Assassin's Creed Revelations.

The story feels fairly standard for an Assassin's Creed game, although there are some nice flourishes and the integration of a number of both historical figures (most notably Napoleon Bonaparte and Maquis de Sade) and events (the storming of the Bastille, the execution of King Louis, etc) in a way that feels more immersive than previous AC games.

The main character of Arno Dorian is possibly the most Ezio-like of all the characters, although overall I will say that he's a little bit forgettable from a personality perspective. But he's definitely up in the top of my favourite AC characters. And after several "non assassin" leads, Arno is a return to form as the fully trained character who is involved in the Order.

The love interest angle to the story is actually neither here nor there... Elise is a nice enough character, there's an interesting dynamic in their relationship, but essentially she's just there to push certain story elements (follow her here, defend her from this, find this thing for her etc).

In both the main game and the Dead Kings downloadable content there were two elements that changed the way I ended up playing the game a little. In the main game you're told that the gangs that are roaming the city (coloured red in Eagle Vision) are harassing the populace and have "no right to be doing what they're doing" or something very similar. These are contrasted with the official guards (coloured blue) who just wander around and will attack or chase you if they see you doing something wrong. But just this one line about the gangs, mentioned once, actually had me going out of my way more than once to take them down. I tried my hardest not to kill the guards, but anybody wearing red needed to die and die quickly.

Contrasting that with previous games, where there's only "innocent bystanders" and "guards/villains" and I didn't have quite as much of an objection to just running past people and letting them live. The fact that many of these gangs are random events that once you'd completed X number the game gives you a bonus of some sort (usually cash) didn't hurt, but it was more my moral objection to them that saw them fall under Arno's blade.

And in Dead Kings there's a little boy who is at the centre of the story, and who I got quite attached to, even over the relatively short play time of the game. Basically by the end of the content in my own personal interpretation of what happened next, Arno adopts him and they go on adventures. It made me wonder about a game where you play a mother or a father of a kid who is integral to the plot (maybe they're a sage or somehow historically relevant... to the Order at least)... and how that would change what you're prepared to do.

The addition of a skill tree for advancing the three areas of stealth, melee and ranged combat felt a little broken... or just that there were never enough points on offer to really do all the things I wanted to. And some of them I feel like I unlocked entirely too late in the game for them to be of much use (although I love the disguise skill). Possibly it was because of the multiplayer element baked into the game and the expectation that you'll be completing those missions which would have, in turn, earned you more points.

One of the things I did like about the redesigned combat was the upgraded Phantom Blade (aka Hidden Blade) which fired projectiles in much the same way as the gun upgrade in either ACII or AC Brotherhood worked. And once the berserker/poison was available, I once again found myself letting characters kill each other off while I watched on from the safety of a rooftop rather than engaging people directly. Likewise, for me, the regular projectiles took the place that daggers have held in previous games. I'm basically a sniper, I'm not going to lie. I'd much rather do the deed from afar then get up close and personal. I mean, Arno's an assassin... why the hell wouldn't he do the deed from a safe distance and live to fight another day.

The range of weapon choices in ACU was pretty amazing too. Swords (regular damage), axes (heavy damage), spears (long reach), pistols and rifles (ranged) are all present, in a range of different skins and damage levels, but I decided quite early on that the spear class was where I felt the most comfortable... once again, all about keeping people at a distance... because why the hell wouldn't you? I also like that the fight animation has become fairly sophisticated and Arno will string hits together in unique ways even though you're essentially button mashing.

It also meant that I relied more on the weapon and not as much on the smoke bombs for close combat. In fact I got through the majority of the fights with the spear alone.

And on top of that Arno's hood, shirt, belt, pants, Phantom Blade and boots were all customisable, with, as always, a range of colours. DRESS UPS! Like seriously, the character creation portion/costumes and accessories are what I love in games.

The problem is that often times the highest powered items that I had access to were kind of ugly or looked ugly when mixed with other items (and the matching ones were only accessible though co-op missions). Thankfully the ability to throw a full costume over the top of those choices (like Ezio or Connor or Edward's outfits from previous games) meant you could keep the stats while still having a decent looking character. I did enjoy the range of things, if not always the specific items, though... and I would really love for them to make a game where you design your own ancestor character a little like the character creation process in something like Fallout 4 (part of me still wants to go back and restart FO4 because I'm really not happy with the final design for his character's wife).

Granted I would be designing that character for about three hours before I was happy with his look.

I feel like ACU was one of the most densely packed games, at least as far as collectibles and side missions and the like. Perhaps that was because the story didn't feel like it was really all that long, but there was still plenty to do. But because of the lockpicking minigame (and it's three difficulty levels) and the slow trickle of points to put into skills, this is also the game where I left the most unopened chests and other assorted side quests just sitting there. Part of that was around the multiplayer element they added, where you could play cooperatively with other people to complete missions (which I never did anything with)... there were at least two different kinds of those, plus all the chests, and the other collectibles. When I finished the game, my map almost looked like I'd never even started.

