Chronical

NOTE - I have not completed Assassin’s Creed: Unity yet, nor am I anywhere close. I have played to the point in the story where Arno has gained his robes, and been given command of the Cafe Theatre. These are my initial thoughts, not a final judgment. Let’s get started. The Movement Coming off Black Flag, Freedom Cry and Rogue, Unity’s parkour looks awesome. But playing with it, as someone who has completed the first few sequences and had a fair bit of time to warm up to it, has had the opposite effect. Moving around Paris with this new system is quite clunky and inconsistent, requiring a level of restraint in order to get what you want out of the inputs and punishing your idiocy if you fail to maintain said restraint. Sometimes I will try to climb up a wall, and accidentally eject backwards off it onto an empty street. Other times I will be in a chase through the streets, desperately racing to tackle a target, at which point I’ll see a parkour opportunity and think that

I thought that my standards needed a tune-up because I liked Assassin’s Creed: Rogue when it came out. But the truth is, my standards always needed a tune-up. This game just made me happy. It doesn’t have that Ezio Trilogy rizz, or the standalone emotional weight of Black Flag, but Rogue does something that I can’t help but enjoy: it references everything . If there was ever a game in this series that had it’s hand in every pie, it would be Rogue. You get a version of New York shown off decades before Assassin’s Creed 3, an icy North Atlantic to sail through with your own ship (via Black Flag), a River Valley reminiscent of the AC3 Frontier which you can traverse by land or by sea, and more things to collect and do than you have any chance of completing in a timely manner. There are numerous locked armors, alongside your own hideout in New York’s Fort Arsenal, and each of the three mentioned worldspaces have plenty of Forts and Gang Hideouts to conquer before you can access a region’

Alright, I decided to talk about Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag - Freedom Cry. I couldn’t stand to handle AC: Rogue without first handling the DLC to Black Flag, it just didn’t feel right. So, I’ll talk about what I enjoyed the most about Freedom Cry by itself, and in comparison to Black Flag. The Rebellion meter is a feature that took crew recruitment missions in Black Flag and turned them into a thematic, interesting story mechanic. In Black Flag, you could acquire crewmates by freeing people from oppressive soldiers, saving shipwrecked sailors, capturing ships and so on. But the only real benefit of this was that your crew count would increase, which made it easier to board ships in the ship combat sections. Freedom Cry takes this concept and expands it; now, rather than freeing people for the sake of expanding your ship’s crew, you can help to free slaves. Whenever you free a group of slaves, they are added to one of three separate manpower counts: there is the ship’s crew, exac

I missed Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag. I played it on Xbox 360 when it first came out back in 2013; many school nights were lost to the Golden Age of Piracy, sailing the Jackdaw to its next glorious bounty. But somewhere along the line, I completed it. And then I completed its poorly timed follow-up, and then I hit a budgetary wall as neither I (jobless child) nor my parents (employed adults) could afford the Xbox One back then. Thus I played my 360 Slim to hell and back, enjoying what could only have been 1000+ hours of Skyrim with zero mods and not a care in the world. When I did eventually receive the gift of an Xbox One S, the Golden Age of AC had fallen to ruin. I played (and enjoyed) Origins and Odyssey, and I still plan to open my copy of Valhalla back up one of these days, but until this past year I neither owned (nor cared to purchase) Unity and Syndicate. I liked the first game but don’t much love the need for the backwards compatible song and dance on my Xbox One, an