The reviews of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla mark yet another occasion where I wonder what on earth the mainstream games media have been smoking. “A saga for the ages!” exclaims Eurogamer, who are clearly hoping I’ll forget that they once gave the Bad Company 2 single-player campaign a 9/10 rating. “A big, bold, and ridiculously beautiful entry to the series!” bleats IGN, presumably because they couldn’t find a more generic set of superlatives for their review strapline. And quoth the usually-on-the-ball PC Gamer: “Valhalla is Ubisoft’s best Assassin’s Creed to date!”, a statement that quite overlooks the fact that the series has undergone so many reinventions over its 13-year history that it’s like comparing Doom to Doom 2016. But assuming, for a moment, that that’s possible: as someone who has also played and reviewed quite a few Assassin’s Creed games, I am here to tell you that Valhalla is nowhere near Ubisoft’s best Assassin’s Creed to date. In fact it barely scrapes in ahead of the worst of the pack, and it is a remarkable step down from 2018’s Odyssey.

The Assassin’s Creed franchise has always been a bit of a weird one for this. Its constant reinvention and evolution is why we’re up to twelve Assassin’s Creed games now without the formula starting to stink like a long-dead horse, but it seems that the cost of this is the developers periodically getting nostalgic and returning to gameplay elements that the series had left behind for good reasons and which no longer fit the new look. This is why the series’ first leap to a true open world pirate simulator in Black Flag was immediately followed up by a return to the now-staid city-based parkour of Unity, and it’s why the move to a Witcher-style open-world RPG in Origins and Odyssey has now been countered by the downright reactionary Valhalla. Valhalla is not as immediately obvious a regression as Unity was — it is still an open-world RPG — but it nevertheless feels like a significant step backwards that makes the fundamental design mistake of being led by criticism from old-school fans who didn’t like the direction that Odyssey in particular took the series, and which feels like a throwback itself as a result.

I would open by talking a bit about Valhalla’s premise, but at this point if you’ve played an Assassin’s Creed game you know what the premise is because nearly every single one of them has exactly the same opening no matter what time period they’re set in — the protagonist character is living an idyllically happy life with their family when they’re suddenly all murdered by the Templars, leaving the protagonist as the sole survivor who eventually falls in with the Assassins so that they can get their revenge on. This is how 2 started, it’s how 3 started, it’s how Unity and Origins and Odyssey started, and so it’s no surprise that Valhalla starts the same way, with this particular protagonist being Eivor the Viking and the time period in question being the Viking invasion of England, which is where the action moves to after a brief (by Assassin’s Creed standards, anyway) introduction sequence set in Norway. Ninth century England is a set of squabbling minor kingdoms rather than a single united country, so it’s easy pickings for the Viking raiders who have permanently set up shop in the north of the country. Those minor kingdoms are also riddled with Templar¹ agents, which is where Eivor comes in: she and her brother Sigurd found a settlement called Raventhorpe and set about adventuring in the surrounding regions, alternately deposing kings who are Templar agents and helping other kings who are being targeted by Templar agents, whilst trying to build up a political power base for extremely poorly defined reasons.

This is the first problem Valhalla has compared to its immediate predecessor: the player’s goals are extremely open-ended, to the point where I might be inclined to call them frustratingly vague and the game overall directionless. England is divided into around fifteen distinct regions, each of which has a core questline associated with it that can be activated from the planning table in Raventhorpe. Working through these questlines in order gains allies for Eivor’s clan, but what exactly Eivor is planning to do with these allies is never explained. There’s not really any overarching storyline connecting the regions together, and some of them are what, in other games, would pass for jokey sidequest content. (Valhalla doesn’t really have any proper sidequests to speak of.) Eradicating the Templars is a thing that you do more by coincidence than anything else; there’s three regions where you go there with the express purpose of murdering a bunch of illuminati-wannabes and in the rest of them it just turns out that, by a strange and incredible set of coincidences, your primary antagonist happens to be a Templar. Eivor’s personal stake in killing all of the Templars is greatly diminished as she murders the main culprit behind the deaths of her family before even setting foot in England, so it’s impossible to shake off the impression that her path through Valhalla meanders aimlessly in a way which Kassandra’s did not in Odyssey. There, there was a war between Sparta and Athens driving everything. Here, everything is an atomic series of political scuffles, with little interdependence between regions and no chance for the story to build up any momentum or even any stakes for the player.

The opening hours of Assassin’s Creed Valhalla are, admittedly, quite pleasant. The starting region of Norway is a very strange choice for a tutorial zone because it’s mountainous and has very few roads and is actively hateful towards a new player trying to get around for the first time, but once you get out of there and into the regions immediately surrounding Raventhorpe you see how Valhalla can, in fact, be quite a charming game. It’s all pleasantly rolling green hills dotted with villages and towns (except for East Anglia, which mirrors the real East Anglia by being mostly swampland), around which you gallop and clamber in search of the points of interest scattered around the terrain. The usual Assassin’s Creed sync/fast travel points do exist in Valhalla but there’s fewer of them than in previous games, and so a larger portion of your time in Valhalla is spent on horseback getting from point A to point B. In these starting regions, where the terrain is quite accommodating for horseback riding, this is not so bad. Because boats are theoretically a core part of Assassin’s Creed now the game also gives you a Viking longboat to traverse England’s rivers that you can (in theory) summon by blowing a horn, but there’s no boat combat in Valhalla, the rivers are not terribly useful for getting around since 90% of the map’s surface area is landlocked, and anyway the boat wouldn’t even spawn for me most of the time — Eivor would give her horn a mighty toot and then look around quizzically as absolutely nothing happened, before I resignedly got back on my horse and travelled to my destination the hard way.

The actual main use of the boat in Valhalla is for raiding. While the primary historical research for this game appears to have consisted of watching all six seasons of Vikings on the History Channel², this does at least mean that Valhalla is aware that the Vikings raided a few monasteries in their time, which is why Ubisoft Montreal have turned it into a major mechanic. Once you’ve actually managed to spawn the boat you can sail it towards one of the many monastery locations that are exclusively and conveniently located on riverbanks and shorelines. When you get close enough you can Push E To Raid, which causes your crew to leap out and charge towards the churches and chapels; monasteries are always defended by twenty or thirty soldiers who politely wait for you to carve your way towards them before attacking one at a time so it’s not like you need your crew’s help to dispose of them, but you do need their help to break down doors and push the heavy lids off of the reliquaries to get at the juicy valuables inside. And the first time you do so, you will be confronted by this:

This made me laugh a lot at the time — English monasteries, famous for their collection of blessed hammers and sacred tongs! Valhalla knows that since it is a game about Vikings it should have some raiding in it, but it’s been implemented in the most stereotypically bland Ubisoft way possible: you don’t raid for gold or treasure, but instead for construction materials to upgrade your settlement — a compulsive tic in their games ever since Far Cry 3, where the primary reason for hunting animals for their animal bits was so that you could make a bigger bag to store the animal bits in — which is why the loot reveal is so utterly absurd. Raiding a monastery doesn’t feel like I’m carrying away jewels and precious relics, it feels like I’m going down to the local branch of Wickes for some paving slabs and cement so that I can finish the water feature in my settlement garden, and the crew is only along because I need somebody to help me lug them back to the car. Eivor isn’t even allowed to kill any civilians while she’s raiding; if you so much as catch somebody with a backswing you get the standard “Civilian casualties will cause desychronisation!” warning. Your crew does set fire to houses as they rampage through the monastery compound which gradually fills the air with burning smoke, which is a nice atmospheric touch — and about the only thing Valhalla does that actually looks like a raid. Otherwise it’s just a standard Assassin’s Creed combat encounter where you kill all the baddies and open the three boxes and then a banner pops up saying “RAID COMPLETE”, after which the monastery population immediately forgets that you exist and goes back to their normal business.

Speaking of combat, Eivor’s power level has been toned down from the superhero antics that Kassandra got up to in Odyssey. She can’t leap down from mountains or smash shields with a single punch, and while she does have leap and kick abilities they feel far less satisfying than the Odyssey versions. On the one hand I do understand pulling things back a little from the full-on demigod that Kassandra became at the end of Odyssey, purely because it’s a bit hard to narratively justify it twice in a row. On the other it means that Valhalla can’t help but come off worse in the inevitable comparison between the two; combat is noticeably duller, and not just because Eivor isn’t hitting as hard. Despite the introduction of gear weight and a stamina bar and a Sekiro-esque defence bar for enemies that should supposedly make things a little more gritty and Soulsy, combat is still just a matter of “counter these enemies, dodge these enemies, don’t worry about stamina at all because you’ll never run out as long as you keep Light Attacking, and all of the baddies die long before their defence bars are depleted”. I got away with ignoring every single new element that had been introduced and which was supposed to be dragging me back and making me think a little more about when and where I hit people, which is a fairly good indicator that they should have just ditched them entirely and gone with what felt fun.

This, sadly, is a question that Valhalla rarely seems to ask itself, instead preferring to wallow in the past while blithely assuming that gameplay mechanics from a decade ago will be just as fresh today. Take the signature Ubisoft open world activity of clearing out a fort. Odyssey’s forts were fairly tricky despite Kassandra’s superpowers; there were a lot of guards and tough enemies who would swarm you if you made too much noise, and there was the additional threat of a Mercenary showing up and forcing you to retreat for a bit. Storming a fort was always preceded by a bird surveillance phase to scope out the guards, climbing the walls to access a less-guarded portion that you could clear out with Chain Assassinate, and then disposing of as many guards as you could as quietly as possible so that when your cover was inevitably blown you’d thinned their numbers to the point where you could win the ensuing melee. Despite my power level in Odyssey I never felt that forts were so trivial that I could just ignore most of the game mechanics and walk in the front door, but that same power level (and Odyssey’s general willingness to disregard plausibility if it enabled a fun and satisfying gameplay mechanic like Chain Assassinate) meant that when the guards did inevitably come for me I had a lot of options and that the ensuing brawl was always fun.

This stands in stark contrast to Valhalla’s take on forts. First off, you can’t use your bird for surveillance because the bird has been nerfed into the ground; it doesn’t highlight enemies and can’t see through walls or find quest objectives, meaning we’re back to the bad old days of repeatedly pinging your immediate surroundings with Eagle Vision like a shit submarine in order to find your target. Valhalla also makes the very strange decision to put far more emphasis on stealth than either Origins or Odyssey did — Eivor has a cloak she can conceal herself inside to lower her profile, and Valhalla also sees the return of the tedious sitting-on-a-bench-to-blend-in mechanic because that was something the fans were apparently screaming for — but then makes it both useless and pointless. It’s useless because even with the cloak up guards will notice you from twenty metres away and going in for an assassinate is impossible because they’ll instantly spot you inside ten (and once they’ve spotted you they’ll psychically communicate your position to every other guard in the fort), and it’s pointless because the penalty for blowing a stealth run is just that you have to fight the guards, and Valhalla’s guards are such incredible pushovers that it’s actually far quicker to just Kool-Aid Man yourself through a wall and beat the shit out of everyone than it is wasting time trying to sneak around.

This is the strange thing about Valhalla’s combat: Eivor’s power level might be a fraction of Kassandra’s, but the guards are so weak and feeble that this doesn’t matter. Each of the normal ones dies in two or three hits, and while there’s a healthy number of golden elite enemies sprinkled in amongst them they can be easily staggered, knocked over and pummelled to death. You don’t even need to use any abilities to achieve this; the only ability I bothered to use outside of bossfights was the Valkyrie Leap — which is a sort of HULK SMASH attack that stuns the target — but regular attacks seemed to work almost as well, especially if I could ping-pong them against a wall. Now, weak enemies aren’t necessarily a problem if there’s a lot of them, but here we run into Valhalla’s second problem, which is that another “classic” Assassin’s Creed behaviour Valhalla dredges up from the crypt is having most of the guards slowly circle you at a safe distance while you kill them off two at a time. They never swarm you the way Odyssey’s soldiers did, and the only time they become remotely threatening is when you’re facing a lot of archers who aren’t hobbled by the melee AI behaviour that demands they form an orderly queue to be butchered. As a result it is incredibly easy to slaughter a fort’s worth of guards in Valhalla because they’re individually so wimpy and you’re only ever fighting two or three of them at once — it’s certainly far easier than engaging with Valhalla’s awkward stealth system, as Chain Assassinate has also been nerfed so that you can only ever kill a maximum of two people with it.

And after chewing my way through this bland, repetitive combat for over sixty hours I really have to wonder: who on earth was asking for this? Who looks at Odyssey’s combat — which is nowhere near perfect, but which remained perfectly serviceable throughout a similar length of time — and goes “That’s neat, but what I really want is a version of this that removes all of the fun parts?” I can only assume that these changes are based on feedback from die-hard Assassin’s Creed fans who didn’t like the fact that you couldn’t do all that much assassinating in Odyssey — but guess what, you can’t do that much of it in Valhalla either because all of the systems that have been reintroduced to enable it work at cross-purposes with the rest of the game. The combat is hardly improved by the combat finisher animations, either, which play every you time you kill an elite enemy and which only have one animation per elite enemy type — and it might as well be the same for all of them, because every single one is “Eivor kills the enemy with their own weapon.” It’s already boring by the fifth time you watch her do it, which is a bad sign when you get to watch it another thousand times over the course of the game, and as an additional insult some of these finisher animations are over ten seconds long.

The equipment and levelling systems are also partially to blame for this repetitiveness, although here I’m a little more understanding because, despite this being yet another part of the game that isn’t fit for purpose, I can at least see that the motivation behind the changes was to fix the parts of Odyssey and Origins that did have genuine problems. Odyssey was afflicted with the same issue that cripples a lot of RPGs nowadays: equipment drops not being fixed, but instead being generated based on your current character level when you picked them up. This made gear less meaningful overall as you were constantly changing it out for a replacement with bigger numbers and not actually putting together something that supported your playstyle. Valhalla sees this and correctly identifies it as a problem; however, its solution is to go way too far in the other direction by stating, as one of its core pillars, that “Every piece of equipment should be unique!” And let it never be said that Ubisoft can’t work to a set of design goals because this is exactly what they have achieved. Every piece of equipment in Valhalla is unique. That hammer you picked up in Norway? You’re not going to pick up another hammer with better stats two hours from now; in fact there’s only one other hammer in the entire game. That hammer is all you get if you want to hammer people, so it is certainly meaningful in that respect. The same goes for the rest of the weapons and armour in Valhalla, as there is precisely one of everything and while you can pick up two or three different sets of heavy armour (for example), each of them will have a different set bonus that, in theory, should make each one fairly distinctive and suitable for a specific playstyle.

