Nobody has to really say anything about this game’s launch anymore I feel, it’s been 7 years and we all know the tale. Ubisoft really were never the same after what happened with Unity and Watch Dogs…2 games that came out after so much hype only to disappoint everyone, what was supposed to be one of Ubisoft's greatest years ended up being its weakest.
But what if I told you, that beneath all of that, once you dig into it, AC Unity is actually one of the best if not the best Assassins Creed game?
I know I know it’s one of those hot takes that’s getting colder and colder everyday but for good reason. The parkour system in this game is like no other really, I don’t think I’ve yet to find another game where you can climb the same building on the same side at least 13 times and each time do it ever so slightly different, nothing mindblowing in that regard but it's the small details that make it not get stale, now there’s interiors in the world, and there must be thousands of them, sure some repeat but it's not enough to where you can say MAN HOW MANY TIMES AM I GONNA SEE THIS EXACT INTERIOR AGAIN?, it's barely noticeable, jumping out of them feels like a risk as you never truly know what you’ll end up landing or where your character will go but god damn does it feel satisfying when you jump onto the building right in front of you and see Arno barely reach it and being a few moments away from falling only to catch the damn thing.
Simply put, the parkour is really fluid, smooth and fast if you get good at it, it's more momentum based than other games, it feels cinematic in the way the other games wanted but with more control given to you so you yourself can make it cinematic, and the addition of being able to free run up and down (with up also being a jump button and down also being a vault button) adds more depth than one could imagine, now you have double if not more the options and ways of getting around using parkour, with animations that I can only describe as mindblowing-ly good. Animations just flow into each other seamlessly as you jump around trying to look as cool as possible. Chaining together the coolest animations becomes a challenge in itself and it’s the type of challenge you’ll do simply because it’s fun not because of any reward.
You could say it’s easy to pick up yet hard to master. You could practice for dozens of hours and still find new tricks to do. The game doesn’t hold your own when it comes to what you can do, it gives you the basics and the rest is up to you to find on your own.
But what good is an amazing parkour system if there isn’t a world where you can use it effectively? Well you see Unity also has the best open world ubisoft ever created, it’s sheer amount of detail is still astonishing to me, the amount of npcs on screen is insane, every minute you’ll see hundreds if not thousands of NPC’s on streets either doing their thing or rioting. Scaling buildings is fast and satisfying, the game makes you think more and make more decisions on the fly to make your journey to the next mission quicker. Though it's good enough you might just continue running along doing cool tricks and having fun till you find yourself on the other side of the map because it’s just THAT damn fun.
The level design is the best in the series. One of the things that help it stand out is the opportunity system. One mission took place in a sewer, so I was able to start a riot above to draw out some of the guards making my entry safe, and I sabotaged the chimneys above, making it way less visible inside the sewers so my escape from there was also safe. It's things like this that really make Unity's level design stand above the rest of the series for me, though not every opportunity was great or that useful, enough of them were to say the system works. In another mission I was presented with the place where my target would arrive and the game told me to hide in a bush though it’s implied that you don’t have to do that right away. So I did the opportunities, I saved a bunch of prisoners and they stood to camp the basement to guard it then distract the guards at the end to make my escape easier and another, though a bit silly, was a map that showed me exactly where my target was heading and how, a bit stupid, but so useful, using eagle vision now I could see where he’d go, so I hid in a haystack right where he was so when he’d arrive I’d just have to wait. It feels amazing to do these things and no other game in this series quite accomplishes this feel.
Though I must say that the opportunity system doesn’t mean that now there’s only 3 ways a mission can go. Missions can go in any way you want them, they are the most open and least liniar they’ve ever been.
The combat is for the first time in the series, great, it’s slower and weightier, it’s harder but more satisfying. The animations are brutal and so are the finishers yet it also feels natural and at least a bit realtistic. It doesn’t simply do the job like in the other games but is actually enjoyable on it’s own. There’s multiple types of weapons and each type has its own move set, your average weapon types like the one handed, the heavy and the long but there’s also rifles that once you equip you can’t equip either a pistol or weapon and you just smack enemies with it, kinda funny. Useless but funny. The guillotine guns are also pretty cool though you need to do the Dead Kings DLC to get it, I’m pretty sure that the dlc is free so you really should play it because it's definitely worth it.
The progression in this game is great IF, you upgrade the Cafe and buy the other properties and do the missions for all of them (2-3 and their all really simple and to the point, one shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes, 5 at max). After you do that you’ll get 40+k per hour, besides that you still get enough from missions to get around though the Cafe stuff is required if you want the best gear with the least amount of grinding. You can also pause the game, alt tab and do something else for an hour then come back and collect your reward if you want. I alt tab a lot so I found that out fast.
