Finished Assassin's Creed: Unity on PS4 yesterday. So, this is the AC game that heralded the series' downfall before it redeemed itself with Odyssey (which I haven't played yet). I assumed that the flaws were very exaggerated and at least the technical ones would have been entirely removed with patches. Well... er...
First off, even a bad AC game is still a pretty good game as far as I'm concerned and I did enjoy Unity. The parkour stuff is both fun and relaxing and Paris during the French Revolution is hell of a location for a game. They also really outdid themselves with the ridiculously massive angry crowds that seem to grow as the movement unravels. And in spite of the game's many flaws I just wanted to keep going.
But there's no denying it: Unity, which was meant to introduce an entirely new generation of AC games, was a step backwards in so many ways, it's crazy. The city may be geometrically massive but the game still manages to feel much smaller than earlier AC titles, largely due to the fact that everything is taking place in this one city without the need to ride or travel by sea between distant locations. And the city itself lacks visual diversity - it may be much more massive than, say, Rome in Brotherhood but Rome was loaded with distinct areas and it frequently made you feel like you're in an entirely different place. That's a feeling that's almost completely missing from Unity. Admittedly there's one more location, Versailles, but that one is so utterly meaningless and small that it doesn't really contribute anything.
Unity also fails to introduce any meaningful new mechanics and got rid of many earlier ones. There's no horse riding or ships, there's no stalking zones or whistling, there's really no interesting gadgets. The options at your disposal for solving stealth or combat situations are ridiculously limited compared to some earlier AC titles. And the way character development works here, with skill points gained by doing story and coop missions, you may end up with only a fraction of abilities from earlier games - I think by the end I still have not unlocked double air assassinations, for example, because I put my points in abilities that felt more important, in particular the three levels of friggin' lock smithing since that one is necessary for getting tons of collectables. The game also lacks any sensible meta mechanics. Since ACII every AC game had some mechanic where you "build" something, whether it's renovating your mansion or building a trading fleet. Here you get to renovate your main base and a few other clubs but that can be done in a matter of hours and then there's no notable progression ever again.
The thing is, apparently all this meta gameplay was pretty much moved into the coop mode and companion app. The companion app is now defunct and any of the (ridiculously bad and tiny) content that could be accessed through it can now be accessed without without restrictions from the game. As for the coop: it's still there, people still play it and it's okay as far as I can tell but nothing overly amazing - it's what fans would have probably expected since the series first introduced multiplayer. I'm not necessarily a fan of how coop was implemented here, though, and what impact it had on other mechanics. E.g. item and skill progression are much more detached from story progress, you can unlock end-game items early on just by collecting money, it's just specific items that can only be gotten by either playing the story mode or doing certain coop missions. Likewise, most skills are unlocked via some sort of skillpoints now and you can't easy unlock all of them, like they were encouraging player to choose classes for coop. I feel that the result hurts the singleplayer experience a lot and it's also not a very good system for multiplayer. It's not like I can buff my character up a lot by playing coop anymore, I'm just unable to max him out without coop (if that's even possible with coop). Oh yeah, and almost all items are obtained just by purchasing them from some menu screen which can be accessed at any point, you can also change equipment on the spot. Talk about breaking immersion.
Anyway, and in all of this they really neglected the foundations. The stealth mechanics are meh, combat is meh, mission design is very meh. Even the parkour feels kinda worse than in earlier titles. It has always been common in the series that the hero would get stuck and not jump where they should but I feel like Unity reached entirely new levels in this regard. Even taking cover by sticking to a wall is extremely flimsy. Ironically Unity is the first game in the series where in-door areas are featured rather heavily and it is in direct conflict with the utterly unresponsive controls that make navigating these narrow areas a nightmare. Certain story missions pretend that there's some Hitman-style options that make the objective easier to achieve but it's just a matter of following a few more quest markers and the result usually doesn't even have much of an impact on anything. Honestly, the only assignments that were genuinely interesting to me were the entirely optional murder cases where you get to collect evidence and then have to determine who is the culprit. But even those aren't usually nearly as good as they could be and only a single story mission uses this pattern and there you can't really go wrong at all.
Additionally the game is an utter UX nightmare. The game bombards you with shitty tutorial popups (which, I guess, I could turn off but I wouldn't because I might end up missing the occasional useful message) which often manage to cover up crucial other stuff. You are not able to easily tell if and how much money is waiting to get picked up at your hideout. The map is wider than tall, so you can see further to the sides than ahead. They use different icons for the same currency in different places. Bonus objectives for getting a perfect rank are still ridiculously easy to miss (which has somehow always been true for the serious - idiots). And what's funny, on some missions you can't just look at the objectives at first because the objective list gets covered up by updates telling you that an objective has been added - one that you could already briefly see on the objective list. What the hell.
Finally: the story. The story of Arno, the assassin we control during the French Revolution, is just okay at best. He feels like a poor man's Ezio. He's an okay character but really very similar to Ezio and far less developed. The intrigue going on is at the same time simplistic and hard to follow and can't compete with most earlier titles. You get to meet historical figures like Robespierre, Napoleon Bonaparte and De Sade but they appear very briefly and aren't very important to the plot - they feel squeezed in for the sake of being there even by the series' standards. The modern-day story tying Arno's chapter into the series is utter shit, however. From what I can gather you're just some random guy playing on Abstergo's new console, your gameplay gets interrupted by Rebecca and that English guy from the earlier games who "recruit" you and... well, you just keep playing the game to uncover "utterly crucial" information to allow them to foil Abstergo's attempts to find the body of another sage - the game doesn't even bother to remind you why that matters (and I honestly don't know why it would be a bad thing if Abstergo found that sage). Aaaand... sorry for the spoiler but in the end it turns out that none of that mattered. Honestly, you don't discover anything useful, finishing Arno's story has literally no meaning whatsoever.
Soooo, Unity is still somewhat fun but yeah, it's a fraction of what it could and should have been. It's not just a matter of not meeting too high expectations, the game is literally worse than earlier AC titles in most regards other than the graphics which are, most of the time, pretty impressive.