However, Ubisoft Montreal didn’t think this all the way through: if I pick up a hammer at the start of the game, and it is one of only two hammers I pick up in the entire game and I’m supposed to be able to use it throughout the entire game if I like the ridiculous DONK noise it makes whenever it hits people — which is probably the key reason I stuck with Valhalla through its odious combat encounters — then they have to figure out a way to make it just as relevant when I’m level 300 as it is when I’m level 1. There are several ways they could do this, none of which are particularly elegant, but because they’re Ubisoft they went with the worst one: spending the resources you collect in the open world to upgrade your equipment, where each item has ten levels and spending 25 iron and 50 leather upgrades it from level 1 to level 2 with an associated stat boost. I have always disliked this mechanic at the best of times since I see it as the game forcing me to scale my own equipment instead of doing it for me, but Valhalla takes it to truly ridiculous levels because of the amount of resources you need to upgrade things to the highest levels. We’re talking thousands of resources to max a single item when the average chest you find contains fifty of each — multiply that by eight (head, torso, arms, legs, back, bow, main hand, off hand) and it’s no surprise that after sixty-six hours I was still some considerable way off having a full set of max level gear despite being reasonably thorough in my resource-hunting. This discourages experimentation since switching away from the gear you’ve spent hours and hours upgrading is a significant drop in power (there was an absurd moment where I found the twelve magic slabs and used them to pull Excalibur from the stone, which turned out to be considerably worse than the Blacksmith Hammer I’d been using for the last 60 hours) and so what actually happens is you end up using the same weapons and armour for most of the game.

(One piece of grudging praise that I will allow for Valhalla here is that upgrading a piece of equipment also changes the way it looks, with both armour and weapons becoming more elaborately ornate as you progress through the quality tiers. I do like it when games do this, although I’m also convinced that the only reason Valhalla does so is because it’s very aware that people are never going to change up their look by changing their equipment and so it has to do it for them.)

The skill system, on the other hand, is just plain weird. Much like Valhalla itself it’s a huge amorphous mess with all the depth of a child’s paddling pool, and it’s difficult to describe in full without getting into paragraphs and paragraphs of boring detail, so I’ll just describe the experience I had with it instead. The skill system started me off in the centre of the tree, with an immediate choice between three different routes: Bear, Wolf, and Cat- uh, Raven. In theory each of these routes is devoted to a specific playstyle, with Bear for melee, Wolf for ranged and Raven for stealth. I like stealth gameplay so I went down the Raven path to begin with, only to discover, to my extreme bafflement, that very few of the skill nodes had anything to do with stealth. Most of them were generic stat upgrades — +5 to health, +2 to Light Attack Damage, +2 Melee Resistance — and included nodes that buffed Hammer damage, which had not previously struck me as a particularly stealthy weapon. Each collection of 10-12 skill nodes with these generic stat upgrades has what is supposed to be a big-ticket ability at the centre of it, but most of them are passives because the active combat abilities — the leap, the kick, and so on — have been removed from the levelling system entirely and thrust out into the open world as collectibles. You now pick up Books Of Knowledge to unlock them rather than levelling them up through a skill tree, which not only robs the skill tree of its most interesting features, but which also means it’s now possible to miss abilities entirely; I didn’t find the kick ability until about three hours before I finished the game.

What’s left in the skill tree isn’t enough to give it the flavour it so desperately needs. The lack of stealth-focused abilities in the Raven tree and the general non-viability of stealth in Valhalla caused me to switch over to the Bear tree instead, only to discover that this was almost exactly the same as the Raven tree: a collection of +5 to health, +2.6 to Melee Damage, +2 to Heavy Attack nodes. There are some minor differences, like the Bear tree boosted Fire damage instead of Poison damage, and the Raven tree had a couple more +Assassination damage nodes than the Bear tree did, but otherwise it was left to those passive ability upgrades to distinguish the two trees from one another. The Bear tree’s passives are more immediately useful than those in the Raven tree because melee is really the only viable way to play, but I had absolutely no way of knowing that ahead of time because Valhalla refuses to show you the entire tree at once, instead shrouding the vast majority of it in fog and only uncovering new segments once you’ve unlocked adjacent skills. This makes it impossible to plan ahead, and because the +stat up skill nodes are distributed randomly in a confusing web structure (so there’s no discrete +Melee Damage path, just a chain of single nodes with +Assassinate Damage, +Melee Resistance, +Stun and one +Melee Damage node at the end of it) you cannot choose to focus on one area over others. You have to level up everything at once just to progress through the tree, and because all of the trees are the same — I eventually unlocked every single skill on it, so I know that the Wolf tree is the same as the other two except with a few more +Ranged Damage nodes — your decisions here are, effectively, meaningless.

This strikes me as a very similar design mentality to the equipment upgrades. There, the game could quite easily scale the loot for you but chooses to make the player spend a lot of time and effort doing it themselves. Here, the skill tree is so shallow that it could quite easily be replaced by a standard levelling system where you automatically get stat upgrades with each level, and then a skill point every three levels which you can use to buy one of the abilities. However, Valhalla thinks it’s more engaging for the player to have to do their own stat ups, even though it’s quite deliberately constructed its skill tree to remove any hint of choice and any possibility of an actual meaningful character build. As it stands it’s just pointless make work, a cargo-cult implementation of a skill tree that assumes the satisfying mechanic at the heart of it is the clicking on nodes to unlock them, not the build planning that sits behind this process. I’m pretty much convinced at this point that the sole reason they hide the vast majority of the skill tree from you for most of the game’s length is that if they showed it to the player at the start they’d figure this out far more quickly than the twenty-odd hours it takes to branch into an alternate tree and discover that it’s identical to the one you just left.

It is truly astonishing to me that Valhalla goes out of its way to sabotage the two great gains the series made with the leap to full-on open world RPG gameplay: fulfilling combat and character progression. Without those, Valhalla is left to fall back on the staples of the Assassin’s Creed series, except we’ve just seen that the stealth and assassination don’t really work so what is left? The free-running and movement? Well, while I’m here I might as well lay into that as well, since another thing Valhalla does is attempt to row back from everything being climbable a la Breath Of The Wild. Everything still is climbable, sort of, except when it isn’t; the climbing and free-running system is incredibly clunky and restrictive in comparison to Odyssey, with Eivor stopping halfway up a cliff face and refusing to climb any further because the angle isn’t quite right, or remaining glued to the side of her boat because she can’t jump off things unless the camera is at a perfect right-angle to the surface that she’s on, or continually climbing over a perfectly good window because there’s no way to tell the game you want her to climb through it instead. Valhalla reminded me rather unpleasantly of the tower climbing puzzles in Assassin’s Creed 2, where you could go up the wrong route and get yourself stuck in a dead end because there were no more climbable surfaces — except there the climbable surfaces were at least clearly marked, whereas here it’s impossible to predict what you can and can’t climb. It’s also quite buggy, with narrow cave entrances that won’t let you through, the ability to dead-end yourself so thoroughly on a cliff that you can’t even climb back down (and because it’s so difficult to get Eivor to jump off of anything this necessitated fast travelling somewhere in order to escape) and on one occasion becoming stuck in a small divot in the ground that the game was convinced Eivor was perpetually sliding into. Again, I had to fast travel out of that one. Even travelling around on the horse quickly becomes a massive pain in the ass because it can’t go up hills faster than walking pace and the later areas in Valhalla are rather implausibly mountainous. Ambushes are a constant irritation, too, since whenever you get ambushed by wolves in the wilderness, which happens approximately every fifteen seconds, the horse automatically slows down so that the wolves can catch you and knock you off of it.

Bugs in general are a huge problem in Valhalla. I know buggy Ubisoft games are a bit of a cliche but I genuinely can’t remember the last time I played one that was quite this bad. Those repetitive combat finishers are a prime culprit; I do not understand why Valhalla insists on playing one every time I kill an elite enemy when they only fire properly a third of the time. The rest of the time they’re either desyncing, with Eivor snapping the neck of an invisible enemy while a guard chokes and collapses ten metres away, or else helpfully breaking bossfights as the game tries to play a stun animation that makes the boss quite literally vanish; that one needed a reload to fix. The game tracks NPC positions incredibly poorly at the best of times, with even named NPCs popping in and sliding around during cutscenes — and the less said about the background NPCs the better. This is particularly bad news given Valhalla’s antiquated love of escort quests; on one occasion the NPC I was escorting got stuck at the bottom of a ladder and wouldn’t climb it no matter what I did, and on another they got stuck six feet under the ground, occasionally taking a break to teleport into mid-air for a split second before burrowing back underneath it. Both of those didn’t just require reloads, they required full reboots of the game so that it could reset the NPC positional data. Even the physics system is screwy: at one point during a bossfight with a legendary elk everything seemed to be going swimmingly and I had it down to 20% health, at which point it kicked me so hard that I got sent into orbit. I’m not even joking; I could briefly see the edges of the skybox, and obviously I did not survive re-entry and had to do it all over again from scratch. The high prevalence of bugs and lack of polish across the entire game isn’t quite Valhalla’s biggest problem, but it is a pretty major one and doesn’t exactly help my perception that it’s yet another AAA game that was pushed out of the door long before it was ready.

Anyway, we’ve established that the combat sucks, the character system sucks, and the free-running and general travelling about sucks. This leaves Valhalla with just two arrows in its quiver: the story and the open world. I already laid into the story and won’t repeat myself here, but something which stood out throughout was just how primitive the storytelling is. I don’t just mean “Valhalla is badly written”, although it is, but rather that I was struck by the similarities between Valhalla’s cutscenes and the cutscenes from main scenario quests in Final Fantasy 14: A Realm Reborn. ARR was rushed and the cutscene tooling sucked so 99% of its cutscenes consisted of two people stood in one spot having a boring conversation. The vast majority of Valhalla’s cutscenes also consist of two or three people stood in one spot having a boring conversation, likely for the same reasons: because this game was also rushed out to launch simultaneously with the new generation of consoles and/or the Christmas release window, and because the tooling for it is nowhere near as capable as what they had in previous engines. Assassin’s Creed 3 has the most wooden protagonist in the series and a story that makes very little sense, but it has also more bespoke animations and camera behaviour in this eight minute set of ending cutscenes than Valhalla contains in its entire sixty-hour running time — and as that video proves, this can make the denouement to a story memorably dramatic even if the lead-in is terrible. Valhalla also moved me to look up this infamous clip of NPCs invading one of Unity’s cutscenes because its NPCs do things which are very similar, but the cutscene itself is remarkably well-constructed compared to Valhalla’s feeble offerings. The thing that really confuses me, though, is that Odyssey used the same engine and (presumably) the same tooling and still managed to overcome these limitations on occasion, with the introduction of Brasidas and Testikles falling off the pier being far more dynamic than anything you can find in Valhalla. These static cutscenes ensure that the already-discombobulated story feels even shabbier, and in fact put me in mind of last year’s high-profile Eurojank RPG Greedfall. And with all of the art and animation resources available to Ubisoft, that is not a comparison that Valhalla should be inviting upon itself.

Finally, then, we come to Valhalla’s open world³. Considering my uniformly negative opinion of the rest of the game, it’s nice to be able to say that my opinion of Valhalla’s world is mixed at worst. Just like Origins and Odyssey it looks stunning (if you disregard the bugged NPC behaviours, anyway) and it’s very aware of how to leverage those looks to good effect. Its version of Viking Britain doesn’t really look like anything I recognise as Britain — I grew up in Kent, which is plenty green and pleasant but nowhere near the ridiculous fairy-tale look depicted in Valhalla — but then I strongly suspect that’s also a criticism I could have made of Odyssey if I’d ever actually been to Greece at any point. It was at least interesting to be reminded that Valhalla takes place just a few centuries after the end of Roman rule in Britain, and so the English towns and cities are all built inside the ruins of the older Roman ones; I’m not a massive fan of the architecture (Brotherhood took the same approach and I hated it there) but it was an effective way of portraying a society quite precariously in flux.

Valhalla even has a decent mechanical innovation for its open world that I’d quite like to see other Assassin’s Creed games pick up and run with: it pre-sorts the points of interest that infest its regions into three categories, Mysteries, Wealth and Artifacts. Mysteries are an assorted collection of “World Events” that have replaced standard side quests, optional encounters with tough monsters and enemies, puzzles based around standing stones and cairns, and some deep cave spelunking to find the usual Precursor artifacts. Wealth nodes consist of the Books of Knowledge that grant new abilities, new pieces of equipment, and chests containing resources for upgrading your equipment. And Artifacts are a wholly useless set of time-wasters that just reward cosmetic tattoos that you’ll cover up with your armour and statues for your settlement that you’ll never see because you’ll rarely go back there, which is the main reason I appreciated this sorting into categories: past the first couple of hours of the game I could just ignore all of the Artifact nodes, and once I’d gone past level 300 I stopped paying quite so much attention to the Mystery nodes as well because I didn’t need the XP. Categorising the points of interest like this so that the player can target the things that are most useful to them is probably the single concession towards not wasting the player’s time that Valhalla makes.

Really, I have no fundamental objections to anything that Valhalla does with its open world. I even think it could have been quite good if its regions had been put together with a bit more time and focus. Its key problem is, sadly, a common one found in modern AAA open world games: it’s too damn big. Because there’s very little water in England the combined surface area of its regions is comfortably larger than Odyssey’s map of islands, which itself represented a significant size increase over the open world in Origins. Naturally, increasing the size of the game by 50% means that the developers have to put in 50% more things, but because development time and resources are finite this means you are at best spending 66% of the time you were previously spending on each point of interest. This probably explains why all of the World Events are so shit; nearly all of them can be wrapped up in under ten seconds once you’ve figured out what to do, because they all involve performing a single task for a questgiver who is stood right next to whatever the quest objective is. Because of the sheer number of World Events in the game Ubisoft were clearly struggling for inspiration here too given how many of them are based on internet memes; I don’t mind the occasional subtle meme reference, but having Eivor literally say out loud “The cake is a lie!” probably did more than anything else to turn me against Valhalla. Given how regressive the rest of the game is it shouldn’t surprise me that it also thinks mindlessly parroting jokes that had already been flogged to death a decade ago represents the pinnacle of humour, but it does and it is terrible.

