Preface
In a well-timed accidental meeting of each other online, myself, Frostos and Tommygunlovers were able to finally give co-op a go in Assassin’s Creed: Unity. With very little expectation, we dived in!
Free-roam = chaos
I had no idea free-roam was an option, I thought we had a few special co-op missions to try, and that was that.
Nope! We can roam the streets as a gang of assassins! It’s not until there are a few of you, that you realise exactly how well-equipped you are.
Running around the streets in single player, you know you can take folk out, and you’ll be fine. But with three of us, we were basically bullies that were climbing everything and taking out anyone we could see. It just made me a much more confident/arrogant assassin, but it felt great.
I didn’t realise that this was what I needed in the franchise, but I loved it! It was mostly seamless, and just good fun. Very impressed.
Missions
Ok, so co-op missions are an element that basically got us into playing the game at all, and something we absolutely wanted to try.
So, we fired up a mission, one where we had to assassinate some priest who was basically a real dick.
It threw us into it with a short clip (nice way to give the mission some purpose), and away we went. We had free run to approach it all as we wanted, and approach it, we did!
I think it would be safe to say that we weren’t very co-ordinated (apart from the video above of Tommygunlovers and Frostos in sync), and if we were, I hazard we could have executed a flawless run……..We didn’t.
We rescued some prisoners (assassin’s that had tried and failed to do this mission before), and then set off to get him. Stealth should have been our primary focus, our ally…..it wasn’t.
I love stealth games, I love stealth mechanics, but as a group without a plan, the fun is in getting the job done and taking folk out in the best ways. 10 people on guard? How many will come to fight us? It was chaos, but it was excellent fun.
We found the guy, I shot him with my pistol from a roof, caused chaos, we fought folk, revived each other and then bolted.
There were no connection issues, no communication issues of any sort, it was essentially a smooth online experience, and that just ensured that it was a fun time.
Expectations vs reality
Honestly, with the god-awful uPlay connection problem when just starting the game, I had concerns that this would just be an unplayable mess and a waste of time, but it was butter-smooth and just a great time.
I really really had low expectations, perhaps it was another tacked-on online mode that was such a huge trend not so long ago. The series isn’t known for co-op, and the old games with online modes were just fine, but not particularly immersive. This really surprised me, it was a great deal of fun and I’d recommend it to anyone.
Now, we’ve found that there are loads of missions, and even “heists” which I can’t wait to dive in to!
Check out this blog by Fierce PC, ranking all of the AC games!