As any game reviewer knows, November is the ultimate review crunch time. You typically have a pile of review games on your desk, and the new ones come in faster than you can get the old ones out. It is hard to review everything. Thankfully, Ubisoft just made my November much, much easier. You see, Assassin’s Creed: Unity has been released. Despite my excitement for the series finally hitting my beloved French Revolution, the new title is currently a mess of technical issues and bugs. These issues have been widely reported, and plummeting review scores abound across the industry. I myself have played through some of the game, and experience a bunch of issues on my own.
The fact is, at this point, there’s really no reason to review Assassin’s Creed: Unity. Currently, it’s an unplayable mess, and you shouldn’t buy it. Writing a review, spending many hours exploring and completing the game, would be a waste of my time, and reading such a review wouldn’t help you. So, instead, I pledge to you something different.
I understand the pressure Ubisoft is under. Last fall, they delayed the highly anticipated Watchdogs, killing their financials for the year. To do the same with Assassin’s Creed Unity, to once again push a game out of the holiday sales season was certainly a tough sell with their management team and their shareholders. Still, this decision, combined with one a rather manipulative press strategy meant that their fall quarter sales were preserved largely at the expense of the confidence and trust of their customers.
Will Ubisoft fix Assassin’s Creed Unity? I think they have to. As their flagship franchise, as one that the company points to and focuses their marketing on, Assassin’s Creed needs to be great (or, at least playable).
Assassin’s Creed: Unity will get a well-deserved, well-thought out and well-written (well, as well-written as I can manage, anyway) review early in 2015, after Ubisoft completes the game. There is, somewhere in this mess of code, a game to play, and a game which you might be interested in buying. But, since I can’t play that game yet, I will postpone my review, with the hope that at some point in the future, Ubisoft will deliver on its promise of fixes, and we’ll all get a chance to experience the game we all envisioned from the start. What is the point of reviewing the game now, anyway? The game the vast majority of consumers might play doesn’t exist yet. I’d prefer a review of something I could actually play.
In the meanwhile, there are currently 8 million other games that released in the past couple of weeks (that number may be a slightly low estimate), so please, play some of those. Sunset Overdrive, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, and Dragon Age: Inquisition are all out there waiting to be experienced.
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