The Wealth nodes have the same problems that come with high volume; Ubisoft Montreal have tried to build a puzzle around each one where it’s inside a locked house or the top of a church steeple and you have to figure out how to get to it, but when there’s four or five hundred Wealth nodes in the game and all of them have these access puzzles it turns out there’s only so many variations you can come up with. Wealth node is twenty metres underground? Look for a well that’s blocked up with wooden planks and jump inside. Wealth node is behind barred door? Look for a window that you can shoot an arrow through to break the bar. Wealth node is behind locked door? The key will never be outside of Eagle Vision range. There’s occasional spins on the concept but the general shape of the solution is the same for each one, and so these puzzles inevitably become tedious time-wasters instead of the pleasantly light challenges they should be. To be fair to the designers who put these locations together I do not think there is any concept that could survive this amount of repetition; this is a failing that comes about from the desire to be able to put “The biggest Assassin’s Creed game yet!” in all of the marketing and review straplines and then inflating the size of the game to the point where everything and everyone is spread so thin it’s on the verge of collapsing entirely. Instead of fifteen crap regional storylines, would it not have been better to have ten with working cutscenes and connecting plot hooks? Instead of fourteen hundred points of interest, could we not settle for a mere thousand and put the effort saved into bulking them out a little bit more? What’s so bad about having a game that lasts a “mere” forty hours if those hours are reasonably satisfying, instead of sixty-six hours of barely-suppressed tedium?

Unfortunately I don’t think that’s a consideration that ever figures into the modern AAA development process, where there’s an insatiable need for each successive game to be bigger and bigger to the point where playing them to completion feels alarmingly like taking on a second job. I hate games that do this. I don’t have a first job right now and completing Valhalla still felt like an awful chore that I probably wouldn’t have bothered with if I had literally anything else to do with my time. Where Assassin’s Creed Odyssey was a forward-looking game that serves as fantastic proof of what the series could gain by shifting to a proper open-world RPG experience, Assassin’s Creed Valhalla is too fixated on recapturing past glories and so merely stands as a sad testament to what the series has lost in that move. Not only does it come off poorly when compared to Odyssey, but it’s also markedly inferior to the games it’s hearkening back to; games like Brotherhood and Revelations and even Assassin’s Creed 3, which weren’t great even at the time but which were produced with a great deal more focus and which knew how to make the most of their strengths. Valhalla’s attempts to crowbar those strengths back into the new formula just exposes how bad Assassin’s Creed is at stealth and storytelling now, and it compromises far too much on the things that Origins and Odyssey did well in order to try and fit them in. Sadly the resulting collection of buggy, bland mediocrity that comprises Assassin’s Creed Valhalla doesn’t appear to have affected either the review scores or the sales numbers, so I really doubt that Assassin’s Creed is going to course-correct in time for the next iteration. And that’s the most annoying thing about it: it dooms the next Assassin’s Creed to being crap as well. That is the mark of a truly bad game.

The post Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed Valhalla appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

As predicted in my Anthem review, The Division 2 has ended up being a significant beneficiary of The Bad Game Effect.

This ties into my theory that you should play a bad game every once in a while to stop yourself from taking the good ones for granted. It’s quite easy, on a normal day, to totally overlook the things a good game does that are so seamless, so natural, so well-executed that you simply don’t notice them; they’re doing their job so well that they blend into the background as if they were always supposed to be there. It’s only when you play a bad game, that tries to do the same thing but, for example, locks the inventory behind a loading screen, and then locks the loading screen to get into the inventory behind a bigger loading screen, that you truly realise just how good the good ones are.

And yes, The Division 2 is good. I didn’t get on with the original Division all that well, as it seemed an entirely unremarkable, average game with no ambition outside of its interesting Dark Zone experiment, and at first glance The Division 2 is an entirely unremarkable, average sequel. If Anthem is responsible for anything here, though, it’s that some of those “unremarkable” features that I otherwise wouldn’t have given much thought to have been thrown into rather sharp relief. It is important not to lower the bar too far, so I’m not going to give The Division 2 many points for having a inventory system that you can access at any time or for only hitting you with a single (fairly lengthy) loading screen when you first boot the game, because those should just be part of the minimum required featureset you try to fulfil when you make what has (against my strong objections) come to be known as a “looter shooter” game: an always-online co-op focused experience where you gun down hordes of NPC baddies in constant search of better guns and equipment for your character. Of course you need a working inventory system, and that The Division 2 has one (barely) shouldn’t be seen as some kind of stunning success on its part.

There are other areas where I’m prepared to give it more credit than I was previously, though. Take the core loop, an industry term which basically means the smallest possible quantum of self-sustaining activity contained within your game. The core loop of a looter shooter is the same as the core loop for an ARPG: kill enemies, get better loot, equip better loot, kill bigger enemies. I think the loot part of Division 2 is not particularly exceptional; there have been improvements made that I’ll get into later and it’s held my interest longer than in the first game, but it’s also messy and flabby and something of a pain to interact with. The part where you kill enemies, though, is interesting, as a point of comparison to both Anthem and the original Division.

I had some big, big complaints about the combat in The Division. It had a decent enough cover shooter system, but all of its enemy types were broadly similar (except for the PMC faction, introduced far too late to make a difference) and it had gone for the approach of making its elite, high-tier baddies gigantic sacks of hitpoints who you’d have to empty several boxes of M60 ammo into to kill. Not only was this breaking the game’s internal fiction of a newly post-apocalyptic New York city set in something approximating the real world — which is supposed to be filled with regular human beings who should fall over when you shoot them, not alien supermen who can soak up absurd amounts of punishment — but it also made gunfights less satisfying because it felt like your weapons were absurdly weak. Hell, they were absurdly weak relative to the stat scaling. And that’s basically the same complaint I had about Anthem’s combat: the guns felt like peashooters and had zero character, which together with the totally braindead enemy AI made combat tremendously unfulfilling once the novelty of the various Javelin abilities had worn off.

The Division 2 has taken heed of the criticism directed at the first game, however, and has charted a new route via both big and small changes to its internal mechanics that ensures it successfully avoids all of these pitfalls. It’s no longer set the day after the apocalypse, but several years afterwards; this means it’s a little more divorced from reality¹ and so the factions and enemy types can be a little more distinct than “a bunch of guys with guns”. There are enemies with goo guns that’ll immobilise you and make your vulnerable; grenadiers who can be shot while they’re throwing grenades to make them drop it just after pulling the pin (and who carry around big red bags full of grenades that can be shot for a similar effect); snipers who will try and blind you with strobe lasers; techno-wranglers who’ll send out RC cars full of explosives or which are covered in sawblades like they’ve just been plucked out of an episode of Robot Wars; and when you get into the endgame the Boston Dynamics robot dog will show up and start shooting at you. With a railgun. And he’s got a friend who looks like a big, angry Johnny-5. There’s enough variety here now to sustain the game past the first few hours of gunfights, so much so that the stock flamethrower guys and suicide bombers are positively pedestrian by comparison.

More than that, though, Division 2 makes the actually sensible choices around enemy health that the first game should have — namely, that a standard enemy that takes four headshots to kill at level one will still take four headshots to kill at level thirty with the appropriate level gear and talent build. (And yes, four headshots sounds like a lot, but it’s an acceptable balance of enemy vulnerability versus needing to provide some baseline level of challenge versus not breaking the game’s internal fiction that these are normal human people you’re shooting at.) When you have multiple people in your party and the game needs to scale the difficulty up to compensate, it doesn’t do it by adding an additional 300% onto everyone’s health bar, it does it by spawning three times the number of enemies it would if you were playing solo. Individual enemies are still vulnerable and go down in a few shots, but so do you if you get flanked or caught out of cover, and so by piling on more enemies you really, really have to be paying attention to enemy positions and managing their numbers so that they never get too close. There’s a lot of gunfire and — thanks to the wider range of enemy abilities in the sequel — a lot of explosions, incendiaries, jamming effects, stun effects, and generally harmful shit flying around a combat zone that you need to be keeping track of. That is where the challenge is: your ability to think tactically, change up your position and prioritise enemy targets based on a dynamically evolving threat level. Not “Here’s a guy with a million hitpoints, have fun shooting him for the next fifteen minutes!” It’s a much more interesting problem than either Anthem or The Division managed to create.

But what about the elite and boss enemies you fight? Those guys need to have a level of toughness appropriate to their boss status, and the solution Division 2 has gone for here is a fairly good one: armour. Again, it’s not just a matter of “This enemy’s health bar is longer because he’s wearing armour”, because that would just be justifying lazy difficulty scaling with words; instead, elites and bosses are wearing physical bits of armour all over their bodies that can be shot off if you punt enough rounds into them. Until the armour is gone you can’t even scratch their health bar, but once you’ve punctured it in one or two places they’ll fold just as quickly as a regular enemy, kind of like the Elite shields in Halo. Armour is a mechanic that rewards precision targeting and focus fire: blowing off the armour on somebody’s left arm isn’t particularly helpful if they then turn so that you can only see their right side. Similarly, having three people in your party shooting a boss enemy in three different locations is very inefficient because each of you is chipping away at a separate armour piece; it’s far better to just coordinate — even if it’s just visually looking at where your teammates are shooting — and shoot at the same spot, as you’ll down the boss in a third of the time. Having armour that can absorb hundreds of rounds of ammo is almost as unrealistic as having an enemy absorb them with his face, but it doesn’t matter so much now because there’s now an actual, visible reason why my bullets aren’t doing damage with some very tangible feedback that introduces new and interesting gameplay considerations — again, just like the Elite shields in Halo — and it turns out that’s all I really wanted.

All of these tweaks, changes and additions come together to ensure that combat in The Division 2 is fun. It would be fun without the loot — you’re barely even thinking about loot when you’re fighting through one of its encounters — and something almost worth doing for its own sake, and that’s a surprisingly rare quality in a loot-driven game. And when contrasted against Anthem, The Division 2 makes an admirable effort to ensure that there’s always a fight happening somewhere in its rendition of a ruined Washington D.C if you want to get stuck in, with rival factions of bad guys sending out patrols that will tussle with each other if their paths cross, or if they run into a strongpoint. You can constantly hear the echoes of gunfire and distant screams as you pick your way through the streets, and if you run towards it you’ll likely be able to clear up a weakened control point or elite patrol and get the corresponding loot rewards — that, or you’ll end up fighting two factions’ worth of enemies at once and get overwhelmed. Either way it’s all about making that combat experience constantly available, even outside of a mission.

Ah yes, the missions. They’re… okay? They suffer mostly from two things. One is that The Division 2 doesn’t really have a story to speak of, with your mute agent glaring at people during cutscenes and then swanning off to murder another 300 people in the name of Democracy. It’s never really explained why you’ve gone to Washington D.C, or what on earth you’re doing now that you’re there (something about turning a computer off and on again, I think — rescuing the President was entirely incidental to this). So the missions are mostly just a sequence of combat encounters in some interior locations; they get quite a long way on the strength of those combat encounters, on their own, being quite excellent, but the locations suffer from the second problem The Division 2 has here, which is that Washington D.C is a very dull place to set a game in. This isn’t a slur on D.C. particularly, but rather an observation that most US cities are built around a repetitive grid system that optimises traffic management and thus tend to lack character compared to their fictional equivalents.  I had the same problem with New York in the first game, and while Washington isn’t quite as bad — some time having passed since the outbreak of the superbug that wiped out the world means that everything is crumbling and overgrown with wild animals running through the streets, which at least injects some colour and life into the proceedings — it still struggles to identify memorable locations for its missions. Even the ones that take place around recognisable monuments like the Lincoln memorial end up being a fight through a series of murky underground rooms beneath the Lincoln memorial; the best missions end up being the ones set inside museums where you’re surrounded by the artifacts of somewhere else that isn’t Washington D.C. There’s also very little flair shown with encounter scripting or objective design, with most missions just spawning enemies and then leaving them to fight as they would in the open world. That’s not to say they’re bad, they just have few redeeming qualities of their own and wouldn’t get nearly as far if the core combat experience wasn’t quite so well-tuned.

The loot is also okay. Probably being merely “okay” would be a damning indictment of any other looter shooter since it’s half of the name, but it does a decent job of providing you with a range of outfitting options for your next brawl. The armour isn’t particularly interesting and mostly exists to make armour value and gearscore go up, but the guns are — and this is a marked improvement from the first Division, where I’d seen all of the guns ten hours in and wasn’t interested in using most of them because they were so weak. There’s a much wider range of them available in the sequel, and because there’s less emphasis on damage — there’s a range of time-to-kills across the guns, but the smaller enemy HP pools make it a lower consideration than it was — there’s much more room to experiment; the gun you end up using tends to be the one that feels the best to you, even if it’s not the best in terms of pure stats, and that’s a perfectly viable approach to take. There’s even a significant degree of variation within weapon categories, with different brands of shotguns, assault rifles and LMGs having different characteristics. Probably the biggest improvement over the original, though, is that nearly all of the guns feel powerful. They look great and sound great, as they did in the original, but this time around they actually have the in-game impact to match the meaty booms and metre-long muzzle flashes, and this makes them a pleasure to use.

In terms of drop frequency The Division 2 is probably more towards the Destiny 2 or Diablo 3 end of the scale, except dialled up to eleven. Loot is dropping all the goddamn time, with encounters with even a few random mooks having a good chance of coughing up an equipment drop, and thanks to the way the gear scaling works (it’s a more sensible version of Destiny’s light level system) it’s almost always going to be at least a small improvement on what you’ve currently got equipped in terms of raw stats. As somebody who likes picking up loot I found this very agreeable; what I didn’t find agreeable was the frankly pathetic interface for managing these huge quantities of loot pickups. I’ve been playing the endgame for a little while now and I have a 100-slot inventory. It fills up from empty to full in around an hour and a half. I have eleven slots into which I can equip items, so even if I wanted to do a complete equipment replace I’d still have eighty-nine items that need to be sold or deconstructed. To do this I need to go down a list and individually mark each one as junk. Eighty-nine times. The game is sorely missing a “Sell all except favourites button”; that or an inventory system that isn’t a giant list. It gets worse when you take equipment and skill mods into account since these go into a separate 100-slot mod inventory, doubling the amount of logistics you have to handle — and to add insult to injury skill mods are completely broken right now, with nonsensically low bonuses and ridiculously high skill requirements in order to equip them making them functionally useless. It’s just pointless cruft that clogs up your inventory and generates make-work, and it is terrible.

