Assassin's Creed Unity (2014)

 Assassin's Creed Unity was the first in the series to be exclusively released on eighth generation consoles. It came out on November 12th, 2014 on PS4, Xbox One, and Windows. 

Plot

The game starts in 1307 with the capture of Templar Grandmaster Jacques de Molay as the French army attacks their temple. De Molay sends one of his subordinates to hide a Sword of Eden as an Assassin pursues the Templar. The Sword is hidden and the Templar is killed soon afterwards. De Molay is captured and executed some years later, with the Templar Order publicly disbanded. 

At this point, an Assassin named Bishop interrupts the memory and talks to the player, asking for their help in finding a Sage during the French Revolution. The player is made an Assassin Initiate and transported to the Palace of Versailles in 1776, reliving Arno Dorian's memories. Arno is visiting the palace with his father Charles and meets Élise de la Serre, a young girl his age that he plays with. When he returns to his father, he finds that Charles has been murdered (see the ending of Assassin's Creed Rogue) and he is taken in by Élise's father, François. 

Thirteen years later, Arno remains François's ward as Élise studies in Paris. As the Estates General begins to gather, Arno is supposed to deliver a letter to François but sneaks off to spend time with Élise. Arno is interrupted by a guard and leave, only to find François murdered. Arno is blamed for the murder and thrown in the Bastille. There he meets the Assassin Pierre Bellec, who reveals that Charles was an Assassin and the de la Serres were Templars. He trains Arno while imprisoned until they both escape during the Storming of the Bastille. 

Arno tries to reach out to Élise, but she reveals that the letter Arno failed to deliver to her father would have warned him of the murder attempt. Arno is distraught at being turned away by Élise and seeks out the Assassins and joins them. They grant him permission to hunt down François's murderers, as the Assassins and Templars had a truce at the time and the murder threatened to end that. 

The investigation leads Arno to assassinate Charles Sivert and the Roi des Thunes. His continuing investigation leads him to François-Thomas Germain, who smithed the weapon that killed de la Serre. Germain points him in the direction of Chrétien Lafrienière, who Arno also assassinates. This draws the ire of the Assassin council, who had not given him permission to commit the assassination. 

Arno discovers that Élise is in danger from a Templar ambush and rescues her. They agree to work together to find her father's murderers, despite he status as a Templar. The Assassin leader Mirabeau allows this and Élise reveals that Germain was exiled by her father from the Templars, which leads Arno to believe Germain was behind François's murder. Before they can act, Mirabeau is murdered and Arno discovers Bellec is the killer. Bellec does not want a truce with the Templars and fights Arno when the latter will not go along with him. Arno is forced to kill Bellec as a result. 

Following Mirabeau's death, the Assassin council sends Arno to recover correspondence between Mirabeau and King Louis XVI before it falls into the wrong hands. Arno retrieves the letters, meeting an artillery officer named Napoleon Bonaparte along the way. Bonaparte helps Arno track down one of Germain's accomplices, Frédéric Rouille. Assassinating Rouille leads Arno to Marie Lévesque, who was plotting to starve Paris to create unrest. After killing her, Arno finds a plot to have Louis XVI executed by another accomplice of Germain, Louis-Michael de Peletier. Upon assassinating him, Arno finds that Germain will be at the king's execution, leaving he and Élise to attempt to assassinate him there. 

Germain, however, anticipates them and escapes and Arno saves Élise instead of pursuing Germain. Élise is furious with him for letting Germain escape and leaves him. Arno returns to the Assassin council, who expels him for assassinating without permission. Arno returns to Versailles and begins drinking. Élise finds him there some months later and convinces him to return to Paris to stop the Reign of Terror. Before he goes, Arno assassinates La Touche, an accomplice of Germain, and finds Germain's last accomplice is the man behind the Terror, Maximillien de Robespierre. 

