Top 50 Challenge 2014 - Assassin's Creed Unity

I always look forward to playing a new Assassin's Creed game each year. When the Animus is roaring at the peak of its capabilities, traveling back to a pivotal point in human history is likely one of the best experiences of the year. But as we all know, the Animus is often unreliable, and can deliver a dud like Assassin's Creed III, a game that makes a mockery of history, even putting the protagonist on Paul Revere's horse during his famous ride.

Assassin's Creed Unity isn't a dud, it's something different: It's a good game built upon an unstable foundation, capable of falling apart or glitching out at any given moment. A dud can be written off without any thought. A good game, well, we want to play it. I'm sure you've all seen screenshots of Unity's most publicized bug: characters with no faces who look like they attended the ark opening at the end of Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark. That's just the tip of Unity's bug-filled iceberg. In my complete playthrough of the game, I often saw NPCs falling through the ground, flying though the sky with no animation, or twitching uncontrollably when they made contact with a building's exterior. Moreover, I fell through the world five times – all during missions, which I had to restart – got stuck on invisible barriers frequently, and turned off my game in disgust when Arno dove into a haystack and couldn't leave it. Significant dips in the framerate accompanied most of my co-op experiences, and also reared up in single player battles.

Long story short, the game clearly wasn't ready for prime time, and should have been delayed. Ubisoft is now furiously trying to patch the experience to make it somewhat stable. Ubisoft's latest "fix" tells players to delete all of their contacts, a ridiculous suggestion in a game that is designed with a huge multiplayer focus. Months from now, it may be a more reliable experience, but for those who played it under the conditions I did, it was frustrating and unfair – a broken game through and through.

There is a fun game to be had here. The French Revolution is a fascinating backdrop for the long-running assassin/Templar war, and the budding romance between protagonist Arno and Élise, who are on opposite sides of the conflict. The story kept me engaged all the way up until the end. On a side note, I am disappointed to see Ubisoft abandoning the future content almost fully this time around. It was reworked in Black Flag and Rogue, and although it still follows a similar strain, it's almost completely buried in this entry.

The game is also stunning to look at...when it's working properly. Paris' architecture is beautifully realized, giving players the opportunity to view the interiors of some of the city's most notable landmarks.

The gameplay design veers away from the boring "follow this person" missions for the most part, and puts more emphasis on assassinations, which embrace player choice in how they approach the target. Fun side missions like murder mysteries are also in great abundance. Like every game in this series, this installment is in no shortage of content. There's plenty to do and see, and most of it is fun.

Sneaking through heavily fortified interiors with friends lurking in the shadows with you is one of the big draws. I occasionally saw glimpses of how it could be great, but again, crippling lag and framerate drops often accompanied this experience for me.

Assassin's Creed Unity has all of the content needed for a great game, it just needs to be finished first.

My Vote
I've received numerous emails and tweets from people saying that Assassin's Creed Unity is their favorite game of the year or their biggest disappointment of the year. In my time with it, I bounced like a pinball between loving it and being disgusted by it. This series has always been a little buggy, but in this entry, the glitches often led to retracing steps, or being distracted from the beauty of the world. For these reasons alone, Assassin's Creed Unity doesn't deserve a spot on the Top 50 list. I'd argue it deserves to be on our Top 10 Disappointments list instead.