In this game you can really make your assassin look the way you want with the gear pieces that you can buy, each have their own stats that DO matter a lot actually and you should buy the ones that help your own play style. Though sometimes it does feel like a sacrifice to go for the gear that helps you the most rather than the one you think looks the coolest, it’s not like there’s a lot of gear that looks bad. Most of it looks amazing actually. And hey if you don’t care about all that bullshit you have outfits you can unlock, they include ones for every previous protagonist, most of which you can find in these yellow chests on the map, there’s only a few of them so collecting them isn’t too bad. There’s also some other lesser outfits ig.
The story is flawed however I enjoyed it. The way the game starts is great, the first few hours on a story level are amazing, Arno has all the charm and personality of Ezio dare I say, the plot is compelling, Arno and Elise have chemistry, the part you play in prison serves as a good tutorial for combat. They put in the game a small city simply for the first hours before you get to Paris and then in a single level again later on, a bit much I’d say, and sure it doesn’t look too different from Paris, but still. I didn’t even know this but you can actually go back there by fast traveling. Don’t think there’s anything to do there but it's cool.
When you join the assassins is when things go to shit I guess, y’know it’s almost funny how much the assassins treat Arno like shit, and also Arno loses half of his personality as soon as he joins and turns really serious fast. It’s weird and comes out of nowhere when he’s suddenly without the charm and wit we see at the start though he doesn’t lose it completely.
When the game becomes a hit list it’s kinda lame story wise but in concept it makes sense, Assassin’s Creed games have always had hit lists at their core story wise, though here it becomes exclusively a hit list so it is a lot less compelling. It reminds me of AC1 but not in a good way.
Story picks up again once Elise shows up again, sure their relationship is toxic and Elise basically turns into Connor at his most WHERE IS CHARLES LEE at parts but they still have chemistry and are entertaining to watch most of the time.
It’s kinda interesting seeing how far Elise is willing to go to avenge her father, especially at the end of the game. The ending is cool, I won’t spoil it but it does redeem the middle section and the occasional great moment makes it so it never gets properly bad or even mediocre but it's never consistently great sadly. One of those occasional great moments has the be “the escape”, writing wise Arno’s and Elise’s relationship is at its most likeable as you chase her on roofs as she’s in a hot air balloon of all things, it's one of the most memorable moments in the story and the last cutscene is one of the most romantic moments in the series, had the cutscene not glitched and resulted in it looking weird af maybe it would have been better but oh well.
Also I noticed this thing where like...the first few times you meet with Elise its like half of their dialogue is them talking about past events when they were kids and it’s all essentially hey remember when we did this, though we’re never really shown these events nor are told about them prior so it feels like being with 2 friends and they’re making inside jokes and you don’t really understand them but they assume you know about them somehow.
There’s some interesting moments and themes, an Assassin being in love with a Templar is a pretty obvious plot for a game in this series at this point but for a reason. Having Arno bring Elise to the brotherhood to seek help in her revenge was a great moment, it plays out as you’d expect though. I loved the ending, felt earned and the silence as Arno...does a thing I won’t spoil, felt very impactful to me. His monologue afterwards was even better. Not a perfect story and it has its low points but it works for what it does and executes its ideas well enough. Could have been better but as it is. It’s good.
There’s these random helix missions or whatever that pop up sometimes throughout the story and they’re pretty cool, useless, but still really cool. Climbing the statue of liberty and the eiffel tower was pretty awesome tbh.
The side content is solid-great. Well more like “I don’t really mind this”-great. There’s the companion missions that serve as little fetch quests but I like that you just press E and then instantly you get a marker on your map, no loading screen or repetitive small cutscene. They’re all really fast, some took less than a minute to complete. There’s the Paris stories which serve as okay-good side missions, most are standalone stories but there’s some like the ones for that old lady that can predict the future and that one cult that serve as some of the more interesting ones.
The other helix missions that are there amount to just you picking up data then going to an assassin and ‘rescuing them’ and they’re...whatever, I don’t really mind them since you get Altair’s suit for completing them so there’s a nice reward to them but they are mostly boring as it’s just the same place but with a different gimmick like wow now there's a tornado here. They aren’t very memorable to say the least.
Also there’s events that happen in the world at random that you complete if you want, they’ll usually take like a second to complete, do enough of them and you’ll get a prize, simple enough though it makes things a bit more immersive. You can catch thieves, kill templars that are about to kill people/have just killed someone, defend a person from a templar, scare off bullies and give money to poor people. They aren’t really anything to write home about on their own but they make the game better by simply being there, going to a location and while on your journey jumping from a roof onto a murderer and saving someone feels great.
