Assassins Creed Chronicles: India is Climax Studio and Ubisoft’s brand new game for handheld platforms. At least, the game should have been released to handheld platforms. Instead, Chronicles India somehow made its way to the PC and home consoles. It is the second installment in what will become a trilogy of 2.5D Assassins Creed games covering China, India and Russia. Naturally, being a part of the Chronicles series, the game once again puts us in the sandals of a the top Assassin in the local area, and sees us having a bit of a tussle with our long term nemesis – the Templer order.
That top Assassin is Arbaaz Mir, who just so happens to be the head of the Assassin Brotherhood in India of 1841. The story sees a master Templar arriving in the city with a mysterious artifact that once belonged to the Brotherhood. Of course, you must get it back while trying to figure out what cunning play the Templars are up to this time, and at the same time protecting the ones you love. I would have liked to go into more detail about the story, but that is all I could work out. The game uses cutscenes tho tell you what happening, but they all came across as a little confusing and seemed to just be jumping from one problem to another.
As opposed to the main Assassins Creed series, Chronicles’ gameplay does not key itself on the free-running parkour that lets the game have flow and a faster paced. Instead, we are primarily playing around stealth elements, where we use parkour just as a means to avoid enemies rather than get around the area in the signature Assassin way. Various enemies in the game will either be asleep, patrolling, or just standing with their back to you waiting to be pick-pocketed. You have to use your initiative to figure out how best to overcome the situation, whether it be quietly sneaking over and silently deal with the enemies, attempting to go around them without alarming the guards or yelling violent insults at them hoping you can intimidate them enough to let you win a sword fight.
If you chose the incredibly slow stealth option, you can abandon all hopes of the game having its own original ideas for how to implement stealth into a platformer. You will be greeted with the same generic “hide in this convenient dark doorway, wait for baddie to pass, run out of conveniently dark doorway” concept that has been a part of any and all side scroller games with even the slightest wink towards the stealth genre.
However, if you plan on being the macho man, picking a fight with any Templar that decides to stand between you and the end of the level, you may find it surprisingly more enjoyable. The combat in the game seems to have been more thought out than anything else. Tackling an enemy face to face in single combat is easy enough, but throw in two melee enemies plus one ranged rifleman and you’re in for quite an intense battle. The game features a neat combo system, where you must stun the enemy and then execute them to actually be able to kill them. You still need to block and guard at just the right moment and simultaneously dodge incoming bullets. This can prove to be quite the challenge but also quite the accomplishment if you are the last one standing on a heap of Templars that will not be getting back up; unless your fingers turn into spaghetti first.
The controls for the game are just fine with a controller, but are poorly designed for keyboard and mouse and will having you reaching uncomfortable places with your fingers. Luckily the developers did think to allow you to re-bind the default keys to whatever is more comfortable to you, which is a plus in my book since it indicates Assassin’s Creed Chronicles; India on PC isn’t just a thoughtless port, but was designed with all platforms in mind.
The art style of the game was a refreshing difference to most current games, which tend to stick to the edges of the spectrum, on either the hyper-realistic or the pixelated retro style. Instead, Chronicles India offers a unique artistic style. Blood effects are done in detailed paint patterns that swirl out from the body. The back and foreground are also not left untouched with a good amount of detail, but not so much to distract you from tip-toeing through a room of sleeping Templars. Although it seems the cutscenes didn’t receive quite as much care as the game itself as they all feel very lackluster, often having no background and a very simple pallet that makes characters recognizable mainly by their voice and not appearance. I strongly recommend immediately turning off the music for this game, unless you are a fan of listening to the same three or four chords played on a guitar, over and over and over again. I realized it too late and as a result I had sleepless nights humming that obnoxious tune on repeat.
Overall, Assassins Creed Chronicles: India is an experience I could quickly forget. There were no unique, memorable moments or mechanics that I could look back on. The game quickly falls into a repetitive cycle of slow paced stealth and somewhat fun combat we’ve seen time and time again in other platformers. It’s even hard to recommend it to fans of the franchise, since it has so little in common with the main games, both in themes and gameplay. Stealth enthusiasts will find plenty of that here, but not much else. I guess if you already started the trilogy with Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: China, you’d want to continue the story, but other than that there is very little reason to visit this spin-off.
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