I was looking for an older AC thread to find it but I gave up so I'll just start this one. With Mirage coming out today and this site and others doing their series rankings I figured I'd put mine somewhere.
I plan on starting Mirage tonight but then I likely won't be able to get to it for a bit. Next weekend looks like the wife will be away and the weather will be shit so I may just binge it then. Understand that I see this is a game for the fans, or at least the "we know what we're getting crowd." It is like those that are saying Starfield is good IF you like Bathesda's whole thing which totally makes sense to me.
Ok here's my rankings. Some of these are worthy of the "hot takes" thread given what I see on the internet.
S-tier Category: Freaking LOVE these games and consider them all-time favorites
#1. Assassin's Creed 2
I was away from gaming for a while when I played this and was captivated and amazed by what I was experiencing. The very idea of being in Renaissance Italy just completely set the standard for what I most value in modern video gaming- being able to just BE in a world. Climbing the Santé Maria de Fiore and leaping down like that is still the greatest single moment of traversing a game world of the 21st century for me.
But then they also introduce this whole whackadoodle Dan Brown-esque conspiracy bullshit with hidden messages and puzzles and like "actually Hitler and Thomas Edisaon are Templars!" and it's just the right amount of crazy to add even more spice to this awesome game.
I disagree with all the criticisms. People saying the parkour is bad? I don't know man. They're all like "you know how sometimes Ezio just flies off of walls?" No, sorry, I don't, there's a button for that so just don't press that button lol. Y'all know I make no claims to being some good gamer (I regularly whine about how I suck) but if you can't make Ezio climb up a tower I dunno what to tell you. In fact, maybe the game is too easy (you can slaughter an army with one counter button).
Pulling enemies off a ledge feels and looks great. Stabbing m'fers from behind looks and feels great. Leaping from a rooftop and stabbing a sucker in the throat looks and feels Batman levels of great. And yes, it all still holds up IMO.
Characters are great! It's-a-me, Mario! Hooker nuns and slimy politicians hot thief chick and Leanardo DaVinci bro. Everything feels big, and melodramatic, and colorful, and intense, and funny. The game feels, appropriately, like an opera by Rossini.
#2. Assassin's Creed
Yeah, the OG. All the common criticisms are wrong.
"It's repetitive"- all games are repetitive. Have you ever played a game?
"It looks bad"- it looks great. No not just "for its time," it looks amazing. Even though it's brown in the age of brown, the cities are different enough to alleviate that, and the skylines alone are both pretty and functional.
"It's a proof of concept"- if that is the case, it's as much a proof of concept for what was left on the floor for future entries as it was for stuff that was kept in, and therein likes the greatness of this game. It was designed to be played without a HUD, and experiencing it like that is revelatory. Considering that like 10 games later they started to de-emphasize HUD elements in response to critical backlash to open world glut, it shows how forward-thinking this game really was.
There are definitely some "unfinished" or incomplete or pointless things in the game but they are all completely skippable or easy to breeze past- the empty "Kingdom" area, the flags, the saving citizens fights.
Frankly this 2007 game feels better for me to play than most modern games I play. Every input has an expected reaction from my character and there is a perfect balance between player expression, complexity, and accessibility. AC fans like to argue about which games has "the best parkour." Well, I think it's the first one (and by definition the first 4 since it's pretty much the same). "Best" to me which ones let you mess around and look awesome but also make you think a little. An actual skill ceiling but you can still get around.
The plot is great. The world-building is amazing. The enemies are cool. I hate that this game is dismissed when I play it and I see a masterpiece.
A-tier Category: Great games, like 'em a lot
#3. Brotherhood
#4. Revelations
Look- I know, I know, they're just glorified AC2 expansions, milking the Ezio thing, more of the same, etc. Hell yeah they are. For sure my ranking these so high are residues of my love of AC2 so unlike AC1 I'm not insisting that the consensus is wrong, I'm just saying I really enjoy these games.
