Assassin's Creed Rapid Fire: Revelations, Unity, and Syndicate

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My revisit of the Assassin's Creed games sped up a bit over the weekend.  I finished my full re-playthrough of Assassin's Creed Revelations and then went into "sampling" mode for the other games in the series.

Revelations is an interesting one, in that it's the most ambitious storytelling they do in the first five or six Assassin's Creed games.  It ties Desmond, Altair, and Ezio together and has them all communicating across time and space.  It works surprisingly well.  The gameplay in it is iterative with some new gimmicks, but it is definitely the strongest gameplay and storytelling of the Ezio collection.

I'm skipping over Black Flag for now since I know I really like that game and it's a great time waster.  My plan is to come back around to it at the end.

Which brings me to Unity.  Assassin's Creed Unity is the worst mainline game in the series.  They tried a lot of new things as they brought the series to a new console generation.  It was ambitious but it doesn't gel into a good game.  I tried to find some fun in it but, after a handful of hours, decided that this is one series entry I'm going to set down for good.  Even after all these years, it's still a buggy mess that isn't very fun to play moment to moment.

It seems like they took everything that didn't work for Unity, fixed it, and mixed it into more of the good systems from previous entries in the series... and that's what gave rise to Syndicate.  I think Assassin's Creed Syndicate is the best game in the old style of AC games.  It's hard to measure it against the later games (when Ubisoft went full RPG with the series) but that's ok.  This is the game I would recommend that series newcomers should try if they want to get a taste for what Assassin's Creed used to be.  It has the highest production values, a solid story, an interesting time period, some fantastic characters, and excellent gameplay systems.

I would still love to know what an evolution of Assassin's Creed Syndicate would look like.  It seems like we'll never get to find out because the series had a major pivot into the action RPG genre with the release of Origins.

It's been super interesting to dive into the backlog of this series again and see all the changes and evolutions.  This revisit has reminded me how much I truly love the Assassin's Creed series overall.

Next up in my revisit will be the jump to Assassin's Creed Origins and the pivot into the RPG genre.

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