Ubisoft are threatening to assassinate our wallets in the coming months with the impressive looking Assassin’s Creed: Unity and its younger brother Assassin’s Creed: Rogue, so I thought this is the perfect time to look back on past successes and failures of one of my favourite AAA game franchises. I’ll rank them from best to worst and critically examine the content and style of each game in the series. Remember this is all my own opinion and I’m not trying to give any kind of objective game reviews here! Spoilers may occur.

1. Assassin’s Creed II

Let’s face it, you all saw this coming. I thank you all for at least having some sense when it comes to this franchise and recognising Assassin’s Creed II for the masterpiece that it is. Let me explain what makes this game so great. Every so often a franchise comes about whose first entry shows off the fancy new mechanics perfectly, but is lacking in mission variety or some other aspects. It ends up being little more than a proof of concept for the series. Think Watch-Dogs or, in our case, the original Assassin’s Creed. I described Assassin’s Creed as an exceptional concept desperately searching for a game and Assassin’s Creed II is that game. Where Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem were all the same city in different colours, Assassin’s Creed II’s Florence, Venice, Forli and San Gimignano all feel distinctly different to each other and each have their own personality that helps to split up the different acts of the game. Pickpocketing is simplified and the Assassin’s weapon arsenal is greatly expanded. The hidden blades are upgraded with the new aerial assassination attack, which is so fundamental to the series now that I was shocked when I replayed Assassin’s Creed and found it wasn’t there.

It’s a strikingly different experience to Assassin’s Creed III, which makes it strange that I like them both so much. Where Assassin’s Creed III stands out for its side content, Assassin’s Creed II stands out for its lack of it. There are side missions and feathers to collect, but it’s exactly the perfect amount. It’s not the cluttered mess of flags that we saw in Assassin’s Creed, it’s just right.

I suppose Assassin’s Creed II is similar in some ways to Super Mario 64, which was important for its genre because it so perfectly defined what games in that genre should be and left the foundations for further games to build on it and add new features. Assassin’s Creed II is and always will be the perfect template and perfect example of how to build an Assassin’s Creed game and it is fully deserving of the gold medal.

As for Assassin’s Creed: Unity we’ll have to wait and see, but it’s looking good so far. And with the handy mission feedback feature in Assassin’s Creed IV, Unity and Rogue might just have some of the most polished gameplay so far.

Do you agree with my rankings? What’s your favourite Assassin’s Creed game? Get in touch with SLAM to offer a response and your article could be published!

2. Assassin’s Creed III

Controversy abounds! Ask anybody what they think of Assassin’s Creed III and they’ll laugh it off as a huge flop, but ask me and I’ll tell you that it’s actually my personal favourite. It’s not the best, but it’s still my personal favourite. Is that possible? Whatever, it’s possible now. I’ll admit that it’s not perfect — the frame-rate stutters here and there and doesn’t seem as technically polished as the others, but Assassin’s Creed III had the most emotional impact on me of any game in the series and I think that’s worth mentioning. It’s hard not to empathise with our hero Connor Kenway, mainly because we’ve never been given such a detailed view of an Assassin’s life before. We get to see him grow up from a young boy, the crisis that sparks the revenge story and his alignment with the Assassins as a means to an end to achieve his revenge. You might be thinking I’m crazy right now for lambasting Edward for not deserving to be an Assassin and then say it’s fine for Connor to use them for revenge, but that’s because Edward never gets called out on it. After every major assassination in Assassin’s Creed III there’s some kind of repercussion that throws into question whether that was a good thing or a bad thing to do and I found myself feeling guilty for playing as such an antihero. The whole story seems to be based around making you question whether the Assassins are the good guys any more (fuelled by the amazing twist early on in the game that left me smiling like a dummy). That aside, it’s the little details that make Assassin’s Creed III a narrative powerhouse. Get off the beaten track and you’ll find interactive conversations pop up on the map. One such character late in the game describes his experiences visiting an opera and being scared witless by a man with a blade in his sleeve murdering someone — an event that you played out yourself from the perspective of said man with blade in Memory Block 1. Leave the cities altogether and you’ll find the Homestead missions, which I have to say is my favourite feature of any Assassin’s Creed game. You find people in the cities and bring them to live out at your Assassin outpost with you and eventually you’ve built up your own little village of characters, each with their own personalities. The conclusion of the Homestead missions actually made me shed real man-tears in a display that should go down in history as evidence of how the most simple of ludic elements can turn a scene into an emotional tornado.

