There are several categories of stealth when it comes to stealth and espionage games. And before we talk about Assassin's Creed Unity we have to first take a closer look at the basic categories of stealth. Through this review for what I believe is one of the most expensive underrated titles of all time. I really think people failed to notice what this game delivered, its potential, and the repercussions of critically panning a game that in retrospect was the last true Assassin's Creed game before the franchise reinvented itself in the form of Assassin's Creed Origins and Assassin's Creed Odyssey.

1. Environmental Stealth

As the name suggest this involves hiding behind or blending in with your environmental. Games like Metal Gear Solid puts emphasis on this idea with camouflage patterns and boxes to hide in.

2. Shadow Stealth

Most popularly used by the Splinter Cell and Thief games, this involves hiding in dark corners and taking out the lights to create blankets of cover. The night is your friend in these types of stealth games and you will find yourself breaking into a sweat to avoid lamps and ceiling lights.

3. Social Stealth

Social stealth is a tricky one to get right and is one aspect of stealth that is actually rarely utilized by most games that involve stealth. The basic idea of social stealth is hiding among the crowd, blending in as staff or civilians, looking the part to hide in plain sight. This type of stealth has been popularized and and made almost iconic with the Hitman games.

4. Gadget Stealth

Gadget stealth is basically where you use tools and high tech gadgets at your disposal to hide from the enemy or supplement the aspects of stealth found in the previous three categories. Invisibility cloaking from Ghost Recon Future Soldier and the EMP device from Splinter Cell Conviction are just two of many types of gadgets used to give a stealthy advantage over the opposing forces.

Stealth in Assassin's Creed

The Assassin's Creed franchise has historically featured on two of the four categories of stealth: Gadget and Social. Environmental stealth was always there for sure but the emphasis wasn't quite there until Assassin's Creed III, which featured much more rural environments in the American Frontier and introduced players to the concept of hiding in brushes or trees.

Hiding in or behind cover wasn't really the primary way of making your way towards your targets as the earlier titles didn't even allow the player to crouch. The whole concept that was presented to the player in the trailers for the games was to walk around like an average civilian, weaving through populated cities and busy crowds to assassinate your target at the opportune moment.

Unfortunately the social stealth was kind of overshadowed by the environmental stealth with most players opting to play vertically or use the assassins tools at their disposal. With the smoke bomb one could confuse a large group of soldiers before stealthy slitting the throats of sometimes even a dozen guards within the cloud of smoke.

Parkour is one of the many selling points of the franchise and most players would move up and down structures to get a vertical advantage over guards, pouncing on them from above to pulling them off the top of towers from the brick the player was clinging onto right below. Civilian crowds were not dense enough to create very strong blankets of cover and allies that served to distract guards from their posts pretty much achieved the same result as a smoke bomb but with less efficiency. You couldn't control where the crowds you could hide in where but you could certainly control which buildings you wanted to climb and throw smoke bombs wherever you needed them.

Social stealth was in danger of becoming obsolete or useless and to be honest I never really utilized this feature from Assassin's Creed I all the way through Assassin's Creed IV. It was just a lot easier, albeit cheesier to whistle attract all the guards in the area into secluded locations or stalker zones, hilariously assassinating and hiding dozens of bodies within hay stacks and brushes. But then in 2014, Ubisoft dropped Assassin's Creed Unity, a game that will probably be forever remembered for its disastrous launch and mediocre story, rather than well, doing justice to the word assassin in the franchise's name, more so than any other entry in the series had before.

Assassin's Creed Unity

The bugs on launch cannot be excused but now that they have been patched and the dust has settled so to speak, what did Unity bring or seek to bring to the table exactly.

The most obvious improvement is in the visuals department. Assassin's Creed IV, while a timeless masterpiece for many fans, was strangely a a visual downgrade from the previous title, though the downgrade was quite minimal and more of a stylistic problem in the end.

Unity on the other hand was a total graphical overhaul. It was a next gen title released in a time when the latest generation of consoles had just come out. The animations for movement, combat, and stealth were organic and fantastic. The scenery and soundtrack was incredible and Ubisoft once again demonstrated their knack for recreating historic locations in breathtaking detail.

Now before I bring out the big guns I do want to touch on some smaller but still important goodies that the game had and has going for it.

The Main Character: Arno Victor Dorian (Also his story)

The story had so much potential it was just criminal that the developers and writers did not capitalize on it. Of course there may have been time and budget constraints but we may never know for sure.

