Assassin’s Creed: Rogue review—A fitting AC B-Side

Ubisoft doesn't want anyone to know about Assassin's Creed: Rogue. That's all I can gather from the game’s total lack of marketing—especially relative to its new-console cousin, the problematic Assassin’s Creed: Unity, which launched the very same day—and the fact that review copies didn’t go out to critics until the game was already on store shelves. What little information spilled out ahead of release focused on the ship combat, returning from last year's Black Flag, and on the fact that players would be controlling one of the traditionally villainous Templars, in the form of the very Irish protagonist Shay Patrick McCormack.

Right from the start, a player loading up Rogue would be forgiven for thinking they had mistakenly started up a copy of Black Flag by accident. A great many assets from that game (and Assassin's Creed 3, to a lesser extent) were clearly lifted to be reused in Rogue. Animations, sound effects, combat, locations, and even the exact same recordings of those wonderful sea shanties are not just familiar, but identical.

It got to the point where I couldn't figure out why "Lowlands Away" wasn't playable on my sailor-powered radio, before I realized that I hadn't collected it in this game yet. The one and only major wrinkle to the sailing gameplay is colder waters, which introduce icebergs and freezing to death as a going concern (but not much of one).

An Assassin’s story… with a twist

Even Shay starts the game relatively indistinguishable from previous Assassin’s Creed protagonists. At the start of the game he's still an assassin, in the American colonies around the time of the Seven Years War. The “present-day” storyline, meanwhile, is another direct follow-up to Black Flag. Your in-game "true self" is still a programmer at a Templar-run research facility, fronting as a game developer.

Secret societies, a historical backdrop, hidden politics: it's about what you expect from Assassin's Creed wacky overarching plot at this point. The main difference this time around, actually, is just how little time the game spends explaining any of these things. Presumably, Ubisoft thought that anyone interested enough in the franchise to actually realize Rogue existed already knows all about Pieces of Eden and the First Civilization.

It's doesn’t take very long for circumstances to shift, though. Despite Rogue's relegation to nine-year-old console hardware, the game produces one of the most impressive looking (if absurd) scenes in the franchise—an escape from a disintegrating city during the 1755 Lisbon earthquake.

Shay blames the resulting loss of life on the Assassins, and a series of betrayal and counter-betrayal ensues to drive Shay’s conversion to the Templars and move the plot forward. Finally, after six mainline entries in the series, Assassin's Creed has produced a character that questions the dogma of his or her particular faction. Unity's Arno Dorian, for example, never wavered or questioned his position despite being faced with constant questions about differing opinions on morality. He's a cipher meant for completing mission objectives. Shay, while not terribly interesting on a personal level, at least acknowledges his situation’s lack of moral certitude.

The problem with Rogue's plot, then, is its unwillingness to drop binary ethics. The moment Shay joins the Templars, they're dedicated to protecting the people, rather than enslaving them. The Assassins, meanwhile, become mass murderers looking to gas entire cities just to dispatch a handful of agents. The right side of hidden history, it seems, is always whichever the player happens to be playing for.

What's more interesting about Rogue's political inversion is how it plays out in the open world. The aforementioned ship-to-ship combat is back, along with just about every side mission, activity, and collectible from Black Flag. You can collect treasure maps and chests, start bar room brawls, hunt animals (aquatic and otherwise) and use their pelts to craft any number of enhancements for Shay to use during his immensely forgiving, counter-based swashbuckling.

Hiding out with the gang

What Rogue has that its predecessor didn't, however, is a large chunk of time spent on dry land. Mid-1700s New York offers a great deal of "traditional" Assassin's Creed rooftop traversal, in addition to the seafaring antics. It's also where your Templar activities are centralized in one of Rogue's more interesting additions: gang hideouts. These fortress-like locations operate much like strongholds in most any open world game: infiltrate a hideout, complete some objectives, and unlock the side missions within the surrounding zone.

But inside these hangouts you’re not just dealing with thugs and guards, as in previous Assassin’s Creed games. Once Shay is no longer in the Assassins’ good graces, they’ll spring from crowds hiding spots within these districts, using his own tools and tricks of the trade against him.

Generally, their guerilla tactics aren't so devastating – a smoke bomb here, a leaping stab there. Your real punishment is looking like a dink, not restarting at a checkpoint. If you want to clamber about unbothered by these annoyances, however, you'll need to clear out the aforementioned fortresses.

Conquering these conclaves is as much about counter-offense as it is about stealth. Each encounter culminates with a battle against a "gang leader,” who's much closer to Shay's level of durability and trickery. Even without the journeyman murderers to contend with, you're still outnumbered, making hideout missions a tense test of whose Assassin kung fu is stronger.

One way to give yourself an advantage is to get the guards involved. The New York City watch takes equal notice whether you’re attacked by a knife-wileding enemy or if you’re doing the attacking. Suddenly, you might find yourself fighting beside the redcoat forces that Assassin’s Creed fans spent the last two games and dozens of hours ventilating. It's a strangely satisfying experience, and did more to close the emotional loop of the 360/PS3 era of Assassin's Creed games for me than the actual story did. Honestly, I'd like to have seen more done with this idea, but what's there is still entertaining.

A fine send-off to aging hardware

Despite all the good twists on a soild old formula, the aging hardware that runs Rogue is hard to ignore at this point. Frigates and Schooners in Rogue don't splinter with the same verve they showed the PlayStation 4 version of Black Flag, and that is a bummer. Worse, the framerate simply can't keep up with the scope of action the game wants to render. There’s also a troubling tendency for the game's audio to desynchronize from its video, an unsettling effect for sure.

What's really hard to go back to, though—particularly after the outstanding animation of Unity, are the bland character models. The wooden visages on the non-player characters make it hard to care very much about them (though, to be fair, the writing doesn’t do much to help on that score). The characters certainly don't hold a visual candle to the characters in Black Flag, a comparison that’s hard to avoid when Rogue reuses so much of the old game’s carcass.

Still, it's disappointing that Assassin's Creed: Rogue was overshadowed by the much splashier debut for Unity. It would be easy to write Rogue off as a cheap attempt to reuse every last piece of the last-generation Assassin’s Creed buffalo, but the game’s willingness to break tradition in spots, and to craft an interesting central character, is much greater than Unity's. It's still a solid swan song for the last arc of Assassin's Creed, but with more attention it could have been the best of its ilk.

Instead, Rogue has been buried to the extent that, when the inevitable current-generation remake appears next year, most people probably won’t even realize it’s not an entirely new game. I’ll probably buy it again, though, just to see a fine Assassin’s Creed game running on the hardware it deserves.

The Good

• It's a lot more Assassin's Creed 4, which may be the franchise's best.
• The story includes some interesting new twists on the tired AC formula.
• The new gang hideout missions are tense, interesting, and a smart addition to the formula.
• Blending Black Flag's sailing with classic cityscapes gives every sort of Assassin's Creed fan something to enjoy.

The Bad

• The story surrounding Shay is different, but he and his cohorts are pale imitations of their predecessors.
• From faces to vessels, this game just doesn't look as good as it could have on newer hardware.
• Viewing the Templar/Assassin conflict from another angle is stymied by some very out of character story developments.

The Ugly

• The performance. This game should have been on PC and current consoles from the start.

Verdict: If you can tolerate the aging hardware, pick it up to experience a flawed but interesting footnote on Black Flag's tested formula.