Assassin's Creed Unity

I remember Assassin's Creed Unity being mired in technical issues at release. One vivid memory is of character face textures not loading but eyes and mouth still being there -- the stuff of nightmares. I think in general people didn't like the game back then but the perception of Unity seems to have curiously turned around: you see a lot of positive comments these days. Playing it now for the first time, I personally found the game to be one of the worst in the series.

Pretty and not much else

The graphical glitches have been since mostly fixed, though there remains pretty noticeable level-of-detail popping. A note on PC Gaming Wiki theorized it to be hardcoded in the engine and impossible to fix by third parties. Outside of the LOD issue, AC Unity is gorgeous. The new engine is a massive visual upgrade when coming from AC Rogue and all the other previous generation games of the franchise. Sometimes, when Unity's superb illumination hit just right, I had to stop for a moment to admire the almost photorealistic scene of the late 18th century Paris.

The massive crowds seems like a thing that could have caused performance issues on the Xbox One and PS4. But I didn't notice them to have much of an actual effect, which is interesting. I guess they're not that intensive computationally.

Like in AC Syndicate later, in the present time you're an Assassin Initiate and there is no gameplay, barely even cutscenes. You're mostly talked to by an Assassin codenamed "Bishop", with "Deacon" occasionally chirping in. Deacon is obviously Shaun but Bishop is someone new; no Rebecca in this one. I don't remember if "Bishop" was in the later games. Her constant yapping sure got annoying when grinding the Helix Rift missions for 100% sync. (The rifts and interlude missions were a way to include the Eiffel Tower that was built good many years after the main game's events.)

In the past you play as Arno Dorian whose Assassin father you got to murder at the end of Rogue. To me Arno felt like an attempt to recreate Ezio: young, easy-going, and carefree. Arno's also the first Assassin protagonist since Ezio to have a name of eagle/bird origin in the mainline games (excluding Haytham in Assassin's Creed III's prologue and Aveline in AC Liberation).

Arno was adopted by François de la Serre who, unbeknownst to Arno, is the Templar Grandmaster in France. Monsieur de la Serre is killed by Templar infighting and adult Arno happens to be there to witness it to get the blame. He is thrown into prison from where he is recruited by the Assassins.

Walked so that Syndicate could run

The narrative has more personal motivation than in Syndicate but in my opinion the latter game is otherwise better in every way. Both have the collectible and side mission marathons but I don't recall Syndicate ever getting so annoying and frustrating. Unity's locked chests (so damn many of them!) require a minigame to open unlike in Syndicate where you just need to have the perk. Unity's lockpicking perks come in three levels and the final one is unlocked only after Sequence 9, meaning you have to leave numerous locked chests you come by unopened (unless you have godlike reflexes), depending of course on how much you're not beelining the main story.

AC Unity introduced microtransactions to the series. You get some of the currency for free when playing the story: enough to buy at least two of the collectible/mission maps. Only the chest/cockade map is really needed; everything else seemed to get discovered and marked on the map as I was going around Paris. It's not like in Syndicate in which you need some kind of map for all the different collectibles: either a bought one or a third party one. The chest map in Unity also does not apply for its Dead Kings DLC but I didn't seem to need it there anyway.

Prepare to die

Combat was completely overhauled for Unity. Chainkill no longer exists: you have to kill everyone by reducing their health bar to zero. Camera -- which had been getting gradually worse after AC3 -- is even worse: you get enemies lunging from offscreen to sink their blades into your back. It is very easy to die with the aggressive opposition: sometimes you have to parry numerous enemies in a row without getting a chance to swing back. Sometimes simple parrying is not even enough because the harder archetypes have chained attack sequences. Enemies also come in 5 different levels -- just like your gear. Over-gearing helps tremendously but obviously doesn't work against equal level guards. Trying to run away without being able to hide in smoke or behind cover gets you killed quickly when everybody pulls out their guns.

