Is it? All of the games are mid gameplay stretched out way too long/thin for their own good, with meh plots that they can't even stick to. They threw away Desmond so the longer term story is basically non existent and they kept ruining with the pacing running modern world stuff anyways. The entire franchise is a fat 7ish out of 10, even if some of the games have little sparks of aspects to them being a little more interesting, they never managed to hit all the nails on the head at the same time.
this post was submitted on 13 Jul 2026
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I might've cared more about the franchise if they didn't have their shit Ubisoft DRM on PC.
It was an innovative series at a time where we still got them frequently, and while seemingly intended to be a trilogy, they chased dollar signs over prestige. It's hard to say they made the wrong choice there, but the animus made a lot more sense in the context of a trilogy with a beginning, middle, and end. For my money, Unity was the best game in the series and came out in one of the the weakest years for video game releases giving it a really good chance at an award, but it was a technical mess, especially at launch. I don't think I agree that Arkham Asylum has much DNA in common with Assassin's Creed.
Unity is still underrated largely due to its reputation formed during launch with all the bugs. But I think there was also a case around then of "Assassin's Creed fatigue", which only amplified the negative reception. It's actually a very interesting what if scenario, what would have happened if Unity wasn't broken on release and was successful? It's well documented that its failure led to the entire rejigging of the franchise into open world RPGs in Origins and beyond.
Any time Unity is mentioned all I see in my mind is the floating eyeballs and teeth.
Struggled to get it to run only to be welcomed by... That...
Switched me off completely. I do intend to go back and revisit it though now everything is fixed but they certainly did themselves no favours.
I played it like a year after launch on PS4 and didn't have any issues. On PC there is also ACUfixes that further fixes and improves things. Honestly Unity was such an ambitious game and both the city of Paris and the crowd system in it is still unsurpassed by later titles. I remember when Mirage came out comparison videos started going viral questioning which game came out 9 years after which. The fluid and varied animations in Unity is still absolute peak, look at how satisfying high level gameplay is.
The shame of it too was I played all the RPG Creeds except for Origins and was disappointed in them, but eventually I got Origins for free so I went back and played it and it was actually a really good marriage between the old games and the new RPG style that every game since missed the mark on
Yeah, but I was also fascinated by the dialogue directly speaking to that fatigue and the series' failings to live up to the fantasy.
"So what's the plan here?"
"Plan? Come up with your own plan! I'm not here to hold your hand!"
Yeah Unity also felt really special.
So the reason why I say inspired because I was thinking that countering was something AC had created, but I'm probably remembering this incorrectly.
I'll bet there's no shortage of games with combat models with counters built in to them that predate Assassin's Creed, but Arkham Asylum's came from an earlier prototype that they built that was basically a rhythm game. AC's combat was pretty terrible for a long while, but it was also a stealth game, so it didn't matter all that much.
Check, yes you are right.
For which year? After the few Assassins Creed games, they were similar in gameplay, so not really worthy of GOTY for most. Not every good or popular game can win an award. The best chance of winning could have II, Brotherhood or Black Flag. I've looked at best rated games of the year for those games on Metacritic (I could not find a way to sort lists on OpenCritic).
Assassins Creed 2 (2009) - 90:
- Uncharted 2 - 96
- Call of Duty Modern Warfare - 94
- GTA China Town - 93
Assassins Creed Brotherhood (2010): 89
- Super Mario Galaxy 2 - 98
- Mass Effect 2 - 96
- Red Dead Redemption - 95
Assassins Creed 4 Black Flag (2013): 88
- Last of Us - 95
- BioShock Infinite - 94
- Super Mario 3D World - 93
The Assassins Creed games are fun, but not a juggernaut in gameplay or otherwise. They were never these massive perfected games, standing out as the pillar of gaming. If you have competition like Uncharted 2, Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Last of Us, and come with the same formula again, then you can't expect to win awards for being the best game of the year.
Yeah looking at these lists, it didn’t win because some real juggernaut games released in the same year and it just couldn’t compete.
Though there have been a couple years over the last 20 where I feel it some of the games could have won
Maybe if you look at the games in isolation, maybe then? The problem for many (especially for testers) was the fatigue of massive Assassins Creed games with so many meaningless stuff added around an actual good game. And later things like microtransactions ruined the fun for lot of people too. And the later games even didn't do anything particularly original or was very perfected games to stick out.
So therefore many testers didn't "champion" the Assassins Creed games anymore. It had its fans, especially longtime players in the series. But those are not who decide if a game gets an award or what rating it has. So even if players like the games, that is disconnected from the testers of various outlets.
I would submit that AC Brotherhood would be a contender, as it was kinda the peak of the original formula before it all started to blend together and degrade, and the multiplayer mode was truly original, fun, and hasn’t been replicated since. Maybe even Black Flag as it was a unique game that many developers have failed to replicate.
