Assassin’s Creed Unity takes place in war torn France in the late 1700’s during the French Revolution. The ongoing conflict between the Assassins and the Knight’s Templars continue on. In the game, you play as Arno Dorion, a second-generation Assassin who is out for vengeance and justice on the man who killed his father during his youth and to stop the ongoing threat of the Templars. His trusty, sometimes shaken ally is his childhood friend and love interest, the beautiful Elise, who accompanies you in some of your missions.
The game’s CG is done very well, looking like a movie, although the game doesn’t focus a whole lot of CG, and focuses more on gameplay. The controls of this game is stiff, making it tricky to control your character, Arno while doing freestyle parkour and trying to stay out of sight from foes. Featured in this game are a variety of weapons that you can customize Arno with. He can be armed with different single handed swords, long weapons, and heavy duty weapons. Two-handed weapons would’ve been great to have in this game like the previous AC game, Black Flag had. Melee combat is simple, although it can be overwhelming to fight multiple enemies. Arno has different gadgets he can use, such as Smoke Bombs, to help you temporarily blind your enemies and disappear. Stun Grenades, can help you stun and blind your enemies, Cherry Bombs, (which I find somewhat pointless to use) to distract your foe for a stealth kill. Arno uses hidden blades for stealth kills. He can stealth kill in various ways, walking up from behind, running stealth kills, coming out of hiding places such as walls, curtains, haystacks, guard rails and the like, stealth kills and while climbing walls and stabbing your victim and throwing him off of a tower fortress, and Air assassinations. You can purchase skills with melee, stealth and long range. You can make Arno perform a double stealth kill walking up to victims, running at them or aerial assassination.
Range weapons has single pistol or single rifle. The newest, coolest feature of the game is the Phantom Blade, which looks like a miniature version of the cross bow, which is good and long range stealth, one is to kill and the other is the Berserk Phantom Blade where he can shoot at an enemy and he can go crazy which causes him to go off team killing, which helps you a lot to decrease the overwhelming odds. The best thing about the entire Assassin’s Creed game is strategy and tactics along with survival skills in terms of using your resources wisely. The game puts to good use on how to figure out a way to infiltrate mansions, fortress, hideouts, and so forth the easier way. After disposing your foes you can loot to get a little bit of money and ammo for your various weapons. It can take time to get a hang of the gameplay controls and it takes time getting use to the targeting system. Utilizing eagle vision can come in handy while using stealth to avoid overwhelming combat situations and helps more for targeting the victim. When on the brink of getting caught by a guard while moving, Arno’s ghostly silhouette image appears, citing on where the enemy must have suspiciously seen the intruder.
You can purchase different, fancy outfits for Arno if you are tired of having him wear the same, original outfit. It’s best to spend your money wisely and don’t bother trying to put down thousands and thousands of Francs to unlock all the costumes.
There is also a free DLC subtitled Unity: Dead Kings, where, shortly after the events of Unity, Arno travels to a town called Franciade, to investigate ancient relics used by the Kings of old. He must go through the underground caverns of Franciade and fight through Raiders and find these relics. Arno uses a lantern to help him through dark areas of the caverns, the most tricky part is that the caverns is like going through the labyrinth to get to your destination or to find an exit. It’s not like Super Mario Bros. going down the pipe to play an underground level and then reach the warp zone room to skip a few levels (underground theme music goes off in my head when playing the cavern levels). There are also perplexing puzzles to figure out in order to progress.
Assassin’s Creed Unity is a fun, open world adventure game to play. The only flaw I find in the game is that it is difficult and a little frustrating to control Arno’s parkour ability other than that, the combat style is fluid and simple, heavy use of tactics and survival strategies and amazing graphics and CG along with realistic acting looks great. If you are a fan the Assassin’s Creed franchise, this game is worth to purchase.