Quick Look: Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China

@raremonkey: I like it. The green and cream go together very well. The main logo, unlike 90% of all other NBA logos, doesn't contain a basketball. And with the new logo it looks like a buck on a mount, a nice little touch. Plus I hate the green and red, so any other color combination would make me happy.

so this isn't mark of the ninja?

Looks like Mark of the Ninja. That's cool.

Dude if this thing sells it'll be a testament to what a developer can get away with by stamping the Assassins Creed outline & UI on a game.

The combat stuff looks reaaally rough.

That being said, I really dig the background art (and the "cut scene" art in general) but that game play resembles some shovel ware on the PSP.

Also, Jeff is right, "2.5D" is some really dumb shit. But for the sake of quickly describing something - it could be worse.

Played this first hour or so. Totally competent. Ninja puzzles and what not. Actually surprised at how much I like it. Music is strong, too.

For $10 i thought this might be worth a look but was waiting for this QL, I think i will try it out now.

I would love it if Ubisoft put the open world formula to rest and made more linear AC games.

I have no keyboard.

Eunuchs? I KNOW this

Agreed to all

This seems pretty cool. Nothing groundbreaking but seems like a good time for a cheap price. I think a lot of people here are writing it off immediately because of Ubisoft-related disdain.

Kinda like this. It clearly just seems to be going for mark of the ninja and isn't at that level but it mostly works and looks great. Excited for the other two.

I had my doubts, but this seems like a decent game. Mark of the Ninja is better, but this game seems okay to me.

Painfully average. Ubisoft is BACK!!! (i keed)

Taking one more lazy kick at the horse's corpse, eh ubisoft?

Also holy shit how about ripping off another game bold faced and flagrant style, hey there ubi wubi dubioft? Even had the circular noise indications. That's good shit. The best, even.

That old dude was supposed to be Ezio? Oh man they didn't even try, he sounds like an old Frenchman.

Wait. Are those characters speaking Cantonese or is it just racist nonsense? I swear I heard somebody say, "chow ching chong." 8:10, for reference.

This looks beautiful but i dunno, a bit too slow? Also, is there any way to remove those ugly cones? They utterly destroy the artstyle.

I'm going to throw my hat in with the people saying the vision cones and floor radar thing ruin what could have been a very cool visual style. Makes me wonder why they just didn't go all out and do this entirely in 2D. Would have looked great as an UbiArt Framework game but the 3D elements in this just look bad.

It all appears to be Mandarin - I don't speak it personally, but I think they said "assassin", which makes sense.

I speak Cantonese however, and I am 100% certain none of the language spoken here is such.

Why would it be racist nonsense, thats how it sound for english speakers which your comment is a perfect example of...

It's cool that Ubisoft is blatantly stealing other games' ideas instead of endlessly regurgitating their own stuff. I feel it's a real step forward for them.

I am a terrible person who still likes Assassin's Creed.

Neat idea that could've used a bit more polish.

If this game came out in a world where Mark of the Ninja didn't exist, I would consider playing it. Unfortunately, I'd rather just play more MOTN.

Please set one of these in Iran so it will just be a prince of persia game and we can come full circle.

@benmo316: Asssasin's Creed has alwasys been housed inside the Animus, it's still a science fiction series, hence the UI style.

Alex and Vinny are the best.

Because if it actually said "chow ching chong", it would be pretty fucking racist. Fortunately, it wasn't that. The language being spoken is very clearly mandarin. However, I'm not sure if its just the audio quality of the game or what, but it all sounds like something spoken by a non-native mandarin speaker as it has kind of an accent to it.

At 8:10, the first word spoken is very clearly Chinese for "yell", or in this context "to call someone". I can't make out the other two words due to audio fuzziness, but I assume the phrase just means "call the other guards", all things considered.

The fact that enemies are throwing shurikens though is kinda...yeah.

