Assassin’s Creed Unitycelebrates its tenth anniversary later this year. That huge milestone will bring up conversations about its controversial launch, and perhaps continued underappreciation. It’s a game that many TheGamer staff members hold close to their hearts, in large part because it was one of the final games in the series before it turned into an open worldRPGthat cares far more about quantity than quality. If anything, Unity caredtoo muchabout quality.
It was the first game in the series to launch onPS4andXbox One, and to make a next-generation splash,Ubisofthoped to push its visual quality further than ever before. But this couldn’t happen without significant compromise. The huge and interactable crowds across the Paris setting slowed performance to a crawl, and it’s difficult to look past horrendous animation issues and horrific facial glitches that quickly became memes of legend after reviews dropped.
A lot of players wrote Assassin’s Creed Unity off for good without ever playing it. It’s ironic that many of the same people adoreSyndicate, which is basically a more refined version of Unity when you break it all down. Using a similar city (London for Paris) and an identical engine, graphics, and gameplay, they are very closely related games often placed far apart in our affections. Unity was doomed and was never going to get a second chance. Or so I thought…
This past weekend saw the Olympic Games begin in Paris with the opening ceremony, and a moment whichsaw a man cosplaying Arno from Assassin’s Creed Unitycarrying the torch while doing all manner of parkour. Viewers couldn’t believe what they were seeing at first, but France was putting the game on a very rare pedestal.
It was an incredibly cool moment, and whether you like it or not, Ubisoft has played a big part in the country’s entertainment culture in the last few decades, becoming one of the most prominent developers on the planet that deserves acknowledgement on the biggest sporting stage in history. Assassin’s Creed is an iconic series built on the French art of parkour, and given Paris is hosting the games this time around, of course, our minds jumped straight to Unity.
Sadly, it wasn’t accurate to the games because the parkour athlete didn’t bug out on the terrain or accidentally go in the wrong direction and leap into a nearby body of water. Desynchronised…
Jumping back into Assassin’s Creed Unity today is pretty breezy. It supports FPS Boost on Xbox Series X, meaning you can play it at 60 frames per second at a higher resolution. It’s transformative and feels seamless to play, although there’s still a handful of weird bugs I’m guessing Ubisoft didn’t see the point in fixing when the game fell off a cliff.
Sadly, the PS5 version is stuck at 30 frames per second unless you have a physical copy handy and decide to launch it with no patches, rawdogging into Version 1.0 without any bug fixes or refinements, but at least its performance is uncapped. Both are decent ways to play, not to mention you get Unity and all its DLC for pennies these days.
To many, it’s one of the last ‘true’ titles in the entire series. It took a single city and strived to depict it in an exhaustive amount of detail, to the extent that authorities even referred to itduring the restoration of Notre Damewhen parts of Paris’ iconic cathedral burned down a few years ago. Ubisoft put the work in, clearly caring about every little detail even if parts of its Paris are still drenched in obvious cliché.
I’ll always measure the strength of an Assassin’s Creed game by how it feels to walk down the most basic of streets in a chosen city. Does it translate the feeling of being in a specific time and place, and is there anything that immediately breaks my immersion and convinces me I am indeed playing a video game? If it lasts even a single minute, that’s a huge achievement.
Unity makes me feel like I belong, as I stumble upon virtual riots on the cusp of the epic renaissance, or various classes mixing together on muddy roads as they peddle their wares and look down on one another. Even a decade later, it looks and feels tremendous under the right circumstances, and it sucks that so many people overlook it. I’ll admit the gameplay and storytelling are a little dry, and Arno is a generic lead surrounded by more interesting people I’d rather be playing as. But he works as a suitable spectre for the most part, even as the main story begins to retcon multiple titles’ worth of story to climb out of the Animus-shaped hole the series dug for itself.
Throw all that aside though, and it’s still a good time, and one I’d recommend diving into if the Olympics has you utterly Paris-pilled. You can go back in time and explore the city without an omnipresent stench of urine, which is a win in my book. Or, if you’re into playing your Steam Deck on the loo- never mind.
