“Assassin’s Creed” is a well-established franchise originated on the PlayStation 3. Each game showcases a different time and place in the history of the world. Until recently, being able to traverse these beautifully created worlds has been worth the cost of admission. “Assassin’s Creed Unity”, the newest iteration of the series, while still enjoyable, is not nearly the best game in the series.

The mechanics are standard fare for “Assassin’s Creed”. The combination of hand-to-hand combat and parkour is done well for the most part. The one quirk I find is when you run down the street and accidentally veer off course into a building, the parkour is automatically initiated and you start to climb whatever you run into. This can be extremely frustrating especially if you are caught in a high speed foot race with someone you need to catch to complete a mission.

In the game, you are put into the city of Paris during the French revolution. In terms of architecture, the game is nearly identical to the actual city of Paris.

The traversal and parkour mechanics have been upgraded as well as the added ability of actually being able to go into a majority of the buildings in the city.

The weapons also portray the time period very well. In previous “Assassin’s Creed” games, I would take pride in collecting all of the treasure chests in each area, gaining all of the viewpoints and clearing out the enemy strongholds until there was nothing left. In this game, the option is stripped away. There are some chests in the game which require you to use the mobile phone app that Ubisoft made for the game in order to unlock. This aspect of the game completely broke the immersion for me in terms of game play ultimately resulting in a less satisfying experience.

The fighting sequences have been changed to make them much more intense.

In the original “Assassin’s Creed”, if you ran into a group of enemies you could quickly dispatch them with one counter attack. This made the combat immensely satisfying. In the new game, there are still counters but instead of killing them, it pushes them away, making the group fights ultimately seem much more overwhelming.

The story of “Assassin’s Creed” is a very winding one. It involves time travel and computers sending people from the present into the past through the use of technology called “the animus”. There is also a common thread in the game with finding the pieces of Eden, which are magical artifacts that give the owner godlike powers.

In this installment, you play Arno Dorian, who is a French bad boy. Through a series of unfortunate events, his father and his mentor both die at the hands of the main antagonist group, the Templars. Arno joins with the assassin’s and the story starts to unfold. Although the story has a good sense of progression there is not enough substance to mentally invest in leaving the experience a little lacking.

In terms of graphics, the game is aesthetically beautiful. All of the places and characters are for the most part realized with clarity. However, the experience is missing where high mirror shine that previous installments in the series boasted.

Also according to IGN, many players who picked up copies of the game at launch were met with horror. In some cases the main character, Arno, would appear to not have skin on his face showing a somewhat disturbing exoskeleton instead of the developed main character. I never personally experienced this as I got the game nearly a month after launch. There are also little moments and glitches in the game that fragment the experience.

With the mobile app, occasional glitches and somewhat frustrating mechanics mark one of the most incomplete “Assassin’s Creed” games in recent memory.

If the folks at Ubisoft Montreal would have had six more months to polish the game I feel it would have benefitted greatly.

It is still a joy to be able to traverse the beautifully realized world of Paris in the 1700s but if you are looking for a story or a complete and polished experience, you should look elsewhere.