The WORST Thing About Every Assassin's Creed Game

The WORST Thing About Every Assassin’s Creed Game

Welcome to MojoPlays! Today, we’re looking at The WORST Thing About Every “Assassin’s Creed” Game. Even the best games have flaws.

For this list, we’re looking at the worst part of each individual “Assassin’s Creed” game. We’ll only be talking about each issue once, even if they’re present in more than one game.

The Controls

“Assassin’s Creed” (2007)

At the time, “Assassin’s Creed” was ground-breaking. Its huge maps, historical realism, and the plot twist at the end have created many fond memories. But it wasn’t perfect, and it’s certainly now showing its age, specifically where the controls are concerned. It’s not easy, especially for a beginner, to know when to switch between weapons, particularly when it’s necessary to swap from the sword to the hidden blade to actually perform assassinations. The platforming controls aren’t great, either, and Altaïr is very slow while climbing. Ultimately, though, most of these issues were immediately fixed in the sequel, so we can’t hold the first game’s issues against Ubisoft too much – though, it's still bizarre that it didn’t have any subtitles.

Missing Content

“Assassin’s Creed II” (2009)

Many people consider “Assassin’s Creed II” to be a perfect game, but perhaps it would have been even more perfect had Ubisoft not cut out story content and locked it behind a paywall. In fairness, the reason this was done is because the content hadn’t been finished yet. But in hindsight, it definitely would have been preferable to delay the game and make sure it was finished. Instead, we got the “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Battle of Forlì” DLCs, which added back in the missing memory sequences that the base game clunkily skipped over. The DLC is now all included in “The Ezio Collection”, but it should never have been DLC at all.

Animus Walls

“Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood” (2010)

Like “Assassin’s Creed II”, it’s a struggle to come up with many faults for “Brotherhood”. Sure, its multiplayer was absurd, but that all added to the charm. However, it did have one major annoyance: the Animus walls. These giant walls of white light locked off huge sections of the map until later in the game. We understand that this was done for pacing, to make sure you didn’t complete all the side content right away and to keep opening up new areas of the map. But it was very frustrating and immersion-breaking to want to go to that last Borgia Tower only to find it still, again and again, stuck behind a wall Ezio can’t get through.

Tower Defense

“Assassin’s Creed: Revelations” (2011)

Ubisoft had successfully innovated in the previous three games; adding side missions, fast travel, and then the Assassin recruit system. But innovation didn’t pay off this time, when they incorporated a tower defense mini-game into “Revelations”. You only have to do Den Defense once in the main story, but if you gain too much Templar attention by doing side missions and buying vendors, you’ll inevitably trigger a Templar assault on one of your dens. Playing the Den Defense missions makes the game less fun, but so does avoiding it, since you’re constantly paying off heralds to lower your notoriety so that you don’t trigger one.

User Interface

“Assassin’s Creed III” (2012)

Years on, and “Assassin’s Creed III” is still regarded as the black sheep of the franchise. Though it eventually got a remaster that fixed most of the issues people had with it, those issues still stick in our minds, most notably the user interface. The previously simple UI was made messy and convoluted, especially the menus and, most infamously, the weapon and tool select screen. The map was frustrating, too, since even synchronizing all the viewpoints didn’t de-fog it fully. It's true there were other issues, like the fact “AC III” introduced the infamous paper-chasing challenges that still haven’t entirely gone away. But you can avoid chasing the pieces of paper if you’re not a completionist; you CAN’T avoid using the awkward menus.

Collectibles

“Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation” (2012)

Maybe the real worst thing about “Liberation” is that it took so long to get a home console release, since it really was one of the best games available on the PS Vita. But as for the game itself, “Liberation” tries to pad its length by adding in more collectibles than you know what to do with. Some collectibles are fine, of course, but “Liberation” has too many. There’s unlocking all the dressing chambers; getting all the Mayan statuettes; finding all the alligator eggs; the mushrooms and fever victims, the diary pages, and the chests. Then each of Aveline’s personas, the Assassin, Lady, and Slave, have their own collectibles; coins, jewels, and voodoo dolls respectively. Did YOU get them all?

Tailing Missions

“Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag” (2013)

It says a lot about the quality of “Black Flag” that even with its obsession with tailing missions, it’s still beloved by players. But you can’t get around the fact that there ARE too many tailing missions and they don’t get any less annoying the more you do. They do encourage you to make use of all the stealth strategies at Edward’s disposal, but was there no other way to give you stealth opportunities than by throwing dozens upon dozens of tailing missions at you? You even find yourself tailing ships, including the notorious mission where you tail a ship through a swamp, then tail people on land, and then have to do a chase.

