Total War: Rome II (2013) by Creative Assembly

Attempt to divide and conquer in Creative Assembly's thoroughly broken, poorly optimized strategy sequel

I'm a huge fan of history, particularly classical history. I spent my time in college studying Roman Civ, so the game was hugely appealing to me. But I'll try and take a step back here in order to review it from the point of view of someone who isn't completely infatuated with history.

I'm a big fan of the old tactical JRPG style games, like Tactics Ogre and Final Fantasy Tactics. I haven't done much gaming with its cousins in the subgenres of military strategy and real time strategy, but I really enjoyed how this game seemed to blend both of those genres together, and I respect that Creative Assembly is basically designing two games in one, here. There's the overarching strategical game in which you're managing your cities and towns and moving your military and spy/champion/dignitary units, and there's what is obviously the meat of the game in the battle system that occurs once you engage in combat with an enemy unit. They flow together quite nicely, allowing you to build up the efficacy of your units via upgrades in your cities and towns. It scratches the RPG itch in that way while at the same time providing a great strategical and tactical experience. You can easily find yourself dumping hours upon hours into this game, thanks to the patented "Just One More Turn" addiction technique made famous by the Civilization series. It's quite enjoyable, and there's quite a lot of it -- One campaign can take nearly 100 hours to complete.

There are some really cool features to the game. I got the most enjoyment out of it simply due to the fact that it strives to be historically accurate, and it does a great job of it. The Roman military is clearly split between the Manipular system of the middle Republican era, and the Marian reforms later on that transformed the army from the group of levied farmers it classically was into the group of professional, disciplined fighters that would eventually conquer most of Europe and all of known Africa. The historical accuracy of the military units also extends to the Celtic tribes of Gauls and Britons, the Iberian tribal fighters, African and Asian horsemen, etc. It's all really enjoyable given my interest in history.

There are numerous little touches that are really nice, as well. The art on the unit cards is really awesome. It's clear they went for an antique style with them, and it really works well. The Celtic tribes look particularly cool. Another thing I found really enjoyable was the pre-battle speeches that the general can be heard giving his troops. They're phenomenally well voice acted, and they make accurate references to religion and state. It's enjoyable down to the cornua that the centurions blow whenever you tell a unit to move. It matters a lot that they get the little things right here, as they do a lot to immerse you in the time period, and Creative Assembly has absolutely succeeded there.

An historically accurate depiction of Caesar vs. the Gauls

The actual combat, and being able to zoom in and out as your units go to battle against others, is absolutely phenomenal. You can zoom in and see each unit, in great detail, fighting against the enemy. Or you can zoom out and take in the entire battle from a colossal scale. Watching your cavalry charge the rear of an opponent is immensely satisfying. I had one situation where one of my legions was caught in enemy territory. I had had the foresight to send my units into a defensive stance, so the battle began with them entrenched in a wooden fortress. I was heavily outnumbered, and didn't have many units to do anything with other than just station them in the doorways of the fortress and hope they could hold off the enemy. They ended up succeeding, breaking the enemy waves at the entrance in true Roman legionary fashion. It was awesome, and easily my most memorable moment in a game filled with them. The problem is that about half of the most memorable moments are due to terrible bugginess, and those memorable moments always caused battles to end in disaster for me. Imagine fighting a battle for close to 40 minutes, and having it suddenly turn because one of your key units got stuck on geometry and slaughtered since you could no longer maneuver them. It's just as infuriating as it sounds.

I've gotten into this game somewhat late, playing it a full year after it originally released, and I've read quite frequently that people say it's become way better, that it's been fully patched and is now recommendable to everybody, but my experience with it has not proven this to be correct. I've had units refuse to enter a breach in a wall literally a dozen times, which has caused me to stop knocking down walls altogether and just use siege ladders. But then I had units get stuck on a wall and do nothing but continue to climb up and down the siege ladders, which caused me to lose an extremely important battle. I've also experienced a bug where my cavalry has run in the completely opposite direction from which I've ordered them. There are numerous other things like this that really destroy the experience for me, but it's also incredibly poorly optimized, even after Creative Assembly has patched the game several times and repackaged it into the "fixed" Emperor Edition. I'm running 780ti SLI and I see dips down to around 20 fps at times, which is absolutely ridiculous.

It really hurts me to give this game a thumbs down, because I did enjoy it quite a bit. But the frustration from dealing with its bugs and its poor optimization make it hard for me to recommend to anybody outside classical history buffs and hardcore Total War fans. If you fall into either of those groups, then by all means, take the plunge, because you'll get quite a bit out of this game. I surely have. But if you're not, then you should probably just pass it up altogether, because the frustration will likely outweigh any enjoyment you'd get out of the game.

⭐⭐

Assassin's Creed Unity (2014) by Ubisoft

Assassin's Creed Unity can be beautiful at times, but the experience is destroyed by poor optimization and instability

I'm a huge fan of the Assassin's Creed series. As a history nerd and a huge stealth genre fanboy, these games are always right up my alley.

Now I'll tell you why Assassin's Creed Unity is, flat out, one of the worst games I've played in years, and why it's absolutely unrecommendable to everybody who owns a gaming PC.

I want to start off by saying that I was absolutely hyped for this game. More hyped than any Assassin's Creed game since Assassin's Creed 2. I had watched a few gameplay videos that sold me due to the fact that the devs seemed to be going for the classic Assassin's Creed experience: An emphasis on stealthy gameplay, an intriguing historical period, and a stripped down approach to weapons and gadgets. It hearkened back to Assassin's Creed II, which is an amazing game and probably the best in the series, closely followed by Assassin's Creed Brotherhood and Black Flag.

