Assassins Creed Unity: Assassins interest restored

One of my favourite games for a while, the Assassin's Creed series, featured brilliant storylines and was fun to play. Then it lost its way and, in turn, my interest. That, however, has been restored by Assassins Creed Unity.

Assassins Creed Unity

For: PS4, XboxOne, PC
From: Ubisoft
Four stars (out of five)

Lets deal with the elephant in the room first: yes this game has got some issues, not bugs, but fundamental issues.

Ubisoft has been ambitious in terms of what it wanted to do with the game's environment, and while it has worked in some areas, it has fallen down in others.

The crowds look immense, and the architecture is brilliant, but the frame rate takes a significant hit in particular areas, to the point of making the game borderline unplayable.

Two things to note about this though.

Firstly, most of these problems are now fixed. Ubisoft has fixed most if not all of the gremlins.

Secondly, Unity is well worth the time to play through.

Unity is set during the French Revolution and stars a new protagonist named Arno Dorian.

Arno is your typical video game protagonist: he has nice hair, is always keen to impress the ladies and is a bit of a smarmy git.

But as unlikeable as that sounds, I found him strangely endearing.

I imagine you can already predict the gist of the story, too.

Arno discovers he was born an assassin, meets up with a bunch of gruff-looking blokes who are part of the Assassins Guild in the city, joins and proceeds to introduce his hidden blade to the spines and necks of various evil Templars.

This is all well and good, but by moving to self-contained story arcs I feel Ubisoft has removed the best aspect of the early Assassin's Creed games.

The first four games in the series were linked, they all had common themes (often ones you'd only realise right at the very end), and this made the story vastly more gratifying.

Now, their mantra has been to find a particular time period that they think is interesting (French Revolution has always been high on their list of priorities), and introduce a story to fit.

Sure it works, and yeah it's enjoyable, but it results in stories that are about as deep as a conversation with Paris Hilton and as memorable.

The saving grace for the series, though, has been its gameplay.

After playing five straight years of what is effectively the same game, I was well over scaling towers and getting viewpoints and leaping into hay bales ad nauseum.

That's not to say you don't do that in Unity, but this time Ubisoft has made fundamental changes to the way you do this.

Every contextual movement in the free-running has been updated, and finally you can free run downwards.

Previously, if you wanted to get off a rooftop in any hurry you either had to take a massive leap (sometimes unintentionally), and end up splattered on the ground, or slowly and painstakingly manoeuvre your way down the facade of the building.

Now, you just hold a different button and Arno merrily trots down to ground level.

True, you still get the occasional wonky jump where you wanted to go across the roof but instead leapt to another, but by and large its a big improvement. It's made the game fun again.

That's a common theme for Unity, for me. I was well burnt out on this franchise, but Unity has restored the faith.

Fans of the (excellent) multiplayer aspect of the series should be warned though; it has been removed.

In its place is a co-op mode. Your enjoyment here will depend on who you play with.

If you're stealthy and your partner goes for in like a bull in a china shop its not going to be as good as two master assassins executing the perfect kill.