Speaking of the endgame, the last interesting thing that The Division 2 does is actually have one. That is, it doesn’t just pat you on the back after finishing the story (if only because it doesn’t have a story) and then tell you to repeatedly run slightly harder versions of the missions you’ve already done, as most looter shooters do on release when they’re waiting for the dev team to finish the actual endgame content. Instead, after you finish the final mission it’ll show you a short cutscene of the fourth faction — the Black Tusk PMC — attacking Washington and taking over the map; this introduces new activities and makes the open world far busier, and it also sets up remixed versions of the story missions that have Black Tusk as the opposition instead of the faction you originally fought there. This is where the standard RPG levelling system stops and the World Tier system starts; you’re no longer chasing XP to level up but are instead looking to boost your gear level to the point where you can tackle the next tier of these remixed Black Tusk missions, which is a nice short-term carrot to keep you playing through the 3-4 hours each of the first three World Tiers takes. Once you get to World Tier 4 the world changes slightly yet again, with the standard control points scattered around the world now gaining an alert level that can be manipulated by the player; raising it dramatically increases the number of veteran and elite enemies that will be defending the point, but will also yield much better rewards should you manage to clear the point. Taken all together there’s about 15 hours of structured content here that Massive have planned out for after you finish the story, which is 15 hours more than anyone else working in the genre bothers with, and a very pleasant surprise for someone like me who really dislikes repetitive grind with no distinct goals; this should be the standard approach for one of these “games as a service” things, and it’s absolutely shocking to me that The Division 2 is the first one I’ve played that’s actually done it.

This review has been generally positive so far, and deservedly so. The Division 2 is very far from perfect, though, since I have a huge laundry list of minor and not-so-minor flaws that I could take the game to task for if I were feeling particularly mean. In general its biggest problem is that it’s not particularly joined-up in its design thinking; there’s a lot to the game, and enough of it is good that the parts it doesn’t do so well can generally be ignored, but they are a significant minority that will require some attention from Ubisoft and Massive in the months to come. Things like the already-mentioned problem with the skill mods, and skill power in general being rather meaningless, and talent recalibration being an arcane process that isn’t explained to the player at all, and a fair chunk more besides. I can get by without really worrying about any of these things too much, but the fact that they’re there and they don’t really work takes some of the sheen off of what’s otherwise a quite polished experience. Probably the biggest of the minor criticisms I’d make of The Division 2 is that the enemy spawn system seems set up to punish player aggression, which is a weird thing to do in a game that’s all about cover and flanking. Enemies will spawn from fixed points on the map during a fight — usually a one-way door that you can’t go through — and these points don’t change based on player proximity, so what will usually happen if you’re being aggressive and pushing forward to a good flanking position is that you’ll clear out one set of enemies and then find that five enemies have all piled out of a door directly behind you into an ideal flanking position on you, and so you die extremely quickly when they start shooting a split-second later. That’s not to say that a good flank is impossible, but you need to be extremely bloody careful of where the spawns might be coming from; if you’re not it’s usually better to stay where you are, stick behind your cover and trade shots from the front, even if it turns some of the fights into ridiculous Naked Gun shootouts.

I should probably start wrapping up now, but I’m sure there’s something else I should mention before I do… oh wait, the Dark Zone! I almost forgot to talk about it, and for good reason: The Division 2 basically forgets about it as well. I thought the Dark Zone’s mix of PvE and PvP was one of the few high points of the first game and I was looking forward to seeing what the sequel would do with the idea, but unfortunately it turns out the answer is “Split it into three much smaller separately-instanced chunks that dilute the player population to the point where I’ve seen a grand total of one other player in two hours spent in the various Dark Zones.” There’s very few other players bothering with the Dark Zone this time around, likely because this time around there’s much more efficient ways to get good loot outside of the Dark Zone, and also because the actual Dark Zones themselves are much duller than they were in the first game with nowhere near as much to do — and without other players who might go rogue providing that sense of tension, all the Dark Zone is is a worse version of the PvE experience you can get elsewhere. There’s a special Dark Zone called the Occupied Dark Zone that I haven’t tried yet, and it might be that this is where all of the actual cutthroat players are spending their time. I’m not holding my breath though, and I think the Dark Zones are possibly the biggest failure of The Division 2 in general since they’re a regressive waste of a good idea that had been proven to work (more or less) in the first game.

The Division 2 is a big improvement over the original game, and a dramatic contrast to the shitshow that was Anthem. It’s gone from being something of a misfire to having some of the tightest combat mechanics of any third-person cover shooter I’ve played, and it is extremely technically accomplished; it runs very well on my machine, there have been very few network problems and I have experienced a grand total of one crash in fifty hours. Even the bugs have been comparatively minor, with the worst of them (involving highly inadequate level scaling for players in your party who were lower level than the host) being fixed a week after launch. There’s plenty in the game that misfires, or doesn’t land, and there’s unfortunately rather more systems that got the “fix after launch” label attached to them than I’d really like, but there’s enough content and structure to Division 2 that this simply doesn’t matter in the way that it might for something following the usual AAA developer strategy of putting out the minimum viable product for release and hoping they’ll be able to fill in the gaps later. It’s got a solid enough foundation that it can stand strong despite the weight of its not inconsiderable list of issues — and importantly for The Division 2, that foundation will make it much easier for Massive to deliver the “service” part of this game-as-a-service. I’m still not wholly on board with the looter shooter as an ongoing concept², but The Division 2 is about as good an attempt at releasing one as I’ve seen so far.

The post Thoughts: The Division 2 appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

This is something that may not come across in my reviews of their games, but I have a lot of respect for the various Ubisoft development studios. They work to deadlines that would put nearly every other game developer to shame, and if you ignore the writing (which is practically required when dealing with anything under the Tom Clancy name) there’s a refreshing lack of pretension about the games they’re making. They scope out what they’re going to make at a very early stage during development, and once it’s defined they don’t muck about with spending years bogged down in ridiculous scope creep such as accurately-modelled horse testicles; they just knuckle down and make the game they planned in the first place. They’ve mastered the process of developing games better than any other company in the triple-A space — things such as efficient content pipelines, consistent design philosophy and effective project management across all of their games¹ — which is how they’ve been able to publish a whopping eleven Assassin’s Creed games in eleven years and have only two of them be crap.

Of course, this efficiency has come at a cost, and the cost is that while few of the AC games are outright bad, there’s very few that I’d recommend as unreservedly good either. Except for the mould-breaking Black Flag, up until last year all mainline Assassin’s Creed titles were effectively the same game because the pace of development was such that the series had little time to truly reinvent itself. All it could achieve were iterations on the same concept, and after nine games in as many years it had thoroughly exhausted that concept by the time Assassin’s Creed Syndicate rolled around in 2015. Syndicate was a competent game, and anyone jumping into the series at that point would probably have been quite impressed with it, but I personally felt nothing but fatigue when playing it. Now, Ubisoft the publisher — the side of the company that sets those yearly deadlines and cracks the whip over the talented internal dev teams — may like the regular infusions of cash the AC series brings them, but while they’re just as amoral as any other publisher they at least saw Syndicate’s comparatively disappointing sales numbers and realised they were in danger of killing off their prize IP. This is why the most prolific franchise in AAA gaming didn’t release a mainline title in 2016; they finally gave their dev teams some time to make some seriously sweeping changes and in the process redefine what an Assassin’s Creed game actually is.

The result was 2017’s Assassin’s Creed Origins, a game that — as is typical of Ubisoft — heavily leveraged technology and design principles from other internally-developed Ubisoft titles, such as Ghost Recon Wildlands and the Far Cry series, but which also took a long hard look at what recent critically-acclaimed open world titles such as The Witcher 3 and Breath Of The Wild were doing and tried to incorporate some of their ideas, and in the process moved Assassin’s Creed towards the full-blown RPG territory that was recently abandoned by Bioware². I played Origins while this blog was on hiatus so there’s no review, but Origins was an extremely respectable game and a definite step in the right direction. It was a bit bumpy in places, sure, and the developers were clearly still feeling their way through some of the changed mechanics; however, even at its lowest points Origins could always fall back on the player’s exploration of its incredible rendition of Ancient Egypt, full of rich, vibrant scenery and stuffed to bursting with landmarks and monuments to stumble across and/or climb on top of. Despite the flaws, Origins felt newly vital in a way that the Assassin’s Creed series hasn’t for at least five years.

Which, in an extremely roundabout way, explains why I bought Assassin’s Creed Odyssey. Ancient Greece is not a time period I have a particular interest in, and if the series hadn’t taken that year out to produce Origins it would have been the end of my interest in the game, too. Even if Odyssey turned out to be just more of the same, though, I enjoyed Origins enough that “more of the same” was something I was still very much interested in playing. And to a certain degree, Odyssey is more of the same; every single thing that Origins does, Odyssey does also. (Except the pyramids, which I miss, and the stargazing, which I don’t.) But my god, even accounting for the typical efficiency with which Ubisoft internal development teams work, Odyssey crams in so much more additional content and so many new ideas (well, I say “new” but most of them fell off the back of a lorry, as we shall shortly see) that I don’t understand how they built this thing with only an additional year of development time over Origins. It’s one of the biggest games I’ve ever played — even discounting the typical Ubisoft filler content, it’s comfortably bigger than The Witcher 3 by some considerable distance — and consequently has an awful lot to unpack, and I’ve really not done myself any favours by spending four paragraphs explaining the context around it. I feel like that context is required, though, as it explains why Assassin’s Creed has gone from being the tired old beast that it was in 2015 to putting out something that’s one of the top three games I’ve played this year³.

The choice of time period for Odyssey does create one rather positive side effect: Origins was, as the name implies, a game about the foundation of the Assassin order, and it was set in Ptolemaic Egypt. Odyssey on the other hand is set in Greece during the Peloponnesian War, four hundred years before Origins takes place. This little logical trap means that nobody in Odyssey’s historical plotline knows what an Assassin is, because they don’t exist yet. Instead you’re playing a Greek mercenary whose family got massively fucked over by a group of Templar stand-ins called the Cult of Kosmos, and after the requisite fifteen years spent stuck on the tutorial island doing odd jobs for random people (and becoming a startlingly efficient killer in the process) the Cult makes the rash decision to start messing with your life again, which prompts your character to acquire a war trireme and set sail for the mainland to hunt down all members of the Cult and end their lives in as gruesome and bloody a fashion as possible.

Or at least that was how I played it. It was so refreshing to be free of the yoke of that tired, tired Assassins vs. Templars plot that Assassin’s Creed has been pushing for a decade now that I revelled in the opportunity to be far more homicidal than the series has allowed me to be in the past — and I very much appreciated that the game gave me the options to do that. Yes, your vendetta against the Cult is basically the same thing that’s been driving every other game in the series, but with the key difference that this one is set ancient Greece in the middle of a ridiculously bloody war, and because there aren’t any Assassin or Templar power structures yet it means that this time there are no rules whatsoever. So I was free to butcher my way across Greece with nary a hint of conscience⁴, but I could equally have focused on putting my character’s family back together over outright vengeance, and that would also have been a valid choice that Odyssey fully caters for. This is how Odyssey moves even closer towards that Bioware RPG territory than Origins did: by giving you a set of Witcher-style conversation options in every interaction, and by ensuring that the conversation options that you pick measurably influence how the situation plays out instead of looping back around to the same outcome no matter what you choose.

As for your character, Odyssey is the first game in the series to give you a choice of who to play: Alexios and Kassandra are sibling children of a Spartan family, both of whom get chucked off a mountain in the opening ten minutes of the game. Whichever one you pick is the one that survives and escapes with their family heirloom spear, which just so happens to be a ludicrously powerful Precursor artifact that you can upgrade over the course of the game to grant access to increasingly powerful abilities in combat. I picked Kassandra because this is the first time I’ve had the opportunity to play a woman in an Assassin’s Creed game who wasn’t going to get lumbered with a tedious romantic subplot, and she turned out to be very much my kind of protagonist: somebody with a lot of pent-up rage who was constantly holding back her natural urge to stab first and ask questions later. She wasn’t exactly Ezio-grade, but the voice actress does a fine job and she’s more than likeable enough to carry the game over the fifty-odd hours it takes to chew through all the strands of the main plotline.

Odyssey takes a somewhat unusual approach to story by splitting this plotline into three separate parts, each of which is tracked separately in your quest log. The first is tracking down the various surviving members of your family against the backdrop of the Peloponnesian War, a conflict between Athens and Sparta that has been going on for decades by the time the game takes place with no sign of slowing down; you take some time out from the family hunt to get involved with Spartan and Athenian politics, meet famous historical figures such as Socrates, Hippocrates and Pericles, and fight for one side or another in the game’s big battle scenes. The second plot thread involves Precursor stuff and talking about it would constitute spoilers, but — unusually for an Assassin’s Creed game — the way the Precursor elements are woven into the historical world and story are well handled and even include some of the best bits of the game, although it does also lead to the sadly obligatory cryptic exposition via magic computers for the benefit of the modern day Animus plotline, which is inexplicably still going long after Ubisoft themselves appear to have gotten bored of it. The third plot thread is your hunt for the Cult of Kosmos, which I’m going to spend a whole separate paragraph talking about because it’s the most impressive part of a very impressive game.

It takes a while for this objective to show up in your quest list, because Kassandra first has to find out a) that the Cult exists and b) that it was responsible for tearing her family apart, and this takes a few hours because Odyssey is preoccupied with introducing basically the entire rest of the game. Once she figures out what’s going on, though — namely, that there are a whole bunch of legitimate targets for her anger wandering around Greece — you get access to a whole new menu screen showing a huge web of masked faces that together comprise the 42 members of the Cult of Kosmos. Some of these faces are already revealed thanks to clues you pick up as part of the main story quest, but most are concealed, with at best just a single clue hinting at their identity. Each cultist requires two clues to fully unmask, which you acquire by killing off cultists lower down the pecking order; once unmasked their location is revealed on the map, and then you can go off and kill them. Gradually you work your way up through each cell of the Cult until you can unmask that cell’s Sage; killing the Sage gives a clue to the identity of the overall Cult leader, but you’ll need to kill all eight Sages (and by extension the entirety of the rest of the Cult) before you can finally chop the head off the snake.