Speaking of side missions, one of the additions that I did really like was the Murder Mysteries. These mostly relied on using Eagle Vision to look for clue markers/people and then solving whatever grisly murder you're discover. It was a definite change of pace, and although occasionally felt somewhat like busywork running from one location to another and then another and then another, only to usually run back to one of the earlier locations to accuse someone, I enjoyed all of those missions. There was only one of them where I was unsure of the culprit and had to resort to looking it up online. And that was more about a choice of two possible villains, and the one I thought was more likely turned out to be the killer.

Also adding a different element were the Paris Stories, often based on actual historical occurrences (I'm pretty sure the murders were likewise at least historically inspired) or French literature. Essentially these are mini-missions broken into three or four parts, they were closer to normal AC gameplay, but not entwined in the main story.

So even with the small number of flaws and the issues that happened when it launched, I actually really enjoyed my time in Revolutionary Paris.

Assassin's Creed Rogue

I tried to like this game, I really, really did. But I just couldn't take any more sailing. Add to that a protagonist who is somewhat unlikeable as he works against everything that players have been taught in all the previous games and it just wasn't working for me.

I actually played this before I started Unity... but given that this is more a short catalogue on why it didn't really work for me than a full description, I figured it made more sense to slot it in under the Unity part.

It feels like Ubisoft have been trying to present a "the Assassin's aren't totally right and the Templars aren't totally wrong" overarching storyline for the last few games. Starting with ACIII and the *spoilers* revelation that the group of men you're been following are actually Templars and not Assassins *end spoilers*, through to a number of deaths in that game where the dying character spreads doubt to Connor that whatever reason he thought he was killing them was essentially flawed in some way. While I appreciate the idea, and especially if they were setting up the idea behind AC Rogue in ACIII (it does share a couple of characters and some locations, so it's possible), but I want my good guys to be good and my bad guys to be bad... none of this wishy washy middle ground.

So at its heart the idea of playing a character from "the other side" was interesting, but may have been more compelling if they'd been a Templar from the start, rather than an assassin switching sides. But then that kind of means you lose a lot of the Assassin's Creed mechanics. Or maybe they started the game as a Templar and you learn about their assassin history as the game progresses.

The gameplay of Rogue is a mix of both ACIII and AC Black Flag (mostly the American cities and a metric ton of sailing from place to place respectively), but as I said, given that I'd just spent the whole of Black Flag sailing from place to place to place, and upgrading my boat and whatnot, I really didn't want to start over from scratch with a completely new character and do more of it. Plus the fact that the setting was a location where you couldn't even swim in the water without freezing to death (I did a lot of swimming around in Black Flag), I just couldn't get that interested.

I got a few hours in and just lost interest. And now that've packed up my PS3, it's highly doubtful I'll even both revisiting it.

Current Mood:

assassin's creed - black flag

It took me around a month to work my way through the islands of the Caribbean with Assassin's Creed: Black Flag.

I enjoyed my time as a swashbuckling pirate overall and it really was a great addition to the series. I don't think I've had quite as much fun running around wielding the hidden blades and diving off very high places since ACII.

Visually it's a gorgeous game... the locations are lush and beautiful to move around, particularly the jungles when the light falls just the right way. The weather effects that worked so well in ACIII work even better in Black Flag, especially when you're caught in a storm out at sea (although the water spouts/mini typhoons can bite me since they seem to achieve sentience and follow your ship around).

And speaking of sea, the water effects here are gorgeous. From the vast Caribbean Sea to waterfalls and even little puddles that you splash through, it all looks great. Instead of just slogging through murky featureless liquid, you can see yourself moving through the water. When you're in the ocean there are also occasionally little fishes and the like (although the fish AI, if there is one, isn't overly bright and they never scatter as you plough your way through them like I expected them to... but then the same can be said for the seagulls, flamingos and other bird life you encounter on various islands, you can't scare them away, and weirdly you also can't stab them which reduces them to mere set decorations, much like the beach dwelling crabs and turtles). There's also a whole underwater world you can explore, as well as a bunch of instances where you need to get to certain missions via the diving bell... which I didn't really care for... but more on that later.

The protagonist this time around is privateer turned pirate Edward Kenway (father of Haytham Kenway from ACII, and thus *spoilers* grandfather of Connor), and as a character he's everything that his descendants aren't... he's flirty, fun, passionate and every inch the pirate rogue. Unfortunately he's also NOT an assassin. Not officially anyway, and I don't think that you could really say at any point that he fully embraces the creed.

