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’s Renovations. When I tell you that this game took every mechanic that it possibly could and threw them all into one big pot, I mean it.
But, I don’t want to slog through all those individually. So I’ll talk about the mechanics I enjoyed the most, then I’ll give a brief talk about the story.
One addition that I absolutely love, which improves upon the Black Flag ship formula, is the addition of the Icebreaker Ram. Your ship now has a ram that can cut clean through sheets of ice in the North Atlantic, but if you charge directly at a ship, it can also do serious damage to a wooden hull. This changed my combat tactics entirely, putting me in more positions to directly face my opponents in an up-close fashion so that I could charge directly into their unprotected broadside. Something about T-boning a French frigate just feels right.
Another addition to the Black Flag ship formula, that being the Seven-Years War. Yes, history came to town and wants to play fucking ball. The fleet map in this game has a progress bar for the War in the top left corner, called the Naval Campaign, with milestones which can be unlocked as you progress in the main story. You can choose to ignore the fleet map entirely, but if you are like me and want to see the Seven-Years War follow a realistic timeline of events, you can complete segments of the Campaign when they become available and then continue the main questline to unlock the next segment in your fleet map. Just like in Black Flag, the fleet missions cost real world time to send out your ships, but the times are far more manageable here. Even in the later game missions, the highest you may see for a mission time is three hours. This made it much easier for me to play the game with the fleet missions occurring in the background, with the occasional mission completion interspersed throughout. Similar to how the Rebellion system in Freedom Cry encouraged me to rescue more slaves to reach the next milestone, the Naval Campaign encouraged me to interact with the war effort and capture more ships for the purpose of supporting it. Now unfortunately, there are no milestone-specific rewards for the Campaign. But the blow is softened by the fact that every mission provides its own rewards, with completing some missions giving you things like ship upgrades, weapons for your character, War Letters, and decorations for Fort Arsenal.
Speaking of the Fort, what’s it like? Well...it lacks character, that is certain. Not a fucking soul lives in this gigantic fort on New York’s west side, with the exception of yourself and the quartermaster who lives in that shed by the dock. Fort Arsenal had so much potential to be teeming with life, to actually show your war effort’s effects, but no – it’s actually better to just pretend that you live in an abandoned district of the city, because otherwise you’ll start to feel self-conscious about how nobody comes to see you. The interior of the fort’s main building is really nice, though. It’s super Templar-coded, which rubs me the wrong way if I wanted to play as more of a Dark Assassin near the start, but it has flair. The authoritarian vibes are strong, and it sets the tone when interacting with the fleet map. Something that I feel like Black Flag and Rogue both struggle with is the duality of having two homes; one at sea and one on land. You will spend more time at the Morrigan’s helm than you ever will at Fort Arsenal, and despite the developers doing a good job at balancing this by making the Fort a part of New York’s map, you have little reason to treat it as your home – this was lessened in Black Flag by the fact that your ship truly was your calling, but my character in Rogue has no such attachment. I would much prefer the location of Fort Arsenal to be a more interesting and functional base of operations when compared to the ship, because that would push me to use the ship as a utility for the gameplay rather than a home-on-the-range. Fort Arsenal should have been the Homestead from AC3, but instead, it is the back room of Great Inagua from AC4.
I mentioned Renovations earlier, and those are the exact same as the ones you can do at Great Inagua in AC4. Except they are everywhere now, and they actually allow you to gain passive income as a result. Each Renovation you do, each Fort or Gang Hideout you capture, each Settlement you liberate increases your passive income by a certain amount. You can collect this income at Bank stations located in every Fort and Gang Hideout, on your Ship, and in Fort Arsenal. I love this system because it makes the economy easier the more you engage in the gameplay, encouraging you to complete content that will make things like outfits and ammo and weapons easier to purchase. By the endgame, I used my $300,000 stash to buy enough hunting goods to craft every single upgrade and outfit for Shay, all at once. And about fifteen minutes later, I collected another $30,000 from the bank and bought the final outfits and gear pieces that I needed. I used that same tactic to also upgrade most of my ship, when paired with the ship combat for resources, and you can quickly see how making a lot of money can make the game more fun to play in a series where the endgame is usually a slog to get through. Plus, completing all Renovations gives you a Governor’s Sword, and completing all Gang Hideouts and Forts gives you a cool pistol set. Completing all Settlements alongside those other objectives gives you a nice achievement on your Xbox page, but that’s about it.
Oh, now I can talk about the War Letters! These are collectible documents spread throughout the worldspaces of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue that expand upon the lore of the entire series. The team behind this game did an absolutely incredible job of showing the broad tapestry of Assassins and Templars across the world, in constant contact with one another. Characters you’ve seen in past games will show up in these Letters, contacting characters in Rogue or characters in adjacent titles of the time: the expanded story of how Achilles became Mentor of the Colonial Brotherhood, and how he met his wife; the inner thoughts and desires of Lawrence Washington prior to his passing; the growing distrust and distaste between Edward Braddock and Haytham Kenway; the rising obsession of Grand Master Reginald Birch, falling into madness over tales of the First Civilization; and so many more, each Letter connecting characters and expanding histories and enriching the world and the times that the game is set in. The War Letters bring together the post-Ezio games in a way that not many titles since have done successfully, in my opinion.
The final thing I want to talk about is the story, and that is because I have the least to point out about it this time around. Not because I dislike it, but because I enjoy it just as much this time as I did on my original playthrough. I have a deeper appreciation for how Shay was manipulated by the Templars into becoming their pet Assassin, and how that role led to him actually surviving the fall of the Colonial Rite by not being present at the time. His mission to find the Precursor box saved his life, and allowed him to be the first member of the American Rite of the Templar Order. Or at least, that’s how I interpreted his speech at the end of the game. The game’s story structure could use some work, and the plot itself is campy at times, but that didn’t hinder my enjoyment of what was happening. If there was anything that I disliked about the game in a big way, it’s that Shay never has any importance after what he did to setup Assassin’s Creed: Unity. His grandson shows up as a character in one of the books, but that’s the extent of it. I actually liked Shay quite a lot as a protagonist, and I feel that if anyone deserved some extra screentime, it would be him – especially with how much the game built him up as “the most important Assassin ever” or whatever the heck Otso Berg was going on about. I know now that Shay is never coming back in one of these, but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Well, that was my little post about a game I just replayed. I really love AC: Rogue, even though in this playthrough, I prioritized different things than my first go around. The younger me enjoyed the unlockable armors and the legendary ships and the Abstergo tablets, while my older self could give less than a shit about the unlockable armors and the Abstergo tablets give me heartburn. I love this game. It really does just have something about it that makes playing it fun, and I hope that I can continue coming back in the future.
That’s all I’ve got for you, have a good one!
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