One of the reasons some love them is the introduction of multiplayer but I personally don't like multiplayer even. I just like more AC2. I also disagree with a common opinion I heard about Constantinople in Revelations being an uninteresting city but again I disagree. It's maybe too brown, sure, but as a city it's pretty interesting.
Brotherhood suffers from introducing a lot of the stuff that would dilute the franchise into the Ubisoft crap we all know and hate now- all kinds of useless activities like a brotherhood management system, annoying optional objectives, an stupid amount of pointless collectibles, etc. Most important, the departure of Patrice Desilets, the werido creative director and with him gone, any hope of a cohesive and authorial voice behind the story. The repercussions of Brotherhood would ripple down negatively to this day but as a game to play it's still great.
B-tier Category: gg
#5. Black Flag
A frequent consensus choice for #1 due to the setting and extremely fun pirating activities. And indeed, no other game offers quite the thrill of sailing around, hearing your crew sing, spotting a juicy target, and raiding a ship. We can include the experience of hopping off on an island, doing some side quest, and hopping back on to continue pirating.
If I were being more "objective" I'd put this above the Ezio-quels but Black Flag takes a hit for being the game that introduced fans to the phrases "not a real Assassin's Creed game" or "a good [whatever] game but not a good AC game." While I don't really agree with that, I do not think they handled the post-Desmond situation well at all.
I don't like this whole meta-you're-actually-a-Ubisoft-employee bullshit, lol, wtf were they smoking. Edward Kenway is great but he's no Ezio. And yeah the tailing missions are butt- they just enhance this Skyrim-esque feeling of encouraging the player to downplay the actual story in favor or side stuff faffing about and I just don't think AC benefits from this (i.e., my S-tier selections).
#6. Origins
As with Black Flag, this game sets itself apart from its predecessors by offering new mechanics and a way of applying the AC lore and ideas to a new kind of setting and gameplay. Of course it's much more of a technical and graphical change (Black Flag was the same engine and mechanics as AC3).
This game's placement in B-tier and above its follow-ups is due to the strength of the main character and the novelty of its vast and beautiful open world, before every critic would get sick of it. And with Layal Hassan at least they try to bring back some larger story-telling. They try... oh, they try, but their own Ubisoftness doesn't let them succeed.
Game loses points for completely removing the unique and interesting assassination mechanics where everything gameplay-wise just becomes "go to some dudes and fight." Real shame, there. Also it was the game that most blatantly illustrated the studio's misogynistic fear of having a playable woman character where clearly Aya should have been the main character based on, well, the plot of the game itself!
C-tier Category: this'll keep me busy for a while
#7. Odyssey
#8. Valhalla
Yep, just gonna dump the [not really] "rpg" right here. We don't need to regurgitate the fatigue arguments we've all heard and wrote a million times, we get it, it's real, we know. I disagree with many who rate Valhalla so much lower than the other two- I can get into details about the strengths and weaknesses of each but I don't find it interesting. They're just ranked in release order because each time a thing repeats, it's lesser.
#9. Liberation
Originally released as a hand-held game to coincide with AC3, most don't even consider it a mainline entry. But I played it a couple times and I enjoyed it. Not only is it the only one where you play as a woman exclusively but it actually uses that unfortunately unique aspect in its plot and mechanics where you can where different outfits to effect how NPCs react. The story is actually pretty great with the mother, the mentor turning evil, the swamp, the smugglers, all the stuff. And you get a whip!
#10. Syndicate
A response to Unity for better (it actually works) and worse (simplified and less interesting). The Victorian England setting is least interesting for me, as it's too modern and covered so much in various BBC and Netflix shows. The best and worst thing about the game is clearing districts from rival gangs because, as with the later "rpg" ones, it's nice to have a mind-numbing pretty world, but the zombie-like dullness sets in a lot faster for me here than it does with the later games for some reason.
D-tier Category: if this wasn't set in a pretty historical world, it could f*** right off
#10: Assassin's Creed 3
Ah, the one that broke my heart.