Aside from Unity, with its micro-transaction rubbish and bugs, I've generally enjoyed the Assassin's Creed franchise. I'm still a tad annoyed by the optional mission "sync objectives" that kind of discourage me from doing things my own way, but eh. They've been in there since Brotherhood and I've learned to accept them. :-P

So, yeah... I'm probably one of the intended audience for this thing and it's pretty fun. I don't regret buying it, and it motivated me to finally try out Mark of the Ninja as a point of comparison. For $10.00, you get a pretty good bang for your buck.

Besides, I've played way too many GTA clones, Zelda clones, Gears of War clones, God of War clones, Metroid clones, and Arkham Asylum clones to get pissy about a Mark of the Ninja clone. If it's done well and is fun, I'm fine. Who knows, maybe it will encourage more people to buy Mark of the Ninja and boost chances of both games actually having sequels. Sounds good to me.

P.S. I hate to say it, but the hidden blade being in her boot feels a tad ridiculous. Yeah, it's a game about a secret order of assassins fighting a secret society of eunuch templars calling themselves "The Tigers," so we're already in psycho-ville. However, I have trouble seeing the boot blade as anything other than a flimsy excuse to have her Kung-Fu kick people to death... and I'd rather just jump down on two talking guards and stab them with dual wrist blades. Less stereotypically Chinese, sure, but it gets the job done.

Oh, and you guys rock. Haha

Yeah, I'm not super familiar with the language, but the combination of it sounding kind of weird and them not allowing subtitles for it had me worried. Also, I was pretty tired when I was watching that and maybe in a bit of a mood. I'm relieved to know that my concern was unfounded.

@hatking: There are subtitles in the game but just like in all the other 10 Assassin creeds you have to enable it in the main menu before loading up the gameplay.

It still baffles me that you accuse it for being racist when you cant make out the difference yourself. Usualy Assassin creed eats alot of shit becouse its all english with bad and missplaced accents and when they finaly speak the correct language its "racist" becouse people dont understand what they say... the irony.

There are monkey bars on the roof Alex!

@rethla: You might be misunderstanding what my issue was, but it's kind of irrelevant now. If the NPCs in that game were going around speaking "ching chong" and other gibberish, that would be extremely racist. I'm not really sure I have the time to or effort in me to explain to you why, but feel free to look around the internet, I'm sure there are plenty of articles on it. My misunderstanding of what they said once doesn't excuse them to not give a shit. But if you want to make the argument that I'm an idiot for misinterpreting that line of dialogue, you might have a point.

that statement just said more about you if anything

This game is really, really fun when you place it as a stealth game. I went for Assassin pretty much always and had a blast.

Mark of the Ninja is a must play game. One of my all time favorites. This looks like shit.

Yeah man, see my other post in this thread. That was a pretty shitty remark for me to make. I apologize for it. It was a genuine concern, and hopefully that's understood. If not, maybe I shan't post drunk QL comments in the future.

Assassin's Creed: Burnout sounds like a game I would play.

Driving off a ramp, through a billboard and using a blade on my car to do an Assassination Takedown on an enemy driver.

It's like Mark of the ninja but with bigger sounds from your feet, a more ninja-ish character (points for that I guess), weird extremely visual cones which could have been better had they been blended in more and not stand out that much and stale movements.

Yeah... get Mark of the ninja instead.

Vinny: What's her name?

Alex: It's uh... Mark. Mark, the Ninja.

I'm torn about this game. On the one hand, I think it's kinda shitty that they didn't make a full-scale AC game set in China. On the other hand, I'm suffering from severe burnout on Ubisoft open world games.

I really liked Mark of the Ninja and this does not seem as polished as that but it definitely seems to have better stealth mechanics than the series has had in a while. Ubisoft's digital-only efforts continue to be more interesting than most of their big stuff. I am kind of surprised this is not reviewing better but stealth games are often quite divisive.

@dcf15: I get that but with the change in art style and game type I would've like to seen that style bleed over.

Game looks kind of alright! But i feel like Alex would be a better wrestler than he would be an assassin. It seems the wolf is no master of stealth.

Seems like a nice change of pace for an off-shoot of the series.

Somehow it doesn't surprise me that this AC has me just a little interested. The art looks solidly nice.

This is meant as a compliment by one who has not touched anything Assassin's Creed since the first game.