Assassin's Creed Rogue

Assassin's Creed Rogue and Unity were released on the same day back in 2014. That seems quite unusual but the reasoning was to have a release on the older gen consoles too (Xbox 360 and PS3) that never got Unity. Rogue was released few months later on PC too and years later as a remastered version for Xbox One and PS4. Rogue was pretty much like a consolidation price for the older gen: its development even helmed by kind of a secondary studio, Ubisoft Sofia, whose previous work for the series had been mainly AC Liberation.

Heavily iterative Assassin's Creed

AC Rogue is gameplay-wise a very safe entry. It doesn't introduce any entirely new mechanics, instead merely iterating and polishing old ones, mainly those of AC4 Black Flag. If you hadn't gotten enough of ship combat, here's another game's worth of it.

One new thing for naval combat is how enemy brigs are able to reverse-board you if they get a chance to ram. I think it was good for giving brigs more of an identity; previously they had been just weaker frigates. Getting boarded is pretty jarring, though. The ship shakes and whatnot for many moments so that the enemy combatants can come on board while you can't do anything about it.

Rogue's change to the swivel cannons kind of took away from naval battles. In Black Flag with the cannons fully upgraded, you just hold down the button to auto-fire at every exposed weakpoint in sight but in Rogue you have to let go of the button if you want autoaim after every shot. And even then it doesn't necessarily hit.

Overall I did enjoy the ship combat more, however. That's mainly because of the Dangerous Waters music track and how it is dynamically used. I'm not entirely sure what's the trigger, like sinking a big ship or something. But when you do hit the trigger, the track jumps to its climax. It's so incredibly satisfying to have cannons firing everywhere, the Morrigan (your ship) emerging from smoke, and have that part playing. And it can happen multiples times in a battle. String instruments really make the series' music.

The soundtrack was composed by Elitsa Alexandrova whose biggest merit on it might be perfect utilization of older tracks from the series. I believe Dangerous Waters was on Black Flag's soundtrack too (at least it sounded familiar to me) but that game doesn't use it as cleverly.

A similar case is in Rogue's boot screen where a completely unexpected variation of Jesper Kyd's Assassin's Creed II main theme hits you with nostalgia -- even me who played that game for the first time mere 1.5 years ago. Also a nice touch in the boot screen is how the Assassin Brotherhood's logo rotates into the Templar cross.

With a twist

Rogue's modern day parts too follow in Black Flag's footsteps. You're back in Abstergo Entertainment, although as a different person and there are no Assassins around. You're reliving the memories of an Irish Assassin Shay Patrick Cormac who is for some reason of great interest for one certain modern day Templar, Juhani Otso Berg.

Mr. Berg is Finnish but Ubisoft didn't try very hard to make him authentic -- for any actual Finn at least. His voice actor clearly isn't Finnish; I reckon one will find it extremely challenging to even find a person to imitate a passable Finnish accent without being an actual Finn. On one audiolog you unlock when hacking Abstergo's computers (or I guess repairing this time), Berg says his own name and he pronounces Juhani's J like in English. But in Finnish, J is like the consonant Y in English -- Yuhani. I wonder how many times they made the actor yell "Perkele!" for another audiolog because that was good enough to be passable.

AC Rogue's past is set between Black Flag and Assassin's Creed III. The Colonial Brotherhood with Achilles Davenport as its Mentor is searching for Precursor temples. Shay is a new recruit but even then the Brotherhood feels unusually hostile towards him. Everyone except Shay's pal Liam are quite antagonizing, seemingly for no reason. It doesn't come as a big surprise that Shay ends up leaving them.

Shay was constantly voicing his doubts about the Assassins before his, ah, expulsion, though. He continues doing so about the Templars too afterwards. I even thought he might not properly join them due to the constant skepticism he showed. The moment I knew he was going to actually join the Templars, was when Shay witnessed close-up Haytham Kenway interrogating someone: a scene that happens more than once in AC3, always with the same outcome. Unlike Connor, Shay does not protest; he merely wipes the splattered blood off his face.

With its characters and many collectible letters, Rogue ties heavily to the other titles in the series. I thought that was really cool. The game even ends with a direct tie-in to Unity. In AC3, Connor demands Achilles on whose watch did the Brotherhood fall. Achilles eventually admits it was on his. In Rogue, you get to see how it all came to be.

Short story yet plenty to play

AC Rogue's main story is unusually short but for a completionist the game will still take about the same time as the previous titles. The various side activities and collectibles will keep one busy; 100% sync requirements for missions are easy like in Black Flag. The game is divided into three maps: River Valley, North Atlantic (featuring breakable icebergs as obstacles), and New York (which looks a lot better than in AC3).

This time there's zero reason to play the same terrible, old board games anymore, even though they're still there. In Black Flag, you had to do some for the Abstergo challenges but Ubisoft had learned something and included easier computer opponents, so the games didn't have to be as bad as in AC3 against its near perfect AIs.

Almost all of Rogue's rewards for getting every type of a collectible are useless. It felt pretty disappointing after such an effort to pick up a reward that wasn't the best weapon of its kind, or a cosmetic item that doesn't look all that cool. (Though that's hardly anything new for the series.)

The best sword, the once again returning sword of Altaïr, but it unfortunately comes from beating all of the also returning Naval campaign minigame. If you do all the other completionist stuff in Sequence 4 when the game is finally open and you have all the tools, you likely won't be able to complete the minigame before the end of the game because its phases are tied to the main memory progression. I finished the game awkwardly with a handful of the Naval missions still to be done. The mission timers are at least shorter than in Black Flag, going only up to 3 hours of wait time or so. The autobattle balance had been adjusted somewhat and I had to pay slightly more attention to what was going on to not lose any ships.

AC Rogue was a pretty cool look at the series from another perspective, though it could have had way more depth to it. It was interesting how fighting the Assassins was initially kind of tough: their surprise attacks actually often surprised me. But once I learned to counter them properly, and how to catch gang leaders unaware, the Assassins were no longer much of a threat.

Rogue finishes the American history set of the Assassin's Creed series and we're off to revolutionary France for the final game in my franchise run.