GeorgeHillier
Prolific Poster
Assassin's Creed Unity
Price on purchase £32 from cdkeys.com (£50 on Uplay)
Gameplay 8.5/10
The gameplay of Assassin's Creed Unity is close to that of AC II, Brotherhood and Revelations, but has been enhanced in some ways. One main difference is there are no more of the follow missions, in which you aimlessly follow someone around and listen into their conversation. Instead of the old filler misisons there are more assassination missions, making the game feel a lot more like an assassin's Creed game, which the last two games failed to achieve.
The fighting in ACU has been changed quite a bit, there's no counter attack, which makes fighting multiple enemies a lot more difficult and encourages you to be more stealthy, making the assassination missions a lot more interesting. They have also added multiple ranged weapons and bombs. There's a smoke grenade, stun grenade, poison grenade and your phantom blade, the bombs are quite useful and I find myself using them very often to stealth past an area or to gain an advantage while fighting, unlike in other Assassin's Creed games when the bombs just felt like a gimmick they'd added and never ended up using them. The phantom blade is basically the replacement on throwing knifes, poison darts etc, it has standard blades which take 1 hit (usually) to kill a standard enemy and berserk blades which are the equivalent to the poison darts which used to make enemies attack their allies.
They have now added skills to the game, at the end of any mission (Storyline mission, Co-op mission, Assassin Contract, heist, etc) you are awarded skill points, these points can then be used to unlock certain skills, ranging from basic skills that you started with in previous Assassin's Creed games, such as double assassination, to new skills, such as lockpicking and an improved phantom blade.
Storyline 9/10 & Side Missions 7.5/10
The storyline in ACU is great, compared to AC4 and AC3 it's brilliant, it goes back to AC Brotherhood style story, where you're an actual Assassin. The story is enjoyable and the Assassination missions are a lot better now, there's a lot less hand holding and a lot more freedom given to you; you can choose how you approach an assassination, how to get in and out, you can create distractions and save civilians who will then help you fight.
The Side missions are rather good, all of the Assassin contracts are now unique, unlike in previous games in which they just repeated themselves and were very bland. In ACU they are actually enjoyable and I plan on doing them all, where as in previous Assassin's Creed games I just ignored them.
Graphics 8/10 & Performance 3/10
I'm running an AMD FX-6200 and an Nvidia 760 overclocked by 160 MHz (80 MHz factory overclock and another 80 MHz by myself), plus the memory is overclocked by 400 MHz, and I can just about run the game on low settings @ 1080p 30fps. I understand that these are below the requirements, but still, a 760 should be more than enough to run any game at 30fps on low. They obviously didn't spend much time optimizing the game, since a 760 should be able to run any new game on at least medium settings at 60fps (obviously dependent on the game, CPU etc), but this game barely manages low at 30 fps.
I can bare 30fps on a games if i have to, but the main issue is that the frame rate sometimes randomly drops to 10-20fps for ten seconds, at which point fighting and free running become impossible to do, which often leads to taking damage in fights. Even the pre-rendered videos barely manage 30fps.
However, the world looks beautiful, even on low settings the city looks very good and you can tell the art team put a lot of time into the city. I found that the low settings were quite strange, as some textures, such as clothing and weapons have very low resolution textures, but other items such as buildings and some furniture have very high resolution textures, I think this contributes to the random lag spikes, as there's no constant level of detail kept.
If your GPU is worse than a 760, then don't even bother trying to run the game, as you'll be very disappointed when you can't play it.
Sound 7/10
The Sound is pretty standard for any Assassin's Creed game, it's good, but nothing ground breaking. That's all there really is to say about the sound.
Co-op
The Co-op is a bit of a gamble, depending on who you're paired with it can be great, or awful, but that's not the games fault. When I've been in games with people who work together as a team it's been a great experience, one of my best in the Assassin's Creed series; when you're paired with people that just run out and get spotted and die, or just sit back and let you do all the work it's very frustrating, as the co-op missions are designed for multiple people and are therefore harder to do by yourself.
You can play the co-op missions by yourself, but I wouldn't recommend it, since they're harder than the standard missions.
Overall 8/10
The one thing that lets this game down is performance, other than that the game is brilliant. If you have a 760 or above, then go out and get this game. If you have less than a 760 then don't bother with this game, or if you did have a 760 but can't stand 30fps then the same applies.
If you've never played an Assassin's Creed game before then either play ACII onwards first or maybe just start at Black Flag, since that's pretty good for people who haven't played before, then go out and get this game.
As an Assassin's Creed game this is brilliant, it's just a shame about performance issues.