That was a downside for me, a minor one, but still a downside. While it worked for the way the story had been constructed, I did find that I really missed that sense of purpose and mission that being an assassin would have given, or if Edward had been inducted into the order during the course of the game (like both Connor and, to some degree, Ezio before him). And him having been aboard ship for two years previously doesn't really explain away him having mad assassin parkour skills.

I will also admit that he takes a little while to warm up to. Initially he's all about the doubloons (or more accurately, the reales, since a doubloon is actually 128 reales, thank you Internetz)... and that did make him slightly less likeable to start with. But once he screws up enough to kick off the major plot, he started to grow on me. That and his interactions with the first Master Assassin in Havana (the unfortunately named Rhona Dinsmore) were fun and flirty and really helped turn him into a likeable character.

And even though in ACIII I found everything about the combat and the guard AI problematic, I didn't mind it quite so much this time around. Partly because I discovered what (for me anyway) the secret is to good combat when there's more than one attacker jumping on you... namely throw a smokebomb, shiv everybody in the vicinity and repeat until everybody is dead. I made it through more than one enemy-filled island and almost every single one of the boat boarding battles that way.

I don't know if they actually balanced out the combat this time around, or if I was just more used to it, it just felt much better overall. And while I desynchronised during combat in ACIII on a regular basis, generally the only times that I did it in Black Flag were due to either a) ship battle related trauma or b) thinking I could jump further than I could (also known as the "whoops, I fell off that mast/cliff/temple ruin"). Also, the "run away and hide until you have some health bars again" technique worked out very well for me a second time around, but I felt like I had to use it much less often too.

The improved Eagle Vision which lets you track enemies through walls and out of your line of site was also incredibly useful, especially any time you're using stealth or trailing people since I only had to keep their eagle vision echo in sight, rather than the character themselves. That was always a giant bugbear for me in previous games, when it was impossible to do that without either falling off a roof or being seen or losing your quarry when they disappeared down a warren of streets.

I also found it much easier to do a lot of the additional synchronisation items within the missions... but then they were also much easier to actually remember or were pointed out clearly this time around compared with ACIII.

In fact, almost everything that I saw as a flaw in ACIII has been upgraded or fixed or otherwise improved this time around which made me happy. Most notably both the on screen prompts and clues, but also the hunting of animals, which was so much easier (specifically the fending off large predators specifically, I think I only died a handful of times as opposed to EVERY SINGLE TIME) and which led directly into the crafting of the health upgrades (which I was so glad to see again) and additional weapon/tool storage, which was also much, much easier.

One of the things I thought was very odd, and maybe I just overlooked it or didn't happen upon the right shop or something, but the throwing knives that I made great use of in previous games seemed to be strangely absent this time around. Sure I'd occasionally pickpocket one off of a dead guard's corpse, but I never found a shop that sold them outright. Not that I was short on weapons (I went through what must have been a couple of hundred insanity/poison and sleep darts taking down guards all over the place), but I did miss the knives on occasion, especially when I was going for uber stealth.

One thing that I definitely liked about Black Flag over pretty much any of the previous games in the series was the way that the game was set up across multiple islands... from well-known ones like Havana, Kingston and Nassau which were the big bustling towns, down to little islands that may only contain a chest or a glowing pyramid or a small "pirate outpost". But unlike previous games where you have a whole city to explore and then, if you're so inclined, go through and clear out all the collectibles and extra content, or just whatever segment of city that you're being allowed to access at the moment, this system allows you to go through and pick a smaller and often more manageable area completely clean, which I LOVE. And assigning the R2 button to a pop-up that tells you how much stuff you have still to clear was a great addition too, although I tended to use the map to target things individually more so than I used that. The return of the fast travel system that allows you to go to an island in general or to a specific viewpoint on that island is highly welcome, especially when you need to suddenly flick back to somewhere you've already been (plus the fact that your ship also appears in the harbour when you do that is damn useful) for some of the assassination missions.

Speaking of ships, I didn't mind the ship missions/combat in ACIII. I wasn't always great at them, and I never finished the very last one which had wave after wave of boats coming at you (from memory), but it was fun just tooling around in the ocean. And I felt the same way about Black Flag, especially in the early part of the game where everything is new and different and you're not needing to travel huge distances to get from one place to another (although they do feel that way initially).

But after a while (by about the 50% synchronisation point I think), it all became a bit repetitive. Not the story missions so much, but the fact that you need to capture other ships in order to upgrade your own ship and therefore be better at capturing ships (to then upgrade your own ship, etc, repeat until insane) and taking over the forts that control/unlock the "mystery fog" for each section of the map. That I got bored with, because it was either a giant pain in the ass, especially when confronting multiple ships, or as happened on more than one occasion, I'd attack, disable and board a ship, only to be taken down by the enemy crew (or in one spectacular case, misjudged a jump from the very top of the mast to some rigging and went kersplat on the deck of the ship with legs all akimbo). The fact that it treated both the sea battle and the ship board battle as the same event was also kind of annoying. I would have much preferred if when you desynchronised after failing the boarding part, it would take you back to the point when you're approaching the ship to board it.

