Assassin's Creed Unity

This game got a bad rap on release, due to numerous bugs and issues at launch. Also, it was the unlucky target for general Ubisoft hate, as in 2014 Ubisoft had been running a very exploitive business model and were pushing out lower quality products yearly that relied on brand name to sell. Basically, they were a nascent EA or Activision.  Also, the "bull-shot", or screenshot faked to look better than what's actually in the game, became an art form pioneered by Ubisoft, and they spent lavishly to hype up the game only to release a disappointing product at the end.

Assassin's Creed: Unity is a victim of all these problems, yet underneath it all is a very decent game.

I've been a fan of the Assassin's Creed series since its inception, I still consider the first game as an open world Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones, however Assassin's Creed 2 cemented my love for the series. Unity isn't quite as good as 2 but it is a worthy runner up after the boring rehashes after Brotherhood.

As an aside, Black Flag is the best pirate simulator made to date, but the actual Assassin's Creed part of the game - open world cities, social stealth, and free running assassinations - are straight rehashes of its predecessors and the worst parts of the game. After you get the Jackdaw pirate ship, you'll never want to touch a main story mission again.

Assassin's Creed: Unity is an iterative reinvention of the franchise's gameplay. The climbing and parkour system got reworked, as did the combat, stealth system, and social blending.

The combat is harder than previous games - the enemies are far more aggressive and will attack you with both swords and firearms, you can die easily against large groups and now you have to consider the specific strengths and weaknesses of the enemy type you are fighting. You cannot counter-kill everyone with a press of a button, but parrying your way to victory is still a viable tactic.

The parkour rework just sucks. They added 3 free run options - run straight (hold right trigger), run up (right trigger + x) run down (right trigger + o). There are special input commands for entering windows, avoiding obstacles, leaping off of walls or up them. Unfortunately its way too complicated and controls terribly. Most of the time the character does not do what you want him to do and the ledge and wall detection is as finicky as ever. Free running seems like it has a mind of its own and feels like controlling a runaway train.

The stealth system got reworked with a new cover mechanic, and the crouch walk/duck walk that I detest in all stealth games. Crouching down to waist level magically makes you undetectable to people when they would have seen you standing straight up. This is a rant for another time. The cover system lets you duck behind objects or around corners in order to ambush a target.  As with all of Unity's new systems, the cover system is really finicky in how it magnetizes the character to cover, how you can come out of it, and who can detect you.

The Achilles heel of all of Unity's new systems are the controls - they are clunky, complicated, and have lagged responses.  The team at Ubisoft really harped on all the new tech they created for AC:Unity, and it shows that they did create a lot of new tech, however it all could have benefited from a lot more polish, bug fixes and time in development. These are really good ideas - I hate crouch walking but I think covering behind items and assassinations from cover really enhance the realism  and tactical nature of stealth. The Uncharted series actually perfected the controls for this system and it launched a wave of copycats. I would have loved to see this system in the open world environment of Assassin's Creed but unfortunately the developers rushed to release this product before it was finished.

The crowds, on the other hand, are the highlight of this game. This feature got some of the most criticism on release - areas with large crowds caused massive game slowdown, frame rate drops and ugly object pop in. As a result of having so many actors on screen, the texture resolution on NPC characters had to be dialed way down, and leads to the clothing of 18th century France, some of the most lavish in human history, looking kind of bland and ugly up close.

However, nothing compares to the experience of muscling your way through a crowd, sneaking past the guards, climbing into and sneaking through a Parisian stronghold to assassinate the target inside. I feel like this is the experience that the Assassin's Creed series had been building towards ever since the release of the first game, but had always been held back by technology. Unity may be the closest we ever come to seeing this vision fulfilled, as the critical backlash of this game meant that in all subsequent titles, the large crowds have been removed. Even in Origins, Assassin's Creed's latest and greatest release, there are very few non player characters on screen at a time, no large crowds and the civilians barely do anything more than walking around.

And this is a shame, because the Assassin's Creed series has never had much interactivity with the civilians. It's not an RPG like the Witcher or Oblivion, where every NPC can be interacted with and may draw you into a new quest or mini game. It's not a Thief game where every NPC is a potential target to be robbed. The most you can do in an Assassin's Creed game is use groups of 3 or more NPCs to hide from guards. At least filling the world with large crowds and large numbers of NPCs on the streets made the Paris of AC: Unity seem populated and "realistic", as opposed to the small, nearly abandoned towns in EVERY other game.

The reception of this game prompted Ubisoft to strip everything down for the next, yearly cash grab release, and when that game tanked as well they put their next game on hold for a year, finally giving it the development time it needed to be acceptably polished on release, but every innovation and rework done for Unity was thrown out wholesale and replaced with a new system.

Assassin's Creed: Origins had a completely new combat system inspired by Dark Souls, the cover system was completely gone and the stealth system was stripped down to crouch walking only, the NPC crowds were completely gone, but at least now you could get side quests from special NPCs. The game released to rave reviews and revitalized interest in the franchise, but I feel that makes Unity all the more unique for having its own vision and a gameplay experience you can't get in any other game.

I feel that if you can get past the flaws of Assassin's Creed: Unity, both technically and in some gameplay decisions, there is a lot to enjoy and a very immersive, engrossing game underneath. I find precious few people defending this game other than some dedicated fans, since most just played it briefly on release and then forgot about it in favor of the next yearly release. I bought this game to sate my hunger for an Assassin's Creed 2 like experience, and while Unity will never be as good as that game it is still better than the rehashed copy games that the franchise had become and like all the good Assassin's Creed games, will suck you in and refuse to let you out from its world.

Quake 3 is perfect

/it doesn't matter what mood I'm in: whether I want to take it easy and meander around for some slow kills, or play an objective based game mode like Capture the Flag, or go all out racing at the speed of light with my reflexes running in split seconds going for kill after kill, Quake 3 delivers.

In Quake you cannot shoot at where the enemy is, you must aim to where they will move to. This goes for the hitscan weapons as well, because the character speed is so high that prediction is the only reliable way to hit your target. 

Though its lack of a dedicated single player campaign was unusual in 1999, now its more or less industry standard, and Quake actually has more solo player content than most games due to the inclusion of bots and campaign matches.