Assassin's Creed Unity
Vive la France! Nine years after its release, Unity still holds up. It’s better than you may have remembered. I recall the public pillorying the game at launch, but in 2014 that was the effect of the availability heuristic: a minority of players experienced certain visuals bugs, a person with a large audience posted about them on social media, and this led to a general belief that the game was flat-out broken. This was not my personal experience. There were minor glitches, though I’ve always attributed those to the nature of the Animus: the fictional, DNA-based reality simulator central to the franchise. I am biased when it comes to Ubisoft games, though. I don’t share in the hatred of the vocal minority. I appreciate the effort that the French megadeveloper takes when crafting their experiences, and Unity is no exception. I think that because it’s Paris, they took extra care and poured an inordinate amount of love into its recreation.
Now that’s not to say that there weren’t issues. I’ve undertaken the mammoth video gaming task of 100% full synchronizing (completing all challenges, collectibles, and objectives) every core console video game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, and Unity presents unique hurdles in the form of cooperative missions. A player must run these missions multiple times with groups of up to four others to collect the full rewards. It is possible to solo this content, it’s just a more arduous than usual grind. This had me reevaluate my task and downgrade it to 100% synchronizing the main missions. I’ll still go back from time to time and chip away at the extra content, but in the interest of expediency—and my sanity—I’ll keep things on a realistic timetable.
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