With a new year comes a new Assassin’s Creed, and Ubisoft does all they can to innovate their franchise time and again, reinventing both their own game and the stealth genre altogether. With the most recent trailer of Assassin’s Creed Unity, we see that Ubisoft has scaled yet another hurdle, as they have innovated and improved upon their stealth and free run mechanics, as well as integrating co-op into the campaign experience.
The game is set in Paris and centers around Arno Dorian and his fellow Assassin’s as they expose the Templar connections to the upcoming French Revolution. This creates the setting for the introduction of a new form of co-op gameplay, which looks to be promising. The assistance of fellow players in-game allows you to traverse through an area more efficiently, prevent teammates from getting detected, and speedily thinning enemy ranks. This brings to life the implication of an Assassin’s brotherhood, as now there can be constant four player action at all times.
Another notable improvement is navigation options for the character and the environment. Your assassin can now leap off of virtually any surface, and downscale a large building fluently in a matter of seconds via the new downward parkour system. The cover system has been improved as well, looking more like most third-person games that allow you to take cover, allowing you to cling and wrap your way around objects to better avoid being detected.
The scale of the game has been tremendously expanded upon as well. There are now seemingly thousands of NPCs present on screen at once, all acting independently and responding to your actions. Now you can also go into almost one of every four buildings, possibly discovering new side quests and activities to partake in. Clearly this game is being showcased as being a massive, living and breathing sandbox that the player can manipulate for their amusement.
Other features such as the combat seemingly remained virtually untouched with the exception of minor tweaks to the enemy’s resilience to attacks, making combat slightly more difficult, encouraging the player to exercise stealth more frequently. Assassin’s Creed Unity has the potential to be the next big Ubisoft success, which we can look forward to when the game drops later this year on October 28th for Xbox One, PS4 and Windows PC.
Check out trailers showing off the co-op gaming experience, the CG cinematic and an introduction to the latest Assassin to join the ranks, Arno Dorian.
