In theory, these Chronicles games should've been brilliant. The basic idea was to take Klei Entertainment's side-scrolling take on the stealth genre, Mark of the Ninja, inject all the weaponry and historically-accurate AC trimmings and release them episodically, each taking the player to a new location not used in the triple-A editions of the franchise. You can just picture Ubi's developers drawing up a list of locations they'd eventually get round to using, and although it's Chronicles' gameplay that lets it down, the visual flourishes and aesthetics for each set of levels remains a highlight. That gameplay though, and like the main canon's latter batch of releases, the execution just wasn't there. It doesn't help Ubi that Mark of the Ninja is an absolute masterclass in animation and mechanical execution; a perfect mix of ability upgrades and item iteration across a healthy runtime. By comparison, putting AC on a 2.5D plane only highlighted how much the series only really flourishes when you have options in an open world. In fairness to the ideology behind such a genre-swap, there is a cool, arcady feel to piloting the various heroes across each level, and some novel mechanics such as first-person sniping segments in the Russian episode to help differentiate further. Sadly, for all its intentions and each episode's identifying factors, the Chronicles games just aren't that fun to play.