The fact that you would sometimes get the "this area not available for the current memory" message while you were sailing around trying to fight was also a pain. If it's an open world/open ocean, then let me move around as much as I like during a fight (within the confines of the attack area I suppose), don't hem me in with random boundaries and punish me for straying outside of them while following enemy ships. I will say that that only happened a handful of times, and mostly when I was doing some of the earlier story missions rather than free roaming, so there may have been additional boundaries put up for those.

Also, don't get me started on the sea shanties... they were fine at certain points, but when you're supposed to be doing a silent or stealth or high tension mission... or are having to do a mission all over again because you failed at the last possible moment, you can take your cheery singing and shove it. I was very thankful that there was an option to (temporarily) silence them though.

The Black Flag version of the assassin recruitment missions from other games have been split into a couple of different tasks this time around... you can rescue pirates from attacking guards (or, like I did, just pick up every random floating sailor you see while travelling from one place to another) which then keeps your crew at full strength and makes boarding ships easier, but the "sending people on missions" portion of the game became controlling your own fleet. Not that you could ever get them to come and help you on missions (although there were some random "friendly" ships that show up out of the blue on occasion, but I never quite figured out exactly what the trigger was for their appearance), they just scuttled about in their own unique portion of the game, running trade missions to far off lands and taking down other ships to make those routes safe to sail.

I had a couple of issues with that "mini game" to be honest and it was easily my least favourite part of the entire game. The first thing was that while you do get very valuable cash from these missions, they're trading items that only exist within their own little minigame... I always desperately needed metal to upgrade Kenway's boat, the Jackdaw, but the trade missions were wine and spices and the like, which didn't do me any good and I couldn't use them in-game anyway. Secondly, you need to capture boats in the main portion of the game to add to your minigame fleet, but they in turn can't capture any of the ships they encounter, so while they fought countless ships, that didn't do me any good at all. And the mini game within the mini game where you battle other ships to clear the trade routes got really, really, really old, really fast. It just ended up feeling very much like a tacked on addition to the game rather than something I wanted to do, unlike the upgrading of assassins in Revelations, or even clearing the other American cities in ACIII. This was essentially doing the same thing over and over and over again with only the reales as reward, and unlike the cities in ACIII, the routes didn't stay clear once you cleared them... it was very annoying.

One of the other things that I gave up on at a certain point were the additional underwater missions. And that was partly because you couldn't even arm yourself. Seriously, there were sharks and moray eels just ready to take a bite out of you, and there never seemed to be a way to defend yourself, which was frankly ridiculous... I understand not being allowed to use the hidden blades or a sword or pistols, but give me a damn knife and let me be Stabby McStabbington. It was also generally annoying that while you do have additional air caches dropped around the map, it was really easy to get lost or not be sure where the hell you were going due to being able to move anywhere in three dimensional space and while I never actually ran out of air, I did get chewed up by sharks on more than one occasion. I'm also never a fan of the "timed mission" sections of the AC games, and this was a whole slew of them.

The rewards for doing those areas weren't enough to keep me going back versus the stresses of actually trying to do them, especially since they were all connected do modifying your ship, which in turn required more sea battles, etc, etc.

And the end of the game (while VASTLY superior to the end of ACIII) seemed to jump out at me from nowhere. I knew I was coming up on it, but unlike the other games which make it really damn obvious that you're on the final leg, Black Flag blindsided me. I jumped back into the Animus after doing the last of the "real world" sections, and there was one short-ish cut scene before the credits started rolling.

I know that other people have complained about this before, but seriously Ubisoft, let us have a way of skipping the bulk of the credits. Yes, there were a couple of cute sections during the credits, one where you're steering a boat while having a conversation with another character (which is actually a really sweet ending) and then another one which *slight spoilers* introduces the child version of Haytham (which also then rewards you with the brilliantly named "Saw That One Coming" trophy). But then you need to sit through at least twenty damn minutes of scrolling boredom.

Then, unlike ACIII, you aren't even rewarded with extra gameplay... I mean the game eventually reboots and the map displayed with a bunch of assassination/bureau icons on it... but they seemed to disappear as soon as I started running around and looked at the main map, which is weird and annoying. Whether they were reminders of "extra content" and I'd done most of it, I don't really know, but I was slightly confused and didn't play for very long after that point.

The portions of the game that take place in "the real world" are very different this time around. Gone is Desmond Miles and the third person perspective, this time around it's all mute first person view as YOU, the gamer, are the newest employee of the Canadian gaming company offshoot of Abstergo Industries (which I'm guessing must have been at least partially based on/inspired by Ubisoft itself and its various divisions spread around the globe).