I skipped all the middle levels of purchasable gear and went straight for the legendary pieces. Head slot should be your first priority due to the pieces giving duration and radius bonuses to Eagle vision as well as a 10% bonus to Creed points accrued.

Creed points come from various Assassin actions such as air assassinations, perfect parries, and vanishing. The points are mainly used for upgrading your gear. Legendary pieces take 10k to upgrade each, and that is quite a lot. It's good to have the 10% bonus as early as possible.

Trying to fight in tight spaces -- which are many thanks to indoors being a prominent feature in the city -- is terrible, particularly if there is elevation. Enemy AI, targeting, and Arno's movement get glitchy, particularly if there are different elevations involved. Health bars and attack indicators tend to disappear.

And there are so many enemies. Four and five star side missions can get absolutely obnoxious if you don't have the patience to perfectly stealth them. It is so easy to end up fighting a whole fucking army. Snipers with their perfect 100-yard vision spot you so damn quickly too. The being-detected sound effect started to seriously get on my nerves.

Tedious to 100%

AC Unity's side missions include numerous murder mysteries, which just on itself is a weird inclusion in a game where you murder people. You get more livres the fewer people you incorrectly accuse but even the maximum amount is always negligible compared to your passive income. During the murder mysteries, the game's weird UI issue of placing viewed note and update messages on top of each other becomes prominent. I completely lost any motivation to care about the murders when I had to constantly wait for a message to go away so that I could read a note under it. Another tiresome side activity are the Nostradamus enigmas. I had done enough of riddle-based treasure hunting in AC Odyssey already. And the reward for solving all the enigmas is merely a cosmetic outfit.

Another stupid HUD element is the rotating rectangle-shaped minimap. It's surprisingly difficult to tell where the North arrow is pointing at on it. Syndicate brought back the circle minimap and also put health bar around it, clearing a lot of space on the screen. You also should take care to zoom the map when fast traveling back to your base in Unity. It is very easy to accidentally start Dead Kings too early because its icon (once unlocked) will be right next to Café Théâtre's. And if/when you start the DLC, there is no going back until you've beaten its first memory. That annoyed me greatly. Maybe Ubisoft shouldn't have made the DLC to be initially accessible from the map.

Additional 100% synchronization goals again exist in main missions only and are easy like they've been since AC4 Black Flag. They feel kind of additional chores this time, most of the time not related to the particular mission at hand. There are too many missions whose full sync requires 'X cover assassinations'. Before Unity that would have been effortless but whistling got lost somewhere between the engine switch. Instead you have firecrackers which are far clunkier to use for luring enemies to death-from-cover. Another lost feature was being able to move bodies.

A lot of AC Unity can be played in co-op and there are quite a few side missions specifically designed for that (at least in name). They are also required for 100% sync. Fortunately, they are very doable solo as well. The only two I had any considerable trouble were the two escort missions The Infernal Machine and Women's March. I saw comments about The Tournament's flag collecting part being tough solo but I suppose I was at that point so familiar with Unity's parkour that I had no trouble at all with it.

It is done!

With Unity beaten, my Assassin's Creed franchise run up to AC Valhalla is now complete. It started off in such a random order -- from Syndicate to Odyssey to Origins to Valhalla -- until going to the release order because I hadn't originally planned to ever play through the whole thing. I definitely played the best two of the series first; most of the games before Syndicate weren't much to my liking. The exception was the Ezio trilogy. I suppose it's easier to appreciate the achievements of AC2 after having played AC1 first too but I could never recommend the original to anyone.

I'm somewhat interested to play AC Mirage and will definitely do so if Ubisoft+ Premium ever gets discounted in the future. Codename Red I'm more hyped about. It's awesome that the series is finally going to Japan. It's perplexing though, that now that they're finally doing it, the main character (or one of them) will allegedly be African, and an actual historical figure. The latter has never happened before. Because the developer studio helming the project is Ubisoft Quebec (Syndicate, Odyssey), I'm expecting the game's combat to be great at least.