My goodness did I have high hopes for this one. I have heard the complaint that the American Revolution is not a good setting for an AC game because there's already too much media bout the US or that there aren't enough buildings to climb or that the themes don't work with the setting and I just disagree, especially with the latter. But I am an American so take that as you will. Either way, playing as an indigenous person was a brilliant choice and I do love hearing the language and seeing a Mohawk village represented and using a freaking tomahawk- that is the best part of the game.
Everything else is a tragedy. With a new engine, reworked mechanics, and finally a new playable character, it was supposed to be a much needed reboot to the franchise. Instead, it's a grab-bag of unfinished systems that don't work together cohesively, incomplete or just bad missions, and vast vast emptiness, wrapped with a story that doesn't make any goddamn sense and I hate it so much. I still hear "TO THE LEFT CONNOR" in my nightmares- and since I live in Boston I get those nightmares every day.
#11: Rogue
Black Flag 2, but with shittier songs. A placeholder for what was then last-gen console owners. A much shorter story than the other games with a LOT more side filler, including TWO different maps of collectathon stuff. But since some of the side stuff is fun like the reverse-assassinations and even a lesser Black Flag is still fun, it's a nice time filler for hardcore AC fans that find this on sale.
F-tier Category: where the 'F' stands for 'F*** you, Ubisoft"
#12: Unity
I think they just literally arrested the creative director of this game lol.
This game has received some retroactive praise because it introduced ideas that would be great if they actually worked. But IMO, quality matters, and all the ideas in the world don't mean jack if the thing on the screen doesn't do the thing it's supposed to do. Parkour down, co-op missions, emphasis on stealth, dedicated crouch button, return of an actual "brotherhood"- great, right? But none of them freaking work!
I am not talking about bugs, I am talking about the core game. It's a broken janky piece of shit and I hate it. And when I say this online I get lectured about patches. Like.. I applied all the patches lol. It still doesn't work. The AI is insane. Arno is a magnet and all the chairs and windowsills are the opposite magnet. And the story is the least consequential of any AC.
This is the only AC game I would never ever replay.
I plan on starting Mirage tonight but then I likely won't be able to get to it for a bit. Next weekend looks like the wife will be away and the weather will be shit so I may just binge it then. Understand that I see this is a game for the fans, or at least the "we know what we're getting crowd." It is like those that are saying Starfield is good IF you like Bathesda's whole thing which totally makes sense to me.
Ok here's my rankings. Some of these are worthy of the "hot takes" thread given what I see on the internet.
S-tier Category: Freaking LOVE these games and consider them all-time favorites
#1. Assassin's Creed 2
I was away from gaming for a while when I played this and was captivated and amazed by what I was experiencing. The very idea of being in Renaissance Italy just completely set the standard for what I most value in modern video gaming- being able to just BE in a world. Climbing the Santé Maria de Fiore and leaping down like that is still the greatest single moment of traversing a game world of the 21st century for me.
But then they also introduce this whole whackadoodle Dan Brown-esque conspiracy bullshit with hidden messages and puzzles and like "actually Hitler and Thomas Edisaon are Templars!" and it's just the right amount of crazy to add even more spice to this awesome game.
I disagree with all the criticisms. People saying the parkour is bad? I don't know man. They're all like "you know how sometimes Ezio just flies off of walls?" No, sorry, I don't, there's a button for that so just don't press that button lol. Y'all know I make no claims to being some good gamer (I regularly whine about how I suck) but if you can't make Ezio climb up a tower I dunno what to tell you. In fact, maybe the game is too easy (you can slaughter an army with one counter button).
Pulling enemies off a ledge feels and looks great. Stabbing m'fers from behind looks and feels great. Leaping from a rooftop and stabbing a sucker in the throat looks and feels Batman levels of great. And yes, it all still holds up IMO.
Characters are great! It's-a-me, Mario! Hooker nuns and slimy politicians hot thief chick and Leanardo DaVinci bro. Everything feels big, and melodramatic, and colorful, and intense, and funny. The game feels, appropriately, like an opera by Rossini.