There are two particularly neat things about this system. First is that it might have taken eleven games to get there, but Odyssey has finally given me what I wanted out of an Assassin’s Creed game all along: a set of freeform assassination targets that I track down and kill on my own initiative. Despite not having any Assassins in the game, Odyssey is the first game in the series that actually lets me be a damn assassin. Second is that while the system isn’t fully freeform — probably a third of the Cult members are key parts of main story quests and cannot be killed until you’ve completed them — most of the Cultists exist in predetermined locations in the world regardless of whether or not you’ve managed to unmask them in the Cult UI, and all the unmasking really does is stick a map pin in that location. You can go and kill them at any time prior to this, if you can figure out who they are and think you can take them in a fight. Occasionally you’ll randomly run into one lurking at the top of a Cultist stronghold that you decided to clear out, or governing one of the smaller Greek islands, or prowling the high seas in their pirate ship, and while you’ll sometimes twig that they’re cultists as soon as you see them it’s more likely that the first you know about it is when you send their ship to the bottom of the ocean and get the “Cultist Defeated” pop-up.

I’m very in favour of being able to pre-empt quest objectives like this, and I’m pleased that it seems to be a prevailing trend in RPGs these days with both Pillars Of Eternity 2 and Original Sin 2 plumping for the same freeform structure. Odyssey enthusiastically adopts this more non-linear structure for both the Cultist kills and its more mundane quests, which makes exploration feel very rewarding because at no point are you retracing your steps back to somewhere you already cleared because a certain thing wouldn’t spawn until you picked up the relevant quest chain. Odyssey does the usual open world thing of having the map be liberally littered with question mark symbols indicating points of interest, which when you get closer can turn out to be anything from a heavily defended fort full of soldiers and treasure chests and things to sabotage, to a shitty cave with three guys and a dog in a cage. There’s hundreds and hundreds of these things scattered all over Greece and you’ll go nuts if you attempt to clear them all, so I don’t recommend methodically working your way through them, but if you happen to fancy a bit of a slaughter and decide to take on a fort garrison and loot all of its treasure you might also pick up a quest item long before you find its matching quest. This means that in most cases it doesn’t matter what order you do things in; a typical RPG has me min-maxing my route through the game by running around hub towns hoovering up every available quest so I only have to go through spoke locations once, but this newer breed lets me do whatever I want without having to worry about later backtracking that feels like a waste of time. It makes the world feel substantially more organic, and encourages exploration for the sheer hell of it rather than because you’re trying to find a specific quest objective.

And Odyssey’s world is one that you’ll want to explore. As you will have noticed from the screenshots in this review it is an incredibly good looking game, with an excellent photo mode for snapping the panoramic vistas that are seemingly just around every corner. A minor complaint is that it doesn’t quite have the superb eye for scenery that Origins did, but that’s largely because of the difference in setting — a columned temple is less impressive to me than a bloody great pyramid, after all — and Odyssey still has a lot of “Holy shit” moments as you crest a mountain and see all of the surrounding region for the first time. An important lesson that the series has picked up from Breath Of The Wild is that being able to climb everywhere is fun, so the free-running system now applies to everything. No more looking for the telltale white ledges or sticking-out bricks that denote a climbable area; now if you want to climb a mountain you just run at the nearest rock face and Kassandra will start clambering up it like Spiderman.  This is taken to the point of absurdity at times as she’s also able to climb giant statues made of bronze which presumably aren’t going to be all that grippable, but I’ll take exploration being made artificially easy over being made artificially hard, because that means I’ll do more of it.

Speaking of drawing ideas from other game series, Odyssey also (finally) nabs the Nemesis system from Shadow Of Mordor, although the way it’s implemented isn’t quite the way I thought they’d do it. You have the standard GTA-style Wanted level in the bottom right hand corner of the screen, and committing crimes that are witnessed by others raises this level as concerned citizens place a bounty on your head. As it turns out there are only two crimes in ancient Greece – stealing, and killing anyone who isn’t a bloodthirsty bandit — but since you have to slaughter your way through a lot of Spartan and Athenian soldiers in your pursuit of your main and side objectives your bounty level inexorably ticks up, eventually resulting in Mercenaries turning up to claim the bounty. A Mercenary is a procedurally-generated elite adversary with a name, a backstory, and a couple of special properties like being followed around by a pet bear, or having flaming weapons that can set you on fire. They won’t constantly follow you around, but if you have a couple of pips on your bounty meter and you start a fight that goes on for longer than thirty seconds you can be sure that it’s going to be gatecrashed by a very tough, very damaging Mercenary — or possibly multiple Mercenaries piling in one after another if you’ve let your bounty level creep too high.

Fighting Mercenaries can be a lot of fun. Odyssey’s combat system isn’t the most complicated thing in the world, with the main elements being counters, dodges and finding a way to get around shield-toting enemies, but staying mobile and avoiding multiple opponents while dueling these big tough Mercenaries demonstrates that it does its job well. The incentive for killing Mercenaries is that a) they can drop some pretty good loot, b) if you knock them out instead of killing them you can recruit them to crew your ship, and c) you yourself are a Mercenary, there’s a Mercenary food chain, and killing Mercenaries who are above you in the Mercenary pecking order moves you up a rank. Getting to higher Mercenary ranks gives you shop discounts, which would be nice except for the fact that it is trivially easy to amass huge amounts of currency in Odyssey; there are money sinks in the form of equipment upgrades and ship upgrades, but both of these are also gated by resource requirements which are comparatively much more difficult to amass, and so the amount of money you have is never going to be the limiting factor on what you can do. I also didn’t ever target mercenaries for their recruitable-ness, as at the start of the game the bonuses they give to your ship are paltry, and at the end of it the ship is so powerful you don’t need them.

So mostly I just killed the Mercenaries naturally when they showed up without ever really going out of my way to do so, and this was enough to eventually get me to the very top tier of the Mercenary hierarchy; however, this isn’t always possible because if you’ve got a bounty level of three or more it’s very probable that Mercenaries will show up who are three or more levels higher than you, and level advantage is a huge deal in Odyssey. You can just about take on enemies that are two levels above you, if you’re smart and abuse abilities such as poison, but a three-level advantage is the point at which they can potentially one-shot you if they hit you, and so you really don’t want to take those fights. If you’re about to do something that’s probably going to end in a protracted battle (like infiltrating a fort) and you have a high bounty level, it’s best to spend some cash to pay off the bounty yourself prior to starting so that your party isn’t going to be gatecrashed by these impossible-to-kill bounty hunters. Aside from that I thought that the Mercenary system added some spice to the mid-game, when I had the tools to make dueling them fun but hadn’t yet grown so powerful that they were total pushovers, but it’s also probably the second item on my list of things that I’d quite happily cut from Odyssey without missing them much, or at all.

There’s something distinctly MMO-esque about Odyssey’s reliance on player and enemy levels to gate what you can and can’t do. That’s not exactly a slur on the game — given that it’s fully open world once you get your ship with no scripting or terrain blockers on where you can go, level-locking areas is all Odyssey has left to stop a player from running too far ahead of the plotline. The Witcher 3 did exactly the same thing, although Odyssey is much more overt about it; the world map is clearly divided into a collection of discrete regions and tells you what level you should be before visiting each one, and since you’ll have extreme difficulty with even regular enemies that significantly outlevel you it’s a good idea to stick to that guideline. This is less of a restriction than it sounds, however, as past the first six or seven hours of the game you will always have a choice of at least two or three regions that you can visit next, and you’ll get enough levels from clearing one that that will open up another two or three regions. This enables multiple paths through the game; after the cult was revealed I elected to go island-hopping for a few hours, but I could just as easily have gone north out of Phokis or followed the coast south into Athens. All the level gating really does is to limit your choices at the start of the game so that they’re not overwhelming.

To deal with the problem of the player being able to take a whole bunch of different routes through the game — and thus potentially outlevelling vast swathes of its content — Odyssey deploys something that I thought I’d hate, but which is handled in a very clever way: enemy level scaling. Once you outlevel a region by more than two levels the game will simply scale that region up so that its enemies are always two levels below you, which ensures that you feel appropriately powerful when fighting them but that they’re never quite pushovers. Even more importantly, though, Odyssey also scales up loot drops and XP rewards for completing quests — this fixes a big problem Origins had, where there wasn’t much incentive to go back and visit a region that you missed and had now outlevelled because the rewards you’d get for doing so would be pathetic. Again, this really helps Odyssey’s goal of always making exploration feel like a worthwhile thing to be doing, as you don’t really have to worry about doing things in the right order any more.

Quest-wise, Odyssey feels mostly solid. Yes, most of the quests, when you boil off the flavour dialogue from their bones, are ultimately just fetch quests where you go and get a thing from a location. However, I replayed Witcher 3 earlier this year and there were rather more fetch quests in that than I remembered; the set dressing around them counts for a lot, and Odyssey makes a decent fist of at least trying to include something a little memorable about each one. There’s nothing on the level of putting on the play in Witcher 3, but it would really be asking a lot of an Assassin’s Creed game to equal the better quests of the best RPG released in recent years. Given that Odyssey is the first real step they’ve made into full RPG territory I think it’s fine for the most of the quests to simply be okay — it does find time for a few standouts, but never really tries to excel. One thing that did impress me about Odyssey’s quests, however, is how reactive they were. The conversation options you’re given to influence events are very RPG-lite and I assumed they weren’t doing a whole lot — that is, until I read about some very different experiences other people had had with the same quests and realised that most quests have multiple different outcomes that depend on your actions, and that those outcomes can have knock-on effects for other quests that you might not tackle for another ten or twenty hours. It’s not exactly the sprawling honeycomb structure of Alpha Protocol, but it’s about as close as I’d expect any other game to get in 2018 and definitely a better offering than anything I’ve seen from Bioware in the last seven or eight years.

This is turning into a bit of a monster review, so I’ll speed things up. Ship combat is back, and it’s hugely improved over the lacklustre offering from Origins, being roughly on par with what was in Black Flag and Rogue. The equipment system is oddly tuned as its power scales with item level and upgrades are very expensive, meaning that to start with it’s usually better to cycle through new items as you pick them up rather than come up with an equipment set that supports your preferred style of play; however, towards the end of the game when you have enough resources to keep your equipment current there’s a surprising amount of depth to it as you can attach powerful properties to weapons and armour via the engraving system. The skills and combat abilities are very pleasing: you start strong, get much stronger as you level up, and once you clear the requirement for upgrading your Precursor spear to level 5 (which takes some work) you’re granted full-on superpowers, shattering shields with a single punch and blasting enemies backwards with force explosions. This focus on abilities that are fun to use instead of boring realism ensures engaging with the combat system is always immensely satisfying, which is pretty much a hard requirement because you’re going to find yourself slaughtering thousands of goons over the fifty hours it’ll take you to finish the game.

As is hopefully now apparent, Odyssey is a very big game with a lot of moving parts, most of which are making their very first appearance in the series. Given that, I think Ubisoft Quebec have done an incredible job of tying everything together without having the game collapse into an incoherent mess. However, Odyssey can’t help but have some rough edges. There was a point about six hours in where I was actually pretty down on the game; this was just after the Mercenary and Battle systems had been introduced, and I was still fairly low level, had invested my starting skill points into the stealthy Assassin skill tree and so wasn’t prepared for these systems that required head-on confrontation. In particular your health doesn’t regenerate in combat, so buying the Second Wind healing ability is 100% compulsory; however, it’s part of the Warrior tree and is terribly described — I misread it as a one-off thing that fired when I hit zero health rather than something that could be used at any time. Fortunately the game also allows you to respec skill points at any time so it wasn’t a fatal mistake that I hadn’t bought it, but I think that needing to buy specific skills to adequately deal with game systems is flabby design; Second Wind should have been an innate healing ability in the vein of Hollow Knight. Regardless, Odyssey can get a more than a little bit frustrating during this early period. When you’re having to deal with Mercenaries showing up to fights but haven’t yet figured out how to effectively fight or manipulate them it’s easy to dismiss them as pointless killjoys, and I think they should have been introduced a little later on when players have more skill points to play with and can produce a more well-rounded build that combats some of the more bullshit Mercenary abilities.

The rate at which you gain levels is also somewhat misjudged. You may have read some whining in the gaming press about how Odyssey is a very grindy game and how reviewers had to buy the XP boosting microtransaction to keep up with it. This is unfortunately yet another case of games journalists turning out to be bloody awful at playing the things they’re supposed to be writing about for a living⁵, because it’s the polar opposite of the truth: Odyssey is constantly flinging experience rewards at you. You get it for practically everything you do, and while many of the XP rewards are comparatively small it flows in at such a steady rate you can’t help but level up. Yes, following the “main” set of family story missions on their own won’t give you enough experience to follow them through to their conclusion if that’s all you’re focusing on, but this is a sodding open world game; if you engage with the rest of the content even a little bit you’ll be able to keep up, and if you immediately go off exploring and do side quests in just a few regions you’ll very quickly level to the point where the scaling has to kick in to keep things on an even keel. Which is the system working as intended, but the problem I had with Odyssey was this: if you are doing all three strands of the story and side quests and occasionally doing other bits and pieces like the battles and the arena combats and clearing forts — playing the damn game, in other words — you will hit the level cap about ten to fifteen hours before you finish it. This represents a full stop for all of Odyssey’s progression systems, and while there’s still value in playing through the rest of the game for the hell of it, it was definitely less satisfying to do so as a consequence of being at the level cap.

However, these are comparatively minor niggles. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey does have some bloody awful bits, and if you have ever played an Assassin’s Creed game you can probably guess what they are: the modern day segments, and the pieces of Kassandra’s story that are related to it. The series has at least walked things back from the offensively stupid premise of having its modern day segments pretend that you were playing literally yourself — i.e. somebody sitting in front of a television playing a videogame about ancient times. Instead it continues with the story of Layla Hassan (introduced in Origins) and her insufferable support crew of Assassins as she delves into memories of the past to try and figure out where the latest Precursor macguffin is buried. I have played every mainline Assassin’s Creed game and I have completely lost track of why they’re searching for these things, and I’m not sure the Assassins know either because it’s never stated what they’re going to do with the macguffin once they get it, or why it’s so important.  None of the modern day characters speak an intelligible language, instead choosing to communicate solely in “lol, so random!” quirky quips that have been ripped straight out of a subpar Marvel movie, and I hated every single one of them. It doesn’t help that while I’m sure that these idiots have voluminous and obsessively detailed backstories that are related in books, comics and other forms of spin-off media, Odyssey actually expects me to have read them and so doesn’t bother explaining who they are in-game. I suppose I should be thankful that I only had to deal with them for a couple of mercifully short scripted sequences, but these are brief enough that it raises the question of why Odyssey bothers with it at all.

