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 it could be a good way to get an advantage over my prey...only for that opportunity to not trigger properly and the target gets away. There is only one saving grace for this system in my eyes, and that is how densely packed the Parisian landscape is. If the parkour ever fails me, I can always fall back on making an unexciting, unflattering beeline directly to wherever I need to go using as little flair as possible, and there’s a fair chance that the Paris skyline will get me there. When life gives you rotten lemons, you use them as ammunition.
The Combat
Speaking of ammunition, let’s talk about the game’s combat. The animation work is interesting, same as with the parkour changes. I personally don’t like using the combat in Unity, at least not at the start, because a lot of it seems to depend on your gear and on the area that you’re in; in the previous games I reviewed, your choice of gear didn’t matter nearly as much as your ability at effectively using the resources at hands. As a comparison, I could decimate a French fort in Assassin’s Creed: Rogue even at a lower level, assuming that I could intelligently make use of the situation. In Unity, having a low level weapon means you do practically zero damage to a more dangerous enemy, which forces me to use the subpar parkour in a desperate bid for escape. You can see now why these are my first two sections: the movement and combat are the beating heart of this game’s mechanics, but the pulse is almost too weak to sustain life.
The Customization
How about a positive note? One thing I really enjoy about this game is the outfit customization. Weapon customization is hit or miss, and the skills are essentially just ways that the developers locked existing mechanics from the prior games behind leveling systems, but the outfit customization has never been as interesting as it is here. Like previous titles, you can unlock entire outfits in-game through the classic collectible hunts or main quest completions. But that isn’t the brunt of it; rather, the real meat and potatoes comes when you mix and match. You can acquire hoods, chestpieces, trousers, belts and vambraces that can be interchanged to create a unique Assassin look for your version of Arno, with the return and expansion of outfit colors from Assassin’s Creed 3 (which I’ll be covering in a future release) to top it all off. Now, I have played the entire series – except Unity, Syndicate and Mirage – up to this point in time, but I can say with confidence that Unity’s complex system of outfit customization is the best version of it in the series. The RPG trilogy, made of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla, each allow for this level of customization, but with no mind paid to how Assassin-like the outfits might feel. Unity has seemingly merged the diversity and complexity of RPG gear with the style and themes of an Assassin’s robes, leading me to be more invested in this system than I was in any gear system that followed it.
The Renovations
My favorite part of Unity so far is that renovations and property purchases have made a return. The Cafe Theatre is presented to you as a rundown club, formerly a meeting place for revolutionaries and thought experimenters prior to the Revolution. With the rise of newer Cafes in recent years, the Theatre has fallen out of favor and is largely patronless when you are charged with it’s operation. Who would provide you ownership of an old Cafe, you might ask? Well, the Assassins. This particular location was once the hub of Assassin intelligence-gathering in Paris, allowing the Brotherhood to gather intel on anything and everything happening in the country from this prime gossip club. Upon your induction to the Brotherhood, which I will discuss more in the next section, you are charged with revitalizing the Cafe and turning it into a worthwhile investment for the Assassins once more. As part of this, you can purchase renovations for the Cafe Theatre, which unlock new rooms, new decorations, new patrons and new missions to complete as you renovate more of the building.
Renovating the Theatre doesn’t just serve to pretty up the building and expand the Assassins in a largely unseen way; each renovation also increases your revenue. Yes, this game sees a similar (if toned-down) system of banking and revenue that Rogue so wonderfully integrated. I’m not entirely sure which tasks raise revenue and which don’t, but here is what I believe has an impact: renovations for the Cafe Theatre, missions completed for the Theatre, and Social Clubs.
Tied into this system of renovation and expansion is the Social Club network, which is a string of similar Cafes to the Theatre which you have the opportunity to buy in order to expand the Assassins’ influence in Paris. I have only acquired one of these so far, and it appears that when you do, your revenue sees a sharp increase. Upon your purchase, you’ll also be able to take part in missions for each Club, similar to the Cafe Theatre’s unlockable missions.
I admit that I don’t know how deep this empire-building goes, but the concept of renovating locations to establish an intelligence network in France is (and always has been) super exciting to me.