Arno and Élise decide that discrediting Robespierre would better reveal Germain's hiding spot as opposed to killing him. Robespierre is arrested and briefly escapes, before being recaptured by Arno and Élise. Robespierre reveals Germain's location before being sent off to his execution. Arno and Élise pursue Germain to the Temple where the Sword of Eden is hidden, but not before Germain gets the Sword. Arno is trapped and Élise fights Germain until the Sword becomes unstable and explodes, killing Élise and mortally wounding Germain. Arno finishes Germain off, revealing that he was a Sage. 

Arno buries Élise with her father and returns some years later to the Temple to find Germain's skeleton. He places the bones among the endless number of other bones in the Paris catacombs, leaving Bishop satisfied that Abstergo would not be able to find the Sage's remains.

Gameplay

Unity took better advantage of eighth generation capabilities than Black Flag was, as it had the best graphics of any game in the series up to that point. The game is restricted to merely Paris and nearby Versailles, but the level of detail is stunning. Not that this has to due with the gameplay per se, but Unity's model of the Notre Dame cathedral is so accurate that there was some speculation it may be used in the effort to rebuild the cathedral after the devastating fire last year, not that it came to anything.

 Since naval combat and exploration from the previous three games are gone, this game focuses on side missions that can be completed in the city. These include solving murder mysteries, such as Jean-Paul Marat, and solving Nostradamus riddles, which unlocks a special outfit. Arno's base is the Café Theatre, which can be renovated and has its own missions to be completed. During the course of the game, the Initiate occasionally has to escape the memory sequence to avoid being detected by Abstergo, and these Rifts contain missions of their own. 

Collectibles include cockades, treasure chests, and artifacts. Unity also introduces co-op missions, which allow the player to work in teams of up to four to complete assassination missions and heists. Sync points are another collectible that only exist in these co-op missions. 

Unity introduces a precursor to the levelling system of later games. The player's gear, (hood, chestplate, belt, weapons, etc.) determines the player's level based on a five star rating. Different areas of Paris have different levels of enemies, so the higher a player's gear, the higher their rating becomes, and enemies become more manageable to fight. 

Tools include the Phantom Blade, which fires a silent bolt from the Hidden Blade mechanism. Smoke bombs and poison gas can be used as well to distract and damage enemies. 

Thoughts

This game was very difficult to get through. Not because I did not like the storyline, though admittedly it wasn't as interesting as previous games. It was technical issues that made this game hard to get through. To put it this way, I was so fed up with playing the first time through, I only got 52% synchronization the first time through. Compare that to the next game, Syndicate, which I got 93% synchronization on the initial playthrough. 

The player movement in this game is easily the most unmanageable of any game in the series, including the original game. When trying to run forward, the player would try to jump up the nearest obstacle, climbing up and down buildings was difficult because the movement would always try to deflect sideways instead of straight up or down, and I would get stuck on random objects like chairs and not be able to jump off. I once got stuck on a chair in combat and was unable to continue fighting and was killed once. 

Speaking of combat, if you are do not have the proper level, you were thoroughly outclassed in an instant. Even if you were overpowered, combat was still difficult due to the jerky player movement and the snipers shooting at the player that never seemed to miss and could be fired at a rate that was entirely unreasonable for the flintlock musket era. 

The coop missions were aggressively aggravating. To be clear, I always play games solo. I don't even play Fortnite with anyone else. While other Assassin's Creed games had had multiplayer modes, starting with Brotherhood, they were not required to achieve 100% synchronization. It was required in Unity. On top of that, you would need a PSN subscription to even be able to play coop with other people. The coop missions were a nuisance to complete, especially one mission that required capturing four dozen flags in a short time frame, which was a near impossibility playing solo with the broken player movement. 

Given that it was set at the French Revolution, ever-present mobs existed all over the city. They were difficult to get through, often forcing me to jump over buildings and be at the mercy of the difficult player movement. Some of the crowds were so big that the game had trouble rendering them, forcing frame rate drops that do not exist in any other game in the series. 

By the end of my most recent playthrough, which I did get 100% synchronization on through many infuriating moments, I was ready to be done. Fortunately, the next game ran much more smoothly and was far more enjoyable.