The sad thing is that people don’t come to Assassin’s Creed for this. That’s why I compel people to give my second-place Assassin’s Creed game a chance and get lost hunting in the frankly gorgeous Frontier or have fun in the naval missions. Helping the timid miner woo the hardy huntress is one particularly charming storyline that most fans of the franchise will probably never bother reaching. Sad.

3. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag

Black Flag is one of those games caught in the limbo between console generations, but I’ll be commenting mainly on the PS4 version since that’s what I played. Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag brought something back to the franchise that it was dearly missing; fun. Sometimes a thing will come along that can’t be described in critical terms with pros and cons — it’s just fun. Think the film Dragonheart — it’s certainly not the best film ever made, but I’ll defend it to the end because it’s so damn endearing. If only Assassin’s Creed had a dragon voiced by Sean Connery.

It’s a widely accepted fact that pirates in video games are very fun indeed [tell that to Richard Phillips!]. That’s why Assassin’s Creed IV wastes no time in putting you at the helm of your very own brig, free to explore the frankly enormous open world of the Caribbean Sea. The naval battles often require just enough strategy to stay challenging without descending into bewildering Civilisation territory and being able to seamlessly board enemy ships and cut them down with Edward’s two swords and four guns (yes, you read that right!) is always a pleasure. I collected everything available in this game and found myself wanting more to do, just so I could navigate my way there on the open seas while listening to the crew singing sea shanties.

This game only gets third place today, though. That’s because it makes the terrible mistake of putting you back on land. Dock up your ship and you find yourself trapped in a cycle of boring tailing and eavesdropping missions with just a little dash of “infiltrate this base without being seen” thrown in. We’ve seen missions like that all the way back to Assassin’s Creed II and it leaves the land elements of this game feeling like the first game for mission variety.

The other thing that bugs me is Edward Kenway. He just doesn’t feel like an assassin to me. He’s out to make a fortune and that’s all. The MacGuffin he’s racing the Templars to is a vital tool for the Assassins, but he only wants it for the money. I know it seems petty, but I just can’t believe that Edward would ever want to become an Assassin or that they’d ever let him in.

For being a really fun experience and for taking the present day present-day story in a very interesting new direction, I offer the bronze medal to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.

4. Assassin’s Creed

Fourth place seems unfair for the game that kick-started the whole franchise, but it’s a distinct lack of mission variety that leaves it stuck in the Worst half of this list. The breath taking scale of the cities in Assassin’s Creed, as well as wonderful free-form climbing mechanics set the series apart from other action games, as well as laying the foundations of the intriguing present-day story. Unfortunately, the game itself was made up of completing the same objectives time and time again in order to prepare for an assassination, then simply finding and killing the guy in the city without even having to consider the intel you just collected. First off, look at the informant missions that have you collecting flags in a time limit. Each informant has a different excuse for making you do this; my personal favourite being “I accidentally dropped these 30 flags in a linear path leading in a loop directly back to me!” It’s the same kind of loose, barely believable context I’d expect to be given to a “Collect SKATE” mission in an old Tony Hawk game and the objective itself is just as unrealistic.

One more thing: it’s no surprise to me that the namesake Assassin’s Creed, the rules that Assassins must follow and live by, never really gets mentioned in the sequels [I don’t understand this sentence]. The tenets seem to make no sense! For example, late in the game one of Altair’s targets turns out to be a decoy. He lets the person in the disguise walk free, because the Creed states that he must never kill innocents. So off he trots back to Masyaf, stepping over the corpses of hundreds of morally grey city guards he killed to get this far. There’s a life lesson for you: if you live by the Assassin’s Creed, make sure your employer properly defines terms like ‘innocent’.

