Assassin’s Creed Unity: The Not So Finished Review

Assassin’s Creed Unity takes us back to Paris, France during the late 1700s revolutionary war, where we’re thrust into the shoes of Arno Dorian and his story during this difficult and historically significant time. Unfortunately, his story cannot yet be told, and our review has been cut short due to the tremendous number of technical issues that are painfully apparent in Assassin’s Creed Unity.

I’m sure by now you’ve already heard of this game’s many technical problems through other news sources; we even touched on some of these the other day when we reported that Ubisoft’s stock had dropped by almost 9% after the game’s abysmal launch. In the wake of this fiasco Ubisoft has launched a blog to better inform customers on what they are intending to fix in future patches.

The bottom line is, there is no doubt that Assassin’s Creed Unity has got a whole boat-load of problems.

As of right now the most common technical problem is performance that is much worse than could be reasonably expected. I personally have a GTX 980 with an AMD 8350 CPU and there are certain areas where even going to the lowest settings with 1080P resolution, the game will struggle to maintain 20 FPS. Even those who have GTX 980s in SLI, including three-way, have immense difficulty properly running this game. There are even reports of this happening on consoles.

The root of the problems must be related to the game engine because these problems increase exponentially when the number of NPCs grows on screen. This suspicion was confirmed, in my mind at least, when I was running around Paris. Things like clothing on NPCs would instantly change right in front of me; there would also be instances of NPCs either appearing or disappearing and other various graphical problems that didn’t happen when there were fewer NPCs on screen.

To compound the technical issues even further the game just suddenly started to crash to desktop on my 2nd day of review. It happened when I was watching the start up Ubisoft logo, loading a level and when going to a new area in Paris. I did all I could to troubleshoot this issue but nothing I did proved beneficial.

Other notable glitches were the NPCs not sounding alarms, targets getting stuck in walls, walls having light bleed through them because they weren’t joined together properly and the game not providing rewards upon completion of challenges. Now I could keep going on about all of the problems that I experienced in Assassin’s Creed Unity but it would be a very long list.

After experiencing so many problems and discussing them with my editor-in-chief, we both agreed that it was best to not fully review the game in its current state.

Despite all these technical problems there were a lot of things that I liked about this game. The story was very intriguing from the start, and the main characters were interesting. There were also new investigation side missions, plus the combat felt more fluid with multiple enemies to fight. The data entries were more interesting as well. Finally, the art crew did a fantastic job bringing the iconic buildings of Paris to life.

Where I felt Assassin’s Creed Unity was the weakest was the music; it was very generic and didn’t encapsulate the period at all. The naval combat is completely removed from this game and in a way this felt like a step backwards because it was something to do other than running around and stabbing so that diversion is greatly missed. I wasn’t always impressed with the art either, many of the city buildings looked like ones from Assassin’s Creed III, therefore it felt like I was in colonial America not in Paris France in some places.

There were many online and mobile features that I did not take advantage of with Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag. This time I chose to give these features an in-depth look. My motivation for this was cemented by my inability to access certain chest rewards unless I completed objectives in these additional apps outside of the game. However, because Uplay was either down or broken, the Companion app broke when anyone linked it to their Uplay account and the Initiates web app did not have any active objectives. It meant that not only was the game broken but so was every single one of its additional features were to.

Assassin’s Creed Unity is the game we got but it isn’t the one that we deserved. The is the least playable game in the franchise to date but for all of its problems, I still want to play this game so Ubisoft, if you want to start making amends, then you need to fix this game. And it’s probably best if you do it in the next few weeks before the holiday break begins. Fixing the micro-transaction system shouldn’t be your top priority. Taking almost 4 months to patch the game until it is playable, like you did Watch dogs, just won’t cut it either.

Editors Update: Corrected stock drop figure.