Still, if you can ignore that, then Odyssey is a smashing success as a reinvention of the Assassin’s Creed franchise as a full-blown RPG Experience. Yes, I can point to nearly every single new idea that it has and then point to another recent game that that idea has been nicked from, but Odyssey introduces so many of them at the same time that it could have easily swollen into a bloated mess. As it happens there is a hint of bloat about the game, but what bloat there is comes more from the standard Ubisoft open world elements than it does the genuinely new stuff, and while the approach is a little scattershot and some pieces fly wide of the mark there’s enough that strikes home to make Odyssey feel like a substantially more joined-up experience than it really should do. That’s a real testament to the skill of Ubisoft Quebec in tying this assortment of new things together so well; Odyssey is not The Witcher 3, but then it’s not really trying to be, and even so the gap between the two, while still considerable, is much smaller than I was expecting. The worst thing I can really say about it is that Odyssey occasionally feels like it has to remind you that it’s still an Assassin’s Creed game, which is hugely counterproductive when it makes such a gargantuan effort to distance itself from what’s come before. That effort has paid off; my previous recommendations of Assassin’s Creed games have been extremely qualified, as I don’t think any of them (save perhaps Black Flag) were going to change the minds of anyone who didn’t already think Assassin’s Creed was going to be their thing. Odyssey’s recommendation, on the other hand, is going to be far broader: if you’re allergic to open world games then you should probably still steer clear, but if you like action RPGs, branching quest outcomes, non-linear routes through games and repeatedly punting people off of cliffs with your mighty boot, then you should, at some point, try Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

The post Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

I think Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate marks the point where I’m starting to get extremely bored of Assassin’s Creed games.

I’m a self-confessed fanboy of the series so that’s really saying something. I don’t think this is particularly the fault of Syndicate itself – mechanically speaking, it’s about as good a “classic” Assassin’s Creed title as it’s possible to make. Like its immediate predecessor, Unity, Syndicate retreats from the high-seas adventure of Black Flag and Rogue and sets itself in a single city, in this case 1860’s London. Unlike Unity, Syndicate displays far more intelligence in how it structures the city and the activities within it, and also deploys two extremely charismatic and likeable protagonists in the form of Jacob and Evie Frye, headstrong Assassin twins who, after receiving a plea for help, decide to decamp to London to liberate it from the clutches of a Generic Templar Villain. There’s gang members to recruit, city districts to take over, and the usual host of side activities and collectibles you can find infesting any Ubisoft game. It all feels very polished for the most part, and in general can be viewed as the best bits of all the Ezio games bolted together into a single title with a lot of quality-of-life improvements layered on top.

And therein lies the problem, I think. Black Flag and Rogue were good because they dared to shake the concept up dramatically by taking AC 3’s boats and promoting them from bonus feature to core gameplay component. Unity by contrast regressed things considerably by cutting the gameplay back to running around a single city and played much like the very first Assassin’s Creed, a game that’s now very close to celebrating its tenth birthday. And for all that Syndicate is much better game than Unity, for all its polish and for all the wit and charm of the Frye twins, when you get right down to it it’s just as regressive as Unity was. It’s the same concept, fundamentally unchanged, and while I found Victorian London a little more interesting to run around in than Revolutionary France it’s not a patch on the Renaissance Tourism Simulator of 2, Brotherhood and Revelations. The environment can’t really justify my playing the game on its own. Perhaps if this were the first AC title released in a few years I’d be slightly readier to accept it on its own merits rather than viewing it as hopelessly derivative, but Syndicate is the seventh annual release for the series (and let us not forget they doubled up in 2014 with Rogue) and so it’s no wonder I’m suffering from burnout when there’s so little about the core concept that’s changed.

Gosh, I got that backwards – that reads more like a concluding paragraph than it does an opener. It does also sell Syndicate rather short, since it’s a game that does an awful lot of good work; it’s simply unfortunate that it’s releasing at the end of the current generation of AC titles rather than somewhere in the middle where I might have still been fresh enough to appreciate it more. I’m going to save some time by assuming everyone reading this review will know, roughly, what an Assassin’s Creed game is – if not, there are several reviews of other titles in the series peppering this blog that describe the basic gameplay of free-running and fighting. Syndicate doesn’t add anything particularly revolutionary to this formula, but it does make semi-decent use of the setting to smooth over some of the bumpier parts and bulk out its repertoire a little bit.

Your eventual goal, as with most city-bound AC games, is to take over all the districts of London. There’s nine of them, each populated by enemies of increasing level and toughness, but the activities you do to take over each district are the same, mostly revolving around killing Templars or their gang proxies. Syndicate’s metagame is themed around a conflict between the red Templar-aligned gang, the Blighters, and the green Assassin gang, the Rooks; as you complete activities and free up districts you start to see more and more Rooks hanging around who can be recruited and brought along to your street fights. Functionally they’re just the same as the Assassins from Brotherhood — NPCs who can be sicced on your enemies to save you the hassle of fighting twenty disposable goons — but there’s a nice line of upgrades for them that increases their level, adds in tougher gang members and gives them the ability to open every fight with a volley from their pistols, which scythes down opposing gang members in a most ungentlemanly manner. But then whoever said gang warfare was fair?

This being Victorian London the technology level has moved on somewhat from previous AC titles. Both of the Frye twins have access to a variety of revolvers; so do your enemies, of course, but while the Human Shield ability from Black Flag remains missing in action Ubisoft have at least added a rudimentary “press Y to dodge incoming fire” ability back in that makes this far less of a pain in the ass than the Unity guards’ flintlocks. Since the game is set in the 1860’s society has progressed to the point where walking around with a sword strapped to your waist would have been rather conspicuous, so Syndicate instead plumps for the Victorian equivalent of “concealed” weaponry – sword canes, brass knuckles and kukris, which all seem to be equally as effective at disposing of goons, making your choice of weapon a case of which murder animations you prefer¹.There’s a few new utility gadgets like electricity bombs that you’ll never use because shooting people in the head (or hitting them with a throwing knife if you’re being stealthy) is so effective that it’s pointless wasting time with anything else.

There have been a couple of changes mobility-wise too. Horses have been replaced with carriages, mostly so that you can have low-tech demolition derbies in the streets of London; however you’ll rarely find yourself using them because of Syndicate’s signature gadget: the grapple gun. This functions much like Batman’s grapple gun from the Arkham series in that it’ll automatically lock on to anything immediately above you or any high points in your field of vision that are in range, and then a simple push of the left bumper is all that’s required to scale a wall or cross from building to building. While this does circumvent the free-running a little bit I feel like it’s a necessary change to speed the game up; Assassin’s Creed was starting to feel positively cumbersome compared to the mobility options on offer in games like Arkham or Just Cause, and while those games went a little too far and reduced their environments to background that you flew over rather than places to explore I think Syndicate’s grapple gun strikes a decent balance between the two extremes.

The other big change Syndicate makes is having not one, but two protagonists. The Frye twins represent a return to the good old days of Ezio as they’re written to be impeccably likeable; Jacob sadly contracts a particularly severe case of Plot Stupidity about halfway through that undoes a lot of his excellent characterisation while Evie gets lumbered with a rather cliched romance subplot, but they’re never less than charming and each of them gets their fair share of cracking one-liners². In gameplay terms they’re less differentiated than I might like, unfortunately; they both have access to almost exactly the same set of skills and you’ll have bought every single one by the time you get halfway through the game. Nominally Jacob is supposed to be the brawler and Evie the stealthy one and each twin has access to 3 exclusive skills that are supposed to accentuate this, but that’s only 10% of the total pool and the exclusive skills don’t have that much of an impact anyway – Evie is perfectly capable of slaughtering goons with astounding ease, while Jacob’s only handicap to being stealthy is that he doesn’t have quite so many throwing knives secreted about his person compared to Evie. You can switch between the twins at any time outside of a plot mission; the plot missions themselves force you to take a specific twin, usually because they tell the story of Jacob being an idiot and Evie having to go around London cleaning up after him, but that’s not so bad because otherwise I wouldn’t have used Jacob at all — not because Evie is better in any way, but because Jacob’s selection of outfits was utter crap. That’s pretty much the only substantive difference between them outside of the cutscenes.

Other than that it’s the same old game — do side activities to get money and XP, tool around London for a little bit with some well-known historical personalities from the period (in this case Alexander Graham Bell, Charles Dickens and Darwin), kill lots of Templars — wrapped in a modern-day metaplot that’s so vestigial and unengaging at this point that they might as well just abandon it entirely.  Syndicate does at least pace its content sensibly – at no point is the map covered with an overwhelming number of mission nodes as it was in Unity, and while all of the side activities are completely disposable they’re the fun kind of disposable where you might legitimately choose to hijack a passing beer cart simply because it’s an enjoyable way to spend five minutes. Victorian London is perhaps not the most natural backdrop for an Assassin’s Creed game, but it works thanks to the effort that’s been made to blend the AC gameplay with the time period in question.

Sadly that effort doesn’t extend to giving the game a set of compelling baddies, a decent motivation to get to the end or a general point beyond just doing the same stuff you did in the previous seven games; it’ll well-constructed enough that it’ll entertain for a while, but you could feasibly stop playing the game the moment you got bored (which will probably come at about the halfway point) and you wouldn’t miss out on a single piece of significant content. Sure, this particular iteration on the AC mechanics is Good rather than Bad, but the fact that Syndicate is a definite return to form after the series nadir that was Unity doesn’t make it any less of a tired retread of a path that’s already so heavily-used it’s now a very deep rut in the ground. I think that, when even a mechanically-decent Assassin’s Creed game is starting to look and feel distinctly tired, Ubisoft have absolutely done the right thing by giving the series a rest for a year or two since it can no longer stand on its own two feet. It’s a question of evolve or die at this point, and hopefully they’ll take the opportunity to go back to the drawing board while they’re at it, perhaps including some of the recent innovations seen in games like Shadow Of Mordor and the Arkham series. It needs something to spice it up, something that will justify the existence of the next iteration beyond Ubisoft wanting their yearly infusion of Assassin’s Creed money. Syndicate is a decent enough AC game but ultimately it can’t come up with a good answer to that question; there is no good reason for it to exist, other than that it provides us with more Assassin’s Creed. And after eight games in seven years that’s probably the last thing that we need.

The post Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed – Syndicate appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

The headline “Why The Division isn’t Destiny for the PC” edrew hollow chuckles from me when I read it the other day. Because it is. It totally is, and trying to pretend otherwise by implementing some nebulously misguided quality standards as a bar separating the two is simple overcontortion of an argument to generate inevitably clickbait-y column inches.

I have a somewhat lower opinion of Destiny than the author of that article, which I suspect is why from my point of view Destiny and The Division sit side by side so comfortably. Given how long these games take to make (both of them were in development for half a decade or so) it’d be unfair to accuse The Division of ripping off Destiny entirely, but I’m sure Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment were very much paying attention to the success of Destiny’s MMO-lite metagame trappings that kept players coming back month after month. It may be bolted to a different genre – the third-person shooter, which very much plays to Ubisoft’s strengths since it seems like every damn game they release is a third-person game — but The Division’s metagame is driven almost solely by that drive to do missions and kill bosses to acquire better, shinier loot that’s been the hallmark of the MMO since time immemorial. In terms of implementation it’s a perfectly adequate system, if a little more unpolished and limited than Destiny’s thanks to The Division being a year and a half behind on the development curve. Where The Division falls down, however, is that this system of shooting hordes of generic mooks to get bigger guns makes absolutely no goddamn sense when you transplant the setting from Magic Future-Earth to modern-day NYC — and worse, actually gets more than a little uncomfortable if you stop to think about it for more than a couple of seconds.

This being a Tom Clancy game, The Division has precisely the sort of right-wing nightmare/masturbatory fantasy for its backstory (delete as appropriate based on your politics) that you’d expect from the dearly-departed master of brick-thick “US Kills Everyone Without Even Trying” potboilers. Somebody has dosed New York with a supercharged variant of anthrax called the Green Poison which promptly spreads out of control, killing thousands and causing an unrealistically rapid breakdown of law and order to the point where the city has been quarantined and the denizens left to fend for themselves. Gangs and other armed groups are running rampant, and the only semblance of government influence left in the city — aside from the scattered (and utterly useless) NPC forces of the National Guard-esque Joint Task Force patrols — are the paramilitary secret agents of the eponymous Division. These guys have carte blanche to shoot as many people as they want in the name of restoring order, so obviously you’re a member since that’s what you spend 70% of your time in this game doing.

One big difference from Destiny is that The Division takes place in one single moderately large map of New York City rather than being split up over 6-7 planets and other areas, and you seamlessly transition between safe areas, the free-roam environment of the city and the scripted mission areas. This means you spend less of your time sitting in loading screens (there’s just one hefty single one when you first load the game, plus a wait whenever you fast travel), which is good because my memories of Destiny are mostly watching my ship fly through a loading screen¹. Unfortunately a natural consequence of there not being any equivalent of the Destiny Sparrow hoverbike in the game is that those loading screens have been necessarily replaced by the questionable experience of having to slog your way from point A to point B on foot – this is what you spend the other 30% of your time on in The Division. On the one hand this provides more scope for emergent gun battles with roving patrols of mooks; on the other these get old roughly three hours into the game and end up being annoyances more than anything else, especially since shooting people is what I’m probably going to be doing once I get to my destination anyway. Exploring for its own sake is out of the question; the New York environment is technically very pretty, but there’s practically zero variation from area to area. This is to be expected since it’s trying to render a real place and you can’t really find the scope for fitting, say, a swamp zone, a desert zone and a volcano zone inside a modern-day city. One side of the map looks indistinguishable from the other, and these unchanging visuals are rendered even more bland by that perennial blight of the third-person shooter: a vast, vast quantity of box-shaped waist-high cover that ensures that even when you get down to street level everything looks the goddamn same²..