While Assassin's Creed III and IV were only somewhat somewhat connected, with both protagonists being directly related, but really the narrative of both games didn't really have that much of an impact on each other. With Unity on the other hand, the smaller budgeted prequel game that was released alongside it told the story of the Assassin Shay Patrick Cormac and how he betrayed the Assassin Brotherhood. Assassin's Creed Rogue really helped to explain the events that led up to Assassins' Creed III and Unity. With Assassin's Creed III, Rogue explained how the colonial brotherhood fell from power and why it is the why it is in Assassin's Creed III. For Unity, the ending of Rogue literally takes place 10 seconds before the start of Assassin's Creed Unity.

Imagine for a second your hot off Assassin's Creed Rogue and then you start up Unity. In the intro section you realize that you are now playing the son of the man you just murdered in Rogue, a young boy named Arno. Not only should you feel conflicted, maybe even a little guilty. You would think that with Shay having such an impact on the setup of the story for Unity, and more directly, Arno's childhood, Arno and Shay would eventually cross paths, maybe even end in an epic showdown between two trained killers.

Well gotcha! Arno never meets Shay, never even brings him up and never even shows the slightest interest in the truth behind his Father's murder. It's brought up once in a short conversation later in the story and then we see a little of Arno's father again in a flashback for like 3 seconds. Given what Ubisoft did with Assassin's Creed Revelations, melding the stories of Ezio and the previous Assassin's Creed protagonist, Altair, you would think they would do the same with Unity, especially a setup for a meeting that was arguably even more anticipated. The amount of story potential lost with Unity is so criminal it honestly keeps me up at night sometimes thinking of what could have been.

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Now this is a defense of Unity and while I just in fact bashed its story, I do want to explain the one thing I think the narrative gets so right and that is its protagonist, Arno Victor Dorian, who is perhaps the most underrated character in the whole franchise.

Edward Kenway was a breath of fresh air after his grouchy and flat grandson. Connor Kenway was somewhat relatable and his story was actually good its just the execution of the voice acting and personality could have been better. Edward Kenway however suffers from the opposite, he is not quite relatable, a little too larger than life in fact. So, while Edward is my personal favorite character in the franchise as a whole, I cannot say that I felt a deep connection to him like I did Arno.

Arno has the charm and looks from Ezio and Edward but is also a lot more vulnerable, less sure of what he wants and where he is going. He is a talent that is misguided, broken, and without a doubt the most tragic character in the whole series. He loses his father at a party, his mother assumed dead even before that. He loses his stepfather figure in the form of his girlfriends father Elise, and then kills his third father figure in the form of Pierre Bellec, his assassin mentor. Did I mention that in the end he also loses Elise? You know, the love of his life? Good god Ubisoft give him a break!

A lot of players consider Arno do be one of the worst protagonists in the series but I really do think it has more to do with the bug filed launch of the game leaving a bad taste in the mouth. I see all these comments on the internet about how Arno is a bad assassin and whatnot but that simply isn't true. Arno is a prodigy of an assassin rivaling or surpassing the talents of all the other Assassins Creed protagonists. In the game it only takes him a year to become on par with his mentor, the master assassin Pierre Bellec, evidenced by his victory over him in a one on one duel. It is generally agreed upon by the community that Unity has the best parkour in the series, this could be seen as a technical achievement of the new engine or Arno being a very agile assassin.

Gameplay (Combat and Movement)

Unity really shines when it comes to its gameplay. As I have mentioned many time before the game really makes you feel like an assassin in his prime. The parkour is the best in the series and the animations cinematic, smooth, and varied. The ability to now crouch is a very welcome addition but perhaps the greatest improvement to the Assassin's Creed game play formula is the way it handles combat.

The sword combat plays out similarly to the Arkham games. You have attack, counter, and dodge. The counters are especially satisfying and the enemy attacks are fast enough to give you a challenge yet slow enough to not infuriate the player when confronting multiple enemies. The problem with the combat in the previous Assassin's Creed titles was that the combat got dull fast with how easy it was. Connor Kenway in Assassin's Creed III was capable of chaining together one hit kills, which made stealth seemingly obsolete as it was far easier to just hack through a thousand enemies with your tomahawk.

By contrast Unity offers a far more challenging but engaging experience. Spamming the light attack button won't get you very far and counters aren't instant kills but just a defensive parry to break the opponents guard. Most guards will block your attacks and you need to either parry or stun them. The enemies in Unity also seem the most trigger happy of all enemies in the series, frequently firing at Arno with muskets and pistols, which really tests your dodge rolling reflexes. Admittedly the next Assassin's title Syndicate also borrows the same combat system but the animations are very janky and the weapon variety poor. While later entries like Origins and Odyssey would overhaul the combats depth to make them true rpg games, the animations once again are severely lacking. There is only one, yes one parry animation for both games and it isn't even a good one. Sure, The Witcher 3 had only two but at least they were satisfying to land due to the smoothness of the animation and the excellent sound design.

