Assassin's Creed Unity Review

It's November again and as inevitable as Christmas coming our way, Ubisoft have released yet another Assassin's Creed game. But why have one when you can have two this time? One (Assassin's Creed Rogue) is an Xbox 360 only game focusing on pirating and the other (Assassin's Creed Unity) is only for the new generation consoles, namely the Xbox One and Playstation Four.

For this review we will be focusing solely on the latter which is set during the French Revolution. For those uninitiated with the series, Assassin's Creed is a game series that follows the eternal war between two factions of humanity, the Assassin's and the Templars. You play as an assassin (yes, it's hard to believe that they're the good guys when I describe it like that).

In Unity you play as Arno, and orphaned aristrocrat (at least I think he is), who grows up to be a waste of space. But after being accused of murder and thrown into the Bastille, and learning of the Assassin's Brotherhood - who Arno's father worked for - you begin your life training to become a master assassin while trying to unravel the mystery of who killed your father and why.

Unity makes a welcome return to the core gameplay I loved in previous titles, namely the stealth and the endless freerunning over rooftops as far as the eye can see. More recent titles like Creed 3 and Black Flag scrapped this to focus the games on other things, but for me it always left the impression that both were missing something. Besides the reintroduction of all the freerunning though, there is not really much new weaponwise or movewise brought to Unity.

Visually you can also see a clear difference in the definition and detail between Unity and older titles. The detail on the buildings and the quality of the characters faces are most notable. Even very recent Creed games like Black Flag, which only came out last year, still suffered from what I like to call "cardboard box" head characters.

The multiplayer mode has had the biggest facelift. While playing the single-player mode you can join mini missions with either friends or random players. There is a wide range of different missions and playing them can really help towards upgrades to your character in the single player game. In previous games I found the multiplayer was often repetitive and got boring very quickly.

But sadly, besides the multiplayer, Unity has not really brought anything new to the table. This is a good game with great visuals and a lot of play in it, but it does rely a little too heavily on its core mechanics rather than trying new things. Like many other reviewers I really wish this game was held back in development for a few more months as the number of glitches it had on the first day of playing was inexcusable.

It gets 7/10.