Sands Of Time

After a year in the shadows, Ubisoft’s biggest series re-emerges to show off its wild side.

- Jen Simpkins

A year is a long time in videogames – but not, it seems, in videogame marketing. It all started so promisingly: Ubisoft’s announcement that there would be no entry in the mainline Assassin’s Creed series in 2016 was a bold one, and, after years of creative stagnation, probably the right one too. Millions of unit sales were willingly cast aside as the publisher said it would be “stepping back and re-examining” the well-worn template of its safest bet. Unity left a sour taste in 2014; a year later Syndicate mostly washed over us, an overfamiliar murder tour of old-timey London notable only for the novelty of its setting and its charming dual protagonists. Despite that, we missed the series last year, and walked into our demo at this year’s E3 excited to see what had changed. Apparently not much had. The world is really big now, they said. There are more objectives. Hey, we stuck some feathers on a Watch Dogs 2 drone and now you’ve got Senu, a fully controllable tactical eagle. It’s the same old Assassin’s fans know and either love or blithely ignore, only... better, kind of.

Not quite. The truth is, despite what the semi-automatic marketing spiel and restrictive demos might suggest, that Ubisoft has actually done it: Assassin’s Creed is different. That’s where all that extra development time has gone; not on simply making a better version of what has gone before, but on making something else. And while a new RPG structure, a rebuilt combat system and an AI world far wilder than we had expected does have us – and, we suspect, Ubisoft – a little worried about what exactly the definition of an Assassin’s game now is, we can’t help but feel that it’s a good problem to have.