Assassin's Creed Unity Reviews
Assassin’s Creed Unity is not a good game. It’s a buggy, poorly written adventure that received a lot of criticism from the fan-base when it released back in 2014. 6 years later, that criticism is still warranted as Unity remains a buggy, poorly written title that stands out as one of the worst games in the Creed franchise.
As of this writing, Ubisoft has created a live blog that promises to address all of the technical issues that is plaguing their high profile game. Considering their misplaced priorities, however, they hardly deserve a pass for releasing Assassin's Creed Unity in the miserable shape that it's in, which damages both this decent entry in the series as well as the very AC brand itself.
Assassin's Creed Unity is a gaudy monument to game design by focus-testing rather than creative vision.
Assassin's Creed: Unity is at once an object of exquisite beauty and exhausting boredom.
Far from pointing the way forwards for the series, Assassin's Creed: Unity is a model of creative indecision and corporate policy -- a corpulent, broken mess that plays neither to its own strengths nor to its fanbase. There are flashes of promise here, moments when everything comes together, and the game's content package is hefty, but ultimately Unity proves to be a mercifully forgettable disappointment.
Assassin's Creed: Unity would already be a mediocre game, but the quality of this PC port brings the series to new lows.
The consequences of brash actions are glossed over, and the last three sequences of the game feel redundant, with back-to-back assassinations occurring first at public guillotines and then private dinner parties.
With Assassin's Creed Unity, there's a great game buried somewhere beneath an unforgivable amount of technical issues, from annoying glitches to frustrating crashes. It's a perfect example of how Ubisoft's insistence to annualise the series has backfired, as it's clearly an unfinished product.
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.
Assassin's Creed: Unity is full of ideas and systems that don't gel or haven't reached their potential. The return to an urban sprawl is fine after playing in the wide-open spaces of the last few games, and the setting is gorgeous even in its state of decay. The core action is largely the same, with the small amount of improvements being very welcome at this stage in the life of the series. With the plethora of single-player and co-op missions available to the player, the game is full of content that is in line with the series' earlier titles. However, the bevy of technical hiccups, from poor online connectivity to bad stuttering to degrading audio, makes this title feel like a rushed effort. Of all of the entries released on home platforms thus far, Unity is difficult to recommend to even the most die-hard of franchise fans.
'Assassin's Creed Unity' is a conundrum. Some of its components have been put together well, like the visual quality of Paris and the co-op. Other parts are a bit uglier and have still made it into the final product, the glaring dearth of proper bug testing foremost among them. Ultimately, the latter outweigh the former, and this game can safely be passed over by all but the most loyal fans. The Assassins have seen better days.
Unity plays well, but it's not really good enough for a AAA-game to play well, and this especially applies to Assassin's Creed, which has always been a franchise with stronger narrative and thematic value than its counterparts. I see potential in a Napoleonic-era trilogy for the Assassin's Creed franchise. As I wrote in my Rogue review, I'd love for the next game to star a Cossack doing his thing as Napoleon bears down on Moscow. But for the next one I would hope that Ubisoft puts more effort into crafting an interesting and original narrative than working on the multiplayer nonsense.
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.
AC:U has its problems. Some are inherent to the design, some can be rectified by patches and some will get much better in the next iteration. This game made bold changes to an established formula and not everything worked. It seems like Unity will be a great relaunch point, just like the original Assassin's Creed was. But for now, it's not what it could have been. This is going to be both a blessing and a curse to the series going forward.
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. Assassin's Creed Unity has all the makings of an expansive, ambitious title that fully takes advantage of current generation technology, but it's marred with countless imperfections.
Ubisoft makes some good changes to its Assassin's Creed formula with Unity, but the game is doomed to mediocrity due to its lack of polish and originality.
Assassin's Creed Unity attempted to improve some core problems with the franchise, but in the rush to meet the Christmas deadline, those efforts have fallen short.
[W]hen playing something as unrefined as Assassin's Creed Unity, I can't help but wonder how much better the game would have been were it given six more months of polish. What we have instead is a decently functioning Assassin's Creed that wraps the 18th century timeline not with a satisfying and fitting climax, but instead with an unfortunate sense of relief that this period is finally over.
Unity simply isn't ready for release. The majority of its new systems aren't refined enough, and its existing ones are showing their age. It's still intermittently enjoyable, but a serious step down from last year's Black Flag.