Assassin's Creed Unity is a real mess of a game. The first half of it makes you start to think maybe its underappreciated and doesn't deserve its reputation as a bad, buggy, unfinished game. Then the second half throws nearly all of that away.
First of all its ridiculously good looking coming from ACIV Black Flag, like just a staggering jump in visual detail. The density of the environment, the gorgeously naturalistic lighting, the teeming crowds of truly huge numbers of citizens, and especially the interiors of buildings, of which there are many. Some of those interiors, especially in the important buildings like the palaces and chateaus and the like, are so finely crafted and detailed they're still kind of jaw dropping 9 years later. The character models mostly look excellent too and are really well animated. The city is dense with paths over roofs, through chaotic streets, and into and back out of buildings, and its genuinely very fun to move through most of the time. There are also a couple animus sequences set in Paris in other time periods as well that make for pretty cool setpieces. The visual presentation and design of the city of Paris itself is the only thing that I don't really have any major issue with, and it's what kept me going through the game as it gradually collapsed around me.
The parkour is always a huge part of AC, and in Unity it at first seems like a big improvement, as does the combat and stealth. Its all incredibly well animated, and the parkour now has 3 modes: neutral, ascending, and descending. This, in theory, should give you a lot more control over movement across the more complex cityscape of paris, and sometimes, it does. Descending in particular is a great addition and feels really cool. When it works. Unfortunately you get stuck on objects or climb on ones you didn't mean to far more in Unity than in any AC game since the first one.You can be in the middle of the coolest looking and feeling chase or escape in the series yet, and then some tiny piece of furniture, or roof gutter, or whatever will just bring it all to a screeching halt. It's so close to being great, but it has just enough jank that it ends up falling way short of the parkour in AC3 and 4
The combat and stealth also seem really solid at first, but they have a major problem: they fall apart completely as the difficulty ramps up. Early on, when its easy, the combat feels weighty and satisfyingly lethal, but still responsive, and the stealth is more detailed than before, with an increased emphasis on crowds and verticality. But they seemingly could not figure out, or did not have time to figure out, how to make those mechanics work for more challenging content. High level enemies parry almost every attack, while their off-screen buddies shoot you to death with bullets that instakill you if you are at all wounded, as you get locked into slow recovery animations. Somehow they regressed to the worst aspects of AC2's combat, and then made it even worse. The stealth on the other hand sometimes stops functioning in later levels because they just put 1000 guards everywhere facing in every direction, many of which dont ever patrol or turn around. The cover system is busted as hell and 50% of the time will cause you to clip into the wall or just get stuck in between animations for 20+ seconds at a time when you try to use it. Many of your tools barely work to manipulate guards. So often in later levels your options become either find the exact specific path they want you to take past all the guards (not well telegraphed, if it even exists in a given mission), or just forget stealth and brute force your way through with the extremely tedious combat. Its a vicious cycle of frustrating tedium.
The story too, is a pathetic parade of squandered potential, missed opportunity, baffling choices, and incoherent and utterly inert plotting. They made an assassins creed game set in the french revolution where the assassins, the secret organization dedicated to changing the world through murder, decide to be radical centrists and not get involved in politics. Except when inevitably the characters, seemingly begrudgingly on the writers' part, do get involved, they are weirdly favorable to the fucking king and other nobles rather than the revolutionaries. The story itself otherwise has nearly nothing to do with the actual revolution, instead being a personal melodrama in which French store brand ezio auditore and his osananajimi (who is a templar, something they manage to wring nearly no tension or intrigue or conflict out of) who he's in love with must find her father's killer. The revolution is constantly "happening" in the background, with plenty of protesting crowds and other details like that, but that's basically all that it is: set dressing. Many of the major events happen offscreen, and the major figures of the revolution are barely present except to be plot devices for the largely unrelated story sequences. Especially after the honestly surprisingly sharp political viewpoint that AC3 had of the American revolution, it's truly baffling how much they managed to fumble such an overflowing cornucopia of storytelling potential. It's like going to a fancy French bakery and being served wonderbread instead of the nice buttery croissant with chocolate and almonds in it that you thought you were going to get.
The most baffling decision of all though, is that if you play with the English voice acting, all of these French people, in Paris, France, during the French Revolution, in a game made by France's largest game development company, speak with EXTREMELY BRITISH ACCENTS. It is so painful to hear all these cockney fucking voices speaking about robespierre and the Notre Dame and other things of an extremely French nature. It comes off like they were ashamed of their own Frenchness, too embarrassed about it to show the world, too afraid an American who watched too much TV during the bush administration might make a cringey surrender joke at them or something. In the AC2 games Ezio and co had goofy Italian accents! In AC3 Connor and his people spoke the actual Kanien'kéha language!! They had a variety of the usual pirate accents all over ACIV: Black Flag!!! But here, on their own home turf they wimped out and went with the generic British-as-foreigner voices you always see in Hollywood movies. Maybe they did deserve those surrender jokes from ol' Joe Sixpack after all.... they must be serving freedom fries over in the cafeteria at Ubisoft HQ. To combat this grotesque transgression against my ears and against the French people, I ended up changing the language of the voices to French, with English subtitles. This was a massive improvement to the presentation but it also meant that whatever dialogue didn't get subtitled, like nearly all incidental dialogue, or any time the subtitles conflicted with another UI element and didn't show up, I had no clue what they were saying. The funniest example of this was the final lines in the base game, which are said by the present day characters (who are barely there, this game, disappointingly, is the first one to barely include any present day segments) as the credits roll. But they apparently forgot to allow subtitles during the credits so literally for the last lines in the story, the concluding statement of the whole mess, I had no clue what they were saying. What an appropriate ending to a very foolish game.