Unity without a doubt had the best balance of challenge, fun, cinematic quality, and depth. It also helps that the moves that Arno executes are actually historically accurate. I've studied a few European sword techniques when doing research for my novels and I was able to recognize from of the moves that Arnos executed, once again showing that Arno is a capable and well trained assassin as well as a master swordsman.

Gameplay (Stealth)

The stealth in Unity is probably ties with Syndicate as the best in the series. While Syndicate had the most complete stealth system in terms of mechanics, I felt like Unity still ties with Syndicate because of how much more intellectually engaging it was and how its social stealth was the best in the series.

Unity is honestly the first game in the franchise to do social stealth proper justice. The the first game you could only blend in with priests in white robes. It was much easier to just hie around a corner rather than praying that their were some wandering priests in your mission area. The same could be said for later entries which had crowds that just weren't dense enough to hide in and not always where you needed them to be. Then came Unity which provided crowds so big and dense that I was honestly taken back the first time I played the game. For once I actually utilized social stealth whereas before I would just opt for hiding in bushes or lurk around corners. It was such a simple fix yet oddly enough Unity is the only game in the series to really being social stealth close to its maximum potential. Perhaps Ubisoft felt like it was unrealistic to have huge dense crowds with every historical setting. In the future I pray that social stealth returns to the franchise and that they find a more intuitive way to reintroduce social stealth practically. Huge crowds worked for Unity's French Revolution setting riots but in other parts of the world, might look jarring and out of place.

Huge crowds worked for Unity's French Revolution setting riots but in other parts of the world, might look jarring and out of place [https://img.wattpad.com/10b61524e0ac6445c92a53b3d24f7738ed8f0540/68747470733a2f2f73332e616d617a6f6e6177732e636f6d2f776174747061642d6d656469612d736572766963652f53746f7279496d6167652f75393761676870566875476658513d3d2d3739393836323136302e313565343664306363366262613933663937373033373531333238332e706e67?s=fit&w=1280&h=1280]

Crowd Blending in Action (Pictured Above)

Moving on to other aspects of stealth, Unity made the interesting choice of dis-empowering the player somewhat by removing stealth features that were a staple before. Arno is incapable of moving bodies, dead or otherwise and cannot whistle to attract guards either. While this all sounds horrible on paper it actually forces the player to use their assassin tools, think about their plan of attack more carefully. Admittedly the inclusion of whistling, as I mentioned before, made stealth cheesy and easy by allowing the player to effective whistle attract and entire army of guards to a secluded location. What I would do is hide in a bush close to guards, whistle attract all the guards within earshot then move onto the next bush with guards in range. It was boring and tedious after a while but so effective that there was no reason to stop. Now when it came to the removal of carrying bodies I was at first resistant to this change but after some thought I realized that moving bodies honestly was such a tedious chore that really brought the action to a grinding halt. It works in games like Hitman and Metal Gear Solid because the guards are more spaced out and because of the more intimate environmental interactions.

Think about it, your probably going to assassinate an enemy when he is alone in a secluded place, in which case their is no need to hide the body since he is already in a hidden location. If you expect another guard to pass through then you simply wait for him to come and then assassinate him while he is inspecting the body or when he sees it. Once again because you assassinated him in the same secluded place there is no need to move the body. Now if you assassinated a guard or an enemy in a courtyard while the other guards turn the other direction, Assassin's Creed guards will only do one of two things. They will either raise the alarm which is no problem if you disabled the alarm bell, or they will search around the area then give up and return to their post after a minute or two. As you can see it is no problem if a body is found and usually you wouldn't assassinate a guard in an open area anyways.

Because the game forces you to use your tools more often, I found myself doing a lot more planning and thinking. How many smoke bombs will I need? Should I save them for a more difficult area to sneak through. Will phantoms blades actually be more helpful here? Should I or should I not risk using a cherry bomb to attract the guard? Yes, cherry bombs are these thrown firecracker like things that replace whistling but are finite in quantity (can carry a limited amount) and are less powerful than whistles (can only attract enemies if the bomb is thrown within his line of sight).

I think you get the point but in short Assassins Creed Unity gives all the skills and tools available to you the proper respect by making them all actually useful or practical. Unlike past titles where just whistling in bushes was your bread and butter.

Closing Thoughts

Assassins Creed Unity is by far the most underappreciated title in the popular game franchise. Its excellent balance of combat and stealth make for a fun and intellectually engaging gaming experience. Though it is rough in some departments, the story not living up to its potential and the graphical optimization pretty wack, it is in its current state a very memorable game. If Ubisoft were to ever remake the game's story or release a another Assassins Creed Game featuring Arno, I'd be all up for it.

Overall Score: 8.5/10