But I’ve said the best for last, the riddles...and even better, the murder mysteries.
Essentially hidden beneath the Assassins Creed gameplay, there’s an entire Sherlock Holmes game, a somewhat short one but still. Essentially you’ll be presented with the scene of a crime, from then the game will highlight certain items that you should inspect for more info and clues, though not every clue is highlighted and there are some that you can find on your own, find enough clues, piece things together and you can accuse someone of the crime, accuse correctly and you win, accuse wrongly and your prize gets smaller. Simple enough yet they’re a lot more interesting and hard to put together than you might assume given that Ubisoft aren’t exactly known for making challenging games. The riddles are also really great, the concept is simple: you get a riddle, figure out where it leads, another riddle appears, do that till you get to the final destination, 18 of those and you’ll unlock a special suit.
These are way more fun than they should, opening up wikipedia pages and looking for info about certain places to know where to go next and spending hours on end on these missions really makes finishing them all the more satisfying even if...the reward for doing them all is just an Altair reskin. Oh well they’re still fun to do.
The biggest issue is the one talked about the most and the one that earned its initial reception. The fucking bugs, don’t get me wrong, game’s playable and in much better state than when it came out...but there’s still a lot of bugs. I can’t defend this too much, they’re either funny or kinda inconvenient when you get stuck on fucking air and have to just fast travel somewhere. Not a deal breaker but they do impact the game a bit.
Also I have to say, this is one of the best looking games...ever, climbing a building and looking down to see hundreds if not thousands of NPCs rioting on the streets is a site to behold. Somehow this 7 year old game still looks next gen, they pushed this engine so much that it’s still arguably the best looking game in the series, even Syndicate...ESPECIALLY Syndicate, looks a lot worse than this game somehow.
The co-op is fun if you play with friends, awful if you play with randoms and almost impossible if you wanna do them solo so be warned, even if they let you play solo it doesn’t mean the missions were made for that and you’ll most likely find them impossible to do.
Before I end the review, let me make something clear, I don’t consider Unity a great game because of it’s awful launch and reputation making it easy to root for it. I consider Unity to be great because of its outstanding gameplay and world that also features a good story and some of the best side content Ubisoft ever made.
No Assassin’s Creed game has ever beaten this game in any regard outside of story for me. It might not be perfect but for me, it’s an all time favorite.
But what if I told you, that beneath all of that, once you dig into it, AC Unity is actually one of the best if not the best Assassins Creed game?
I know I know it’s one of those hot takes that’s getting colder and colder everyday but for good reason. The parkour system in this game is like no other really, I don’t think I’ve yet to find another game where you can climb the same building on the same side at least 13 times and each time do it ever so slightly different, nothing mindblowing in that regard but it's the small details that make it not get stale, now there’s interiors in the world, and there must be thousands of them, sure some repeat but it's not enough to where you can say MAN HOW MANY TIMES AM I GONNA SEE THIS EXACT INTERIOR AGAIN?, it's barely noticeable, jumping out of them feels like a risk as you never truly know what you’ll end up landing or where your character will go but god damn does it feel satisfying when you jump onto the building right in front of you and see Arno barely reach it and being a few moments away from falling only to catch the damn thing.
Simply put, the parkour is really fluid, smooth and fast if you get good at it, it's more momentum based than other games, it feels cinematic in the way the other games wanted but with more control given to you so you yourself can make it cinematic, and the addition of being able to free run up and down (with up also being a jump button and down also being a vault button) adds more depth than one could imagine, now you have double if not more the options and ways of getting around using parkour, with animations that I can only describe as mindblowing-ly good. Animations just flow into each other seamlessly as you jump around trying to look as cool as possible. Chaining together the coolest animations becomes a challenge in itself and it’s the type of challenge you’ll do simply because it’s fun not because of any reward.
You could say it’s easy to pick up yet hard to master. You could practice for dozens of hours and still find new tricks to do. The game doesn’t hold your own when it comes to what you can do, it gives you the basics and the rest is up to you to find on your own.
But what good is an amazing parkour system if there isn’t a world where you can use it effectively? Well you see Unity also has the best open world ubisoft ever created, it’s sheer amount of detail is still astonishing to me, the amount of npcs on screen is insane, every minute you’ll see hundreds if not thousands of NPC’s on streets either doing their thing or rioting. Scaling buildings is fast and satisfying, the game makes you think more and make more decisions on the fly to make your journey to the next mission quicker. Though it's good enough you might just continue running along doing cool tricks and having fun till you find yourself on the other side of the map because it’s just THAT damn fun.
