In the face of Ubisoft’s other Assassin’s Creed game on Xbox One, PC and PS4, the last generation Assassin’s Creed Rogue comes out fighting as a direct sequel to last year’s AC IV: Black Flag which for many changed the direction of the series with its pirating theme. Whilst AC: Unity perhaps returns to form in a city based environment and despite the serious performance problems it has, Rogue on the other hand is more organic as the opening moments attest to. The ship navigation of Black Flag returns and a new hero rises to add an almighty sense of purpose. What’s good is that being developed by a separate studio within Ubisoft’s massive resources has meant the team has been able to push the boundaries for the Xbox 360 and PS3 consoles (and rightly so) as Rogue certainly looks nice, but more importantly plays as smooth as silk.
What Rogue simply highlights is Assassin’s Creed Unity was perhaps too big and ambitious a project for the development time it was granted. In terms of performance, the two games are worlds apart. Take a look at our Assassin’s Creed Rogue first 60 minutes gameplay video for the full picture. Rogue releases tomorrow exclusively on Xbox 360 and PS3 (a PC release is planned for early 2015) but it’s clear the game could easily be ported over to the Xbox One and PS4 at a later date. We still found Unity to be a solid game (awarding it an 8/10) despite its issues – which we would hope will get fixed at some point. But Rogue is another beast, and thus far we’re enjoying its salty jaunt on the high seas. In some ways, Rogue simply enforces the idea that Ubisoft can get things right and make quality gaming experiences out of the box rather than the industry wide reliance on post-release patches and fixes.