So, Assassin’s Creed is an exceptional concept desperately searching for a game to go along with it. It’s certainly the weakest in the franchise gameplay-wise, but I just can’t bring myself to place it any lower than this. It’s still a seriously impressive game and we owe it so much for starting off this franchise that I think it deserves fourth place on my list.

5. Assassin’s Creed: Revelations

This second game in the Filler Duology between Assassin’s Creed II and III actually ended up being the better of the two. We accompany Ezio into his twilight years as he moves to Constantinople and ends up facing…Templars…probably. I’ll admit, I was never really inclined to pay attention to the storyline of Revelations much. Not the main (and inevitable) Assassin/Templar conflict, anyway. There are actually some quite nice elements to the storyline, including Ezio’s developing love-life and visits back to Altair (who we see is still in the habit of flagrantly disregarding the Creed, even after we spent the whole first game teaching him to respect it — how’s that for gratitude?). The problem with this game in particular is how forgettable it is. The city is boring — I can remember more of Rome than I can of Constantinople (you’ll see why that’s a bad thing later on). The present day present-day story sees Desmond trapped inside his own mind in the animus trying not to be driven insane by overexposure. It does nothing to progress the present-day story, actually focussing on Desmond’s backstory instead. Anything new that this game introduced was swiftly removed in the next game. The hookblade is pretty uninteresting and the tower defence missions are laughably out of place. All in all, the franchise as a whole would be completely unaffected if Revelations never existed. That would be fine for a handheld game like Bloodlines or Liberation, but for a canon entry in the series it’s kind of a problem.

I don’t have much to say about Revelations because I honestly can’t remember all that much. Fifth place it is, then.

6. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood

Here comes more controversy: the surprisingly popular Brotherhood in dead last. I don’t feel like I’ll be spending much time on this one, but what I say will likely be particularly passionate. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood is the only game in the series that I never finished. In fact, I never managed to get much further than Memory Block 2. I hated every minute I spent with it. Why so, you may ask, at first glance it’s no different to Assassin’s Creed II! That’s the problem. As least Revelations made some effort to change the setting in an interesting way, but Brotherhood sends us to another city in Italy, one that we even visited in Assassin’s Creed II. I’ll be fair and say that the city does have a fair bit of variety to it from what I saw, but it was such hell to navigate. I remember one particularly frustrating river placed slap bang in the middle of the city with banks that couldn’t be climbed from the water. The one place I did manage to get out of the water, all the walls were too high to climb so I had to go back and find somewhere else to climb out. Variety in a city is fine, but ease of navigation is supposed to be at the forefront of any Assassin’s Creed game since it’s based mainly around the climbing mechanics. Ezio is completely unchanged from Assassin’s Creed II, yet somehow manages to become an even more boring character in Brotherhood.

In the end, I’m left with the horrible thought that Brotherhood might just have been a hastily mashed together single-player to accompany the new multiplayer mode. It certainly feels that way to me. As a side note, I never even played the multiplayer mode since I think the inclusion of that is a marketing ploy in itself. Here we have a disappointing example of the bad side of Ubisoft’s insistence on yearly releases. You’ll have noticed that I called Brotherhood and Revelations the “Filler Duology”, because that’s exactly what they are. Ubisoft needed a little more time to bring Assassin’s Creed III to fruition and this is the mess we were left with in the meantime.

Despite all my quarrels, the bad times really don’t overpower all the good times I’ve had with this series. People give it a reputation for being another Call of Duty series with yearly releases that innovate little, but I say why fix what isn’t broken? Assassin’s Creed is still one of my favourite game franchises and I’ll proudly stand by it through thick and thin!

Do you agree with my rankings? What’s your favourite Assassin’s Creed game? Get in touch with SLAM to offer a response and your article could be published!