11. Assassin’s Creed
Ah, the OG. Playing this game in 2020 was not as bad as I thought it would be. The controls were not as tight as the most recent games, but I will cut some slack for a 12 year old game. You got to respect the first Assassin’s Creed. It really kicked off the whole open-world parkour style of games and this incredible series of ups and downs. Really the only reason that Assassin’s Creed is nearing the bottom of the list is because the best games have just come so far from the original. It is a testament to how much they have improved, and this is the foundation.
Compared to the later games, Assassin’s Creed is pretty basic. You have one sword, one blade, and no money. The free-running, climbing, and blending mechanics were all also foundational to what would become core elements of the series. Visually, the game was quite bland. It may have just been the aesthetic Ubisoft was going for, but the clothing, the stone buildings, the present day Abstergo location, everything was white and beige. I guess the time period was before color was invented.
One of the big reasons I went back to the beginning of the series in the first place was the flag collectibles. Each area had 100 flags, and while that does not sound like all that many, this was before in-game treasure maps were available, so this was a pain. The flags also evolved into other collectibles in the series like feathers, sea shanties, and Animus fragments. You can decide for yourself if these collectibles enriched the experience or not.
12. Assassin’s Creed Unity
Similar to how the two best Assassin’s Creed games could be interchangeable, the two worst ones are also equally horrible. This is it. The whole reason I wanted to rank these games was to vent my frustrations with Assassin’s Creed Unity and III. First up, AC Unity. This was meant to be the first big step of the series into the Xbox One and PS4 generation of consoles. Ubisoft overestimated the power of these machines and Assassin’s Creed Unity suffered for it. It was plagued with graphical issues and glitches. By the time I got around to playing the game, those had been fixed, but some things cannot be fixed.
The controls. Controlling Arno was one of the single worst experiences I had playing through this series, and it lasted the whole playthrough of the game. It felt like I was controlling the game with Surgeon Simulator hands. I quickly had to accept that whenever I needed to get somewhere in the game, I would never get it right on the first try. I would never land where I wanted to. I would never climb the building the way I meant to. I never got to play the game the way I wanted to.
The combat was made to be more challenging, which is okay, because up until now, you could really take on dozens of enemies by countering and instantly killing them. As much as I liked that, it made the games too simple. That being said, the combat in this title was punishing. The different zones of the map had varying enemy difficulties, sentencing you to death if you ever got in trouble and were under-leveled or outnumbered. “Open world,” but don’t explore too much.
In addition to regular guards, there were also these jackasses who were literally always suspicious of you. They would pick you out of a crowd and ruin your day. Not fun in real life, not fun in video games, Ubisoft. If dying wasn’t bad enough, a strange thing would happen every time Arno died. For some reason, your pistol and your main weapon would default to the weakest option whenever you reloaded your save. So, if you forgot to change your weapons back after you died, you were bound to die again.
Assassin’s Creed Unity added light RPG elements. As the story progresses, you could unlock new skills or tools, like lockpicks, disguises, or increased damage resistance. That is cool and everything, but many of these abilities were locked by story progression, so for a while, you had to play the game in the ways that were available to you, not necessarily how you wanted. You also had to play multiplayer missions and collect all the optional items in them if you wanted enough Ability Points to spend on the skills you wanted. To that end, multiplayer missions were… not wonderful.
Getting all the treasures and completing all the side quests was an awful experience. On top of the frustrating controls, many chests and collectibles were hidden inside buildings, often with convoluted ways of getting inside. Once you do find a blasted chest, oh no! You better come back later because this one has a lock and your lockpick skill isn’t high enough or you are out of lockpicks. One of the collectibles also stole my lunch money this one time.
The Assassin Order chapter of Paris sucked. I believe that earlier Mentors would be disappointed in them and the way they ran things. They were fraught with traitors, secrecy, and mistrust. Arno also sucked. Even though he had good instincts as an Assassin, he was a punk. He didn’t even really believe in the Creed and saw the Brotherhood as a means to his personal ends. Very unbecoming of an Assassin. Whenever things got tough for him, he turned to the drink, and mandatory drunk sections of video games suck. The only really interesting part of the narrative was the Romeo and Juliet thing that Arno and Elise had going on.
The few good things about the game were the technical aspects. The animations were really good, once the initial bug fixes were made. The climb-down controls were surprisingly useful, even if climbing in any other direction was a chore. The streets were also very alive with NPCs, making the atmosphere of Paris more immersive. Pardon my French, but the rest of this game was três mal.
13. Assassin’s Creed III
Assassin’s Creed III. The crême de la crap. The first bad game of the series. Again, it isn’t the worst by a longshot; I am tempted to declare Unity as the worst. The most disappointing part of this game is that there is a really good game hiding inside. Deep, deep down. Underneath the bullshit, past the inconveniences, there is fun to be had. There are great additions the game made to the series, like satisfying executions during combat and naval battles. The trouble is there are so many barriers deliberately put between the player and fun.
The optional objectives in this game were debilitating, suffocating, and frankly abusive. “Take no damage during this very dangerous section”, “Don’t get seen ever”, I think there was even a point where you had to materialize gold from thin air. Not only were the optional objective unnecessarily challenging, but in order to complete them, you were forced to play the game in a very specific way. Your choices of how to approach every situation were made for you.
Like I said, there are parts of the game that are fun. Running around on rooftops: Fun. Fighting the British in the streets: Fun. Going after collectibles and opening treasure chests: Fun. Playing the story and side missions, which are the core of the game: Very, very not fun; painful, in fact. Any time that you should have a choice in how you play, optional objectives were there to knock your ice cream on the ground.
I will say that the Tyranny of King Washington DLC was actually quite good. The alternate reality is a great What If… setting and the animal abilities Connor gets really mix up the gameplay, particularly the eagle form. Though the curse of the optional objectives still persist, the new gameplay elements were very refreshing.
There is another silver lining to playing Assassin’s Creed III Remastered. I got it for free, bundled with Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and if I never played it, I would have never played Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation, which as you can see above, has some of my highest praise.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise has spanned a long time, both in-game and in real life. There are no signs of it slowing down either. The games have adopted many different styles and identities throughout the years, such as cultures and time periods they explore. A hot topic of debate has been and always will be what era or place in history could a great Assassin’s Creed game take place in. What do you think? Where would you like to see this series take us? Do you agree with this list? Is your ol’ pal Zane wrong at every point? Let us know in the comments below.