The level design is the best in the series. One of the things that help it stand out is the opportunity system. One mission took place in a sewer, so I was able to start a riot above to draw out some of the guards making my entry safe, and I sabotaged the chimneys above, making it way less visible inside the sewers so my escape from there was also safe. It's things like this that really make Unity's level design stand above the rest of the series for me, though not every opportunity was great or that useful, enough of them were to say the system works. In another mission I was presented with the place where my target would arrive and the game told me to hide in a bush though it’s implied that you don’t have to do that right away. So I did the opportunities, I saved a bunch of prisoners and they stood to camp the basement to guard it then distract the guards at the end to make my escape easier and another, though a bit silly, was a map that showed me exactly where my target was heading and how, a bit stupid, but so useful, using eagle vision now I could see where he’d go, so I hid in a haystack right where he was so when he’d arrive I’d just have to wait. It feels amazing to do these things and no other game in this series quite accomplishes this feel.
Though I must say that the opportunity system doesn’t mean that now there’s only 3 ways a mission can go. Missions can go in any way you want them, they are the most open and least liniar they’ve ever been.
The combat is for the first time in the series, great, it’s slower and weightier, it’s harder but more satisfying. The animations are brutal and so are the finishers yet it also feels natural and at least a bit realtistic. It doesn’t simply do the job like in the other games but is actually enjoyable on it’s own. There’s multiple types of weapons and each type has its own move set, your average weapon types like the one handed, the heavy and the long but there’s also rifles that once you equip you can’t equip either a pistol or weapon and you just smack enemies with it, kinda funny. Useless but funny. The guillotine guns are also pretty cool though you need to do the Dead Kings DLC to get it, I’m pretty sure that the dlc is free so you really should play it because it's definitely worth it.
The progression in this game is great IF, you upgrade the Cafe and buy the other properties and do the missions for all of them (2-3 and their all really simple and to the point, one shouldn’t take more than 3 minutes, 5 at max). After you do that you’ll get 40+k per hour, besides that you still get enough from missions to get around though the Cafe stuff is required if you want the best gear with the least amount of grinding. You can also pause the game, alt tab and do something else for an hour then come back and collect your reward if you want. I alt tab a lot so I found that out fast.
In this game you can really make your assassin look the way you want with the gear pieces that you can buy, each have their own stats that DO matter a lot actually and you should buy the ones that help your own play style. Though sometimes it does feel like a sacrifice to go for the gear that helps you the most rather than the one you think looks the coolest, it’s not like there’s a lot of gear that looks bad. Most of it looks amazing actually. And hey if you don’t care about all that bullshit you have outfits you can unlock, they include ones for every previous protagonist, most of which you can find in these yellow chests on the map, there’s only a few of them so collecting them isn’t too bad. There’s also some other lesser outfits ig.
The story is flawed however I enjoyed it. The way the game starts is great, the first few hours on a story level are amazing, Arno has all the charm and personality of Ezio dare I say, the plot is compelling, Arno and Elise have chemistry, the part you play in prison serves as a good tutorial for combat. They put in the game a small city simply for the first hours before you get to Paris and then in a single level again later on, a bit much I’d say, and sure it doesn’t look too different from Paris, but still. I didn’t even know this but you can actually go back there by fast traveling. Don’t think there’s anything to do there but it's cool.
When you join the assassins is when things go to shit I guess, y’know it’s almost funny how much the assassins treat Arno like shit, and also Arno loses half of his personality as soon as he joins and turns really serious fast. It’s weird and comes out of nowhere when he’s suddenly without the charm and wit we see at the start though he doesn’t lose it completely.
When the game becomes a hit list it’s kinda lame story wise but in concept it makes sense, Assassin’s Creed games have always had hit lists at their core story wise, though here it becomes exclusively a hit list so it is a lot less compelling. It reminds me of AC1 but not in a good way.
Story picks up again once Elise shows up again, sure their relationship is toxic and Elise basically turns into Connor at his most WHERE IS CHARLES LEE at parts but they still have chemistry and are entertaining to watch most of the time.
It’s kinda interesting seeing how far Elise is willing to go to avenge her father, especially at the end of the game. The ending is cool, I won’t spoil it but it does redeem the middle section and the occasional great moment makes it so it never gets properly bad or even mediocre but it's never consistently great sadly. One of those occasional great moments has the be “the escape”, writing wise Arno’s and Elise’s relationship is at its most likeable as you chase her on roofs as she’s in a hot air balloon of all things, it's one of the most memorable moments in the story and the last cutscene is one of the most romantic moments in the series, had the cutscene not glitched and resulted in it looking weird af maybe it would have been better but oh well.