The whole game in general has that feeling of being sloppy and unfinished. There are visual bugs and glitches, janky NPC behaviors, constant aggressive LoD pop-in visible on screen at nearly all times. You can get stuck on or inside of objects at a moments notice. The cloth physics are super busted and need a mod to restore them. Sometimes when you go to pick a lock it takes 10 seconds to start the minigame. UI elements are constantly overlapping each other rendering important info unreadable while you wait for them to fade. Many common events and actions have no sound effects to go along with them. The story is a fucking embarrassment. Its really a shame. And this is apparently after a campaign of extensive patching and bugfixes! Turns out releasing a AAA game series on a yearly schedule is unsustainable!!! Not even Nostradamus himself could have foreseen this turn of events!!!
There is the Dead Kings DLC though, which serves as a sort of epilogue to the main story. Dead Kings is pretty good! It takes place in a small self-contained mini-open world and has a slightly spookier feel. Unlike the main game it actually feels polished and complete, with a consistent tone and an OK story arc (still barely related to the revolution though lol). The gameplay additions and changes work really well and actually mitigate some of the problems in the base game. It actually makes some pretty cool use of the catacombs, which the base game had but did nearly nothing with! The sidequests in it are actually kind of worth doing! So it was nice to play that and have it kind of wash the bad taste of the last like 1/3rd of the base game out of my mouth, but at the same time the fact that it presented a vision of how good the base game could have been if they had actually finished it and had been able to pull together any level of coherency to the proceedings, actually kind of bummed me out too, it just makes the base game look even worse in comparison.
AC Unity is like watching a parkour master from inner-city Paris pound a monster energy, trip over their own untied shoelaces while going for a sick leap onto a flying buttress of a 1000 year old cathedral, and fall 68 feet to the cobblestones below, breaking 203 of their 206 bones on impact. And then as the ambulance is carting them away, still somehow alive, they muster the last of their strength to whisper, in a cockney accent: "Louis XVI was actually a really nice and dignified guy and it was honestly really mean of the brutally impoverished starving peasants he was oppressing to break into his house and guillotine his head off. I bet you never considered that!"
First of all its ridiculously good looking coming from ACIV Black Flag, like just a staggering jump in visual detail. The density of the environment, the gorgeously naturalistic lighting, the teeming crowds of truly huge numbers of citizens, and especially the interiors of buildings, of which there are many. Some of those interiors, especially in the important buildings like the palaces and chateaus and the like, are so finely crafted and detailed they're still kind of jaw dropping 9 years later. The character models mostly look excellent too and are really well animated. The city is dense with paths over roofs, through chaotic streets, and into and back out of buildings, and its genuinely very fun to move through most of the time. There are also a couple animus sequences set in Paris in other time periods as well that make for pretty cool setpieces. The visual presentation and design of the city of Paris itself is the only thing that I don't really have any major issue with, and it's what kept me going through the game as it gradually collapsed around me.
The parkour is always a huge part of AC, and in Unity it at first seems like a big improvement, as does the combat and stealth. Its all incredibly well animated, and the parkour now has 3 modes: neutral, ascending, and descending. This, in theory, should give you a lot more control over movement across the more complex cityscape of paris, and sometimes, it does. Descending in particular is a great addition and feels really cool. When it works. Unfortunately you get stuck on objects or climb on ones you didn't mean to far more in Unity than in any AC game since the first one.You can be in the middle of the coolest looking and feeling chase or escape in the series yet, and then some tiny piece of furniture, or roof gutter, or whatever will just bring it all to a screeching halt. It's so close to being great, but it has just enough jank that it ends up falling way short of the parkour in AC3 and 4
The combat and stealth also seem really solid at first, but they have a major problem: they fall apart completely as the difficulty ramps up. Early on, when its easy, the combat feels weighty and satisfyingly lethal, but still responsive, and the stealth is more detailed than before, with an increased emphasis on crowds and verticality. But they seemingly could not figure out, or did not have time to figure out, how to make those mechanics work for more challenging content. High level enemies parry almost every attack, while their off-screen buddies shoot you to death with bullets that instakill you if you are at all wounded, as you get locked into slow recovery animations. Somehow they regressed to the worst aspects of AC2's combat, and then made it even worse. The stealth on the other hand sometimes stops functioning in later levels because they just put 1000 guards everywhere facing in every direction, many of which dont ever patrol or turn around. The cover system is busted as hell and 50% of the time will cause you to clip into the wall or just get stuck in between animations for 20+ seconds at a time when you try to use it. Many of your tools barely work to manipulate guards. So often in later levels your options become either find the exact specific path they want you to take past all the guards (not well telegraphed, if it even exists in a given mission), or just forget stealth and brute force your way through with the extremely tedious combat. Its a vicious cycle of frustrating tedium.
