First off, there might be plot spoilers in here. Protip - there's no plot worth caring about, so don't feel too

ing upset about it. Now that I'm done with unity, thought I'd spill all of my thoughts out on it and have it excised from my body.
I do enjoy the AC games immensely as a rule, so if it seems like I'm giving something a free pass that I shouldn't be that might be why.
Pros:
- It looks good. Really really good. There's actually quite a bit of polish to how good it looks. Having played through the whole game start to plat (not quite 100%) including a bunch of coop I can say that the performance complaints from reviewers have virtually no merit. It chugs here and there, but (for example) AC3 was waaaaay worse just running across an empty field. there are certain big ornate buildings that can get the slowdown effect on demand, but otherwise it's impressive.
- Bunches of people. I scoffed at this and continued to scoff at this being the reason for the game needing to be 900p/30fps. It just seemed like such a silly luxury. Then there's a mission near the end where there has got to literally be thousands of individually animating people and it's a pretty damn cool effect. It's not uncommon when running around to hit a crowd of a hundred or so and that's neat, but the gigantic crowd in that mission really got my attention. despite how douchey it sounds, that really did feel like a 'next gen' moment.
- Historical (main) story. Pretty good, really. They've gotten good at this part - the story in the past. AC4's was fun too with good characters - AC:unity has some fun characters too that don't get nearly enough screen time. It's also just the right length, it doesn't overstay its welcome at all.
- New assassination mission setup. There's a new mechanic where there's optional mini-missions in a main assassination mission that can help your chances of success or change the missions completely. Like you can help a salesman get past some dudes trying to rob him before you go to your target and he'll set off fireworks behind the building to get all the guards to turn around. Or you can free some prisoners to start a riot in the main courtyard letting you walk right past. Or you can set up circumstances to poison your target's wine instead of stabbing. Good idea and fairly well done for the first time out, should get better in the future.
- Helix Rift Missions. Arcade type levels where you collect glowing boxes and stab people for points to go for high scores and bonuses in settings outside of the main story. I thought these were silly fun and could've been a good standalone game on the cheap. Plus they were another excuse to run through the extremely well done alternate Paris environments (WWI Paris at the Eiffel Tower, Medevil Paris and one other?). Not a total waste of time!
- shortest AC plat since AC2 by my reckoning. If you're in to that sort of thing.
Cons:
- Seriously, almost no modern day plot at all. I might as well say none. Unless I missed something, even the ending didn't have much to do with the modern day / futuristic crazy crap of the series except for the end boss weapon (which you see in the intro anyways, so not a big spoil there). Why the

not? I guess these are just going to start being historical shorts except for the numbered games? I dunno. The modern day plot is so stupid and silly but I like it and really ended up missing it here.
- Co-op. What an utter waste of time. Turns out you *can* solo them if you want by the time you're all beefed up at the end, but why? The missions are uninspired and uninteresting. There's very little that feels cooperative about it too - I did play just with randoms without a mic, but there was rarely a time it felt like communication would've helped.
- Collectibles. Always a downer in these games for most folks, it's actually something I enjoy - running around the well designed cities and getting to see everything is generally awesome. HOWEVER, they done gone and

ed up my enjoyment of it this time around with the chests. Worst idea. You have to collect something like 296 chests. I'll bet 190 of them have to be 'lockpicked' through a stupid timing mini-game (many of which you can't do until you've puchased all the 'lockpick' skills) AND almost all of the lockpick chests are guarded by 3+ dudes that you have to spend time to kill. So it's not just running around and collecting, you have to run up, assassinate, kill 2 or more dudes, play a mini-game and then wait for the chest opening animation to get ONE of those 296 collectibles. I'll admit this is one of those times I felt stupid going for a trophy. AND THEN YOU DON'T EVEN GET A REWARD OTHER THAN THE SHITTY TROPHY FOR COLLECTING ALL OF THEM. A costume! A helmet! Uplay points! Give some sort of in game motivation for completing the set! BLURGH
- Nostradamus Enigmas. See collectibles. Pointless secondary collectible that isn't fun at all and probably no one on earth will try to do without a guide. Ditto on the no reward if I remember right, but I might be wrong on that one.
- Murder Mysteries. Another pointless addition. The mechanisms they added in to have the protagonist play junior detective were fine and worked well in the mainline missions but you didn't need to have a bunch of auxiliary missions that use the concept.
- Mainline mission extra objectives. Out of the 30ish main missions only maybe 5 or 6 had extra objectives that seemed to follow the theme of the mission. Just a weird departure.
- Remote play. First game I've played where something was off about remote play. It took me forever to figure out, but I guess you have to hold down multiple quadrants of the rear touchpad for it to register for this game (the whole rear touchpad is 'L1', but it doesn't count unless half or more of the touchpad is held down?). That was just annoying, not game ruining.
- No more brotherhood allies. No more pressing a button to rain down assassin terror from a distance! I couldn't remember if AC4 had them gone too or not, but yeah it's completely non-existent in unity.
Overall I'm glad I played it if anything to temper my expectations of the future. If they could buck up and stop throwing so much useless shit in there to artificially extend playtime for ocd people like me they could probably get their games back on track. If they took out: chest collectibles, coop, enigmas and cut in half the paris stories and murder mysteries I would've still been perfectly happy to have bought it at release. Definitely the most technically impressive game they've put out by a mile, but my least favorite too.
EDIT - I should note that there ARE a bunch of people that are getting glitched/corrupted saves and trophies and shit. This isn't the safest game to play right now, but purportedly the next patch will fix 'most' of these issues. I only ever had crashes when I finished a coop mission (thus making it not count) but I already hated the coop so the crashes didn't make me hate it more.
DOUBLE EDIT - Oh right, the engimas were to get the armor that I still don't know what it does. It seems like it's just to play dress up in, but it also felt like I could jump to the ground from waaay higher up. Who knows. Probably google.