#2. Assassin's Creed
Yeah, the OG. All the common criticisms are wrong.
"It's repetitive"- all games are repetitive. Have you ever played a game?
"It looks bad"- it looks great. No not just "for its time," it looks amazing. Even though it's brown in the age of brown, the cities are different enough to alleviate that, and the skylines alone are both pretty and functional.
"It's a proof of concept"- if that is the case, it's as much a proof of concept for what was left on the floor for future entries as it was for stuff that was kept in, and therein likes the greatness of this game. It was designed to be played without a HUD, and experiencing it like that is revelatory. Considering that like 10 games later they started to de-emphasize HUD elements in response to critical backlash to open world glut, it shows how forward-thinking this game really was.
There are definitely some "unfinished" or incomplete or pointless things in the game but they are all completely skippable or easy to breeze past- the empty "Kingdom" area, the flags, the saving citizens fights.
Frankly this 2007 game feels better for me to play than most modern games I play. Every input has an expected reaction from my character and there is a perfect balance between player expression, complexity, and accessibility. AC fans like to argue about which games has "the best parkour." Well, I think it's the first one (and by definition the first 4 since it's pretty much the same). "Best" to me which ones let you mess around and look awesome but also make you think a little. An actual skill ceiling but you can still get around.
The plot is great. The world-building is amazing. The enemies are cool. I hate that this game is dismissed when I play it and I see a masterpiece.
A-tier Category: Great games, like 'em a lot
#3. Brotherhood
#4. Revelations
Look- I know, I know, they're just glorified AC2 expansions, milking the Ezio thing, more of the same, etc. Hell yeah they are. For sure my ranking these so high are residues of my love of AC2 so unlike AC1 I'm not insisting that the consensus is wrong, I'm just saying I really enjoy these games.
One of the reasons some love them is the introduction of multiplayer but I personally don't like multiplayer even. I just like more AC2. I also disagree with a common opinion I heard about Constantinople in Revelations being an uninteresting city but again I disagree. It's maybe too brown, sure, but as a city it's pretty interesting.
Brotherhood suffers from introducing a lot of the stuff that would dilute the franchise into the Ubisoft crap we all know and hate now- all kinds of useless activities like a brotherhood management system, annoying optional objectives, an stupid amount of pointless collectibles, etc. Most important, the departure of Patrice Desilets, the werido creative director and with him gone, any hope of a cohesive and authorial voice behind the story. The repercussions of Brotherhood would ripple down negatively to this day but as a game to play it's still great.
B-tier Category: gg
#5. Black Flag
A frequent consensus choice for #1 due to the setting and extremely fun pirating activities. And indeed, no other game offers quite the thrill of sailing around, hearing your crew sing, spotting a juicy target, and raiding a ship. We can include the experience of hopping off on an island, doing some side quest, and hopping back on to continue pirating.
If I were being more "objective" I'd put this above the Ezio-quels but Black Flag takes a hit for being the game that introduced fans to the phrases "not a real Assassin's Creed game" or "a good [whatever] game but not a good AC game." While I don't really agree with that, I do not think they handled the post-Desmond situation well at all.
I don't like this whole meta-you're-actually-a-Ubisoft-employee bullshit, lol, wtf were they smoking. Edward Kenway is great but he's no Ezio. And yeah the tailing missions are butt- they just enhance this Skyrim-esque feeling of encouraging the player to downplay the actual story in favor or side stuff faffing about and I just don't think AC benefits from this (i.e., my S-tier selections).
#6. Origins
As with Black Flag, this game sets itself apart from its predecessors by offering new mechanics and a way of applying the AC lore and ideas to a new kind of setting and gameplay. Of course it's much more of a technical and graphical change (Black Flag was the same engine and mechanics as AC3).