The thing probably is that I remember it being something special especially gameplay wise, but probably because I was out of touched with gaming. I think around the same time Mass Effect came out and the Xbox 360 was for me an impressive console.
AC2 and Brotherhood are both great games but yeah. That is some truly stiff competition in 2009 and 2010. Great games vs. incredible games.
OpenCritic only goes back to 2016, so metacritic would be all you have here.
Screw the awards...I mean, starfield won "most innovative game" for being exactly the absolute opposite of that.
I actually disliked AC until Origins. That was nice, and odyssey is my favourite. Malaka!
The animus-thing is probably the only part that strings them together to call it AC. But for me, it was always the annoying immersion killing part.
starfield won “most innovative game”
No way…
I’m not a gaming drama queen, but that’s just silly.
EDIT: Oh, it was the Steam Awards.
That makes sense. The voting is largely a popularity contest.
It's entirely a popularity contest.
Doesn't make it better 😉 Still haven't purchased. Not even pirated or played. That's so sad they fucked it up.
But for me, it was always the annoying immersion killing part.
I'm always exactly the opposite! For me it lets me forgive all the gamey-nonsense. Why can't I leave the map? Because this ancestor never did so there's no data for anywhere beyond here.
Fair point. That was indeed a good reason. But IMHO an intro would've been enough to explain the boundaries of this simulation. Not a whole "mini-game" around it. But anyhow, it didn't really kill the vibe, just temporary. Loved the games. Even Valhalla was nice. At least the beginning....
It was an example to illustrate my point, not the entire line of reasoning. There's loads of other stuff I feel the Animus side of the setting works well for, I just didn't feel like writing an essay so provided just one example to support my line of argument.
Maybe they should just ditch the whole Animus plot.
I think if that was going to happen it would have happened after AC3.
Personally I'm glad the Animus is there, it makes it much easier for me to suspend disbelief about so many things in those games. I wish AC3 hadn't messed up Desmond's story though, I wanted a cool conclusion, rather than having Desmond get Poochied.
Is the animus still there in the newer games? I haven't played a AC since origins and I don't remember the animus but perhaps that story was so insignificant and boring that I have suppressed those parts.
I wished Desmond's story should have gotten more time or even a spin-off focusing only on Desmond.
Sounds like you're talking about the Animus as sections where the player isn't in the historical period rather than what I mean, which is that the historical experience takes place in an in-universe simulation.
I didn't remember when the game character entered the animus to get the historical experience from Black Flag, Unity and Origins. So I believed the game started and ended with the historical character, in the AC world that means someone was connected to the animus all the time. But from the player's perspective it is not different from any other game where one plays a historical character.
For me there's a lot of video gamey ness to the AC series. I don't find this breaks my immersion because the character I'm playing as is canonically in a simulation.
If the Animus wasn't there as a framing device there's a lot of stuff that I would find extremely hard to look past. I think it's a great way to justify loads of stuff that would otherwise marr the experience.
The game character coming out of the Animus appears a lot up to AC3. There's sections in AC 4 in the game dev's offices, I've not played Unity, and there's the stuff with Layla in Origins (incidentally, it's only just occurred to me that I went to school with someone called Layla Hassan!).
There's a lot more of it in the Desmond games, including part of AC3 where one gets to do assassin shit in modern times.
I wish more games copied the way AC Odyssey did waypoints/exploration, I quite enjoyed that system =w=
It's not inherently related to the post, but I think it's one of the things in assassin's creed games that was executed well but seemingly largely unrecognized/forgotten
I mean, Odyssey seems like an obvious target for a remaster, so maybe it will come back.
That was peak AC for me though. In fact, I have no motivation to try later titles because that felt like the series' definitive game, to me. And Fate of Atlantis was such a good epilogue.
Odyssey only came out like 5 minutes ago. What year are we in?
Seriously, people need to stop saying everything needs a remaster. It's precisely how we got into the current situation we're in.
It doesn't need a remaster imo. It's not even 10 years old, and it still looks and plays very well.
Animus
ive never played an assassins creed game but i will try going through them all at some point
There's certainly a good start to the series, but fair warning, most of them are very similar and you can't really play them one after another without burning yourself out. Still, interesting to see how the series evolves over time.
yeah not in one go, just havent started as1 yet
My brother is doing that right now. It's brutal and so tiring.
I would not recommend it.
The original trilogy is amazing. But after those, I would only recommend Black Flag and Origins. I haven't played the others in the series but I have seen enough of the gameplay and reviews to say that the Assassin's Creed franchise had jumped the shark.
You're right about AC2, especially since it's a relatively quiet year for hits (2009) so getting a nomination shouldn't have been that hard. That said, it has a lot to do with who is voting, money spent on promoting the game, etc., and I'm not sure it would have won GotY even though it might even end up on some people's top games of all time.
Fun fact, apparently same year Minecraft released. Lol (I looked up a list, that and LittleBigPlanet are my favorite of the year).