While these sections feel very, very different (and there are only a handful of them) to the Desmond ones, they are all part of the same universe, and characters from the Desmond storyline do show up (which made me very, very happy). I may also have gotten a little glassy eyed when I hacked into one of the computers (in game, obviously) and discovered a video/report detailing exactly what happened to Desmond after the end of ACIII. Actually 90% of these real world sections are hacking minigames set in various parts of the Abstergo building. Thankfully it wasn't the same game over and over and over, there were three distinct types (although the "guide the ball through these killer lines" version was my least favourite), and the various files you uncover detail not only the development of the first Animus and the ability to dive into memories that aren't part of your genetic heritage but also various snippets "recovered" from Desmond's phone. It was interesting enough to keep me coming back, and viewing/listening to all of them and hacking every computer I could get my grubby little virtual hands on.

Again, this section of the game, although it appeared to be rolling to a close, didn't feel like it properly ended before I jumped back into the Animus for the final time. In fact it felt very much like all it was missing was "to be continued".

All in all, this game slots in as my second favourite after the ACII/Brotherhood two-parter, and I'm definitely sad to have said goodbye to Edward, his Jackdaw and the sun-drenched islands of the Caribbean.

Current Mood:

honor the creed

"Nothing is true... everything is permitted"

This year was definitely the Year of the Assassin in my house. Thanks to the Good Game Top 100 list (where Assassin's Creed II came in at number 19), and a random conversation with one of the girls at work about the fact she'd picked up the first two games, the combination of which led me to do the same.

And it all snowballed from there.

I was going to wait since I'm getting Assassin's Creed: Black Flag for Christmas, but these five games are all part of the "Desmond" story arc, so it makes sense to keep these thoughts all together and deal with the later games one at a time.

Also, these aren't necessarily "reviews" as such, they're more my associated thoughts around the games.

Assassin's Creed

Technically the first game in the Assassin's Creed series is sitting on my Pile of Shame.

I finished Brotherhood last year (the third game in the series but my first foray into the world of AC), and then earlier this year bought both AC1 and AC2 at the same time. I started playing AC2 and then thought that I would just try out the first game before I got too deep into AC2.

I played a few hours of it and haven't gone back... at least not yet. And, if I'm being honest, it probably won't happen at all (and the more games in the series I play, the less I want to go all the way back to the beginning).

Part of the issue is that by comparison with both AC2 and Brotherhood, the controls feel SO DAMN CLUNKY. Add to that the fact that the guards all seem to be ridiculously sensitive compared with AC2, and I really didn't like the way the game felt as a whole.

I'm sure there is some basic rule of the universe that says that you should never go backwards in a gaming series!

Assassin's Creed II

Everybody with an internet connection already knows that AC2 is the best of the AC games... pretty much just full stop, end of story.

I do have a tendency to lump this and Brotherhood together in my head as Part 1 and Part 2 of the same game. I very much feel like they were most of the way through developing AC2, looked at the amount of content they had, the scope of story they wanted to tell, knew that the multiplayer wasn't going to be finished in time and went "well, if we take these things and the multiplayer and cut the story here and then develop these other things that were on our original wish-list, we can make two full games".

Maybe at some point in the future they will re-release AC2 and Brotherhood as one giant game (and remastered, naturally... damn that would be awesome).

So, given all that, it's a little hard for me to talk about AC2 on it's own.

Because I'd played Brotherhood first, I dove in at the deep end. In fact I rage quit Brotherhood for several months because I couldn't follow Uncle Mario through the streets of Rome without losing him or running up walls I didn't intend to. But AC2 has a brilliant, gentle introduction to all the skills, both things new to AC2 and things that carried over from the first game.

And unlike AC1 and AC3, the hero of the AC2 trilogy, Ezio Auditore da Firenze, is a likeable character with an actual sense of humour, even if everything around him is turning upside down. From what little of AC1 that I've played, I didn't actually like Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad all that much. He comes off, at least at the beginning of the game, as a complete arrogant douchebag (he was better in Revelations, but that takes place after the events of AC1). And Ratonhnhaké:ton aka Connor from AC3 was, for the most part, entirely too busy being serious and lacked a sense of humour or lightness (there were a couple of very rare moments, such as some of his interactions with the folks at the homestead, and he grew on me as time went on, but overall, he's a much more dour hero).

It's also not just Ezio that has a sense of humour... the game in general has a lightness in certain parts... like the fact that they introduce Ezio's uncle by having him say "It'sa me, Mario" literally had me laughing out loud.

AC2 just gets it all right... the combat, the difficulty, the missions and all of the additional content. There were some spots that were challenging and missions I had to do a few times before I got things right (and I did end up hitting the internet for some of the solutions to the Subject 16 quests that didn't make any sense), but I never felt like I was out of my depth like it did at certain points in later games of the series.

Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood

As I've already said, this really does feel like the natural sequel to AC2, especially given that you literally start the Ezio part of the game in Brotherhood in the exact same location that you left it in AC2.

