Assassin’s Creed Rogue

Assassin’s Creed Rogue is Black Flag with a new coat of paint. Offering the same systems and overall structure, it shares the exact same problems that plagued its predecessor: it’s shallow, bloated, and repetitive. Its story follows suit, showing some promise at the beginning, but quickly falling into the same pitfalls, packed with one-dimensional characters while having little to say about anything.

The story follows the Assassin Shay, who – as the title suggests – betrays his brotherhood and allies himself with the Templars. Changing sides, however, doesn’t change Shay’s mission, only his motivation: he still must search for Precursor sites, finding alien artifacts, but instead of destroying them, now he intends to use them to control the people and bring peace to the world.

The first hours of the game have Shay carrying out missions for the Assassin Brotherhood. He’s the new guy, still under the tutelage of an Assassin named Liam, but is nonetheless tasked to do great things for his coven. He shows signs of discontent right from the start, however, frequently questioning his mentor about their methods.

What makes Shay betray his brotherhood is the old question of “how far are you willing to go in the name of the greater good?” He’s not questioning the Assassins’ beliefs or ideology, but their method: he’s disturbed when he has to murder a sick man and things get worse when, a bit later, he is sent to assassinate an unarmed one. Liam, meanwhile, is not a good mentor, as he usually just dismisses Shay’s comments instead of trying to explain the Assassin’s….creed to him. He doesn’t even ask his pupil what the hell he thought Assassins did if he’s so bothered by the nature of assassinations and decided to join them anyway.

The narrative never intends to make Shay’s betrayal a complicated matter, surrounding him with Assassins that are either assholes or capable of cruel acts. The story never goes into detail about what made Shay join the brotherhood in the first place. Was it because he thought their ideals were noble or because they were there for him when he needed them the most? This question is important because it impacts how he should view his new allies.

If he cares about ideology, for example, how should he handle working for the opposite team? Rogue never bothers to offer an answer, just changing the protagonist’s mindset with no prior development. First, Shay thinks freedom is paramount and even accepts working with pirates, but after he changes sides, he starts to go on about law and order and to link “control” to “peace”: “We bring order from chaos. If everything is permitted, no one is safe,” he tells a former ally. This huge contradiction is never tackled by the story, with the game handling his turn with a simplistic approach: “ I thought Assassins were good and Templars were bad. But then the Assassins did me wrong, so I joined the Templars and everything they do is automatically good now,” Shays seems to think.

There’s an early scene, for instance, in which Shay questions Liam about their political allies. He hears the Brotherhood is working with the king of France and says to his mentor: “Here, the Assassins are helping King Louis. But in Haiti, the French own slaves who are set free by the Assassins.” And yet, when he joins the Templars, Shay never asks his new companions the same thing. In other words, the betrayal in Assassin’s Creed Rogue doesn’t work because, afterward, Shay’s questions simply disappear.

He starts to hunt down former slaves, defend the English crown, and work against the American Revolution, and not a word of protest comes out of his mouth. The things that made him betray the Brotherhood don’t become part of his character, just functioning as a plot device to create the betrayal and justify the game’s existence. The heart of the story, therefore, is left a shallow thing.

Assassin’s Creed Rogue doesn’t care much about character development. Shay is a walking contradiction and the supporting character are framed in a binary light. His former colleagues are either complete douchebags or do unspeakable things without good reason, while his new bosses are framed as altruistic and virtuous. There’s no nuance.

Shay, meanwhile, also keeps repeating the same sentence (“I make my own luck”) over and over again, which eventually ends up being annoying. The point is to juxtapose him with the Assassins: while he makes his own luck – showing that he’s in control –, Assassins – with their freedom – leave things to chance. But having Shay say that all the time is just bad storytelling, especially when he says that after something that was beyond his control just happened, such as a piece of ice falling.

The game is packed with some funny moments of dissonance. There’s an early scene in which Shay is climbing the inside of a church, activating some locks to move some panels on the walls, and eventually open a huge passage underground in the middle of the place. The whole thing is hysterical instead of exhilarating, however, because there’s a mass being performed right there, in front of Shay, and nobody reacts to this robed guy jumping around and walking on planks or even to the ground opening right next to them.

Assassin’s Creed Rogue doesn’t change its gameplay formula to match the change in sides of the protagonist. Templar Shay plays exactly like Assassin Shay, who plays exactly like all other protagonists in the series. Shay is not a pirate, which doesn’t stop the game from being structured like he was, with you boarding or sinking random ships to get resources and finding treasure maps. Even the nameless crew of your ship remains a bizarre radio that plays sea chanties whenever you wish.

The only attempts to differentiate Rogue from Black Flag are badly executed. Take the Assassins that hunt you, for example: in New York – the biggest city in the game – there are a bunch of Assassins hidden in the streets just waiting to strike you down. It’s a neat idea that makes Shay’s betrayal have consequences, but it’s also one that quickly becomes an annoyance since these Assassins are not only everywhere but also followed by whisperings to signal their presence. This means that you can’t take five steps without hearing those whispers, which basically become the soundtrack for the city. This also means that you probably won’t care for the Assassins, just trying to run past them, because if you do care, you won’t be doing anything else with your life for the foreseeable future – and there’s no reward for killing them.

Rogue also suffers from the same issues as its predecessor. It’s still full of pointless collectibles, for instance, that makes you question how you’re spending your time on Earth. Why should you care about finding a chest that rewards you with two hundred gold if you have more than thirty thousand in your bank? Why should you go hunting for twenty swords if it will just reward you with a funny costume? Rogue keeps adding things and never bothers to ask if they’re worth it.

Even the letters you find scattered across the world can be funny in their blatant pointlessness. One of the first you can find is very honest about how careful they were thought out, starting with, “We are basically just sending letters out filled with secret plans and praying they arrive safely.” Combat, meanwhile, remains repetitive and easy to a fault, and the stealth approach remains unbalanced, with the berserk darts being ridiculously overpowered, removing any kind of challenge from the missions.

Finally, the shenanigans in the “present” timeline remain nonsensical, focusing on one more Abstergo employee that is willing to go around hacking their colleagues’ computers for no good reason – although the cheerful “let’s kill people” attitude of your bosses gives a creepy edge to the proceedings.

The design behind the Assassin’s Creed games has always seemed to favor adding more useless activities to the mix instead of making the ones that are already there more engaging and rewarding. This usually makes the final experience a bloated mess. And with Assassin’s Creed Rogue it’s no different.

March 29, 2021.