Assassin's Creed Unity preview

With just these two improvements, Unity would be a better game, in the actual playing of it, than any Assassin's Creed before it. Fighting and running is 90% of what you do in these games, and improving both instantly elevates Unity above its peers. More importantly, they now feed into one another, with the free running being a necessary component of the fighting, used for escape rather than just travel, which makes the mastery of it a necessary rather than just a distracting optional pursuit.

But Ubisoft hasn't stopped there, overhauling pretty much every aspect of what makes an Assassin's Creed game an Assassin's Creed game, and while it's not all successful, or particularly revolutionary, every change is a welcome one, in varying degrees.

Ubisoft will tell you all this is possible because of the entirely new game engine that powers Unity, but the leaps and bounds that it makes are more hops and skips, moving forward with things that should really have been rectified after Assassin's Creed 2 made such sweeping changes to the grand scale of the game, without ever really refining the basics. Perhaps the largest departure from the previous games is the reworking of the main assassination missions, which have become less combat galleries with optional stealth and are now daubed 'Black Box' missions, mimicking the freedom of Hitman's larger levels. They're filled with optional objectives and multiple ways to eradicate your target, all while you observe them moving around the level going about their business.

In theory, this is a huge improvement, actually making a bid to earn the 'Assassin' part of Unity's title. As the centrepiece of the section I was able to play, an assassination set in Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral, it was introduced with a quick fly-by that highlighted a few of the things I might want to investigate as I went about my murdering. If it was just that, it would have been invigorating, a quick push in the right direction before being left to go about my business however I wanted.

But that spark of curiosity was soon doused as the fly-by ended and I was thrown back into the game world, with a set of intrusive objective markers that labelled each and every one of the different ways I could go about the mission. It's as though Unity is ambivalent about exactly what it wants you to be doing, not sure whether to give you the freedom to experiment and discover, or just do all the leg work for you in case you get lost.

It's an insecurity that's infected almost every major Ubisoft release for the past few years, admittedly, with your minimap and HUD constantly littered with a distracting periphery of icons and pointers that do genuinely help you find new activities to do, but can't help but tear your attention away from the thing you're actually doing, right this moment. During the pre-demo presentation Unity's Creative Director Alexander Amancio assured us that this time when we climb to a viewpoint and reveal a section of the map 'you won't reveal everything', and after playing it, rather than feel excited by that prospect, eager to head out and discover the unrevealed corners of 18th Century Paris, the thought that what I can already see isn't everything available just makes me feel nauseous.

That said, the distractions in Unity are significantly more developed than Ubisoft's anaemic Watch Dogs, where each activity was as bare bones as it was possible to be. Here they're fleshed out, each feeling unique enough that they start to develop a bit of impetus in the player rather than just being a checkbox to tick. The majority come in two flavours; murder mysteries and assassination side-contracts.

The murders have more than a few similarities with the crime scenes of Batman, albeit with significantly more detective work and witness interviewing. You have a series of clues in the area, after which you need to analyse them and then accuse someone. Get it right first time and you get the full reward, with each failed accusation docking your pay. It's a fun diversion, and in the three or four I played there was enough variety that they didn't feel repetitive. There were even elements involved from both combat and free running, which was a welcome change of pace.

The assassinations, too, mix things up enough not to feel bland. They're not all about killing, either, with one of the first I started tasking me with recovering wax death masks that had been stolen from Madame Tussaud. Each of them put an emphasis on a different aspect, one hidden behind a heavy guard presence, requiring a lot of stealth, and another needing to be taken by force.

These, in combination with the addition of a dedicated stealth button so you don't have to rely on geographical cover to stay hidden, and the complete removal of instant failure in missions if you're discovered, all combine to present Unity as a sort of apology by Ubisoft. It's a representation that they have been listening to the various complaints about Assassin's Creed that have compounded over the better part of the last decade. With that in mind Unity is likely to be the best Assassin's Creed game the studio have produced, but the improvements are an iteration, rather than a revolution.