14 DAY TRIAL // By far one of the most anticipated games coming from Ubisoft this fall is Assassin's Creed Unity, the next iteration in its popular series and, considering everything that's been showcased up until now, the most innovative one yet.
The studio brought forth at Gamescom 2014 a fresh build of the upcoming action adventure title, this time focusing much more on the customization system that affects everything from how a character looks to how he plays and what abilities he can use during the all-new cooperative mode.
Assassin's Creed Unity overhauls the whole recipe of the series, starting with the combat and continuing with the exploration and mission systems, while adding brand new things like the cooperative mechanic.
When playing with friends, players can make use of the extensive customization system.
First up, there's the visual one that encompasses hundreds of possible clothing items, each with different values in terms of resilience, stealthiness, and other such attributes. As such, players can opt for gear that makes them withstand more punishment from enemies or ones that will prevent detection.
Of course, different weapons can also be equipped for use in certain situations and even the iconic Hidden Blade has been augmented into a completely new gadget called the Phantom Blade, which can be used not only up close but also at range, thanks to a brand new mini crossbow that deploys when targeting foes from a distance and kills silently.
Last but not least, players can choose different skills and a very special cooperative ability from one of four possible things. The first is called Disguise and allows the player to fool enemies into believing he is one of them. Another is Communal Sense and acts as a sort of augment Eagle Vision, tagging enemies and items for all the other players to see. The other two abilities are rather self-explanatory, in the form of Revive (get another player back to life) and Weapon Cache (which can offer new gear on the fly).
The actual cooperative missions in Unity are ranked with stars and can even be done alone but expect plenty of tough times if you attempt the four or five star ones on your own.
During the actual encounters, Ubisoft wants players to use stealth as much as possible and even goes as far as to reduce the possible rewards at the end depending on how many times you were spotted by enemies. As such, you should always use the brand new crouch button to move more silently and to deploy tactical smoke bombs to either eliminate more foes in quick succession or to sneak into new areas.
Overall, Unity feels like a drastically overhauled version of the Assassin's Creed recipe. The climbing and exploration also feel different and the combat is tougher, without any easy guaranteed kills when parrying enemy attacks.
Unity launches this fall for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.