Current Progress: Up to Sequence 7 Memory 2
23%
16 hours played
There is a lot of negative press about this game and five hours in I agreed with most of it. However, now with 16 hours played and about half way through the plot, I am becoming more positive. Don't get me wrong, this is still not a great AC game. I have played every AC game except the Vita Liberation port and Rogue.
I'll start off with what most of the press is focusing on. The game doesn't run well at all. I can't generally tell the difference between 30 fps or 60 or anything in between. However, in this game there are choppy frame rates, which I do notice happen often. Though the recent update does reduce the frequency of the frame rate drops. Also the loading screens are stupidly long. It's sometimes quicker to run across the city than fast travel to a viewpoint. There haven't been too many glitches since I've been playing. The no face bug seems to be only present on PC. Some console owners never connect their console to the Internet so there is no excuse to release a broken game which can then be fixed afterwards with updates.
Now some positives. Paris is huge and looks fantastic. The sense of scale is amazing and it definitely feels like the biggest AC city. A big change from Black Flag where you never spend much time in one city. Also the game looks graphically beautiful. Whether you are watching in game cut-scenes or running around the city the game graphics are amazing. One of the features this game showed off in all of its press previews was the amount of NPCs on screen. While it is impressive when you see a large crowd, the individual people seem lifeless. Different areas of the city feel different. You know when you're in rich areas with unrest and in rough areas.The city is great and the best thing about Unity.
Mechanically the game has changed drastically since Black Flag. Some are improvements, a lot aren't. One improvement is the combat. You can no longer just counter one move and then chain kill every enemy. You have to parry and dodge. An enemy's health bar flashes yellow when you can parry. Taking on a lot of enemies on is a challenge as it really should be. Because of this stealth is encouraged so to avoid the more difficult combat.
Another improvement to some extent is the huge character customisation. In the past the options for how your assassin looked was purely cosmetic. Now you can customise the head, chest, waist, forearms, legs and the overall colour of your assassin. Each item looks different and has different levels of health and stealth bonuses. It's awesome. This is your Arno and he keeps all of the items of clothing you choose in the cut-scenes. A disadvantage is the skin crafting is no more and instead these items of clothing comes with different item capacities. I found I was looking more at these numbers than how the pieces of clothing looked. Weapon choice has also increased. I'm currently using a spiked club but could use a pickaxe or swords among other choices. Every item can be brought using the in-game currency or annoyingly micro-transactions. The game becomes even more like an RPG with skill points which is a good addition. However necessary skills like double assassinations need to be unlocked and the amount of skill points you get from the missions isn't many.
My biggest issue with the game so far is the French revolution seems to be barely used, it's more than of a backdrop. There are few references to the guillotine and none to the royal family. There are crowds burning flags but they don't attack the officers and storm the buildings like the trailer shows. The storyline doesn't focus on the revolution at all. I wasn't too impressed with AC 3 but at least that taught me things about the American revolution. I think one reason for this is there will probably be 3 games set in France around this time period so by the end you'll know more about the revolution. 3 Italy games and then 3 America games. Next step 3 France games. But I can't be bothered to play through all of that.
To conclude I am so far enjoying this game. There are a lot a changes and some are for the better. This game is in line with the other poorly received AC games like Revelation (my personal worst AC game) and AC3. Not great but still somewhat enjoyable.