Also I noticed this thing where like...the first few times you meet with Elise its like half of their dialogue is them talking about past events when they were kids and it’s all essentially hey remember when we did this, though we’re never really shown these events nor are told about them prior so it feels like being with 2 friends and they’re making inside jokes and you don’t really understand them but they assume you know about them somehow.
There’s some interesting moments and themes, an Assassin being in love with a Templar is a pretty obvious plot for a game in this series at this point but for a reason. Having Arno bring Elise to the brotherhood to seek help in her revenge was a great moment, it plays out as you’d expect though. I loved the ending, felt earned and the silence as Arno...does a thing I won’t spoil, felt very impactful to me. His monologue afterwards was even better. Not a perfect story and it has its low points but it works for what it does and executes its ideas well enough. Could have been better but as it is. It’s good.
There’s these random helix missions or whatever that pop up sometimes throughout the story and they’re pretty cool, useless, but still really cool. Climbing the statue of liberty and the eiffel tower was pretty awesome tbh.
The side content is solid-great. Well more like “I don’t really mind this”-great. There’s the companion missions that serve as little fetch quests but I like that you just press E and then instantly you get a marker on your map, no loading screen or repetitive small cutscene. They’re all really fast, some took less than a minute to complete. There’s the Paris stories which serve as okay-good side missions, most are standalone stories but there’s some like the ones for that old lady that can predict the future and that one cult that serve as some of the more interesting ones.
The other helix missions that are there amount to just you picking up data then going to an assassin and ‘rescuing them’ and they’re...whatever, I don’t really mind them since you get Altair’s suit for completing them so there’s a nice reward to them but they are mostly boring as it’s just the same place but with a different gimmick like wow now there's a tornado here. They aren’t very memorable to say the least.
Also there’s events that happen in the world at random that you complete if you want, they’ll usually take like a second to complete, do enough of them and you’ll get a prize, simple enough though it makes things a bit more immersive. You can catch thieves, kill templars that are about to kill people/have just killed someone, defend a person from a templar, scare off bullies and give money to poor people. They aren’t really anything to write home about on their own but they make the game better by simply being there, going to a location and while on your journey jumping from a roof onto a murderer and saving someone feels great.
But I’ve said the best for last, the riddles...and even better, the murder mysteries.
Essentially hidden beneath the Assassins Creed gameplay, there’s an entire Sherlock Holmes game, a somewhat short one but still. Essentially you’ll be presented with the scene of a crime, from then the game will highlight certain items that you should inspect for more info and clues, though not every clue is highlighted and there are some that you can find on your own, find enough clues, piece things together and you can accuse someone of the crime, accuse correctly and you win, accuse wrongly and your prize gets smaller. Simple enough yet they’re a lot more interesting and hard to put together than you might assume given that Ubisoft aren’t exactly known for making challenging games. The riddles are also really great, the concept is simple: you get a riddle, figure out where it leads, another riddle appears, do that till you get to the final destination, 18 of those and you’ll unlock a special suit.
These are way more fun than they should, opening up wikipedia pages and looking for info about certain places to know where to go next and spending hours on end on these missions really makes finishing them all the more satisfying even if...the reward for doing them all is just an Altair reskin. Oh well they’re still fun to do.
The biggest issue is the one talked about the most and the one that earned its initial reception. The fucking bugs, don’t get me wrong, game’s playable and in much better state than when it came out...but there’s still a lot of bugs. I can’t defend this too much, they’re either funny or kinda inconvenient when you get stuck on fucking air and have to just fast travel somewhere. Not a deal breaker but they do impact the game a bit.
Also I have to say, this is one of the best looking games...ever, climbing a building and looking down to see hundreds if not thousands of NPCs rioting on the streets is a site to behold. Somehow this 7 year old game still looks next gen, they pushed this engine so much that it’s still arguably the best looking game in the series, even Syndicate...ESPECIALLY Syndicate, looks a lot worse than this game somehow.
The co-op is fun if you play with friends, awful if you play with randoms and almost impossible if you wanna do them solo so be warned, even if they let you play solo it doesn’t mean the missions were made for that and you’ll most likely find them impossible to do.
Before I end the review, let me make something clear, I don’t consider Unity a great game because of it’s awful launch and reputation making it easy to root for it. I consider Unity to be great because of its outstanding gameplay and world that also features a good story and some of the best side content Ubisoft ever made.
No Assassin’s Creed game has ever beaten this game in any regard outside of story for me. It might not be perfect but for me, it’s an all time favorite.