Note: Just in case anyone with nvidia cards is having trouble running the game due to lag spikes then go onto the Nvidia control panel and change the "Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames" setting from 1 to 2, it stops the majority of lag spikes and makes it run much smoother
Price on purchase £32 from cdkeys.com (£50 on Uplay)
Gameplay 8.5/10
The gameplay of Assassin's Creed Unity is close to that of AC II, Brotherhood and Revelations, but has been enhanced in some ways. One main difference is there are no more of the follow missions, in which you aimlessly follow someone around and listen into their conversation. Instead of the old filler misisons there are more assassination missions, making the game feel a lot more like an assassin's Creed game, which the last two games failed to achieve.
The fighting in ACU has been changed quite a bit, there's no counter attack, which makes fighting multiple enemies a lot more difficult and encourages you to be more stealthy, making the assassination missions a lot more interesting. They have also added multiple ranged weapons and bombs. There's a smoke grenade, stun grenade, poison grenade and your phantom blade, the bombs are quite useful and I find myself using them very often to stealth past an area or to gain an advantage while fighting, unlike in other Assassin's Creed games when the bombs just felt like a gimmick they'd added and never ended up using them. The phantom blade is basically the replacement on throwing knifes, poison darts etc, it has standard blades which take 1 hit (usually) to kill a standard enemy and berserk blades which are the equivalent to the poison darts which used to make enemies attack their allies.
They have now added skills to the game, at the end of any mission (Storyline mission, Co-op mission, Assassin Contract, heist, etc) you are awarded skill points, these points can then be used to unlock certain skills, ranging from basic skills that you started with in previous Assassin's Creed games, such as double assassination, to new skills, such as lockpicking and an improved phantom blade.
Storyline 9/10 & Side Missions 7.5/10
The storyline in ACU is great, compared to AC4 and AC3 it's brilliant, it goes back to AC Brotherhood style story, where you're an actual Assassin. The story is enjoyable and the Assassination missions are a lot better now, there's a lot less hand holding and a lot more freedom given to you; you can choose how you approach an assassination, how to get in and out, you can create distractions and save civilians who will then help you fight.
The Side missions are rather good, all of the Assassin contracts are now unique, unlike in previous games in which they just repeated themselves and were very bland. In ACU they are actually enjoyable and I plan on doing them all, where as in previous Assassin's Creed games I just ignored them.
Graphics 8/10 & Performance 3/10
I'm running an AMD FX-6200 and an Nvidia 760 overclocked by 160 MHz (80 MHz factory overclock and another 80 MHz by myself), plus the memory is overclocked by 400 MHz, and I can just about run the game on low settings @ 1080p 30fps. I understand that these are below the requirements, but still, a 760 should be more than enough to run any game at 30fps on low. They obviously didn't spend much time optimizing the game, since a 760 should be able to run any new game on at least medium settings at 60fps (obviously dependent on the game, CPU etc), but this game barely manages low at 30 fps.
I can bare 30fps on a games if i have to, but the main issue is that the frame rate sometimes randomly drops to 10-20fps for ten seconds, at which point fighting and free running become impossible to do, which often leads to taking damage in fights. Even the pre-rendered videos barely manage 30fps.
However, the world looks beautiful, even on low settings the city looks very good and you can tell the art team put a lot of time into the city. I found that the low settings were quite strange, as some textures, such as clothing and weapons have very low resolution textures, but other items such as buildings and some furniture have very high resolution textures, I think this contributes to the random lag spikes, as there's no constant level of detail kept.
If your GPU is worse than a 760, then don't even bother trying to run the game, as you'll be very disappointed when you can't play it.
Sound 7/10
The Sound is pretty standard for any Assassin's Creed game, it's good, but nothing ground breaking. That's all there really is to say about the sound.
Co-op
The Co-op is a bit of a gamble, depending on who you're paired with it can be great, or awful, but that's not the games fault. When I've been in games with people who work together as a team it's been a great experience, one of my best in the Assassin's Creed series; when you're paired with people that just run out and get spotted and die, or just sit back and let you do all the work it's very frustrating, as the co-op missions are designed for multiple people and are therefore harder to do by yourself.
You can play the co-op missions by yourself, but I wouldn't recommend it, since they're harder than the standard missions.
Overall 8/10
The one thing that lets this game down is performance, other than that the game is brilliant. If you have a 760 or above, then go out and get this game. If you have less than a 760 then don't bother with this game, or if you did have a 760 but can't stand 30fps then the same applies.
If you've never played an Assassin's Creed game before then either play ACII onwards first or maybe just start at Black Flag, since that's pretty good for people who haven't played before, then go out and get this game.
As an Assassin's Creed game this is brilliant, it's just a shame about performance issues.
Note: Just in case anyone with nvidia cards is having trouble running the game due to lag spikes then go onto the Nvidia control panel and change the "Virtual Reality pre-rendered frames" setting from 1 to 2, it stops the majority of lag spikes and makes it run much smoother
Last edited:
