Assassin's Creed Unity review

Assassin's Creed Unity review

The Assassin's Creed franchise has remained a constant in the video gaming industry. A saga that spans time melding elements of action, weaving history on a rigid and compelling science fiction framework, charting the never-ending silent battle between the Assassins and the Knights Templar. Assassin's Creed Unity is an important move for Ubisoft. Marking the shift in not only graphics but marking new territory in gameplay and visuals. But is that enough to beat the vast open seas of Assassins Creed: Black Flag or the charm of Assassins Creed III? We find out in our review...

Story



Assassin's Creed Unity's story is as much a coming of age story as it is a sweeping romance set in a backdrop of Paris's slow descent into madness. Young Arno Dorian watched his father die and met the love of his life, Elise, on the same day. Adopted by Elise's family, Arno is a likeable, roguish stable boy who is on the path into the Brotherhood of Assassins courtesy the tides of love and revolution . All of this is perfectly voice-acted, even though many of the characters have sharp English accents.

Arno himself is very much like Ezio from Assassins Creed III and Edward from Assassins Creed IV. In fact, Arno's later introduction is very reminiscent of Ezio's as he's accused of stealing and is pursued by thugs.

There's nothing new about the tale of Assassins Creed Unity. Even as Arno makes his way up through the ranks of assassins, you feel you have read or heard this story many times over. Though the romance between Elise and Arno does have its sweeping highs, the story just tapers into background noise after a point. This is good in a way as Arno serves as a device to lead you into the bigger picture.

What the story does right is get you riled up, watching the overflowing opulence of the upper caste Parisians and the growing anger of the peasant class. All this leads up to the horrific guillotine executions that still resound throughout history. Ubisoft has rendered Paris in such amazing detail, you feel completely transported in time, right into the heart of the revolution.

Gameplay



At its core, Assassin's Creed Unity feels like every other Assassins Creed game out there, which is disappointing. That's not to say there are not a lot of new things, but a lot of them are focused more on making the game feel more realistic that updating the gameplay.

The Parkour, freerunning element has gotten the best and biggest update of the lot. Barring a few glitches, Arno just seems to flow over the environment as he vaults over edges, runs across rooftops and does slight wall runs to grab adjacent hand holds. It's just incredible. You can also freerun down with another button, allowing Arno to do a controlled descent. This more than makes up for a lot of the flaws of the game.

One annoying feature of most Assassin's Creed games was the stealth mechanics, where you could only crouch and hide in certain areas. Taking a page out of Watch Dogs and Splinter Cell, Assassin's Creed Unity now has a new cover system as well as the ability to crouch and walk anytime. However, the controls can get a bit sticky at times.

The combat system is changed a bit to include more of a fencing style; however, it's rickety at best. There were times we could not tell when we are supposed to parry and there were times where it feels like hits were just not connecting. Add to that glitches like enemies clipping into your character and you've got a mess.



There were times I parried, but the animation of the sword was pointing in the wrong direction, which is shameful because an Assassin's Creed clone Shadow of Mordor did combat so well; in the latter, you can feel the power of your character's sword-strokes as you can cut through swathes of enemies with precise control. At best Assassin's Creed Unity's combat feels clunky. We sincerely do hope Ubisoft will fix this in upcoming patches.

Assassin's Creed Unity does not break away from the usual bunch of mission types. You still follow targets, eavesdrop, chase and perform the occasional assassination, but now you get to solve murders too. With a game overhaul, it would have been nice of Ubisoft to mix things up a little more. However, to be fair the, game does give you a lot more freedom on how you can go about your mission. Earlier there were just external buildings you can traverse, but in Unity you can enter certain interiors through open windows.

Assassination is a lot better this time around as well, with you feeling a lot more like an assassin. You will actually need to case the scene, prepare you kill and see the multiple routes to go in, kill and get out in one piece, preferably with the head still attached to said piece. You can either sneak in unnoticed or create distractions or go in sword swinging, taking down guards and target alike.

One annoying factor is the crowds. Sure, it fills you with awe watching the angry mobs from a rooftop. However, on any mission, be it a chase or a sneak, there are milling crowds of people getting in your way. It just gets annoying watching bumbling peasants wearing ridiculous pink and white dress shirts get in your way as your target happily traipses around the crowds to get away from you.

