My Assassin’s Creed playthrough continues, after taking a break for some time. Rogue brings us to the seventh in the flagship series. It was released on the same day as Unity (AC8), but Rogue was released for older consoles, whereas Unity was developed for the then-new, PS4/Xbone generation. It’s fair to assume then that any new technical advancement was only happening for Unity. Rogue was just being concurrently cobbled together from Black Flag‘s existing parts.
It shows. The core gameplay and even many of Black Flag’s assets return with virtually no changes. You have a new silent ranged gun and grenade launcher, but the sleep/berserk effects of its ammunition have been around for some time. Everything I complained about for getting stale in Black Flag is all the more stale here. The velcro ledge-climbing has been the same forever, and is dull in comparison to the likes of Breath of the Wild‘s free climbing, which had management of stamina and puzzle-like usage of tools and objects in the environment. If there were any tweaks to the core combat, I barely noticed — you can still just stab everyone after throwing a smoke bomb. The guards are still utterly stupid, and will not turn around despite all the commotion created when you stab the coworker standing one foot behind them, no matter how hard they seem to hit the ground in their heavy armor. But to balance that out, trying to stay hidden also quickly gets frustrating, particularly on rooftops, where you can’t even crouch to break line of sight. Best not to think of these as dedicated stealth games.
It’s not the buggiest AC game I’ve ever played, but I did die once from falling through the deck of a ship I was standing on, and another time got stuck on an object while parkouring, and had to quick-travel away to get down.
None of this is particularly enjoyable anymore except perhaps the naval combat, which is still kinda fun, but I also didn’t feel keen on completely repeating the grind for a maxed-out fleet, especially when it was by no means necessary to beat the game. I sampled everything, but completed nothing, as I had no intention of spending another hundred hours in Black Flag’s leftovers. And I have to say, when an Ubisoft game tells you, “Okay, time to collect all the animus fragments, templar maps, crosses, native pillars, viking swords, cave paintings, chests, shanties, blueprints, gems, emails, war letters, complete all the renovations, and beat every mission challenge objective for 100% Sync,” there’s something very freeing about saying “Nah.”
The “Naval Campaign” gameplay mode still has that “Babby’s First Flash Game” quality to it, is tediously slow, and the less time one spends on that, the better.
The story was surprisingly and mercifully short, and I wrapped up after about only two full days of play. To its credit, I don’t recall any NPC tailing missions, which were a source of annoyance for me in the last one. Several missions played to the strengths of the naval combat, though I have to say the Seven Years’ War is dull subject matter, and sailing the West Indies during the golden age of piracy had a natural appeal that just isn’t present in the likes of Colonial-era New York and Halifax. The war was very clearly only chosen because it filled the gaps between the Connor and Kenway generations, and not because there was really anything cool to take part in there besides seeing the British and French hate each other, which you can pretty much do anytime anyway.
Following the linear path up a series of uniquely climbable rocks through a cave, though — who still thinks this sort of thing is cool? Aren’t you tired yet? I tend to mock the Naughty Dog style of cinematic games, but at least I’ve been told they sell you quite well on their story and characters.
Rogue‘s angle is that you are an Assassin who turns Templar, and get to fight for their side for once. The suggestion is that things aren’t so black and white, and Templars can sometimes be on the right side of history, but if you’re expecting a more nuanced picture that stretches backwards into the earlier games, you don’t really get that. Near as I can tell, it’s simply that at this point in time, the Assassins had a world-historically stupid idea to cause a bunch of earthquakes and kill tons of people in the hopes that something good might work out if they kept doing it. I kept waiting for some reveal where they had evidence of the bigger picture that the protagonist wasn’t yet privy to, but it turns out that no, the leader of the cell eventually concurs that they were wrong, and it was in fact Their Bad, and Sorry About All That, Man.
Can’t say I got much out of it, but there’s little to cry about when I got through it so fast. If I had forced myself to pick up every pointless bullshit gewgaw, I’d have really hated this game. You’re still probably better off skipping it and looking up a story synopsis on Youtube, but then again, you could probably say the same of all the games up into the “modern” installments, if that’s what you want. If you’ve made it to the seventh Assassin’s Creed, you more or less know what you’re getting into, and a bad review won’t stop you from attempting to satisfy that weird part of the brain that wants to return to stale installments of an old franchise instead of trying something new and interesting.
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