The day after the game's launch, I was finally able to boot up Assassin's Creed: Unity. I'll give a full review once I complete the game, but what do I think about it so far? Find out after the jump!
Last night, I played AC: Unity on PS4 for about 2 hours or so. To sum it up quickly, I'll just say that Ubisoft consistently screws up Assassin's Creed year after year. I don't know why; I just know that that seems to be the case. Since Assassin's Creed III, there seems to be at least one aspect of the game that gets pooped on with every subsequent release. This time, a couple of things got pooped on.
Graphics
Man, the graphics are gorgeous... when you're standing still. The frame rate is atrocious 85% of the time. I had heard that the game would run at 30fps, but consider yourself lucky if you get that. In other words, it's not "locked" at 30 fps, and often dips below that target number, meaning the game chugs a lot . I even encountered a bug that dipped the frame rate to what seemed like 2fps as I was climbing a steeple and trying to jump off to the side! This literally happened every time I held the R2 and X buttons while trying to move off the steeple. If I climbed either up or down, everything was fine.
About a month ago, Ubisoft released the system requirements for the PC version of the game. I rolled my eyes when I saw that the minimum requirements involved having an Nvidia GTX680 graphics card. That's the same one I have, and it's still considered high-end/top-of-the-line! That particular card is also 4-5x more powerful than the two consoles the game was designed for. There is no reason whatsoever that Ubisoft couldn't have optimized the game to have minimum requirements of low-end GPUs. Given these horrible frame rate issues,it seems that they didn't optimize the game for consoles, either.
Gameplay
Even more so than ACIII and ACIV: Black Flag, the parkour controls are terrible. Let me clarify by saying that it's not necessarily the controls, but the detection on climbable surfaces. The game tries to make the decision of what you want to climb on, pulling you like a magnet towards a surface if you're just a little too close to it. The first two games, as well as Brotherhood and Revelations, didn't have these problems. I don't understand why this aspect of the game gets progressively worse.
Another issue in gameplay is the combat. While I felt the timing for countering enemy attacks was buggy in ACIII, IV, and Liberation, that has been fixed in Unity. Timing works fine, but combat is extremely slow and sluggish. Rather than feeling like I'm controlling a nimble, well-trained assassin, I feel like I'm controlling a mentally-challenged tank.
Positives
A lot of the reviews out there have knocked pretty hard on the story. I think it's ok, even though it shares a lot of similarities with ACII's story. Even the main character, Arno, seems like a carbon copy of Ezio. However, the story is - so far - shaping up to be better than ACIV's, which I didn't care for much at all.
And again, the graphics are pretty when you're standing still.
Review
I don't want to throw out an all-encompassing opinion until after I finish the game, so I don't want to say something like, "This is the worst Assassin's Creed game ever!" I don't think that would be fair, since I've only played roughly two hours of the game. Maybe I just have to get used to the gameplay issues. Maybe Ubisoft will release a patch that will clear up the frame rate problems before I write my review. These are possibilities I'm going to keep open, and I'll provide you with a more in-depth (or at least, as "in-depth" as I usually am) look at the game in the coming weeks.
-Josh
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