Graphics



Assassin's Creed Unity is one of the best looking games out there to date. Every turn, every corner is so detailed that you have to blink twice and remind yourself that it's not real. The detail in the textures is staggering, stones on a building are varied in style and not just a repeated tile. The ground is mucky in places and dusty near market areas. The crowds look great, as the game distinguishes each member with an astonishing amount of details. Later in the game the crowds are just plain malevolent entities, walls of angry peasants.



All of the famous Paris architecture are rendered in exquisite detail. You can not only visit but also climb to the top of monuments like Notre Dame and Eiffel Tower. Everything just looks amazing. Picture perfect. Interiors of buildings are equally detailed, with gold trimmings along the walls, paintings on the ceilings and old French furniture in the room. Assasin's Creed Unity is just a feast for the eyes.

The animations are very realistic too, marked by Arno's fluid and real movements. Little details in the parkour animation add to the realism, for example, when running over rooftops, Arno seems to accelerate and decelerate on the slopes of the roof; when running he goes into a controlled slide before vaulting easily and hanging off the edge.

Everything about Assassin's Creed Unity will make your jaw drop. Everything. Though such beauty comes at a price. A steep one. Even at 900p on the PS4, the game's framerate drops regularly, especially in places where there's a lot of crowds. Managing so many animations is taxing on even next-gen consoles.

Unity has quite a lot of glitches. While we just experienced weird hair movements, odd character floats with a healthy serving of clipping and we fell under the map several times. However, there's the now-famous kissing glitch, where users took screenshots of a passionate kiss between Arno and Elise, except that Arno just had hair, eyeballs and teeth, nothing else.



The PC version undoubtedly looks the best, but to run it at 1080p with all effects on you will need a juggernaut of a card. At least a Nvidia Geforce GTX 680 and above, an i7 and above processor and a lot of RAM. Those who have beefy PCs will get the best of Assassin's Creed Unity.

Conclusion
Assassin's Creed Unity feels a lot more like a glorified tech demo than an actual full fledged game. A decent game that needs a lot of patching up from Ubisoft. That said, what it gets right turns out to be great. There's good Parkour and stealth with the revolution bursting through the seams. Of course, this is the best looking game out there and has raised the bar graphically extremely high for games.

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Review

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare Review

PROS
Depth-of-field effects
looks good in 4K resolution
Multiplayer mode is good
Smart grenades

CONS
Minimal multi-level gameplay
Drones could have been better
Our Verdict

Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is at the pinnacle of its genre now. The production values are brilliant, the acting quite comparable to anything we’ve ever experienced before (in-game or otherwise) and whatever little is lacking is more than made up for by Kevin Spacey’s very presence. Now if only they’d managed to rope in Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt, what a movie game this would have been! The exo-suits and a few new gadgets add a welcome amount of depth to the otherwise formulaic multiplayer experience and there’s a lot of fun to be had, if you’re willing. This is the best Call of Duty game since Modern Warfare and deserves a spot on every gamer’s bucketlist
Gadget Deals


It’s hard to describe the joy of playing a good Call of Duty game again. Ten years of bland, generic sequels have left us more than a little disheartened with the franchise. The games have been nothing more than gloomy click-fests that the die-hard fans among us try to get through in the hopes of catching a glimmer of that combination of spectacle, pacing and gameplay that made Modern Warfare (and United Offensive before it) such a great and memorable game.

So what’s different this time around? Well, for one thing, Kevin Spacey. Any semblance of a story, or lack thereof, is more than made up for by Spacey’s very presence and ruthless charm; it’s a major factor in bringing this game to life. You can’t help but see him on-screen and get drawn in by his persona. It doesn’t matter that he really doesn’t have a big role in the game (he is the villain, but he’s not even as memorable as 343 Guilty Spark) and that you rarely interact with him outside of cutscenes. The other thing that’s new is the exo-suit; it’s the first time, since Modern Warfare, that we’re actually introduced to something that has the potential to drastically affect the way we play and the best part is – it doesn’t suck



Spectacle

The true heart of a CoD game has always been spectacle, those moments that make your jaw drop and go, “That was awesome!” The franchise has, off-late, gone very over-the-top with that aspect and the recent glut of superhero blockbusters have spoilt us silly, but CoD still manages to illicit more than a few “oohs” and “aahs”. Never before have we actually been happy to say that a game is an interactive movie.

