You can pay a few extra dollars to buy temporary combat boosts or new weapons that would otherwise take hours of play to earn. Worse still, “Unity” is filled with prompts to engage with the game’s business model as much as its fiction. In my week of playing on an Xbox One, the game’s servers mostly loaded me into these missions alone, left to fend for myself against the increased number of soldiers, producing more frustration and disappointment than discovery and intrigue. But these concepts are mostly theoretical. The game’s newest feature is a series of cooperative missions that can be played online with up to four other players, which can lead to interesting group dynamics creating elaborate crowd distractions or planning ambushes for guards. If caught by one of the 50 or 60 guards who patrol these lush estates, the game makes an awkward transition into combat, the camera drifting overhead while you swing a sword, mace or halberd at the guards in a sluggish, color-coded version of rock, paper, scissors.
That usually entails spending 20 minutes scaling the sides of buildings and sneaking through open windows to track down some untrustworthy nobleman who is actually a Templar. You sprint through the crowded avenues of Le Marais or the ramshackle alleys of the Cour des Miracles in Paris, running toward an icon on the map designating one of the various mission types, then watch a short cut-scene, sprint to the other side of the map to find another icon, at which point you’re usually presented with a heavily guarded mansion that you’ll have to infiltrate. In the same way that history is used as a pretext for wild science fiction, “Unity” uses Arno’s quest as a bizarre pretext for a kind of racing game, with a gymnastically gifted human standing in for the sports car.
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