Assassin's Creed Rogue

+ Decent story with varied locations.
+ Liked the twist over the usual "Templars bad" narrative.

Completed.

Really obvious copy and paste job. Like they needed another Assassin's Creed game for the last-gen systems at the time, so they just grabbed Black Flag, threw on a winter theme, and viola, new game. I do still enjoy it though because Black Flag's gameplay was already fantastic, so I still had a lot of fun with this one. However, god damn is it buggy. I played this originally on PS3, and later, on the Switch, and I had the game crash many times on both systems. The Switch version at least ran fine, but my god. The plot isn't too much to write home about other than "oooh look you're now playing on the side of the fascists isn't that crazy". Still an enjoyable game, just pretty uninteresting rush job.

Here me out now guys, what if the pro-slavery facists were actually the good guys. Miserable 'bothsides' writing, who thought this was a good idea.

That Lisbon Earthquake setpiece is so good.
That final Ice mission is also quite good.

Everything else in-between is shite.

I died from melee combat a grand total of 0 times in the entire playthrough.
At all the cool parts of this game (even the aforementioned Lisbon mission) i was forced to trick myself into believing it was hard. I'm not even particularly good at games - but the only times I struggled in the game was due to clunky movement in the free running or major glitches in missions (like the 30 times I was running after someone and for whatever reason was unable to tackle them even though they were 2m away from me)

Yeah everything else ranged from bad to meh.
Boat combat is still cool - but somehow feels worse than black flag.
The environments are mostly boring.
The free-running is clunky.
The story is very average - although (avoiding spoilers) the premise of hunting down people who were """narratively significant""" was actually pretty cool - but once again was ruined by every one of these misssions being way too easy or way too clunky.

Stealth felt like luck and if stealth wasn't required it was way too easy just to kill everyone.

4.5/10

Now my favorite one, Assassin's Creed Uni- wait what is this?

A 5 hour totally not a standalone expansion for ac4 in which you play as a templar? That sounds sick!

But well it's quite bad. The gameplay feels tired and gets old quickly meanwhile the story is utterly atrocious. Though with a nice start and cool ending, everything in between that is...not great.

Shay is likeable and his motives are understandable as...we'd all leave our friends if they made us destroy an entire city and kill thousands of innocents...but joining the templars and fighting to enslave humanity so fast is quite stupid.

One minute he's all about freedom then he's all about order with no second thoughts...or really much thought put into it.

This never gets brought up once in the game either and this game doesn't go for the anti hero story but actually wants you to go with the story and plot thinking that the templars are the good guys. If you title this simply as 'Rogue' and make someone who never heard of Assassin's Creed play this game they'll never figure out that the Assassins are actually the good guys. It's simply unlikeable on a fundamental level.

In this game they basically just swapped colors between the templars and assassins and that was it. The templars are perfect and do everything right and are the good guys and the assassins are the bad guys who do everything wrong and are all gonna be killed by you and your cast of forgettable friends including....that guy with...y'know the one with like...the funny voice or something?

Well Haytham is in this game quite a bit but he lacks his charisma and personality and only gets it back right at the end of the game because ofc he does ONLY at the end.

You see with AC Brotherhood and Revelations what kept me going was the fact the stories were still good-great, even if the gameplay got old at least the story was there to drive me to keep playing as I wanted to see what would happen to Ezio.

But when you don't really change much about the gameplay and offer a story that wastes it's potential with unlikeable and forgettable characters where even then at the end it’s all for nothing since AC3 happens and undoes everything in this game and THEN at the end you find out in the modern day setting that you're going through Shay's memory just because someone wanted to send that footage to the assassins so he could shitpost them or something…

That's when you've got yourself a lazy shitty and forgettable game not deserving of the "underrated" label. Mostly forgotten and ignored for good reason.

Released the same day as unity in a time where it was easy to be burned out with the franchise. This made the game overlooked by many, including me.

Gameplay is identical to Black Flag, but that is not a bad thing. Story is pretty good and is what makes this game stand out from the rest as you get to see the world through the eyes of an assassin turned templar.

If you enjoyed BF and don't mind going a generation back (although not that hard between current and previous generation, especially with the remastered edition), it is worth playing. Just don't expect anything new or revolutionary.

Playtime is around 6 hours if you only play the story, going for platinum does increase playtime drastically (but not that long compared to other games).