And, for me anyway, I feel like they took everything in AC2 that I loved and just +1'd it. The tower missions being more of a puzzle than a straight climb, having the whole of Rome to conquer and free rather than the multiple locations of AC2, the additional missions and tasks you could undertake... all of it just worked for me. True, it was the first AC game I played, and that probably factors in rather heavily, but other than the aforementioned steep learning curve and rage quit at the beginning of the game, it really did hit all the right notes for me.

Also, because it was the only AC game I owned at the time, I was a bit of a completionist freak... I think the only things I didn't finish were a couple of the racing challenges, since the one thing I hate in AC games more than almost anything else is having to do timed runs... I completely suck at it.

Brotherhood is also the only AC game I've played where I've dabbled in the multiplayer mode. To be honest it was what got me past my initial rage quit... I taught myself how to climb, how to assassinate, how to find a target, how to just exist in the world, all from a handful of multiplayer sessions. But it gave me enough confidence and desire to eventually go back and restart the single player campaign.

Once I finally got into it, one of the things I did love about it was the assassin recruits (and it's something I really missed when I went back to play AC2). In fact I've loved it in all the games since Brotherhood, and it's been interesting to watch the development of how you recruit the assassins from the initial idea of random people on the street in Brotherhood, to the mixture of random citizens and specific missions in Revelations to the story based missions of AC3.

I can totally understand why people found the story and the story missions as "more of the same" in Brotherhood after playing AC2, but because I really enjoyed both games (and the aforementioned thought that they're essentially one big game) I never had that issue.

Assassin's Creed: Revelations

Rounding out the Ezio Trilogy is AC Revelations.

I do have a confession to make... when I started this game I was just so damn happy to be out of Italy and into somewhere that looked different and felt different. Sure, after a while of running around the city I realised that it's all essentially the exact same people and building models, just with different skins on them, but it was a welcome change after two games worth of the same "Italian-ness".

I also found myself surprisingly fond of the whole new bomb mechanic. Usually with things like that I tend to forget about them or else use them only when absolutely required. But in this game I used them all the time, granted not always well, but I definitely gave it a red hot go. And, once I moved on to AC3, I actually really missed them... especially given the limited bomb capacity (both in terms of choice and number that could be carried) in that game.

And, secondary confession, I much preferred Ezio's relationship with Sophia Sartor in this game to the flashback memories of Cristina Vespucci from Brotherhood (and to be honest all I really remember of those is that Cristina comes across as a bit of a bitch for the most part). But he and Sophia are just sweet together.

Maybe it's the change of city/country, maybe it's an updated game engine, I don't know, but I did find Revelations to often be a more attractive game than either of it's predecessors. Not that AC2 and Brotherhood were ugly games, far from it, but I found myself more likely to stop and just take in a sunrise or sunset vista in this game than I was in either of the previous two games.

As with Brotherhood, there aren't really that many major changes to the gameplay from the Brotherhood game. You do get a new hidden blade weapon, the hook blade, and there are some new take down moves for the blade that you can use on guards. But like the two previous games, I'm essentially a button masher at heart and essentially just mashed my way through all of the combat, with the occasional use of the kick to break things up (which is something else I miss in AC3).

One of the things that I hated in Revelations was the decision to "force" players into a "tower defence" section if they spend too much time being wanted by the guards. Other than the introductory sequence that showed you how to play (which I had to play twice before I got it right), I didn't succeed once. Fortunately all that meant was recapturing the tower again, which was the much less painful option. I'm very glad it's a mechanic they abandoned in AC3 though since it was pretty damn annoying, at least until you get your assassin recruits up to the required level and they held the towers for you.

Overall, Revelations had the weakest story, there's no real reason why Ezio needs to get that worked up about the plot in this game, and to be honest, he kind of doesn't... it's more of a "really, I've already done all of these things and now I have to stop them from finding these discs?" kind of vibe. The stakes are generally pretty damn low.

It's also the game with the most annoying "Desmond" storyline/gameplay. The switch from third to first person gameplay in those sequences and the difficulty spike of the Desmond story missions made me abandon them about halfway through since they weren't vital to the overall game.

Just as an aside, one of my favourite moments from the main game comes from when you visit Cappadocia. At the end of the sequence you confront the main villain for that location and he has a big soliloquy about why he's doing what he's doing before the game gives you back control of Ezio. When you get control back, the bad guy keeps talking and you're supposed to have a big fight with him while he, presumably, talks the whole time. I'd forgotten that I'd equipped the crossbow earlier on and once the cut scene was over the first thing I did was pressed the attack button and shot him straight in the face, fight over. You had to be there, but I was amused.

