He’s neither a great protagonist, nor a particularly annoying one. His motivations for leaving the assassins are sound, but he rather slides into being a Templar and then just rolls with it. Shay himself is a well-meaning (if rather naive) fellow who wants to do the right thing, or at least convince himself of that delusion. Gist isn’t deep, but proves to be an enjoyable, and absurdly over the top, travelling companion. The gregarious Christopher Gist (another explorer, prone to outbursts of “splendid!” and dressing like a cowboy) probably winds up with most one-to-one time with Shay, serving as a reminder that Ubisoft side characters can be fun when given time to grow. Explorer James Cook (whom Assassin’s Creed: Rogue decides to turn vaguely Scottish for some reason – he was actually from Yorkshire) gets similarly short shrift. Jack Weeks is a potentially interesting fellow with plenty of relevant ancestry, but he barely has a handful of lines and accompanies Shay on just one mission. Our main character, Shay Cormac (complete with mesmerising Canadian-Irish accent,) starts off with a Brotherhood of five or six Assassin buddies and later winds up with a similar number of Templars. Even more so here, because the story portion is around half the length.
Like Black Flag before it, Assassin’s Creed: Rogue tries to tell a story with too many characters and ends up selling all of them short on screen time. This guy is one “outrageous!” away from being Batman: The Brave and the Bold’s version of Aquaman. Meanwhile, those of us who’ve played a fair proportion of these games are left wondering how many hours of tutorial-story will go by this time before we’re allowed to just get on with it (about two hours, as it happens.)
#Assassin creed rogue how to
Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (rightly) recognises that some people really might need a tutorial about how to jump out of a tree and stab someone, but offers them absolutely no help whatsoever with a narrative world of precursor artifacts, Subject 17s and meta-referencing Abstergo Entertainment missions. This speaks further to the series’ problems with reconciling its own lengthy history with a mix of newer and older players. Ubisoft is hyper-aware of this and, as always, drip-feeds features and accompanying tutorials through the opening portion of the game. You may never have played an Assassin’s Creed game before, mind you. Which is just about the best thing an Assassin’s Creed game can be at this point in time, but comes with the dual-layered problem of being over-familiar both as an Assassin’s Creed title, and as a boat sailing, open world piss-about. Don’t panic, this isn’t a stealth ship-tailing mission.ĭespite being one of the more mechanically decent games in the series, Assassin’s Creed: Rogue feels weighed down, at times near-immobilised, by the lineage to Assassin’s Creeds of the past.