Assassin's Creed has always walked a well-placed washing line between historical realism and pure video game fantasy. Unity, whose revolutionary Paris Ubisoft claims is their most accurate recreation yet, doesn't seem to so much tip the balance as just make both sides far more noticeable, like replacing two children on a seesaw with a professional wrestling tag-team after a heavy meal. At least, that's the way it looks to us in this new gameplay demo.
The spectacularly realised Notre Dame interior is filled, for no reason at all, with comfortable haystacks, plate-sized buttons made of gold activate secret passage doorways in painstakingly detailed tiled floors and the new, ridiculously smooth parkour animations still have you landing in the middle of crowds who totally fail to realise that a dapper man with a sword just fell out of the sky. It's all faintly ludicrous, but we can't help but find the total lack of care a little endearing, too.
What Ubisoft would prefer us to focus on, however, is their new "blackbox" system, which finally turns Assassin's Creed main missions into something like the minute-to-minute gambits we'd always hoped for. Offering multiple points of entrance and egress, moments and locations for attack, and even side missions (or "MOD missions" as we're being told to call them) that change how the main mission plays out.
It should at least help ease a few fears that Edwin had about how the game's co-operative multiplayer would deal with the series' usually linear objectives - you can read more on that side of the game in his
first hands-on with the game.
http://www.totalxbox.com/80365/watch-11-minutes-of-new-assassins-creed-unity-gameplay/