Assassin's Creed III

AC3 was definitely a mixed bag for me. There were things about it I liked quite a lot... a new protagonist, a completely new time period and location completely unlike any of the previous games, plus the overall look of the game... but the things that I didn't think worked as well as previous games tipped the scale a little more that the things I loved.

I get what they were trying to do with making you play the opening sequences as Haytham Kenway before switching to the real main character several hours in... it sets the whole landscape, introduces a large number of the characters quite quickly, sets up conflict and gives motivation for the main story (well, kind of). But all it really serves to do is clog up the first several hours of gameplay with a character who isn't the lead. And it's not even like the "revelation" that comes at the end of the Haytham chapters is in any way surprising.

*Here there be spoilers*

Having played all the previous games in quick succession, the one thing I know about Assassins as a group (at least as they've been presented to me thus far) is that they can't seem to shut the hell up about BEING Assassins... it's all Brotherhood this and Assassins that. Haytham never says it once... everything he talks about is cloaked in an extra layer of subterfuge and even if I hadn't known he was a Templar when I started (thanks to damn internet spoilers), I'm pretty sure I would have been damn suspicious after the first couple of hours.

*End spoilers*

I think overall, my main complaint is that AC3 doesn't actually feel like an Assassin's Creed game. Or at least not like the Assassin's Creed games that I'd become used to. It's a decent enough game for what it is, but it's changed enough of the core mechanics and game-play that the things that made the Ezio trilogy feel properly "assassin-y" are nowhere to be seen.

On the positive side, I love the ability to free-run through the trees, and not randomly jumping off in the wrong direction (well, unless you really screw up) once you're in one of those "branch corridors", but the free-running in the cities just doesn't feel the same. The buildings are all the wrong shape, it feels like there are no flat open roofs, there are far too many soldiers with rifles who can just snipe at you from what seems like miles away without you knowing they're even there and on the whole the buildings are just too damn far apart.

A lot of the time in previous games I have just run through the streets, shoving people aside as I go, but I pretty much did that ALL the time in this one. That is when I wasn't using the Fast Travel system, which was a godsend.

And I absolutely hate the regenerating health bar. Hate it, hate it, hate it, hate it.

That, combined with the lack of health potions in this game as well as the fact that the guards are much more difficult to take down (plus their lack of floating overhead health bars and their annoying combo breakers and Connor's fighting controls), means that any large amount of combat and I was desync'ed before I knew it (and don't even get me started on the number of times I've been killed and eaten by bears, bobcats, wolves and cougars due to the stupid "push this, now this, now this" mechanic for repelling them... I did get a better handle on it towards the end of the game, but overall, hated it). I worked out over halfway through the game that the best way to cope with large groups of guards is to use the smoke bombs, but since you're restricted to carrying three bombs for a lot of the game and you can't craft them yourself like in Revelations, that tactic isn't always a viable option.

Another contributing factor is that there's no armour and no progression, stats and equipment-wise, that I really noticed anyway, to the amount of health you have. In previous games I've tended to start the story missions, then at a certain point go off, do a ton of the side quests and extra things until I either unlock or can afford the best armour available, and then I can take on all of the enemy types with much less trouble. And the fact that you have to craft the upgrades to your belt pouches (after having found or purchased the items to do that) rather than just spending cash on them is just frustrating beyond measure.

Overall, I really didn't have any use for the cash I collected. Sure, I used it to buy all the maps, and I bought all the different dye jobs for the outfit, but there was no other real incentive to spend cash. I didn't feel the need to buy additional weapons beyond the sword I bought fairly early in the game with what appeared to have the highest overall stats, as every new thing that I unlocked seemed to be in some way less effective than the weapons I started the game with. Once I'd finished the game I immediately went back and bought them all, just to appease the completionist in me, but it didn't seem to be required for the game.

Also, there's no shops to buy, no paintings or books to collect (the pirate treasure tinkets and the incredibly annoying floating pages... which I don't think they ever properly explained the purpose of, although I did mostly work it out towards the end of the game... but all of that stuff just wasn't the same)... and to be honest, while I could've wasted cash on the boat (and did on a couple of occasions), I didn't really feel a need there either.

Weirdly, all of the things that made the combat harder also made me more likely to do sneaky assassin-y things. And yes, I'm aware of the inherent contradiction in that given what I said before. But there was lots of sneaking around and hiding and whatnot. But even there the game felt much messier. More often than not there was no real obvious "path" from one hiding spot to another, and there were multiple occasions where I got to an area, jumped into the first patch of straw or brush or whatnot and looked around and looked around and looked around, and there was no obvious way to progress without being seen.

And don't even get me started on the entire end mission and the following end sequence...

*Here there be more spoileriness*

Not only was the final mission/task almost impossible to do without desyncronising, but once I managed to get to a certain stage, there was no clear path of where I was supposed to go, yet again. I literally only made it through because I accidentally flailed my way onto the right place at the right time and was able to run after the villain.