This game's placement in B-tier and above its follow-ups is due to the strength of the main character and the novelty of its vast and beautiful open world, before every critic would get sick of it. And with Layal Hassan at least they try to bring back some larger story-telling. They try... oh, they try, but their own Ubisoftness doesn't let them succeed.
Game loses points for completely removing the unique and interesting assassination mechanics where everything gameplay-wise just becomes "go to some dudes and fight." Real shame, there. Also it was the game that most blatantly illustrated the studio's misogynistic fear of having a playable woman character where clearly Aya should have been the main character based on, well, the plot of the game itself!
C-tier Category: this'll keep me busy for a while
#7. Odyssey
#8. Valhalla
Yep, just gonna dump the [not really] "rpg" right here. We don't need to regurgitate the fatigue arguments we've all heard and wrote a million times, we get it, it's real, we know. I disagree with many who rate Valhalla so much lower than the other two- I can get into details about the strengths and weaknesses of each but I don't find it interesting. They're just ranked in release order because each time a thing repeats, it's lesser.
#9. Liberation
Originally released as a hand-held game to coincide with AC3, most don't even consider it a mainline entry. But I played it a couple times and I enjoyed it. Not only is it the only one where you play as a woman exclusively but it actually uses that unfortunately unique aspect in its plot and mechanics where you can where different outfits to effect how NPCs react. The story is actually pretty great with the mother, the mentor turning evil, the swamp, the smugglers, all the stuff. And you get a whip!
#10. Syndicate
A response to Unity for better (it actually works) and worse (simplified and less interesting). The Victorian England setting is least interesting for me, as it's too modern and covered so much in various BBC and Netflix shows. The best and worst thing about the game is clearing districts from rival gangs because, as with the later "rpg" ones, it's nice to have a mind-numbing pretty world, but the zombie-like dullness sets in a lot faster for me here than it does with the later games for some reason.
D-tier Category: if this wasn't set in a pretty historical world, it could f*** right off
#10: Assassin's Creed 3
Ah, the one that broke my heart.
My goodness did I have high hopes for this one. I have heard the complaint that the American Revolution is not a good setting for an AC game because there's already too much media bout the US or that there aren't enough buildings to climb or that the themes don't work with the setting and I just disagree, especially with the latter. But I am an American so take that as you will. Either way, playing as an indigenous person was a brilliant choice and I do love hearing the language and seeing a Mohawk village represented and using a freaking tomahawk- that is the best part of the game.
Everything else is a tragedy. With a new engine, reworked mechanics, and finally a new playable character, it was supposed to be a much needed reboot to the franchise. Instead, it's a grab-bag of unfinished systems that don't work together cohesively, incomplete or just bad missions, and vast vast emptiness, wrapped with a story that doesn't make any goddamn sense and I hate it so much. I still hear "TO THE LEFT CONNOR" in my nightmares- and since I live in Boston I get those nightmares every day.
#11: Rogue
Black Flag 2, but with shittier songs. A placeholder for what was then last-gen console owners. A much shorter story than the other games with a LOT more side filler, including TWO different maps of collectathon stuff. But since some of the side stuff is fun like the reverse-assassinations and even a lesser Black Flag is still fun, it's a nice time filler for hardcore AC fans that find this on sale.
F-tier Category: where the 'F' stands for 'F*** you, Ubisoft"
#12: Unity
I think they just literally arrested the creative director of this game lol.
This game has received some retroactive praise because it introduced ideas that would be great if they actually worked. But IMO, quality matters, and all the ideas in the world don't mean jack if the thing on the screen doesn't do the thing it's supposed to do. Parkour down, co-op missions, emphasis on stealth, dedicated crouch button, return of an actual "brotherhood"- great, right? But none of them freaking work!
I am not talking about bugs, I am talking about the core game. It's a broken janky piece of shit and I hate it. And when I say this online I get lectured about patches. Like.. I applied all the patches lol. It still doesn't work. The AI is insane. Arno is a magnet and all the chairs and windowsills are the opposite magnet. And the story is the least consequential of any AC.
This is the only AC game I would never ever replay.
