Where does Assassin’s Creed Shadows rank among the best and worst Assassin’s Creed games ever? Here are all 14 games in the franchise, ranked by quality.
Over the nearly two decades since the first entry, Assassin’s Creed has ballooned into a mixed-media franchise that includes at least seven spinoffs, nine novels, 11 comics, a Michael Fassbender film, an in-development TV show, and enough Pop! toys to fill a jam band. The brand is so ubiquitous, so familiar, that its core ideas — religion is a misreading of coded messages from an ancient, advanced race of technologists; a shadow war between the champions of freedom and control has been fought over centuries by Earth’s greatest historical leaders and thinkers — have mutated from quirky and compelling to obtuse and intimidating to predictable and bland.
It’s easy to forget how audacious this series was and occasionally can still be. So if you remember one thing from this article, let it be this: The second Assassin’s Creed ended with the player fistfighting the pope in order to uncover the truth of an ultra-advanced, pre-human civilization on which our world’s concept of religion is built. Let’s take a moment to recognize that, of all video game franchises on the planet, this particular series about cynical, comical, and controversial conspiracy theories somehow became a mainstream phenomenon.
This year, Assassin’s Creed Shadows marks another type of reboot, bringing together ideas from the original trilogy, the “modern” trilogy, and the most recent pseudo-spinoff, Assassin’s Creed Mirage.
Shadows’ release is a good opportunity to reflect on the series’ zigs and zags. Because for all of its overwrought melodrama and impenetrable conspiracies, Assassin’s Creed has consistently spawned some of the strangest, most self-effacing, and most ambitious AAA games. A single series that spans swashbuckling pirates, Victorian-era organized crime, the plurality of famous Renaissance artists, a golden apple with the power to obliterate human life, and, yes, of course, a boss battle that culminates with the graphic pummeling of Pope Alexander VI for no other reason than “the truth is out there.”14. Assassin’s Creed Revelations
Despite (or perhaps because of) the constant threat of succumbing to franchise bloat and committing an expensive creative misfire, Assassin’s Creed’s designers have largely built their games around the shared and proven skeleton of third-person stealth combat. With each entry, a hero pairs a knack for parkour with a love of concealed blades to slaughter an entire political regime using crowds, haystacks, and extreme heights to stay just out of sight. Assassin’s Creed Revelations is, in some capacity, the exception.
This game takes a series known for graceful stealth combat and adds, of all things, bombs — yes, “bombs” is plural; there’s a variety of explosives to craft and combust.
Even at the bottom of this list, I can’t bring myself to bully Revelations. In their quest for a raison d’être, the designers grasped for something, anything that would distinguish this game from its predecessors. The bombs are a bust, but some ideas hinted at greatness. Its messy fort defense system was, six years later, refined by Middle-earth: Shadow of War. And I’ll go so far as to say that Revelations includes the best character work for Desmond, the unlikable protagonist who, for years, had dominated the franchise’s modern-day timeline.
In an extended collection of first-person, 3D puzzles (yes, you can wear 3D glasses; Revelations was published in 2011, after all), the player navigates abstract spaces (think a clumsier Portal) to uncover Desmond’s deep existential truths. Paired with these vignettes is a collection of monologues recapping Desmond’s former life as a puckish runaway who gets caught up in the hubbub of 20-something life in New York City. If you’ve ever wondered what Assassin’s Creed would sound like if written by John Updike on a bender, then have I got the game for you. —Chris Plante13. Assassin’s Creed 3
Assassin’s Creed 3 is a multicar pileup: the franchise’s rapid commercial expectations colliding into the publisher’s exponential desire to include more and more things to do, further demolished by the complexity of developing a game on a quick turnaround with a team of hundreds spread across the world. When the lights went off in Canada, they came on in Shanghai, and for years a moment didn’t pass without someone, somewhere, feeding their ideas into this machine.
Since then, Ubisoft has built itself around this global production model, but Assassin’s Creed 3 feels, more than any other entry, like the product of growing pains. The team had many years to make the game, but with the final product being a mixed bag, one wonders how much of that production time went into formalizing a process for creating games at this humongous scale.
It doesn’t help that the game, like Revelations, misunderstands the appeal of previous entries. Where early Assassin’s Creeds send the player skittering across the rooftops of cramped villas and cities, Assassin’s Creed 3 drops the player in the wide-avenue towns and dense forests of Colonial America. The setting makes for some playful story turns, but never quite supports the play style at its heart. —CP12. Assassin’s Creed Unity
Have you ever seen a controlled demolition of an old building? That’s how I remember Assassin’s Creed Unity. Like an implosion of a dilapidated hotel, it’s an achievement that requires great knowledge, thorough planning, and a profound attention to detail. It’s a beautiful thing to behold, but at the end of the day, all that’s left is rubble.
The first Assassin’s Creed game built truly for the previous generation of consoles and PC hardware, Unity is still one of the most visually stunning entries in the series despite being 11 (!) years old. What a rarity in video games, an art form in which new iterations surpass their predecessors, visually speaking, thanks to a constant hum of new graphical horsepower and creative tools.
Unity also experiments with multiplayer within its central campaign, rather than relegating it to supplemental modes. Where early Assassin’s Creed games imagine the player as a leader of an army of AI-controlled killers, Unity portrays each player as part of a human-guided team.
The combination of multiplayer and graphical finesse seems to have been too much for both the development team to achieve and contemporary hardware to power. The initial 2014 release is notorious for containing some hilarious and grotesque bugs.
As in Revelations, there’s still something special tucked beneath the game’s flaws. Unity oozes big ideas and inspired craftsmanship.
