When the developers of the Assassin’s Creed series, Ubisoft, announced that there would be two rather than one new game releases at the end of 2014 there was a muted response. Ubisoft’s decision to make even one new game in the series each year has been a relatively unpopular one and this new move seemed like a cynical cash grab. As with the last two main instalments in the series and their respective spin-offs (settings have included the early days of Spanish Louisiana, a maroon settlement on Saint Domingue, revolutionary Boston and New England and the Caribbean in the 1710s and 1720s), both Assassin’s Creed Rogue and Assassin’s Creed Unity (focusing on the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror) are set in the eighteenth century. Assassin’s Creed Unity is only available on the very latest generation of consoles (Xbox One and PlayStation 4) and on PC, while Assassin’s Creed Rogue is only available on the last generation of consoles, with initially no PC release for four months.

Unity was released with much fanfare (TV trailers, electronic billboards, bus adverts), whereas it would have been easy to completely overlook the release of Rogue, as it received so little hype and advertising. In a way this reflects the very different tone and setting of the two games and their protagonists; Unity is flashy and loud while Rogue is understated and conflicted. Rogue is also notably shorter and much less ambitious than other recent Assassin’s Creed games, presumably because Unity ate up Ubisoft’s budget and time.

I played Unity first, but the events of that game take on a different significance in the light of Rogue. Although released simultaneously Rogue is set before Unity both in its present day and eighteenth-century timelines, the latter covering the period 1752-1776 with most of the action taking place during the Seven Years’ War around the North Atlantic coast and the Hudson River Valley. Rogue bridges the last two main instalments in the series – 2012’s Assassin’s Creed III (focusing on the American Revolution) and 2013’s Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag (set at the end of the Golden Age of Piracy). Shay Patrick Cormac, the protagonist of the game, interacts with characters from the two previous instalments and through Rogue the three games begin to form an eighteenth-century colonial trilogy of sorts, rather than remaining loosely connected entities. Unity, in turn, is linked to the action in the North Atlantic by Rogue, as Shay is also inextricably involved with the main plot of Unity.

While a player new to Assassin’s Creed could pick up Unity and enjoy it as a self-contained experience, Rogue is best appreciated as a part of the series.
As with other offerings in the series the game follows hostilities between the Assassins and the Templars, two ancient secret societies interested in the supernatural artefacts created by the long-dead powerful pre-human ‘First Civilization’. The current factions seek to best each other by reviewing the ‘genetic memories’ of their dead predecessors in order to gain more information regarding these artefacts (for background on this read my Criticks review of Unity). In the games the Templars are usually portrayed as authoritarian and the Assassins as freedom fighters, but Rogue blurs the distinction between the two and questions the motives of both. There is a twist on the usual format here – Shay is a disillusioned Assassin turned Templar, intent on hunting down members of his old Brotherhood. This change of loyalty is sparked by Shay accidentally triggering the 1755 Lisbon earthquake while out on a mission for the Assassins, only for his subsequent warnings of the dangerous matters they are messing with to be ignored by the Assassin leadership. As a result, Shay takes up with the Templars and sets about eliminating his old allies.

This is not the first time players have had the opportunity to play as a Templar, but it is the first time one does so for the majority of the game. It is encouraging to see that Ubisoft is still trying to edge away from the black-and-white morality of the first Assassin’s Creed game and the Assassin’s Creed II trilogy, even if they remain unable to capture the imagination of their players in quite the same way as those earlier games.
Assassin’s Creed as a series has a reputation for choosing rather unusual historical locations compared to other games and Rogue’s French and Indian War must surely be one of the most obscure so far. Few people have a solid understanding of this period in history, even when compared to the other relatively unexplored settings featured in the franchise (at least with regard to video games), such as the Third Crusade or Renaissance Rome. Unfortunately, the causes of the conflict are never actually explained to the player. The series previously touched on the Seven Years’ War both in the opening of Assassin’s Creed III (before focusing on the slightly more accessible American Revolution) and again in the minor game Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation. As a result of this setting Rogue has far fewer universally recognisable historical characters than other recent instalments; Washington and Franklin (both featured in Assassin’s Creed III) have cameos and Captain Cook makes an appearance, although with an inexplicable and slightly dodgy Scottish accent with vague undertones of Borat. However, the sequence in which the player is given charge of HMS Pembroke with Cook’s guidance during the Siege of Louisbourg looks like something from a late Turner painting and is definitely one of the highlights of the game.

The North Atlantic/Arctic Ocean itself is the most appealing location featured in Rogue, with its floating icebergs and aurora borealis. Here, Shay is able to hunt polar bears and the now-extinct great auks as well as harpoon white sperm whales.
Rogue plays like a cross between Assassin’s Creed III and Black Flag. It shares its North-East Atlantic coastal setting with the former (including some of the same locales) and its focus on sea-faring with the latter. New York is the one large settlement that can be explored, although hardly any time is spent there during the main gameplay which makes it feel largely unnecessary as a setting. The sea shanties from Black Flag – arguably the best in-game music system apart from the Grand Theft Auto series – are also back and remain great fun even if many of them are actually folk songs that date from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

As in Black Flag, the player takes the role of an employee at games developer Abstergo Entertainment (a subsidiary of the Templar-controlled Abstergo Industries) hired to review hours of simulated memories. The action mainly takes place within these reconstructed eighteenth-century memories, but the player is also free to wander around the offices of Abstergo Entertainment, which gives Ubisoft the opportunity to poke fun at themselves and, as it is termed in the game, their ‘crazy conspiracy shit’ (indeed, the Voynich Manuscript, beloved by conspiracy theorists, is key to the plot of Rogue). The ability to roam around the games development office was a nice touch in the last game, but there is nothing really new here now – and this is the problem with Rogue, generally.
Although the game is not at all as bad as many expected, Rogue still feels and plays like a rehash of Assassin’s Creed III and Black Flag. It lacks the sense of ambition and scale that both those games and Unity – despite their flaws – possess. It is hard to see it appealing to buyers other than dedicated fans of the series, as it relies so much upon prior knowledge of the last two games and their downloadable content spin-offs, Liberation and Freedom Cry. It also seems odd to tie up the loose ends of what was essentially a family saga (the three playable characters in Assassin’s Creed III and Black Flag were a grandfather, father and son) with the story of a stranger.

With the next game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise to be set in Victorian London, Unity and Rogue mark the series’ departure from the eighteenth century. Although the historical accuracy may sometimes be shaky (reasonably excused in-game as the workings of the animus machine that replays the genetic memories), the four games set in this period should be acknowledged as representing perhaps the most sustained pop-culture interaction with the eighteenth century (with a total of more than 60 hours of average gameplay each), as well as being incredibly popular, with combined sales in the tens of millions. Over 12 million people alone will have watched part of The Beggar’s Opera thanks to the prologue of Assassin’s Creed III, itself probably one of the most even-handed mass-media representations of the American Revolution. Bearing in mind just how enjoyable the Assassin’s Creed games have been, it does seem a shame to end the North Atlantic storyline on a game that tends to feel something of an afterthought. Given the unlimited possibilities of a Victorian London setting, hopefully the nineteenth-century Assassin’s Creed Victory will mark a return to form when it is released at the end of this year.

Assassin’s Creed Rogue was released in November 2014. It is available for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. Stephanie Howard-Smith played the game on PlayStation 3.