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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, [...]
Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag builds on the foundations of its predecessor to set its story in the Caribbean and put the focus on pirates and naval warfare. Black Flag’s many mistakes are old ones in the franchise, with the game being dragged down by clunky stealth, weak combat, and a repetitive mission structure, but this time the story could have used a little more ambition as well.
The protagonist this time is the pirate Edward Kenway, who one day gets stranded on an island with the rogue Assassin, Duncan Walpole. When Edward learns Walpole is carrying money, a quick chase and a furious brawl follow, which end up with Walpole’s death. Edward, then, decides it’s a good [...]
The ambition of Assassin’s Creed 3 is both its strength and its Achilles heel. The scope of its world and the number of activities available can certainly impress players, since at one instant they will be bombarding ships in a storm on the high seas and, in the next, they will be hunting foxes with traps in a forest. With so much diversity, it is at least understandable that the developers have been unable to craft such moments with the complexity they deserved.
Finally abandoning the Renaissance aesthetic, the franchise here moves on to the period of the American Revolution. The premise of Assassin’s Creed, after all, has always allowed a huge change of setting. Desmond, the [...]
The Assassin’s Creed franchise has become so successful that its producer (Ubisoft) has adopted the strategy of releasing one title per year. It was inevitable, therefore, that this business plan would begin to generate games that would clearly show signs of an uncreative development cycle, being simply devoid of a reason to exist. For this reason, it is surprising that it’s only the fourth game in the franchise, Assassin’s Creed Revelations, the first one to truly expose these problems.
In order to finish the stories of the previous protagonists, Ezio Auditore da Firenze and Altaïr ibn-La’Ahad, Assassin’s Creed Revelations’ follows the last days of the two [...]