The great Assassin’s Creed marathon

For many months I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed. I was playing the first game for a while and once my PC was built I started on Assassin’s Creed Black Flag and Rogue. Next, I’ll play Unity and Syndicate and will hopefully finish the whole franchise within the next few months (excluding minor games like the Chronicles series).

Assassin’s Creed IV Black Flag (completed)

Well, this one was a pleasant surprise. I loved it. I started off a bit skeptical because the story had less to do with assassinating and more to do with pirating. So at first I was a little pissed that it was basically a pirate simulator, especially since the naval aspects of Assassin’s Creed have never been my favorite thing. Even though I still liked them, I wasn’t keen on naval combat being a huge part of the game. However, they improved so much over the more primitive naval combat from AssCreed 3 (it was a prototype, and actually very good until Black Flag came along) and I found myself spending hours plundering ships for upgrade materials. It was addicting.

For the first third of the game I was admittedly still unimpressed with the storyline but it picked up the pace and turned into something great. Edward is one of the best written characters I’ve ever seen and his character development is just spectacular. I can’t say any more about it because I don’t want to spoil anything, but the story really was amazing, especially towards the end. The characters in the Kenway saga as a whole are written very well.

The combat and freerunning is very fluid, but somehow felt slightly less fluid than 3’s. The targeting (during combat, switching targets to start kill streaks and what not) sort of had a mind of it’s own which made combat with a large amount of people a bit tricky. The tree climbing also felt less refined, but not enough to complain about it. The stealth is exactly the same as 3’s, with whistling and bushes and all sorts of sneaky stuff. Overall the gameplay is great and very fun, and I’m making it sound a lot worse than it really is.

The few cities in the the game are beautiful and the small islands and villages are also really interesting to visit. The beautiful environments make getting the myriad of collectibles actually fun.

I could sing praise about this game for hours, but there are a few cons too. This is by far the worst Assassin’s Creed PC port, and one of the worst ports I’ve played. I have a very solid rig (GTX 1070, i7 6700K, 16 GB RAM) and at first it wouldn’t run above 30 FPS for me. No wonder my laptop couldn’t handle it. I found a fix and then the game ran at an even 60 FPS (it’s locked at 60) on max settings for most of the game. However, even with the fixes, there were some parts that had some stuttering and certain areas always caused big frame drops. My one other complaint: Something they had started to phase out in Assassin’s Creed 3 were those godawful trailing missions. Well, they’re back in full force in Black Flag. Not only are you tailing people, you’re eavesdropping, tailing people in guard riddled restricted areas, and guess what! You get to tail ships too! Luckily these frustrating missions are made slightly better with Edward’s strange X-ray vision.

If I could I would write a full scale review of this game but I don’t want to force someone to scroll through too much of my bad writing

Would I recommend this game? A thousand times yes, even if you don’t like Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s Creed Rogue (completed)

AC Rogue, aka the Black Flag clone with a lot of potential that was for some reason released at the exact same time as AC Unity. Rogue had so much potential to be just as good as it’s predecessor, but it seems as if it was just a side project to milk the success of the naval combat. That being said, I really liked it. I just think it could have been so much better.

Much of what I said about Black Flag applies to Rogue, since they’re pretty much the same game, just with different settings and stories. The freerunning and combat is exactly the same and the naval combat is very similar, if not slightly improved to the combat in Black Flag. Plus there are less trailing missions!

Now to the story. It’s not bad per say but it’s incredibly short, which doesn’t allow for good character development or a good story arc. My main problem in the story is how they handled the Assassin vs Templar war. In games like AC1 and 3 (and to a degree, 4), you really had to question which side was right. The stories did a great job of showing that both sides are not black and white, meaning the Assassins aren’t inherently good and the Templars aren’t inherently bad. I expected this in Rogue as well, and I was a bit disappointed. Rogue made the Templars look like saints and the assassins like assholes, the complete opposite of what the Ezio trilogy did. The story would’ve been much more powerful if they didn’t paint the assassins as the villains. Shay should’ve had to question whether he made the right decision in switching sides to become a templar, but he didn’t need to do that because the Assassins in this game were just cruel anarchists. That being said I did enjoy the story despite its issues and Shay was a very well written character that deserved to be in a much better game.

I really liked the North American setting in this game, I personally liked it a lot more than the tropical setting of Black Flag. Exploring the icy North Atlantic was a very unique experience, as was seeing AC3’s New York in a new light. Bottom line it was super pretty.

The game is a fairly good port, it’s graphics options were limited compared to other AC games, but there were still more than enough options. Frame drops and stuttering were less common and overall it performed very well.

Would I recommend this game? Definitely yes if you’re a fan of the series, and if you want more naval combat

And now I’m going to start playing Unity, even though I’m a bit burned out with this series. I hope it’s not as bad as some people seem to think it is!