But the thing that REALLY irked me was the fact that ALL control is taken off you. You don't even get a "Press X to stab", it's all cut scenes. Then you're forced to lumber very slowly up a path and into a tavern, you trigger another cut scene, but once again, aren't given any agency or ability to DO anything, other than watch it all play out. The thing that really shocked me though was the very last foe you kill, there's no "pre-death conversation/send off" moment... maybe it was an intentional thing, Connor has nothing he wants to say to the villain, he isn't going to offer him forgiveness or even send him on his way with the traditional prayer of his people like he's done with every other foe, bear, deer and bunny he's killed along the way.

*Here endeth the spoileriness*

And then there's the 900 hours of credits you can't skip through before they throw you into a new, incredibly badly explained sequence. Don't get me wrong, once I worked out what the hell I was supposed to be doing, I kind of enjoyed it, but like a lot of the game I just felt that it was badly explained.

There were two main things that really, really bugged me throughout the game... firstly was the fact that more often than seemed usual in Assassin's Creed games, control was taken away from you and turned into a QuickTime event... and secondly, but more importantly, the total and complete lack of appropriate information before you go on a mission, and even worse when it's any of the additional content... for example, I had absolutely no idea what to do with the "find these things around the place" missions (aka Delivery Missions) without having to look it up online.

The same with the assassination contracts and the like... without knowing that you needed to go and look at the map for additional markers, the game doesn't do a very good job of signposting things, or just flat out telling you what the hell you're supposed to be doing.

The other issue I have is the appalling menu design. Previous games haven't had the BEST menus, but this one is next to useless. There are three icons devoted to returning to the mission, restarting the mission from the last checkpoint and quitting the mission entirely, but no ability to go straight from the menu to the map via the menu, and the things that are there are hidden inside a layer of badly described user interface that doesn't help.

Maybe it's just that I'm not great at the game, I certainly don't consider myself any kind of kick-ass guru, and 98% of the really, really cool things I've done in all of the games, but especially this one, have often been done completely by accident. It just felt like the difficulty curve really, really spiked between Revelations and AC3.

Having said all of that, there are a lot of things I do love about the game. Firstly it's a really, really good looking game. Even with the occasional visual glitch (and that's more about the AI putting characters in places they shouldn't be than about how the game actually looks... I had more than a few instances of seeing characters appear a foot off the ground and then drop into place, once humorously, straight into the ocean for some reason) and the slightly weird way that foliage just seems to instantly sprout out of the ground or unfold as you run forward... it's still very pretty. Especially with all the new weather effects, there's nothing quite like stalking a target in the middle of the night while a thunderstorm rages around you.

And even though it was often trying to bite, claw, stab, maul or eat me, having the world be alive with all manner of animals was fantastic too.

In addition to the new story based missions to recruit the small group of assassins (which were problematic only because of the combat mechanics), which I did enjoy once I got my head around them, the addition of Connor's homestead and the tradespeople he finds and assists is a great dynamic, and one that I really enjoy (well, maybe not the bit where you have to round up the very stubborn pigs and get them back into their pen... although Conner's mutterings while he ran around did amuse me). I kind of wish that there were more of those to be honest, and I also wish they had been released more gradually between other missions as they make less sense when you did them all in one giant hit like I did... but that's the way they're given to you... and so that's the way I played them.

I also enjoyed the idea in this game that the Templars aren't this band of evil, moustache twirling villains only out to cause trouble and mess things up. There's a great ambivalence to this particular set of Templar villains where they tell Connor exactly why he's screwed up and why him trying to stop them has instead caused him to make things worse than they were before, at least from their perspective. I was never completely sure how truthful they were being, or whether the game was trying to set up the idea of this being how you turn an Assassin to the Templar cause... slowly, seductively, by convincing them little by little that your goals aren't so different. But either way I did enjoy that element of ambiguity (and I'm wondering how it will play out in later games if at all).

I think this was also the game where I enjoyed the Desmond missions and storyline (except, again, for the way it ended) more so than any of the others. The little I played in AC1 was fairly straight forward story set up, AC2 was better and did have a couple of sequences where you were allowed to run around as Desmond. Brotherhood ramped that up with the modern day Monteriggioni setting where you could run around like a madman and climb all over everything as well as the final sequence through the Colosseum. Revelations was the worst of the bunch, although some of the Desmond backstory was interesting, it wasn't enough to actually make me struggle on through the gameplay. But in AC3, they really give you the chance to go on missions as Desmond, and while the lack of the "Animus" HUD information kinda bugged me (as it did in all the other Desmond portions of the games really), this really felt like the first time I really got to get out there as Desmond (beyond the Brotherhood sequence). And I liked it.

I am very much looking to see what they've done with Black Flag... and while I don't know that I'm ready to upgrade to the PS4 any time soon, I wouldn't mind checking out Rogue.

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