(I powered through the game using the same attack-parry-stun-attack combos.) The new press-a-button-to-stick cover system often disregards your input and can’t be depended on during hair-trigger maneuvers. While combat is more gratifying and enemies more aggressive, your bag of tricks remains small and the opponent A.I. Adding a button that lets you crouch gives you more approach options (to say nothing of making you feel stealthier), but the new guard-luring gimmicks–cherry bombs or taunting guards to probe by letting yourself be spotted then breaking the sightline–often fail because the guards seem to know you’re waiting and stop short of your hiding spot, even as you absurdly pepper them with fireworks. Other changes seem like half-measures or outright missteps. Carried over to the new cooperative play modes, where you and up to three other players can work together to dispatch operatives or recover loot, and Unity surpasses its predecessors. Those missions now feel like proper assassination puzzles, the game dropping you outside heavily patrolled fortresses and folding in optional goals you can engage to tweak your infiltration routes or unlock distractions. One of those skills, lockpicking, finally strikes the right balance between twitchy and skillful and now applies to doors that can open up alternate routes in missions. There’s even a modest roleplaying angle: weapons, clothing, stealth moves and combat abilities–most familiar with a few wrinkles–are now spending-based unlocks that let you finesse your play style meaningfully. And Eagle Vision, the game’s spot-the-bad-guys radar system, now only works for brief periods, encouraging more judicious use. A downward free-run option (hold a button to climb down automatically) makes descending from even the highest points quick and safe. The new 3D overview map helps you better pinpoint objects in a 3D world. It’s a shame, because so much else about Unity‘s design overhaul works. And I ran into this in even the simplest scenarios: dangling from a rope between buildings or hanging from the edge of an unobstructed platform (he’d neither climb nor drop), or trying to dive Dukes of Hazard style through an open window (hammering the button the game keeps telling me to hammer while ignoring my input). Not “That next thing’s too high up, find another way” stymied, but “Why am I halfway up this continuous lattice and hitting all the right buttons and he’s frozen stiff?” I’m not misreading the path, because if I hammer the buttons or reset the thumbstick, he’ll swing into action and clear the distance, no problem. It’s harmless enough when you’re wall-crawling freeform, but under the gun, say in one of those target-tailing missions with bonus challenges like “don’t touch the water,” whiffing the mission because Arno decides to dive off a wooden post into the drink instead of leaping to the next one on the third or fourth replay is exasperating.Ĭlimb a building with clearly navigable points and sometimes Arno gets stuck. I haven’t fought the controls like this since the original Assassin’s Creed. I expect some slack in any 360-degree motion system, but this is something else. If I zig, odds are one out of four he’ll zag. If I push one way, he’ll occasionally leap in another. What I do know, is that Arno, the game’s French protagonist–an assassin who’s confused revenge for redemption in the game’s story–sometimes has a mind of his own. Maybe some of that will be ironed out in future patches. (That’s not an idle complaint the game actually stutters severely in spots.) Maybe it’s just buggy. Sometimes it’s clearly the game’s impaired frame rate in large crowds lagging behind your input. Perhaps it’s the busier world geometry, its handholds and footpaths multiplied who-knows-how-many-fold, making it even easier to snag on something. Unity feels like a step back, though it’s hard to pinpoint why. Moving through the Assassin’s Creed games has always been fidgety, but it’s steadily improved over the years.
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In short, Unity is a phenomenal world-building achievement held back by a glitchy navigation system. But then you push a button and leap from your roost and start moving through this ridiculously intricate insurrection simulator, clambering over realistically uneven slate rooftops and corroded chimneys linked by fictional passage-smoothing plank and rope skyways, only to find the actual game sagging beneath the weight of its world design.