Video Game Roundup
Assassin’s Creed: Unity
Available on PC, PS4 and Xbox One. Played on PS4
After two excursions to the Americas, Assassin’s Creed returns to its European roots with Assassin’s Creed: Unity. Set against the backdrop of the French Revolution, Unity should have the proper ingredients for a fantastic return to form for the series.
Unfortunately, Unity’s litany of technical issues and bafflingly awful design decisions ruin what might have otherwise been a great game. The core free-running mechanics have gotten a much needed face-lift — the new buttons dedicated to parkour-up and parkour-down are a godsend — but bugs still abound, compounded by a spectacularly awful frame rate, at least on the PS4 version.
It’s still far too easy to accidentally climb up or over tables while chasing down a target, and climbing up and down buildings is frequently impeded by finicky ledge-grabbing controls.
Combat has somehow fared even worse. The excellent Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor recently managed to make combat both challenging and satisfying. Unity, in contrast, makes every encounter the equivalent of fighting in a giant pit of molasses. The fighting is now more difficult than in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, sure, but it’s also terribly arduous to slog through.
Players are meant to buff fighting stats through the in-game economy, but Unity has a total of four (!) separate currency systems, each of which is earned through different means and is required for different types of upgrades. Oh, and there are microtransactions to boot.
Were it not for the stunning recreation of Paris, Unity would have almost no redeeming qualities. As it stands, the game can be recommended for the historical sightseeing and virtually nothing else.
Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
Available on PC, PS3, PS4, Xbox One, Xbox 360. Played on PS4.
Credit where credit is due: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare does actually push the aging franchise into new territory. The much ballyhooed exo-suit abilities have, in fact, shaken up the core mechanics of the game. Now that double jumping, boosting and other power abilities are part of the basic tool set, Call of Duty feels like Call of Duty on speed.
Multiplayer is much more engaging than Call of Duty has been in years. Fights are more frenetic and require vertical situational awareness. Weapons feel more exotic and punchy. Double jumping and then power-punching an opponent never gets old.
The single-player front, however, is more of a mixed bag. While the developers have done an admirable job shaking up the usual Call of Duty mission design, Advanced Warfare still feels like a rigidly scripted corridor shooter.
The new toys end up making the stifling level design feel more claustrophobic. You can double jump, but only within the designated areas, with a legion of invisible walls forcefully trapping you within the confines of the play area.
Advanced Warfare also continues the series’ ongoing habit of misusing Hollywood talent. Modern Warfare 2 got an utterly anonymous Hans Zimmer soundtrack, Ghosts was written by Stephen Gaghan while Advanced Warfare boasts both Zero Dark Thirty’s Mark Boal as a writer and House of Cards’ Kevin Spacey as its main villain.
Spacey’s motion capture work is top-notch, but the impressive animation and modeling only serve to breathe life into a confused mishmash of anti-PMC bulls— and broad, unconvincing characterization.
So while multiplayer gets a much needed shot in the arm, single player is still the same old Call of Duty with a fresh coat of paint.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection
Available on Xbox One. Played on Xbox One.
Halo: The Master Chief Collection is a shambles, an utterly broken and heartbreaking piece of crap. What should have been easily the best value of the holiday season has, instead, turned out to be a frustrating grab bag of bugs, tasteless bling, interminable loading screens and ruined dreams.
In theory, Halo: The Master Chief Collection combines Halo 1, 2, 3 and 4 into one game disc and one UI, allowing players to seamlessly jump between any of the four games at will. In reality, pretty much only the campaigns of each game even work. And out of these four, only Halo 3’s single player runs at a decent clip.
Multiplayer, on the other hand, is completely broken. I’ve only managed to play one game of Gungoose CTF in the past week through matchmaking. Every other attempt has either resulted in an error message or several minutes of fruitless waiting.
Split-screen is somehow even worse. Everything in the menu takes time to load: map selection, game-mode selection, data syncing (whatever that means), etc. If you should have the gall to create your own maps in Forge, then prepare for immense disappointment.
Custom maps and game modes in Halo: The Master Chief Collection seem to constantly exist in a state of quasi-deletion. We could access a Forge map one round, only for it to disappear from the menu the next.
Worse still, the game would flat out crash half of the times we tried to load up a multiplayer game. Sometimes, the game would crash to menu after a bout of loading, while other times the game would freeze mid-countdown on a terrifying sound effect loop before outright crashing to the system home screen.
All the added value in the world can’t make up for this buggy, borderline unplayable mess. Halo: The Master Chief Collection may very well get fixed in the near future, but it’s damn near unforgivable for this game to have been released in this state.