Good art direction is consistently hampered by poor technical performance; see the aliasing and low-res textures above

The first drawback is the one everybody already knows about: The game is nearly totally broken at this point. Bugs are everywhere, the game hard crashes quite often, and it runs like a dog even on the most beastly of rigs. For me in particular, the most damning graphical drawback was some kind of weird frame stutter that I would experience literally every 4 seconds without fail, even in menus. I'm not sure what's causing this, but the game is nearly unplayable with it unless you're incredibly determined. As you can see, I have managed to bludgeon through several hours of the game, mostly due to its amazing recreation of Revolutionary Paris, which is by far the best aspect of the game. Most of that is wandering about the landscape and gathering collectibles, which has been the peak of my enjoyment of the game, because any missions are so difficult to get through thanks to the fact that it's maybe the single most broken game I've played since Obsidian was forced to release Knights of the Old Republic II in it's half-finished state way back in 2004. And that's saying something, because that game was a broken mess.

There's been enough said about the games broken, poorly optimized state. I'd like to talk about why it would be a bad game even if it were to run beautifully. I'm going to talk about the past couple of AC games here, so bear with me.

I hated Assassin's Creed 3. Absolutely despised it. I thought it was terribly designed. It had muddy control and poor line-of-sight mechanics that often resulted in instant game over detections, it had awfully designed stealth sequences that forced you to follow people at ridiculously close lengths, and it had bad checkpoints that compounded both of those issues. A number of the missions (the midnight ride, the Charles Lee chase sequence) were just horribly designed to the point where they were frustrating. To top it off, the writing was utter trash, all of the characters were cardboard cutouts, and nothing was even worth following.

Then came Black Flag, which was a complete redemption for the series. The game was so much fun, it was beautiful to look at, and, most importantly for me, IT FIXED THE SERIES STEALTH AND GAMEPLAY DESIGN PROBLEMS! Control was smooth. Stealth sequences were designed well. Free running and climbing was nearly bug-free, quick, and intuitive. Trying to achieve 100% stealth in the plantation sequences were probably my favorite missions in the game. Playing Black Flag felt like the Assassin's Creed series had truly taken a step forward, like it was ready to get back to being the stellar franchise that Assassin's Creed II had promised it would be.

Enter Assassin's Creed Unity.

The reason I contrasted AC3 and Black Flag is because playing through Unity gave me the distinct feeling that I was playing a game designed by the AC3 team. It has the same exact pitfalls that I just described in AC3. Controls are muddy and you never truly feel totally in control of Arno. He lumbers to and fro in the vague direction you send him. A cover mechanic has been introduced that's way too sticky, way too close to guesswork, and generally hampers stealth so poorly that I completely stopped using it except in sequences when the game forces you to. And, to top it off, they've redesigned free running and climbing with a system that seems like it should work beautifully, but fails miserably in every aspect of its execution. The days of your jumping off into odd directions, taking the wrong path up a building, and even inexplicably stopping in place and having to recenter the stick, then hit up again to continue moving HAVE ALL RETURNED FROM ASSASSIN'S CREED II. Seriously, bugs from a game that was made back in 2009 and were just solved last year have miraculously reappeared. How do you mess up that badly?

Add in that the music, something that was unbelievably atmospheric and really made the experience of Florence in Assassin's Creed II, and lent you sea shanties that stuck in your head for hours in Black Flag (and was utterly forgettable at best and terrible at worst in AC3) is absolutely unnoticeable. In fact, I didn't think about it once until, midway through this review, I remembered how much I loved Jesper Kyd's work in AC2. That's how forgettable it is.

There are also several instances of immersion-breaking content, including chests that are only open via the Unity Companion App, and microtransactions that are so hamfistedly jammed in they pull you right out of the experience. It's a basic example of an immersion murdering mechanic, and it boggles my mind that developers have not learned why you don't do these things in games. Hell, even the publisher and the money people should know why immersion is important for a single player gaming experience. There's no excuse for garbage like this.

My face when the 3rd bug in a row loses me another hour of playing time

You can also consider Ubi's utter failure to maintain some semblance of business ethics by setting their review embargo to 12:00 PM of release day, rather than the day of or the day before as is common practice. Why would they do this, you say? The only obvious reason that comes to mind is that they knew their game was an unfinished, broken piece of garbage, and they decided that their best course of action was to lie to their customers for as long as possible in order to prevent them from canceling their pre-orders. Despicable.

It really disappoints me to tear this game apart so viciously because I've been such a huge fan of the series. I'd like to believe that this was rushed out the door by Ubi, and that the team would eventually have produced a good game if they were given adequate time to have worked on the things that fail here. But at the end of the day, blame lies with the developer as well as the publisher.

"A delayed game is eventually good, a rushed one is forever bad."
- Shigeru Miyamoto

In conclusion, there is very little redeeming quality in this game. Unless you're an absolute history nerd or a super hardcore Assassin's Creed fan, this game is completely unrecommendable in its current state. Furthermore, even if the game were totally fixed, even if the graphical issues and the bugs were completely ironed out and the game ran beautifully, this still isn't worth a purchase because it's easily the worst Assassin's Creed and just not a great game period. The dev team here has an eternity of failure to look forward to, as people will forever think of this game as an exemplary pillar of Ubisoft's descent into the basement of video game development and business ethics. Hell, at least Watch Dogs had some interesting mechanics and some competent stealth sequences. This game brings absolutely nothing to the table. Just replay Black Flag instead. Or burn $60 in your backyard while punching yourself in the face, because that's a more valuable, entertaining experience than playing this game will ever be.

⭐