Although we're all still buying enough of the AC games to allow Ubisoft to give us two titles a year, the fact remains that the heart of the experience is in dire need of a complete overhaul. It's not hard to see why someone would be utterly sick to the back teeth of this franchise being that we've had annual instalments for the better part of a decade now - all still with only minor changes applied to the same game engine that initially wowed us back in 2007. With a climbing mechanic that was going to rely on throwing your body weight around a series of outcrops and architecture so you could make your getaway in style, the whole thing was reduced down to just pressing forward whilst holding the right trigger and the A button. It was a move that firmly favoured accessibility and after so many sequels and so little innovation, even upcoming AC: Unity looks like it's going to play exactly the same as all the others. Whilst it seems that both the WWE, FIFA and Madden series' get away with making only minor alterations to a winning formula, when the core gameplay isn't as drop-in, drop-out as those titles and has to power an entire 20-odd hour campaign, it gets tiring extremely fast. Chuck in a whole host of glitches and the fact that the only thing that separates AC IV: Black Flag from the previous three is some tacked-on boat combat that's about as far removed from what being an assassin is all about as you can get, and you have a collection of reasons that are incredibly off-putting to many players.
