I’ve always been a major fan of the Assassin’s Creed games ever since the day when I got my Xbox 360 and bashed out a long session of the original. Since that first game we’ve been sent jumping over the houses of Italy, sailing the beautiful seas of the Caribbean, eating cheese and drinking wine in France and the more recently having a sip of tea whilst slitting throats in London, which I’ve recently been playing non-stop to earn my platinum trophy (I’d bow in reality if I was there with you now) and loved every second of it. I’m wondering if I missed a game but then again I’ve permanently removed one of the games from my mind (Assassin’s Creed 3) because everyone is allowed to make at least one mistake in their lives and it was fixed with Black Flag.
So naturally I’ve been wanting to play the chronicles series and managed to get my grubby hands on Russia, I haven’t really had the time to play China or India as of yet so this experience is pretty new to me. I’ve been pretty excited about this as it’s a new take on the Assassin’s Creed games which doesn’t involve your traditional open sandbox mechanics but more of a go here, click there, do this and do that style of gameplay, furthermore I wanted to see how the franchise would tackle the release of a smaller Assassin’s Creed title since they usually pack so many things into the games that I’ve lost the use of my legs by the time I’ve managed to finish one.
Assassin’s Creed Russia has been developed by Climax Games who you may know of because of a few of the Silent Hill games that they’ve developed, it’s also published by Ubisoft who you may know if you’ve played a video game at any point in your life. It’s the third in a 3 part spin off which involves 3 different assassin’s from different parts of the world, and as I mentioned before these are China, India and now, Russia.
The game plays as a puzzle action adventure type game, really in that in the majority of situations you have to make your way from A to B and try to get their as safely and quietly as possible. You also get bonuses if you manage to make it there in one piece, without getting spotted and by not killing as many guards as you possibly can, something which I only realized a short way through the game after butchering the majority of Russia. The bonus system is a nice incentive to try and encourage you to play the game properly, but there’s nothing really forcing you to go down that route so feel free to become the most bloodthirsty savage you possibly can, if you don’t die first.
You play as Nikolai Orelov, an assassin who isn’t really too fond of the standard assassin’s blade and swords but more into slapping people with the back end of his rifle and shooting them in the face, it’s not the standard approach to assassin games but it’s an effective one none the less. Long story short, there is a box in Russia which might contain a piece of Eden which the Assassins are after but so are the Templars, so it’s pretty important that you get their first, it always amazes me with the Assassin’s Creed games that whenever the most important object in the world is found they only send one assassin to go and get it. What the Assassins don’t know is that Nikolai intends this to be his last mission and wants to raise the funds to get himself and his family out of Russia and over to America so that he can pitch to Ubisoft for an Assassin’s Creed 7: Hungry in New York. Your job is to track down the box and to not die on the way, which proves incredibly difficult considering the second your spotted, your more or less dead. I’m not going to delve too much into the story because I don’t want to spoil it, but it’s needless to say that it gets very interesting.
Further into the story you will get to play as another character; Anastasia Romanova who has a few more skills at her disposal. I won’t spoil the story line but long story short is that you will enjoy playing the game more with her than you ever will with Nikolai because of the abilities and the way she’s received them.
The game encourages you to be stealthy and to use your own logic to figure out the best way to get from A to B. You have a few tools at your disposal, but these are almost ‘get out of jail free’ cards since you don’t really need them most of the time. The only tool that you do need is the winch and the whistle but we’ll come to that in a second. This is where the original Assassin’s Creed that we all know and love comes into play, since you have to use your logic and your initiative to find the best course without causing a scene. If you want to be like me then it’s quite fun to pretend that Nikolai had forgotten his clothes that day and that was why he had to hide in so many shadows and evade all of the patrols. The box didn’t really have a piece of Eden in it at all, but actually a dressing gown. Shame that the storyline spoilt this fantasy that I’d created in my own head.
As far as tools go, you’ve got some new ones to play about with. Much like the other games you have your standard smoke bombs and your whistle but you also get a snazzy new rifle to use which you can point at the guards crouches and obliterate any chance they have of having children and re-populating after all those guards you’ve just slaughtered. You also get a nice new winch to fire off at objects and interact with them in a variety of ways such as pulling them towards you, shooting off an electrical circuit to destroy them and to pull yourself up to monkey bars so you can dangle above guards heads.
Some of the puzzles that you are given can also be quite tricky and you will find that a lot of trial and error comes into play in order to find the best route. This is a definite pro in my book since most games like this can be far too simple and that really takes away the enjoyment of playing it in the first place. The main reason anyone plays puzzle games is to use their brain and this is a game in which you will need too, but when you do solve the puzzle and get to that next bit there’s a sense of achievement which comes with it.
The graphics are nice and are designed quite well. The game has a noir feel to it and it reminds me a bit of a dark graphic novel. The majority of the map is mainly grey with objects that you can interact with highlighted, it’s never really said but it’s fairly obvious after playing that red items are for progression, interacting and climbing where as green items are for hiding and jumping out right in front of the guards, which much to my disappointment I did quite well. The majority of puzzles are based around multi-dimensional planes, so when you’re trying to hide you can go forward a plan and hide behind a window frame, still seeing the guards, their lines of sights and their movement patterns. This also comes into play when you transition on to the next puzzle and it’s a nice way of moving onto the next puzzle.
The sound is fine, nothing special but nothing bad. To be honest though I struggled to understand what the main character was saying at the beginning of the game which probably didn’t help. I don’t think that this is necessarily a problem with the game, but more a problem with me and I’d like to know if a someone else experiences the same issue because it’d be nice to know that I don’t have to brush up on my Russian vocabulary from 1918. I can’t say anything negative about the sound because their isn’t really anything bad about it, but at the same time there is nothing really that strikes me as special so all in all it’s pretty average.
There are a few other things to kill time with. From the main menu you can take part in some challenges which are a nice little way of killing some free time and testing out your skills. I enjoy things like this and it takes me back to Assassin’s Creed 2 when you were able to make Ezio run around a little grey room, throwing knives at as many as he could and testing out your skills in lots of fun and interesting ways. It’s just a change of pace from the actual game play and allows you to time yourself and see how you are progressing as a master assassin. You also have the animus database which will be familiar to anyone who has played the main games before. This provides snippets of information about the current time, architecture, state of politics, whatever is important basically, it ensure that you learn something, because after all, knowledge is power.
To summarize, the game is good. It’s nothing special compared to the other Assassin’s Creed games but it’s certainly nowhere as bad as the third. But to be honest it’s not really a game that you can go into expecting it to be like the others since it’s a completely new style of gameplay. If you are interested in adventure puzzle games then this is definitely going to tick some boxes for you and I’d say that so will the others as they all seem quite similar but with different storylines. One thing that always get’s to me in reviews is when the reviewer says something along the lines of “I’m giving it a lower score because it’s not as good as the first one” and so the final score that I’ve given it is based around the game as whole and nothing to do with it’s predecessors.
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