Assassin's Creed Chronicles China is the first 2.5D platformer game in the series and the first among the three in the Chronicles series. The game was released on PS Vita, consoles and PC by Climax Studios.
This game has a simple and short plot and can be finished in a bit more than 5 hours. You're playing as Shao Jun who has to eliminate the Eight Tigers who are the Templars who rules China from the shadows.
The game is divided into levels and has a nice balance between slow-paced (stealth) and fast-paced (speedrunning) levels. In the slow-paced levels, you're awarded the more points the less times you've been seen and the less guards you've killed, while in the fast-paced levels, the faster you finish the level. Those awarded points, if they pass a certain level, you get an upgrade and those points cannot be transfered later in the game, what you achieve at a certain mission that's it. New level, new points. This way the game forces you to make several attempts to achieve a better score and get better upgrades. Overall the game isn't hard, it just gets a bit complicated in the fast-paced missions, since you have to be really used to the controls to don't die while escaping a fire.
You're given many stealth options and few different routes to finish the missions, so you're probably not going to use always the same path to your objective in your next playthrough.
To be honest, even though the balance between before mentioned types of levels is great, I've expected a bit more variety and unfortunately the game is locked at 30fps (at least at 1440p, I am not sure for other settings). That framerate is great for PS Vita, but I think they could've raised the cap to 60fps for consoles and PC since this game isn't graphics-demanding at all.
All in all, I liked the change from an open-world stealth to a platformer game, the art design is great, but a longer story, more variety and an raised framerate cap could've made the experience on higher-end platforms a bit better.
This game has a simple and short plot and can be finished in a bit more than 5 hours. You're playing as Shao Jun who has to eliminate the Eight Tigers who are the Templars who rules China from the shadows.
The game is divided into levels and has a nice balance between slow-paced (stealth) and fast-paced (speedrunning) levels. In the slow-paced levels, you're awarded the more points the less times you've been seen and the less guards you've killed, while in the fast-paced levels, the faster you finish the level. Those awarded points, if they pass a certain level, you get an upgrade and those points cannot be transfered later in the game, what you achieve at a certain mission that's it. New level, new points. This way the game forces you to make several attempts to achieve a better score and get better upgrades. Overall the game isn't hard, it just gets a bit complicated in the fast-paced missions, since you have to be really used to the controls to don't die while escaping a fire.
You're given many stealth options and few different routes to finish the missions, so you're probably not going to use always the same path to your objective in your next playthrough.
To be honest, even though the balance between before mentioned types of levels is great, I've expected a bit more variety and unfortunately the game is locked at 30fps (at least at 1440p, I am not sure for other settings). That framerate is great for PS Vita, but I think they could've raised the cap to 60fps for consoles and PC since this game isn't graphics-demanding at all.
All in all, I liked the change from an open-world stealth to a platformer game, the art design is great, but a longer story, more variety and an raised framerate cap could've made the experience on higher-end platforms a bit better.