It’s Too Short

“Assassin’s Creed Rogue” (2014)

Lots of people skipped “Rogue” in favour of playing “Unity”, such is the issue with releasing two games on the same day. And it’s clear that even within Ubisoft, the focus was mostly on “Unity”, with “Rogue” being treated as an afterthought. That’s really the game’s biggest issue; it’s too short, though much of what’s there is great. You can extend the length by doing the side content, but the story suffers most of all, coming in at a measly 10 hours. This means it also doesn’t spend as much time setting up Shay’s targets, which makes it less rewarding when you take them down since you’ll only have talked to them briefly during the tutorials.

Performance Issues

“Assassin’s Creed Unity” (2014)

It could never be anything else for “Unity”, still notorious for its bugs and glitches even a decade on. Upon release, only the most high-end PCs had a chance of running Unity with any kind of stability, with constant frame-rate drops on PS4 and Xbox One. Considering the consoles were, at the time, only a year old, this didn’t reflect well on Ubisoft. As well as the FPS, there was the now legendary face disappearing glitch that’s been giving us nightmares for years. Although, it’s worth mentioning that Ubisoft HAS finally ironed out the frame-rate issues on ninth gen hardware, but they haven’t fixed Arno’s inability to whistle, which makes stealth needlessly tedious.

Bounty Hunts

“Assassin’s Creed Syndicate” (2015)

Like “Unity”, “Syndicate” also had a lot of performance issues, and bafflingly still only runs at 30fps on PS5 and Xbox Series X. But the Templar bounty hunts might be the most frustrating part of the game. There are a few bounty hunts in each section of the map, where the Fryes are tasked with kidnapping a criminal or Templar agent alive for Inspector Abberline. Some of the higher-level bounty hunts can be very annoying, and might require you to slowly take out all the surrounding enemies just for a chance at kidnapping the target alive. And then you’ll usually have to deal with a carriage chase on the way to Abberline regardless; so much for stealth!

Grinding

“Assassin’s Creed Origins” (2017)

After adding levels and gear upgrades in previous games, “Origins” went further into RPG territory than ever before with a much deeper levelling and skill upgrade system. But with that came a LOT of grinding, since you had to do lots of side content if you didn’t want to be under-levelled for the story. This is all well and good, but not all of the side content is that fun, and it was jarring to go from games where you can beat the whole story without doing side content if you don’t want to, to this. The crafting system in “Origins” was also grindy, requiring you go out of your way to hunt crocodiles and lions over and over.

Forts

“Assassin’s Creed Odyssey” (2018)

A big criticism of “Odyssey” was that many of the optional objectives were, essentially, copy and pasted. The forts are the worst example of this, since they’re huge, take a while, and offer diminishing returns. If you’re trying to tick every objective on the map, you’ll be tired of forts before you even leave the first few areas. Aside from completing the location, the rewards aren’t all that great, either; you’ll get plenty of loot, sure, and some resources, but you level up so frequently in “Odyssey” that going out of your way to find loot is rarely worthwhile. And getting into open combat in the fort is only going to get you into trouble with mercenaries, which is even more annoying.

It’s Too Long

“Assassin’s Creed Valhalla” (2020)

Yes, we know, complaining about a game having too much content sounds a little backward. But Valhalla’s map is simply too large with much of its side content not meaningful, making getting from start to finish a slog even for the most dedicated players. On their own, all the side missions are fine, and it can be rewarding to clear the map of those glowing orbs. But there are so many instances of each mission type that you’ll get tired of it by about halfway through. There are too many cursed objects, too many Roman artifacts, and too many cairns. Luckily, “Valhalla’s” smaller DLCs got the balance much better, and it looks like they’ve finally taken criticisms that the games have gotten too bloated on board for “Mirage”.

The Ending

“Assassin’s Creed Mirage” (2023)

We’re not going to spoil the ending of “Mirage” here, but if you’re one of the players who stopped enjoying the series as the games got longer, you may have found yourself at a disadvantage when you played it. Though much of the game follows a simple and familiar story about the street-thief Basim, the entire game is a prequel to “Valhalla”, intended to be DLC originally. If you loved “Valhalla” and finished the story, you’ll have also loved the way Basim’s journey and his relationship with Nehal unfolds. But if you didn’t finish “Valhalla”, and don’t know its complete story, you’ll have been left scratching your head and wondering what the last hour of gameplay was all about.