With a new generation of console hardware, comes better graphics, bigger environment, and more of almost everything. This rings true for Unity. There are crowds on the street, NPCs feel much more organic than previous titles. The buildings are enormous, and filled with detail. You feel you are actually traversing the streets and buildings of Paris in the late 17th century. The infiltration missions were diverse, and offered unique routes and approaches. You can poison the wine, or you can cause distraction within a crowd, or simply just sneak above and drop assassinate them. Finally! the devs found a way to break the repetitiveness within missions experienced in the previous titles.
The difficulty is also way higher, which I welcome. It was extremely easy to blast through 20 guards in the last titles due to the over powered tools you had. But in Unity, items are way more limited. And you can no longer assassinate people during a smoke or stun. Sleep darts are taken out, and you only get max 2 berserk darts. All this promotes stealth, over aggression, which is great.
All that sounds great...BUT it's all ruined by one fundamental factor: the controls. The environment is detailed, yes, but this becomes a problem. When you free run, your character will often hop onto a random object on the ground instead of going around. While climbing a tower, you'll often find yourself jumping to the wrong ledge. There's simply too many things to go to. Unless your camera and joystick are aligned perfectly to the object you want to get to, you'll often not move or jump to the wrong thing. This is absolutely kills the pace of the game during chase sequences especially. Because of how volatile your character is, jumping to the wrong thing, or staying in the same spot, can mean massive health depletion. Or wasting medicine or smoke bombs. It is a very frustrating experience. There are also times where I've successfully stealthed through a large section, but only to be seen because an unintended jump was made.
The narrative was not very engrossing either. The plot is extremely political. I'm not big on history, as I mainly care about the fued between Assassins and Templars, and their relation with the present and past. I found myself not caring for the allies that died, or the enemies I killed. I felt no bond with them, as they all lacked character development. There was also an absence of present day sequences, which were a staple to the AC series. No Abstergo building and modern Templars vs Assassins. Virtually no story development in the present. This was a huge let down, as those were one of my favorite parts in the past titles.
Overall, Unity had potential, but the controls made it an extremely frustrating experience. And it barred me from enjoying the positive changes that were made to the game.