Assassin's Creed Chronicles: Russia (2016)

The AC Chronicles series has generally been received with mixed reactions, as visible from the ratings here on Grouvee and other communities. I personally enjoyed playing ACC China quite a bit, I can't seem to remember much about ACC India, and I've discovered ACC Russia to be unpolished and difficult.

The art style of the game is pretty impressive, showing the world of the October Revolution with bold streaks of red colour. The gameplay essentials also get a modern-day upgrade. Nikolai, our protagonist, wields a rifle and also has an electric winch that can short-circuit electrical equipment. Enemies are varied, with some of the advanced ones requiring specific conditions for a kill to be possible. On paper, the ACC formula is replicated here well enough to suit the setting.

The problem is with the feel of the gameplay itself. Simply put, ACC Russia contains far too many 'instant-fail' scenarios. Chase sequences are a good example: I've seen a truck leave two feet away from my character over and over because I stumbled one step in a long obstacle course. Mission scenarios also include a fair number of these - get spotted and you fail, raise an alert and you fail, and so on. Used sparingly, these can elevate the level of challenge in a game, but here they are set up with so little room for error that they feel unforgivingly harsh. It's hard to say that you're enjoying a game when you're restarting a checkpoint for the 10th time to complete a segment.

The difficulty of the playthrough also means that you can't opt for a stealth approach at times. This directly affects your score, lowering it to the point that I wonder if it's possible to get all the upgrades, even in New Game Plus mode. The combination of issues make me think that this game was not playtested enough during the development process, because most of these problem should have beeneasi identified through player feedback.

At this point, I'm torn between a decision to move on, or to go back and figure out if this is a challenging game or simply a broken one. Regardless of my decision, I can say that if you're planning to play this game, be prepared for the inevitable frustration.

Final rating: Barely 3 out of 5 stars, owing to the fact that I still played the story to completion regardless of the game's faults.

Addendum: I ended up going back to the game to try out New Game Plus, and it was much more enjoyable. With a bit more planning around the approach, the familiarity of the game's systems, and the helix abilities, I was able to obtain the highest score on most levels. So, I'm bumping up my rating to 4 stars, consistent with my rating of the other ACC games.

Beat on Normal as free from xbox gold. This game was significantly more difficult than China, so much so that I got mostly bronze ratings and never unlocked a single upgrade. The noise dart was replaced by a shocking grappling hook thing that was mainly used to short out lights and electrified barriers, and occasionally knock out enemies that were in water or next to a wall outlet thing. Overall it was more for solving specific puzzles rather than the more widely applicable noise dart. The rifle was an excellent tool that killed with only 1 shot, and was my favorite way to deal with enemies that spotted me or would not look away. There was 1 type of armored enemy that could not be shot, 1 mission that had fumes that made it very bad to shoot, and gas mask enemies that were immune to the smoke grenade. Since I never got any upgrades I had to beat the entire game with 1 lousy hp. Combat seemed to be simpler than in China as I found it easy enough to light attack mash single enemies then finish them with Y when the skull appeared. I was not able to perform any parries, kicks, rolls or dodges. Any time an enemy got the chance to hit or shoot, I died, though I could mow down 3 guys with my rifle if I was fast enough. There were some other new mechanics that made the game more interesting; telephones that could lure guards, radios that would trigger alarm if no guard was able to answer it, and land mines that required a key from specific guards to safely pass, with lethal consequences for the guard if you steal the key and move on. I even got guards to kill themselves on the electrified barriers a few times but that required fleeing from open combat.

I liked the story here better than in China, and enjoyed the gameplay dynamic between the guy and the girl. In particular the shooting gallery sniping parts to protect her, and then playing as her to lure enemies into position to be sniped. This was a very nice touch. She was weaker than the guy though with no gadgets and no ability to openly fight, though she did get the magical helix glitch powers from China, which were mandatory to get past some puzzles. I overall liked the 1st half or so of the game more than China, and appreciated the black and white art style with interactible environment being shown in red and green. Unfortunately the latter half of the game frustrated me to the point where I had to exercise seft restraint to not smash my controller and even look up online to see if I was missing anything. God damn fucking time limits. It did not feel like Normal difficulty at all because it required perfect execution to meet the unforgiving limits. I did find out watching a video that jumping was faster than just running, which was dumb. It took me dozens of attempts to get past every timed sequence. The worst was during the final level where I was running from a tank. That absolutely required the jumping trick, and pixel perfect jumps over gaps because even a split second mistake meant death. Also frustrating were the auto fail on detection levels, especially when that combined with a time limit. I did like how the story also portrayed the Assassins as bad (somewhat reminding me of AC Rogue), but there was 1 area where I was not allowed to kill any enemies and the game did not teach me how to be non lethal (it was electrical shocks). The final boss fight against the tank was pretty good, using the sniping mechanic.

While this game had some fun improvements over China, it was overall a worse game with frustrating trial and error that did not seem properly calibrated. Just give me a level populated by enemies and other stuff to get through however I see fit, not fucking time limit auto fail nonsense.

5.5/10

For some reason the site didn't let me choose PC edition, although I played it on PC. As I've said before, I'm not going over the similar features again, I'll link my previous reviews here:

• Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China
• Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India

This game was pretty short too, but it took almost 9 hours to finish (out of which at least 3 were spent failing over and over again due to the poor controls) .We are playing as Nikolai Orelov, during the Russian Revolution in 1918. The arsenal has changed yet once more, now we have:

• Whistle
• Rifle (Chakram / Throwing Knife)
• Smoke Grenade (Smoke bomb / Firecrackers)
• Electrical Winch (Noise Dart / Noise Bomb) I liked this gadget, you can pull stuff towards you and also send out an electric shock (you can use it on soldiers or on objects).

You can now lure guards with the telephone, very helpful if you want to play without killing people. A similar new object is the radio, which, although cannot be controlled, it lures guards periodically (and if you don't have a guard around who can respond, because you killed him earlier,too bad, they will send reinforcements). It was a little disappointing to see that Ubisoft removed the foreign language feature completely (enemies speak English with Russian accent, instead of speaking Russian). The tutorial here is very fast paced too (you get the sniper mini-game in the first level, and also lots of times throughout the game, including the final boss fight, I really liked that). You have to avoid mines now, which can be done by either tailing a guard who has a magnetic card on him, or by stealing it (I don't recommend doing that every time since he will keep patrolling and the mine will explode under him). I didn't really understand this feature, because even if you steal such a card, it "evaporates" when reaching the next area (Yes, I know that it would make the game a lot easier if you could keep it). Another thing that I liked a lot is that you can hide in vents, and your whistle will be heard only at one of the entrances, very useful when luring guards. For the first time in this trilogy, you can play as two characters (Nikolai and Anastasia, one of the children of Tsar Nicholas). Helix skills cannot be used by Nikolai (in the first playthrough), only by Anastasia, and she doesn't have access to Nikolai's gadgets, all you can use is the whistle (Also you can't fight in open combat, or carry bodies).

While I didn't like the overall controls in the previous games, in this game it was terrible. You also have some parts where you have to react fast, and the slow animations / character not doing what you want it to do make those very hard to beat.Moreover, the final boss fight was insanely difficult. It might be better when you play on a console, with a controller, but with a keyboard it was pretty hard, and there was a lot of time spent failing because of it. I don't necessarily recommend playing this game, you can watch some walkthrough on youtube if you're interested in the story, unless you can get your hands on a controller. With a keyboard, just don't.