The game is simply gorgeous and, as befitting the oodles of graphical goodness, the system requirements are understandably high. We found our systems regularly running low on RAM (with 8GB onboard) and loading screens took up an inordinately long time on anything but the highest-end of systems (an Intel 3960x with HyperX beast RAM and a couple of SSDs).



For those who have such fancy systems, this is the game that makes that investment worth it. Of particular note are the extremely high-resolution textures that look fantastic on even 4K systems. The depth-of-field effects bring cut-scenes to life in a cinematic art-style that’s worthy of the best of cinematographers and are also exceptional.

If there’s anything we have against the cinematic cut-scenes, it’s that random quick-time-events just ruin them. Sections where you’re not shooting should just be played out by the game with you as a passenger, it would be more immersive and definitely less tedious.

Introducing: The Exo-Suit

The real star of the game is the Exo-suit (Exo from now on). CoD games have always been elaborate turkey shoots, good ones of course, and what the Exo does is give you the ability to perform trick shots. In single-player, the exo isn’t that much fun. It’s alright, fits in with the general theme, lets you hop around the map and over obstacles and lets you hover over gaps, etc., which is good, but you’re given all that power and are only allowed an atrophied brain and a claustrophobic sandbox to play in. As with any CoD game, creativity is severely punished and you’re only allowed to use your abilities when the game tells you that you can. Of course, you can double-jump up the occasional staircase or over the occasional wall, but that’s really as far as your Exo-abilities truly take you in single-player.



It’s very apparent from the mission design that the levels weren’t really designed with multi-level gameplay in mind, except as gimmicks. There are one or two missions where you really feel like you can put your Exo’s abilities to good use, but they’re so few that by that time, you don’t really care.

When it comes to multiplayer however, the Exos come to life. Instead of running and gunning, you can now run-and-gun-and-jump-and-boost-and-shield-and-cloak and do so much more and it’s all good fun. You get to choose the type of Exo you want, be it one designed for speed and extended sprinting or one designed to absorb damage for the slightly tankier among us. It’s easy to customise the suit and your build to suit your play style and quite frankly, you’d better. Higher-level players are quite hard to take down, not because they have better gear, which they do but because they’ve customised their suit to take advantage of their play style and they know how to use it.



Too SMART?

Advanced Warfare has done a really good job of showcasing, well, advanced warfare. You really feel like you’re in a battlefield of the future, what with the drones popping up all over the place, the “threat” grenades, your Exo, SMART grenades, wonky looking tanks and walkers and more. The problem here is that Sledgehammer games either went too far or didn’t go far enough.



Take the grenades for instance, they’ve always been something you hurl at an enemy and run. Now, you throw a grenade, watch it try to hover while it performs a maniacal dance and then direct it to an enemy. It looks cool, but it’s too cumbersome. The threat grenades (they highlight enemies through obstacles) and EMP grenades (for taking out Exos and drones and other electronic devices) are actually grenades that you hurl by first pressing “Q” and then cycling through grenade types by pressing “F”. It’s too complex and is definitely not something you want to do mid-battle. We rarely found ourselves switching grenades during the campaign, and they’re even less significant in multiplayer for this very reason. Speaking of which, multiplayer is bucket loads of fun. There are issues with matchmaking and pings can be bad, but we’ve rarely had this much fun in a CoD game.

Call of Duty: Drone Warfare

It has to be said, a more plausible argument for drone warfare couldn’t have been made better than in CoD. The drones are smart, as deadly as a pack of ravenous chiwavas and creatively implemented. The blowing up of the Golden Gate Bridge for example, was one of the finest examples of possible drone use that we’ve seen, it’s too bad that there aren’t enough of such moments. In fact, the one major argument against the drones is that they’re just not dangerous enough. They’re more like the aforementioned chiwavas which will, only if given enough time, eventually wear you down. It would have been so much cooler if you had drone swarms darkening the sky and unleashing a hail of bullets or clamping on to enemies (even you) and detonating or any of a myriad of such scenarios.



To be fair though, it’s testament to the game’s design that the drones seem as natural to the environment as a gun to a battlefield – they seem inevitable - See more at: http://www.digit.in/gaming/call-of-duty-advanced-warfare-review-24644.html#sthash.I9pQu12h.dpuf