Speaking of cover, I should say a word about the shooting mechanics, which are as polished as you’ll find in any other title currently on the market — but which don’t do anything outside of currently-accepted genre norms. You crouch behind cover and you headshot the baddies, and if you’re in a group you can think about having one player tank with a shield special ability while the others flank or heal or whatever, and that is how every single encounter with The Division’s walking bullet sponges will go. I did like the system for moving from cover to cover, where there’s a line showing your projected route and holding the spacebar will make your scramble to your target point while pathing around/over any obstacles fairly organically, and I also appreciated that it was possible to suppress enemies by firing half a box magazine of LMG ammo over their heads; suppressed enemies can’t do anything but crouch behind cover, making this a good tactic in a group when you have friends who can take advantage of that to flank them, and otherwise useless because once you stop shooting they recover from being suppressed very quickly.  On the flipside the cover system can be more than a little bit finicky in what it does and does not consider to be cover, with the player avatar often refusing to hide behind a seemingly-solid piece of wall because it is too “short” and subsequently getting shot full of holes – this is a cover shooter, after all, and if you’re not physically attached to cover you die very quickly.

The weapons themselves are fine for what they are. There’s a decent selection of shotguns, SMGs, sniper rifles etc. on offer, and they all sound great and handle well (there’s a particularly satisfying headshot sound effect). This effort is unfortunately muted somewhat by the actual effect your weapons have in-game, with even regular mook enemies often taking most of a clip of assault rifle ammunition to put down. If you’re in a group fighting purple or gold enemies (i.e. the standard MMO/ARPG colour-coding for elite and champion goons) then you can pump a hundred rounds of 7.62mm ammo into them and it’ll shave off maybe two thirds of their health bar – and that’s if you were aiming for the head. It’s still possible to do significant amounts of damage to non-boss enemies with headshots from a slow-firing sniper rifle — all weapons of the same type, quality and level will do roughly the same amount of DPS, but a rifle that fires less often will do more damage per shot and thus gets more out of the headshot crit bonus, as well as using less ammo overall — but otherwise your weapons appear to be dismayingly weak and that robs a lot of the satisfaction of using them.

This brings me on to possibly the biggest non-thematic problem I have with The Division, and it loops back around to the “makes sod-all sense” problem I mentioned at the start of the review, and which the rest of it is going to focus on. The weapons appear weak because the enemies are tough. The enemies are tough because The Division is a quasi-MMO, and tough enemies are basically necessary in order to provide the player with a suitably grindy challenge. This is acceptable – or at least doesn’t break suspension of disbelief all that hard – when your enemies are heavily-armoured aliens or frothing orc berserkers, as these are fantastic creatures that might have a similarly fantastic level of durability. It’s less acceptable when they’re just people. People do not get back up after being shot in the head by a heavy-calibre sniper rifle. People are not merely staggered by a full box magazine of M60 ammo. It’s the same problem I have with playing CoD on hard mode multiplied by a hundred; The Division has made a conscious choice to have a modern-day setting, but it can’t reconcile that with its mechanics and this throws the gamey nature of it into sharp relief. And because The Division wants to be an MMO, it’s super gamey.

Take the guns, again. I got my first M60 at around level 8. It was a nice gun for the level, and with some modifications I was able to give it a 120 round clip that basically let me shoot for ever. At this point I wasn’t regularly fighting purple enemies so those 120 round woulds put down, oh, three or four guys if I was shooting straight – still unreasonably tough, but I could kill them quickly enough that it didn’t feel like too much of an issue. As I levelled further the damage of the M60 started to drop off in comparison to the health of the bad guys, and this is the point where an MMO would usually throw a different fictional sword or laser gun at you with the argument that it does more damage because it’s enchanted or comes from a different manufacturer or something. Not The Division, though. The Division’s approach was to offer me another M60, this time at level 15. It looked the same as the old M60. It was the same quality as the old M60. It just happened to do 50% more damage because it was a level 15 gun as opposed to a level 8 gun. Weapons are constantly recycled in this fashion, with damage being determined by their level rather than what the weapon is — not only does this make no sense, but it also contributes to that problem with sameiness that I talked about earlier, as the weapons you are using at level 10 are the same as the ones you are using at level 30. They just do more damage now, is all.

This is an issue that extends to the enemies, who are members of one of four factions. One of them is the Last Man Standing PMC, who are edging their way into becoming the fourth member of the Universally Acceptable Enemies club (the first three being Nazis, zombies and aliens). They don’t show up until the end game, though, and their introduction is the first thing to shake the game up in a good long while since they like to fight using a lot of grenades fired from underbarrel launchers. For the first fifteen hours of the game, though, you’re fighting one of the first three groups of enemies. You’ve got your basic faction of “rioters” that The Division conflates with criminal gangs and whose just reward is to be shot on sight.  Then you’ve got a group of escaped prisoners called the Rikers; if you maybe feel a little conflicted about indiscriminately murdering these less-advantaged segments of society the game justifies it by showing you flashbacks of them all turning into deranged axe murderers the moment the quarantine went into effect, which I think says rather more about The Division’s writers and designers than they possibly intended. The same is true for the Cleaners, who are basically a bunch of blue-collar workers — the city’s garbage men, in effect — who have inexplicably decided to try to cleanse the infection by burning everyone who has it. Alive.

Once again, not only does it make precisely zero sense that society would break down to the point where you have binmen roaming the streets with flamethrowers to roast people inside their cars, but since all of these groups are introduced in the first two hours of the game (and the mechanical difference between them is so small anyway) you’re effectively fighting the same baddies throughout the entire thing.  For twenty hours. The only difference between a level 5 enemy and a level 30 enemy is the size of their healthbar and their damage output. The same goes for the quests and side missions you undertake in each area of the game; after you unlock the main hub area you get a mission to go to a safe house that’s a brisk couple of minutes’ walk away. Once you’re there, you get 1-2 “main” missions (think Strikes or dungeon runs; these are scripted experiences but every single one of them is just “shoot a bunch of dudes”) and 5-6 side missions. The side missions come in one of about seven types, but five of them (bounties, disrupt the arms deal, defend the supplies, defend the JTF officer, rescue the hostages) are completed by shooting people and so are functionally identical with minor variations. Again, though, you’ll see all of them in your first two hours with The Division, and I really hope you like them because that’s all the game has to offer for the next eighteen. Well, that and the Dark Zone.

Somewhat paradoxically the Dark Zone is the single shining point of light in The Division’s otherwise bleak MMO-esque landscape. You see, The Division goes a little light on the “massively” part of the descriptor as the entire game world is instanced rather than sharded. I’d occasionally see other players running around in Destiny finishing their own quests and in one case even randomly ran into a few high-level friends who were completing some dailies, but there’s naff all chance of that happening in The Division because the only place where you can even see other players are the insides of the safe houses. Once you go out of the safe house door you’re into the instanced portion of the game that’s shared only by you and whoever you happen to be partied with. This makes the vast majority of The Division more of a co-op game with an overelaborate loot/crafting system than it is even a pseudo-MMO.

(Personally I think the descriptor is still accurate considering how many of the MMO mechanics it steals; it just forgets to include the other players for the most part.)

Anyway, the only place you can encounter other players who are actually playing the game is in a walled-off area in the centre of the map called the Dark Zone. This area has been completely abandoned by the authorities; there are no quests and no JTF presence. The only inhabitants of the Dark Zone are groups of very tough purple and gold enemies who drop better-quality loot than non-Dark Zone enemies. If you succeed in downing one of these groups and picking up a nice epic-level machine gun, you’ll find you have two obstacles to overcome before you can actually use it. The first is that the Dark Zone is the area of the city where the virus infection is at its most severe; anything you pick up inside it is heavily contaminated and can’t be taken out through the ground-level checkpoints. Instead you have to call for a special extraction helicopter to remove those items and (presumably) take them to some sort of lab where they can be disinfected. Dark Zone items are kept in a special section of your inventory with a very limited number of slots, so it’s likely that even if you’re being selective you’ll have filled it up within twenty minutes or so and you’ll have to call for an extraction. And this is where things get interesting, because:

• Calling for an extraction helicopter sends out an alert to any nearby players with your location and the amount of time remaining before the helicopter arrives.
• Because the Dark Zone is also The Division’s PvP area, those nearby players can come and shoot you.
• And because you drop your Dark Zone inventory on death, they can then steal your items and extract them using your extraction helicopter.

This is a setup that’s supposed to promote paranoia and infighting amongst the various groups of players scavenging the Dark Zone for items. You’re always supposed to be watching your back in case any opportunistic bandits come along and decide they want your stuff. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite work that way; if you shoot another player you get marked on everyone’s map as a Rogue Agent and become fair game to be killed yourself without any repercussions, and in my experience (from the other side) this will result in a constant stream of law-abiding players trying to storm your location and collect the sizeable bounty on your head.  This makes it highly unlikely that you’ll be able to extract with your ill-gotten gains, and so most people don’t go Rogue since it isn’t worth the risk; the Dark Zone is for the most part a pretty well-mannered area where the players actually help each other out (since you’ll get a loot drop if you cause some damage to a named baddie even if it’s being shot by five other people at the same time) instead of killing each other. However, there is a minority of players that will try it on just for fun, and the experience of being cold-cocked from behind while you were engaged with an elite group of mobs does lend future ventures into the Dark Zone a certain nervous thrill that the rest of the game is sorely lacking.

The Dark Zone is accessible from level 10 (so about four hours in) which is one of the rare good decisions The Division makes; it’s the sort of thing I’d usually expect to be locked off for the endgame, and the fact that I can split my time between scavenger hunts in the Dark Zone and more braindead mashing of the fire button in the regular game is refreshing – and necessary. Outside of the Dark Zone The Division is nothing more than a mishmash of mechanics and features that might be individually well-executed but which are tied together by a nonsensical metagame that doesn’t even try to adapt itself to its setting³. As for that setting, it is remarkably dull with a backstory that has more than a few questionable overtones (the last time I played a game this unpleasant was Splinter Cell: Blacklist, but that at least had the saving grace of otherwise being an excellent stealth game) and a main plot that might as well be nonexistent.  I wasn’t too impressed with Destiny when I played it, but The Division’s mistakes rather ironically demonstrate how much Bungie got right and my opinion of it has retroactively improved just a little bit. And that’s about the best thing I’m going to take away from it since I’m deleting it from my hard drive now and I’m not looking back. Adios, The Division.

The post Thoughts: The Division appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

08/02 – I’m halfway through the XCOM 2 review and it’s shaping up to be a monster, so I’m postponing it to tomorrow so that I can a) finish it and b) get some screenshots that aren’t of the late game.

So I guess it’s admission time: I would not have had anywhere near as positive an opinion of Assassin’s Creed: Rogue as I did if I hadn’t immediately gone on to play Assassin’s Creed: Unity afterwards. Rogue is a great game, don’t get me wrong, but it wasn’t until I experienced the series debacle that is Unity that I realised I’d been taking a lot of the good stuff Rogue was doing completely for granted. It turns out there’s a hundred little things about Black Flag and Rogue — from the ease of the movement to the speed of the combat (even if it is a bit button-mashy) to the sheer sense of freedom that having a ship gives you — that you don’t notice until they’ve been replaced with clunky, regressive mechanics that take the AC series back at least five years to a time when it was far weaker as a game and was coasting largely on the strength of its history porn and a charismatic main character. This was fine when the star of the series was Ezio and the games were all set in Renaissance Italy (and Constantinople) and abused the historical elements of that setting in a particularly egregious yet crowd-pleasing way. It’s less fine when you have a lead with all the charm of a particularly smart-ass 12 year-old; a locale that, while not inherently dull, is something that Unity summarily fails to do anything even remotely interesting with; and an additional half-decade on the clock that means your game comes across as a relic from the very historical time period it is supposed to be set in.

Unity adheres almost slavishly to the formula that the Ezio trilogy already beat to within an inch of its life. It switches the relative freedom of the Caribbean/North Atlantic for a single city – an 18th century Paris that’s caught up in the epic convulsions of the French Revolution – and introduces a new protagonist in the form of Arno Dorian who is trying so hard to be the French Ezio. He’s young, orphaned by the Templars, and full of ill-advised rage and fury in his first (and in all likelihood) only outing that causes him to make some amazingly bad decisions during the course of Unity’s baffling plot. The game tries to play him as the same sort of carefree rogue that Ezio was, except it’s not nearly as well executed and he comes off a smug asshole instead – when combined with the terrible decision making mentioned above, it’s a toss-up between Arno and AC 3’s Connor for “Most Unlikeable AC Protagonist”¹. He falls in with the Assassins and starts chewing his way through a series of Templar stooges yadda yadda yawn I have played this game literally ten times already and the only thing interesting about Unity’s plot is that there’s a tenuous truce between the Templars and the Assassins that you spend all of your time actively sabotaging (firmly against the orders of the Assassin Council, which further reinforced the “Arno is a fucking idiot” impression I had).

There’s the usual framing guff about magical precursor artifacts and super DNA memories, but I think the thing I’m going to save most of my opprobrium for is the modern-day metaplot, which has always been a way for the Assassin’s Creed series to plumb exciting new depths of awfulness. It started out with the confusing saga of Desmond — and I suspect I was in a minority by actually liking Desmond himself, if not his story’s coherence — milked him for five games, moved on to the self-referential disaster of being a developer at Ubisoft self-insert Abstergo Entertainment in Black Flag and Rogue, and has now reached a new low by having my modern day avatar be… a guy (or gal) playing a video game. The Assassins call you up inside the game and ask you to help them decode Arno’s memories; this interaction is done directly with the player via your TV screen/monitor and it is absolutely cringeworthy because it’s played 100% straight, like the Assassins are on such hard times they really need the help of some schlub who spends all of his free time glued to a videogame trying to get sweet sweet cheevos². It makes the stakes so much lower to be essentially playing yourself, not to mention being somehow more implausible than the ridiculous doomsday storyline of Desmond.

I also have some issues with Unity’s use of the French Revolution setting. It was actually one of the things that intrigued me about the game as it’s a very unusual choice for the time period and I thought I might learn a few things, or at least see something I hadn’t seen done before in a video game. Unfortunately Unity makes the choice to use the Revolution more as a backdrop for its terrible plot than as something that drives the plot itself. It doesn’t help that the Revolution doesn’t have quite the same cultural penetration as the Golden Age of Piracy or the Italian Renaissance; it doesn’t have all that many well-known historical figures it can deploy in support of its setting, and the ones it does use are wasted in five-minute cameos. I didn’t get a great sense of a city in turmoil; the new engine allows bigger crowds on the streets but Paris didn’t particularly feel like it was undergoing a revolution, and since the plot wasn’t really interested in communicating that either it means that Unity doesn’t really have any historical flavour to it. Even the architecture is a bit boring, as aside from the landmarks 18th century Paris falls into the same blandly repetitive pitfall as AC 3’s Boston did. The amusing thing is that Ubisoft apparently agree with me, as they keep abusing glitches in the matrix to pull Arno out of the Revolution setting and into other time periods such as La Belle Epoque and World War 2. These are visually interesting, but creatively bankrupt as they are just painstakingly scripted experiences of the sort you’d find in a Call of Duty game. One of them even has a turret section. I’m laughing about it now, but I really wasn’t at the time.