The Story/The Assassins
I like the story so far. I already know how it ends, I’ve been telling myself for years that I would never purchase Unity for the base price of $30 so I spoiled myself ages ago. But after buying it pre-owned for $10 at GameStop, I can say that the story has yet to really lose me. It has confused me, but I’m not lost on it yet.
So, you play as Arno Victor Dorian. Shay Patrick Cormac, former Assassin and known Master Templar by the year 1776, killed your dad (an Assassin of the French Brotherhood) in the epilogue to Rogue and the prologue to Unity, taking the Precursor box from his corpse and disappearing into the annals of hidden history. Arno was taken in and raised by a kind man whom he would one day recognize as the Grand Master of the Parisian Templars; he fell in love with this man’s daughter, who would also be raised into the Templar Order. Keep in mind, Arno knew nothing of Assassins and Templars until the inciting incident of the game’s plot: the betrayal of his foster father by a fellow Templar. Arno was accidentally responsible for not warning the man of this attack, and he’s framed for the murder altogether. He meets a friend of his father in the Bastille, where he is imprisoned, and initially wants nothing to do with him but accepts his training reluctantly. When the Bastille is attacked, the two escape and eventually meet back at the Assassin Headquarters.
Now that the intense preamble is done, let me talk about the Assassins and Templars in France at this time. The Templars are in a minor civil war, with a fellow Templar having assassinated the Grand Master and a succession crisis on their hands. The Assassins have a large power base in the country, with a collective Assassin Council making decisions alongside the Mentor, all operating from their underground fortress. This place looks way too impressive to be that hidden, with columns and large rooms and so on. It’s cool, but kind of off-putting when you ask “how is any of this possible?”
Regardless, the Assassin Council resides here in the Parisian sewers. They suffer from bureaucratic deadlock, unable to make any real change because each member has their own ideas of how best to guide the Brotherhood, and the Mentor’s own ideals are dividing the group in half. No one is willing to commit to a set path, and so nothing is happening.
Despite this, it doesn’t take the Council long to decide that Arno should undergo their one and only admittance trial for entry into the Brotherhood: a drug trip. If you can survive the power of acid, you too can be named a novice in the Assassin Brotherhood. All it took for them to name Arno Dorian, an unproven 20-something who just escaped from prison after being raised by a Templar for ten years, as a member of the Assassin Brotherhood was a single moment. Yes, he was trained for maybe two months with sticks by an Assassin in a prison cell, but that does not equal multiple years of diligent training in my opinion. Altair was raised in the Brotherhood, he simply had to regain his rank over the course of the first game. Ezio spent the better part of twenty years honing his craft, going from a civilian to a trained killer before ever being considered a fellow member of the Assassins. Connor had to train for a year just to wear an Assassin’s robes. But following Arno’s induction, we are given a one-year time jump, during which he is completely trained to be an Assassin. When we regain motor functions, he already has his robes and his hidden blade, and it’s unknown whether he had to do anything more than declare himself an Assassin to earn them. I don’t know if I’m just nitpicking, but becoming an Assassin when you start from the outside should be something that you have to earn. It isn’t a one and done deal, you need to prove that you can become a part of this eternal battle that they all take part in. But Assassin’s Creed: Unity doesn’t seem to share that opinion; if it does, then I have yet to see it in-game. I would love to be wrong.
When it comes to the story itself beyond this point, I’ll explore that in my completed review. I just really needed to talk about the Assassins in Unity for a while.
The (Temporary) Conclusion
Though the review may not show it, my view of Unity is looking better. I am getting better at avoiding the parkour’s rough edges, and I have gained a healthy aversion to the irritating combat. The renovations and revenue streams excite me, and the outfit customization helps my Arno feel more like an individual. I didn’t even touch on the god-awful UI, but that will be for my final thoughts on Unity. For now, I’ll be leaving this with a bit of optimism for the rest of the game. Maybe I will enjoy this one more than I thought I would at the start.
I’ll see you all in the next post, which will be a slight departure from gaming as it focuses on my new experience with the Sonic movies. As someone who never watched nor cared to watch the first Sonic movie before this past week, I am proud to say that it surprised me – and I’m a bit excited to watch the sequel and the upcoming third film. Stay tuned for that one at 6:00 AM Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, and I hope you have a good day!
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