Assassin’s Creed Unity sees the latest instalment of the historical video-game series arrive in late eighteenth-century France. The franchise is known for its ‘open-world’ settings, in which the player is free to explore digitally recreated large-scale historical cities and landscapes. Earlier games have focused on the Holy Land during the Third Crusade, Renaissance Italy and Ottoman Constantinople. The previous two main instalments in the series and their stand-alone spinoffs have all been set during the eighteenth century, including Revolutionary North-East America, New Orleans under Spanish colonial rule and the Caribbean at the end of the Golden Age of Piracy. Unity was released simultaneously with Assassin’s Creed Rogue, which focuses on the French and Indian War. The extremely popular and widely acclaimed Assassin’s Creed series was always going to visit revolutionary Paris. Ubisoft, the producer, is a French company and the game is developed by their Montreal studio. At its core Assassin’s Creed is concerned with the balance of free will and safe order and this period is such obviously fertile ground for an Assassin’s Creed game. Whether Ubisoft do justice to such promising material is a different matter.

First, a word on the complex and schlocky mythology of the franchise. For the uninitiated, Assassin’s Creed is predicated on the idea that ‘genetic memory’ survives within DNA and such memories can now be extracted and reviewed. All the games follow the conflict between two groups of people; the Assassins, proto-libertarian vigilantes who fight for individual freedom, and the Templars, who work towards an ordered and controlled world. Both secret societies are seeking the relics of Earth’s super-human ‘First Civilization’. While in the first few games the Templars were cartoonishly evil (counting Adolf Hitler among their ranks), the series has begun to treat both them and their motives more sympathetically. The 21st-century Templars now operate as business conglomerate ‘Abstergo Industries’, controlling ‘countless corporations, governments, media outlets and NGOs – but now they want control over history itself’. Abstergo have developed a means of marketing the doctored genetic memory of test subjects as a game – ‘where the past is your playground’. In Unity the player is contacted by the Assassins and asked to sift through genetic memories in order to gain useful information for their cause. Aside from a few of these interferences, Unity stays resolutely out of the Dan Brown-esque modern-day storyline and sticks to historical conspiracy. This is a sign that Assassin’s Creed as a series is suffering something of an identity crisis – the contemporary plotline was crucial to the early games but its more outlandish elements are now being rapidly abandoned.

The historical conspiracy, however, is still going strong. In Assassin’s Creed’s French Revolution, the comte de Mirabeau is the leader of the French arm of the Assassin Brotherhood seeking to broker a truce with the Templars, who are orchestrating the revolution to demonstrate the dangerous nature of chaos and to remove the aristocratic leaders of their organisation. The idea that the revolution was the work of conspirators involving the illuminati, the Knights Templar or the Freemasons dates from the end of the eighteenth century itself; the Templar conspiracy in Unity has its roots in the conspiracy theory proposed in 1797 by Abbé Augustin Barruel (and to a slightly lesser extent in that suggested by John Robison in the same year).

Unity follows Arno Victor Dorian, a reluctant Assassin seeking revenge for the murders of his father and guardian across Paris, Versailles and Franciade/Saint-Denis. His adventures are financed through his proprietorship of a café. This main plot is the weakest part of the game and seems predictable and uninspired – the hero and his central narrative bear more than a passing resemblance to those of 2009’s Assassin’s Creed II. Plotting, however, has never been a strength in the series, which instead relies on the immersive nature of its historical locations and the main narrative represents a rather small percentage of the overall gameplay.

In comparison to its predecessors Unity shows uncharacteristic restraint in refraining from attributing every political assassination in Paris to Arno – Charlotte Corday remains the murderer of Marat, although the player is tasked with discovering the identity of his killer (with the assistance of a young Vidocq). Anachronistically, Jacques-Louis David is found painting at the scene of the crime. However, Corday has been reduced to a cameo appearance in a series that has been heavily criticised for its lack of female characters; for example, Olympe de Gouges only features as a severed head.

Unity mostly resists what some critics have described as the ‘Forrest Gumpification’ of its revolutionary brother, Assassin’s Creed III (2012). Aside from Mirabeau and a select few other well-known names (Napoleon in particular is shoe-horned in), Arno does not directly interact with many historical figures during the main game. Rather, the player has to choose to actively seek these figures out after locating them through reading newspapers. In this way Unity’s revolutionary Paris feels alive and spontaneous. These ‘Paris Stories’ prove to be a delight. Arno encounters far too many politicians, society women, writers, criminals and scientists to list. The player might duel with the Chevalier d’Eon or be rewarded for assisting André Chénier with a translation of Chénier’s ‘The Young Captive’. The game also interacts with other fictional material inspired by Early Modern France – Arno can purchase a Man in the Iron Mask outfit or assist a fop known as the ‘Crimson Rose’ in rescuing members of the French aristocracy.

As with other games from the series, there is a comprehensive in-game ‘encyclopedia’ detailing information about the people, locations and events encountered and referenced throughout Paris. The player can also collect revolutionary anthems like the Carmagnole in this database. However, there is no distinction made between fictional and historical characters in the entries – anything the player might learn from the game is purely incidental. Admittedly, no one plays Assassin’s Creed games expecting an absolutely accurate representation of history.

But really how different is Assassin’s Creed Unity to the fictional Abstergo if the plot and the history is incidental to the experience of letting your avatar roam around a recreated city like a personal playground? There is no sincere involvement with the revolution or its aims. Only in the very last cut-scene of the game does Arno ruminate on the titular creed of his order, the semi-Nietzschean ‘Nothing is true, everything is permitted’: ‘Not a grant of permission, the creed is a warning. Ideals too easily give way to dogma. Dogma becomes fanaticism […] only we ourselves can guard against our obsessions’.

As all the Assassin’s Creed games since 2012 have been focused on eighteenth-century Atlantic colonies from Boston to Havana, Unity marks a welcome return to old-world cityscapes. The chief mechanic of the series is based on free-running/parkour and remains best-suited to densely built settlements with plenty of recognisable buildings to scale and Ubisoft certainly appreciate the power of the set-piece. Arno attends a ball in the Hall of Mirrors (under the nom-de-plume Thélème), explores the interior of the Saint-Chapelle, escapes from the Bastille and infiltrates the Tuileries Palace on the 10th of August 1792 as the crowd outside chants the Marseillaise. For the first time in the series the player can walk around inside many of the buildings, be they cafés, brothels or the homes of the poor and the wealthy. Unity’s pre-Haussmann Paris is incredibly detailed and beautifully rendered – not to mention huge. Notre-Dame has been digitally recreated on a 1:1 scale (albeit with an anachronistic spire). The city is a joy to explore and is unequivocally the game’s best feature. For some reason, it is populated by Parisians speaking in British accents, which can feel a bit jarring (although there is a French language option).

Unity is a fundamentally enjoyable game and remains a solid addition to the now slightly lagging franchise. Many of its problems are redeemed by the sense of vitality Ubisoft have given their eighteenth-century city and its environs. However, it suffers for its unimaginative main plot and lack of willingness to take creative risks or to resolve the problems endemic to the series (some of its best new features are those pioneered in other stealth games): A note here – when originally released Unity was essentially unfinished and full of bugs, but these issues had been resolved by the time I came to play the game and I experienced no problems.

Assassin’s Creed: Unity was released in November 2014. It is available for PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One. Stephanie Howard-Smith played the game on Playstation 4.