Speaking of that new engine, there’s been a couple of other “innovations” that have finally made their way into Assassin’s Creed from other games. In particular it’s finally stolen Splinter Cell’s “last seen” mechanic, where passing out of the line of sight of a pursuing guard will leave behind a static silhouette that they’ll converge on instead of you. This is…okay, I guess, except for the new guards all being Terminators with very long vision ranges who have no trouble reacquiring you from three hundred metres down the street in the middle of one of those huge crowds. The Terminator thing is continued in Unity’s new combat system, which — in keeping with the rest of the game — is absolutely godawful. It’s supposed to be modelled on fencing with parries and ripostes being the order of the day, but the complete absence of the customary Break Defense button means it seems stilted and slow in comparison to the fast-paced massacres of Black Flag/Rogue and even AC 3. Higher level guards will have their guard up all the time, meaning you have to sit there and wait for them to hit you, and then counter and riposte.

This combat flow is not particularly interesting, and it’s rendered even worse by the removal of an explicit dodge action for evading gunfire; the Human Shield mechanic is gone (which is a big shame because I really liked it) and instead you have to repeatedly roll along the ground like a really shit Sonic the Hedgehog when you see the gunfire indicator come up – and even then you’ll only dodge the shot about a third of the time. This is particularly aggravating when you’re facing five guards and *all* of them whip out pistols at the same time since all guards have access to firearms now, not just the specialised snipers from Black Flag. Even more aggravating is that if a guard is winding up for a sword swing and you move back out of range, they’ll cheat by sliding forward (with no animation) as far as it takes in order for them to hit you. Oh, and regenerating health is gone; we’re back to the bad old days of chugging medicine to restore health. Because the combat system is so frustrating to deal with I lost health all the time, and because medicine is so expensive I ended up having to search every single corpse in order to keep my stocks up. Finally, and most bafflingly, Eagle Vision now has a cooldown. It’s like they were actively trying to fuck up everything Black Flag got right by deliberately crafting an AC game that would annoy the player as much as possible.

Unity makes further missteps when it comes to Arno’s inventory. You now level him up with Creed Points (or whatever the fuck) and unlock gadgets that way rather than having them made available to you at set points throughout the plot, meaning it is entirely possible to go through the entire game without getting access to stun grenades or poison gas. Because Unity now has microtransactions for in-game currency the usual Assassin dress-up has been subverted so that Arno’s various outfits now provide concrete stat bonuses and gameplay advantages; you can either grind for hours to buy these with regular old francs, or you can get them right now by buying Helix Credits! Aside from how distasteful it is that this system has been tuned so that you have to fork out even more money to get the most out of it (I paid for this game once already, Ubisoft), you also end up looking like a fool as you equip the clothing items that provide the best bonuses instead of the ones you like best in terms of looks. There are far more pieces of clothing available than in previous AC games, but since they only exist to support this bankrupt system of microtransactions I’m not going to give Unity an inch of slack for providing a theoretical increase in variety.

I never thought I’d say this, but Assassin’s Creed Unity handily beats out Assassin’s Creed 3 for the title of Worst Assassin’s Creed Game. I rag on AC 3 a lot and it was pretty terrible in a number of ways, but it did still have a few good points, such as the boat sections that provided a template for Black Flag and Rogue and some excellently-directed cutscenes (big spoilers if you’ve not played AC 3 yet). By contrast Unity basically doesn’t have a single redeeming feature that I can think of, except maybe that Ubisoft had fixed most of the notorious bugs by the time I got around to playing it. It is a pure regression of the series that ignores everything good that Black Flag and Rogue achieved, and that’s a natural consequence of the annualised nature of the AC series. In order to crank out an entry every year Ubisoft have to have multiple iterations in development at the same time at different studios, and that results in the series having this very Jekyll and Hyde nature where innovations in one game will not be present in the next because each of them were being developed in isolation according to their own set of design rules. In the case of Unity those design rules basically haven’t moved on since AC 2, and are combined with a dick of a protagonist, the worst plot the series has seen so far (and for AC that’s really saying something), a so-so setting, and the weaponised war crimes of game design that are now common to all Ubisoft games: an open world map that is absolutely crammed with pointless, inconsequential shit for the player to do, and an economy that’s been designed to try and induce the player to part with more cash via in-game microtransactions after they already shelled out for the game’s RRP. The only “good” thing about it is that after a string of 10-12 games that got more-or-less favourable reviews out of me I thought I might be getting soft, and so I’m actually a little relieved that I did force myself to play AC: Unity: it is quite obviously and unabashedly A Bad Game, and so I can fairly give it the thrashing it so richly deserves.

The post Thoughts: Assassin’s Creed Unity appeared first on The Scientific Gamer.

It’s 2016 now, and I find myself suffering from the same bout of madness I did almost exactly three years ago: a delusional desire to play through all extant Assassin’s Creed titles in one fell swoop. I’ll stagger the reviews out over a few months so this blog doesn’t turn into all AC all the time.

Assassin’s Creed: Rogue is a bit of an odd game. On the surface it looks like a shameless cash-in on the excellent Black Flag: it was released just one year after Black Flag and uses a reskinned version of the same engine and most of the same gimmicks (i.e. boats). It was also available for last-generation consoles only, which heightened my impression that it wasn’t really anything more than an attempt to squeeze one last bit of cash out of the 360 and PS3 install base before everyone’s attention moved on to the now current-gen Xbox One and PS4. I picked it up mostly because it was cheap, because it let me play as series bad guys the Templars, and because even if it was just a blatant reskin of Black Flag it wouldn’t be too bad because Black Flag was really, really good. I wasn’t expecting great things from Rogue at all.

Which is why I find myself somewhat surprised to be writing the following sentence: if Black Flag didn’t exist, Rogue would be the best game in the series yet.

I actually think Rogue is better than Black Flag in several ways. Unfortunately the reskin impression I got wasn’t a million miles off the mark, and so everything Rogue does has to be considered in light of its parent game; Black Flag already did most of the heavy lifting where the basic game mechanics are concerned, meaning it’d be a little unfair to give Rogue too much credit when a fair chunk of its goodness has been lifted wholesale from its progenitor. The sailing and naval combat system has made it through almost entirely unchanged (which I view as a good thing since it was by far the best part of Black Flag) and Rogue hasn’t seen fit to mess with other core elements of the franchise such as the sneaking and fighting. It’s taken an iterative approach where those things are concerned, changing a couple of minor aspects and bolting a few things on, but otherwise leaving them unmolested. And that’s fine. That’s a large part of why Rogue works so well; it’s built on the bones of what was already a very strong game. However, that’s not to say it doesn’t make a significant effort to fix some of the weaker aspects of Black Flag - i.e. most things where you weren’t on a boat.

Rogue has you playing as Shay Cormac, a trainee Assassin voiced by a Canadian actor who is doing what I assume is supposed to be an Irish accent that ended up wandering around various parts of England throughout the game. Shay isn’t as likeable as Black Flag protagonist Edward Kenway and is in fact a little bit of a blank sheet of paper (“Irish” is his defining character trait), but he at least isn’t as bad as actual plank of wood Connor from AC 3. Shay starts the game doing various odd jobs for the Colonial Assassin brotherhood, which provides a nice bit of continuity by including returning characters such as an older version of Black Flag’s Adewale and a younger version of AC 3’s mentor assassin Achilles, but which also turns out to be a little too single-minded in their pursuit of the magical Precursor macguffins that have been the driving force behind every Assassin’s Creed game to date. After one of his errands inadvertently causes the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 and kills a hundred thousand people, Shay understandably starts to question the wisdom of retrieving these artifacts and defects to the Templars to foil the Assassins’ plans and prevent the same catastrophe from happening again, all against the backdrop of the North American portion of the Seven Years’ War between the British and the French.

This is… not quite as effective a setup as I’d hoped it would be.  The Templars are the bad guys. Playing as the bad guys is supposed to be fun, or at least interesting. That’s why the prologue of AC 3 where you played as Haytham Kenway was so great; he seemed like a decent chap on the surface but was willing to go to whatever lengths were necessary in order to achieve his goals, which put him in a moral grey area that I thought Rogue would spend a little more time exploring. Instead all Ubisoft have really done is the script for a standard Assassin’s Creed game with a find/replace command on the terms “Assassin” and “Templar”; in Rogue it’s the Templars who are the good guys and the Assassins who are doing heinous stuff like running criminal gangs in New York and manufacturing poison gas to destroy their enemies. There’s no real moral struggle for Shay as he comes to terms with his new position. He chews through the Assassin lineup just as he would if they were Templars, and the game’s attempts to justify this and paint Shay as a good guy by making the Assassins the bad guys make this far less interesting than it should be. I’m fine with the Assassins and Templars being as bad as each other at different points in their history, but Rogue doesn’t make great use of this concept at all.

Ah well. Shay at least gets much more baller outfits in the Templar order than he does in the Assassin brotherhood, complete with fancy red and black colour scheme, and his ship also gets a set of cool crimson sails. (But it’s okay, he’s definitely not a bad guy.) It’s actually pretty impressive how quickly Rogue cuts through the bullshit to hand you the ship; the AC series is notorious for its overlong tutorial segments, which is why I was very surprised to see Rogue rushing through the running/jumping/fighting/sneaking tutorial in less than ten minutes and then moving straight on to ship combat. The whole dedicated tutorial segment took less than a quarter of an hour, and while Rogue does continue to introduce new concepts to you throughout the game they’re handled in an unusually brief fashion. If the plot is intent on not letting me have any fun as the bad guy, I can at least applaud the fact that the game itself put as few barriers as possible between me starting the game and plying the North Atlantic in my own upgradable ship.

This is the other big difference between Rogue and Black Flag: the change in venue from the sunny Caribbean to the cold, bleak waters of the North Atlantic. Rogue is split out into several maps: you’ve got the North Atlantic,which is your classical ocean zone full of icebergs, squalls and shipping to plunder; an inland area of narrow channels and lakes punctuated by many islands called River Valley; and finally New York, which is the stereotypical Assassin’s Creed city. By doing this Rogue actually manages to serve up all the best bits of the series so far combined into a single game, which is a large part of why it endeared itself to me so much; it plays kind of like a Greatest Hits version of Assassin’s Creed. The North Atlantic provides the meat of the Black Flag sailing gameplay, River Valley has some wilderness areas that are far better judged than the ones in AC 3 and which are just plain fun to explore, and New York repeats the towers controlling economic districts of Brotherhood.  New York itself comes across as a successful attempt to compensate for one of the legitimate complaints about Black Flag – that while the sailing was great, the various settlements dotted around the map were really boring to explore. New York and River Valley change that, but for me the North Atlantic was the standout area; the palette swap to a freezing ice-strewn ocean might be mostly superficial, but I like it a lot more than the Caribbean setting. It’s also got some neat explorable areas of its own, including shipwrecks and ice floes.

The other changes Rogue makes are tweaks to the Black Flag formula more than anything else; during the first few hours they came across as pretty similar games, but sitting down to write this review I realise there are enough good ones to give Rogue its own character. Take sailing, for example: bounty hunters can now ram into you and board your ship, making them a bit more threatening; your own ram is now much more effective thanks to a boost ability specifically for ramming; and the small cannons on your ship’s rail have been replaced with puckle guns, which Rogue makes into a sort of 18th century autocannon. They fulfil the previous role of shooting weak points on enemy ships for massive damage, but they’re also now incredibly useful when boarding enemy ships as you can use them to snipe enemy sailors off the deck as you reel them in. As the criteria for winning most minor boarding actions is “Kill X sailors” this means you can often win without ever having to actually board the other ship, which is an absolute godsend when you don’t want to faff around with capturing your fiftieth brig. Larger ships have additional objectives so while the puckle guns make boarding them easier they don’t trivialise them completely, and the nicest touch of all is that if you’re boarding a man ‘o war – the toughest ship class in the game – the decks on the opposing ship are so high up you can’t hit anyone on them with the guns. You have to do it straight up. Now that’s a well thought-out game mechanic.

The additions Rogue makes to the fighting and sneaking are far less pronounced; there’s a grenade launcher that you can load with various types of gas, and because you’re now fighting against Assassins there’s a new enemy type that hides in bushes/haystacks/whatever and waits to hit you with an ambush attack that’ll take off half your health bar. There are new side missions and collectibles that reflect the new tenor of the game, but I didn’t engage with them all that much; I learned a long time ago that Ubisoft put far too much in these damn games to make collecting them for their own sake worthwhile (especially since they crank out one game per year, which means you just find yourself doing the whole slog all over again soon enough), so I just did enough to get me some nice sea shanties and ship upgrades. What I will say is that they seem more intelligently laid out than in the past, with many of the wilderness areas in River Valley constructed around the collectibles like a good platformer. If I had taken leave of my senses and decided to try and 100% an Assassin’s Creed game, it’d probably be Rogue; it seems like it’d be more fun to do it here than in any of the others.

To a certain degree, Rogue is Black Flag all over again. It does a fair bit to establish its own identity but at the end of the day the shameless reuse of assets (models, animations, colouring in all the soldiers white instead of red and calling them French) from Black Flag means it couldn’t escape that comparison even if it wanted to. If it is Black Flag, though, it is at least Black Flag with most of the rough edges sanded off. The plot isn’t as incomprehensible as Black Flag’s, the Abstergo Entertainment sequences make an unfortunate return but are thankfully minimised, and the core mechanics are just a tad more satisfying thanks to the new additions and improvements. Does this justify Rogue’s existence alongside Black Flag? I think it does, but then I enjoy the period and the sailing gameplay enough to stomach a whole new game of it. If you’ve already played Black Flag, then that makes the choice fairly easy, at least: do you want to play more Black Flag? Buy Rogue. Don’t want to play more Black Flag? Don’t buy Rogue. However, possibly the biggest compliment I can pay Rogue is this: if you haven’t played Black Flag then I’d probably recommend Rogue over it since it’s a better all-around package – that is, unless you really like pirates.

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