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.

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.