The story too, is a pathetic parade of squandered potential, missed opportunity, baffling choices, and incoherent and utterly inert plotting. They made an assassins creed game set in the french revolution where the assassins, the secret organization dedicated to changing the world through murder, decide to be radical centrists and not get involved in politics. Except when inevitably the characters, seemingly begrudgingly on the writers' part, do get involved, they are weirdly favorable to the fucking king and other nobles rather than the revolutionaries. The story itself otherwise has nearly nothing to do with the actual revolution, instead being a personal melodrama in which French store brand ezio auditore and his osananajimi (who is a templar, something they manage to wring nearly no tension or intrigue or conflict out of) who he's in love with must find her father's killer. The revolution is constantly "happening" in the background, with plenty of protesting crowds and other details like that, but that's basically all that it is: set dressing. Many of the major events happen offscreen, and the major figures of the revolution are barely present except to be plot devices for the largely unrelated story sequences. Especially after the honestly surprisingly sharp political viewpoint that AC3 had of the American revolution, it's truly baffling how much they managed to fumble such an overflowing cornucopia of storytelling potential. It's like going to a fancy French bakery and being served wonderbread instead of the nice buttery croissant with chocolate and almonds in it that you thought you were going to get.
The most baffling decision of all though, is that if you play with the English voice acting, all of these French people, in Paris, France, during the French Revolution, in a game made by France's largest game development company, speak with EXTREMELY BRITISH ACCENTS. It is so painful to hear all these cockney fucking voices speaking about robespierre and the Notre Dame and other things of an extremely French nature. It comes off like they were ashamed of their own Frenchness, too embarrassed about it to show the world, too afraid an American who watched too much TV during the bush administration might make a cringey surrender joke at them or something. In the AC2 games Ezio and co had goofy Italian accents! In AC3 Connor and his people spoke the actual Kanien'kéha language!! They had a variety of the usual pirate accents all over ACIV: Black Flag!!! But here, on their own home turf they wimped out and went with the generic British-as-foreigner voices you always see in Hollywood movies. Maybe they did deserve those surrender jokes from ol' Joe Sixpack after all.... they must be serving freedom fries over in the cafeteria at Ubisoft HQ. To combat this grotesque transgression against my ears and against the French people, I ended up changing the language of the voices to French, with English subtitles. This was a massive improvement to the presentation but it also meant that whatever dialogue didn't get subtitled, like nearly all incidental dialogue, or any time the subtitles conflicted with another UI element and didn't show up, I had no clue what they were saying. The funniest example of this was the final lines in the base game, which are said by the present day characters (who are barely there, this game, disappointingly, is the first one to barely include any present day segments) as the credits roll. But they apparently forgot to allow subtitles during the credits so literally for the last lines in the story, the concluding statement of the whole mess, I had no clue what they were saying. What an appropriate ending to a very foolish game.
The whole game in general has that feeling of being sloppy and unfinished. There are visual bugs and glitches, janky NPC behaviors, constant aggressive LoD pop-in visible on screen at nearly all times. You can get stuck on or inside of objects at a moments notice. The cloth physics are super busted and need a mod to restore them. Sometimes when you go to pick a lock it takes 10 seconds to start the minigame. UI elements are constantly overlapping each other rendering important info unreadable while you wait for them to fade. Many common events and actions have no sound effects to go along with them. The story is a fucking embarrassment. Its really a shame. And this is apparently after a campaign of extensive patching and bugfixes! Turns out releasing a AAA game series on a yearly schedule is unsustainable!!! Not even Nostradamus himself could have foreseen this turn of events!!!
There is the Dead Kings DLC though, which serves as a sort of epilogue to the main story. Dead Kings is pretty good! It takes place in a small self-contained mini-open world and has a slightly spookier feel. Unlike the main game it actually feels polished and complete, with a consistent tone and an OK story arc (still barely related to the revolution though lol). The gameplay additions and changes work really well and actually mitigate some of the problems in the base game. It actually makes some pretty cool use of the catacombs, which the base game had but did nearly nothing with! The sidequests in it are actually kind of worth doing! So it was nice to play that and have it kind of wash the bad taste of the last like 1/3rd of the base game out of my mouth, but at the same time the fact that it presented a vision of how good the base game could have been if they had actually finished it and had been able to pull together any level of coherency to the proceedings, actually kind of bummed me out too, it just makes the base game look even worse in comparison.
AC Unity is like watching a parkour master from inner-city Paris pound a monster energy, trip over their own untied shoelaces while going for a sick leap onto a flying buttress of a 1000 year old cathedral, and fall 68 feet to the cobblestones below, breaking 203 of their 206 bones on impact. And then as the ambulance is carting them away, still somehow alive, they muster the last of their strength to whisper, in a cockney accent: "Louis XVI was actually a really nice and dignified guy and it was honestly really mean of the brutally impoverished starving peasants he was oppressing to break into his house and guillotine his head off. I bet you never considered that!"