Let's talk Assassin's Creed, as it definitely doesn't feel like anyone else is this year. Seriously, remember across all of 2014 all you read about was how Ubisoft were 'reinventing' their core game engine, making sure we were going to get "an all-new experience" - hell, they even had their company tagline be "Next gen starts here", which you could've patted them on the back like some self-confident village hero for, if they delivered in the end. However, as has been written about at length (so much length), the state of AC Unity at retail was an absolute disaster. The issues of character models falling apart weren't as widespread as you were led to believe, but everything else therein only indicated Ubisoft's higher-ups were clearly putting a lot of pressure on the devs to get something out the door, despite a total lack of polish. Textures regularly popped in, NPCs and pedestrians would randomly take flight as you walked down the street - and that's if the immediate sensation of "seen it all before" in regards to animation and plot didn't make one hell of a sour taste appear manifest within minutes. The weird thing though? People weren't all that incensed or infuriated. It was more just a sense of complete confusion the series had gotten to this point, especially after the brilliantly forward-thinking mechanics of Black Flag and its ship-based combat, or spin-off Freedom Cry's more mature narrative themes. There are tens of thousands of people out there who still actively want to like and love Assassin's Creed like they did in the late 00's, but even with Syndicate on the horizon it's looking increasingly harder to do so. Let us know in the comments where you stand, as with Watch Dogs a smouldering wreck of potential, it's about time Ubisoft put this out to pasture alongside and started something completely different.
