Assassin's Creed Unity

As the first next-gen addition to the series Unity is a stepping stone on the way to something outstanding, but not an outstanding game in its own right. [13/2014, p.32]

Look, Assassin’s Creed Unity isn’t a bad game, it’s just not up to the standards of the franchise. It needed more development time – more time to optimize the experience and to get its systems to work smartly.

Ubisoft’s insistence on releasing what is, frankly, an unfinished product is inexcusable. Players falling through floors, obnoxious NPCs interrupting cutscenes, characters turned into terrifying grotesques as they are rendered without skin. All have been exposed in Unity’s litany of bugs. You could be lucky and not see any of them at all, or they could come and spoil your fun entirely.

It stumbles out of the gates, but underneath the issues lies a pretty good experience that I would hope will get better with patches.

Ubisoft tries to create a sense of greatness, but the technical flaws keep this game from really doing so. This is a tremendous let-down, as the tougher fighting system, the extended missions and the co-op multiplayer experience are all great assets to the franchise.

Assassin’s Creed Unity is not the evolution everyone was looking for. Ubisoft has done a good job with the brand new cooperative multiplayer mode, but the game has too many issues to be a real must-buy. Paris is awesome but having just one place to explore is quite boring, and the lack of horses or side gameplay elements such as the sea battles from Black Flag can be a problem too. And there are too many bugs even after day 1 patch.

Entertaining and beautiful but lacks new ideas.

Unity attempts to improve on some of Assassin's Creed's innate problems, but it misses the mark as often as it hits. Nevertheless, you'll want to play it for the gorgeous rendition of revolutionary (etc.) France and the involving, opened-ended primary assassination missions. It's clear Ubisoft is trying to shake up the series a bit, but next time they need to shake a little harder.

It's a great story wrapped in a more confusing story, some satisfying stealth action, and mechanics that leave me banging my head against the wall. It's Assassin's Creed, warts and all.

It's very good, maybe even great in places, but the story's smaller focus has come at the expense of its exquisitely rendered backdrop. The grandness and spectacle that so often graces the finest Assassin's Creeds is sadly sorely lacking here.

My lack of enthusiasm for the multiplayer is mirrored by my experience with the rest of the game. Unity does take a few extra strides towards advancing the series, but in many ways it feels like a step back from Black Flag.

Unity is still one of the weaker entries of the series. Co-op, while fun, feels half-baked; the game is ultimately meaningless in terms of the series canon because of the lack of focus on the present day story line; and many of the design decisions feel driven by the unwelcome addition of micro-transactions. Better luck next year, I guess.

Unity follows in the original Assassin’s Creed’s footsteps in many ways as the first game in the series developed exclusively for the new generation of consoles. And, much like its ancestor, for every good thing Unity does, it adds something else that just leaves you scratching your head—giving the whole experience a hit-or-miss feel that we haven’t seen from the series in a long time.

In the quest to build something that looked and sounded "next generation," Ubisoft Montreal failed to fix the problems that have accumulated over so many annual release. Combined with an uninspiring story, and a long list of considerable technical problems, Unity falls short of the fresh start Assassin's Creed needs.

Assassin's Creed: Unity is full of ideas and systems that don't gel or haven't reached their potential.

What could have been the definitive entry in the Assassin’s Creed series is actually the definitive example as to why releasing an unfinished product is always a bad call.

Whether you can get over these glaring flaws or not is going to probably be the main thing that affects your opinion. We fought through the overall unpolished finish of the product, and we were glad that we did so, but this really isn't how anyone can reasonably have expected the game to have turned out.

Paris shows some promise, but it's hard to enjoy a game when it's so nauseating, even if it does suggest a return to the series' best ideas. Maybe next year. [Issue#119, p.65]

Assassin’s Creed Unity is a beautiful game that’s fun to play with friends. It’s also an outmoded mess that incenses with its dated controls and shoves Ubisoft’s executive-minded priorities directly in the player’s face.

Not the bold new reinvention that Assassin’s Creed needed but instead a rushed, patently unfinished mess whose improvements are minor and failings more obvious than ever.

I’d love for every iteration of Assassin’s Creed to be great, as I genuinely enjoy the series. Assassin’s Creed 2, Brotherhood, Black Flag…these are all fantastic games to me. But Unity doesn’t compare favorably at all to the better entries we’ve already seen.