Download Murderer's Creed Stories: Spain Evaluation
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Dasvidaniya, and good riddance.
By Zachary Ryan
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia is a dichotomous affair from the outset. This side-scrolling stealth game is very clearly an Assassin’s Creed game in more than just name, but it lacks much of what works well in the full-fledged entries in the series and manages to retain much of what doesn’t.
ACC: Russia arrives devoid of any compelling characters, and repeatedly subjects you to tedious trial-and-error missions. There are moments when it truly shines, but those are quickly eclipsed by uneven mechanics, instant fail-states, and bland level design.
Modern History
The story is less interested in the October Revolution of 1918, and more on our hero Nikolai Orev’s attempts to flee Russia and start a new life outside the order with his family. He falls squarely into the “grizzled veteran” archetype, and instead of delivering a politically charged story rooted in one of the most interesting historical uprisings, you’re simply charged with seeing him through his last mission and recovering a Piece of Eden before the Templars do, just like in every Assassin’s Creed game before it.
Russia wastes no time in introducing you to its numerous ways to fail a mission. Firstly, despite being a Master Assassin, Nikolai has very little health and he’s not worth much in a fight. As a stealth game, combat is supposed to take a back seat to sneaking and hiding, but even when you’re spotted and must engage enemies head on, you’ve only got one chance to get it right. Regardless of whether enemies are swinging swords, pounding him with clubs, or shooting him with rifles from afar, Nikolai can only withstand one or occasionally two hits before you’re staring at the loading screen.
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As a Master Assassin, Nikolai has very little health and he’s not worth much in a fight.
This makes taking on multiple enemies exponentially more difficult. You’ll regularly find yourself with your back turned to one enemy while engaging another. To be fair, a dodge mechanic occasionally saved me from a bullet when I least expected it, but it was clumsy, and only worked half of the time. As the game progressed, I found myself worrying less about blocking and dodging, and mostly trying to brute-force my way through combat segments, as attacking seems more reliable than any defensive maneuvers.
So don’t get spotted, right? Unfortunately, the stealth segments aren’t particularly wonderful either. Most missions are focused on a sneaking segment and, to be fair, there are sometimes genuinely clever and engaging ones. It’s admittedly impressive just how much of the traditional Assassins’ skill set developer Climax Studios was able to cram into the structure of a 2D platformer. You can hide behind or inside of objects, stash bodies, and distract guards using guns, smoke bombs and and an electrified grappling hook. Each area is laid out almost like a diorama, you can survey the scene around you and plan accordingly to try and reach your objective as efficiently as possible.
And the backdrops are occasionally gorgeous to look at. The war-torn buildings and gilded palaces of Moscow look like something out of a watercolor pop-up book, and the art team should be applauded for their clever use of backdrops that recall the iconic propaganda of the era.
When instant-fail states are thrown into the mix, however, these beautiful stealth portions are reduced to trial-and-error style of gameplay that cripples many of ACC: Russia’s best segments. Frequently, there’s no clear indication of how to sneak past certain guards, and I was forced to adopt a method of purposely failing missions in different ways to eliminate things that didn’t work, hoping to stumble across the right path. In the end, each stealth encounter felt like a poorly designed puzzle without clues, and that robbed me of much of the joy and vindication that I would feel finishing a particularly difficult or perplexing segment in most other games.
Wasted Youth
Both combat and stealth missions are improved upon by the second playable character, the young Duchess Anastasia Romanova. Not unlike Assassin’s Creed Syndicate’s Evie Frye, Anastasia is an instantly more likeable character, and after an encounter with a Piece of Eden, Anastasia learns the ways of the Assassins. Her skill set offers more variety than Nikolai’s, despite having fewer weapons at her disposal.
What sets her apart is her Helix abilities. These skills are rooted in Assassin’s Creed lore and allow Anastasia to phase unseen between hiding spots, and to erase the bodies of her foes from time and space. She can move through areas much more fluidly, and late-game missions see you switching between to the two characters to solve puzzles and open doors for each other. These are by far the best missions in ACC: Russia, and are disappointingly few and far between.
Neither character can salvage any joy from the overly difficult, repetitive, and infuriating endless runner segments, though. These missions, while beautiful to look at, represent the worst that ACC: Russia has to offer. They take what could have been a series of exciting platforming challenges and ruin them with poor mechanics and insane difficulty spikes.
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Neither character can salvage any joy from the overly difficult, repetitive, and infuriating endless runner segments
What’s frustrating here is the lack of direction in these sequences. You’re usually being pursued by something, like a series of explosions, or a tank that moves faster than your character, so you’re constantly trying to stay one step ahead while leaping and ducking obstacles. Over and over I found myself running to the same spot with no indication of where to go next, only to be run over or blown up and do it all again.
The controls also seem to go haywire in these segments. Whether it’s a result of the speed or perspective, it seemed like a jump or hiding spot that worked on the first four attempts led to instant deaths on the fifth and sixth runs, only to inexplicably work flawlessly on the seventh. It repeatedly undermines the pace and rhythm that could have made these segments great.
The Verdict
Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: Russia disappoints on multiple levels, from a flat main character to unintuitive insta-fail stealth levels to clumsy combat and platforming. The few times it nails it with diorama-like puzzles and Helix powers only serve to make the rest of this side-scrolling spinoff look even worse by comparison.
Editors’ Choice
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