After nine months of non-stop marketing, Ubisoft Game is finally here. But does it live up to expectations? Find out in our review.
By Tim Colwill on June 4, 2014 at 3:56 pm
Presented with only the greatest of love for Ubisoft.
By now we’ve all heard of Ubisoft Game, and if you haven’t, then you’ve been living under a rock. Ubisoft Game is the latest in a long line of titles from Ubisoft, and with a bigger budget than ever before and no less than 75 of Ubisoft’s 193 global studios working on it, there’s no doubt that this year’s Ubisoft Game is going to be the big one.
You can play Ubisoft Game on basically any platform of your choice, but we’ve been reviewing it on a next-gen console, because that’s the platform it was made for.
Ubisoft Game is the story of Main Character, a gruff or sassy white man who is really good at parkour, killing, and killing while doing parkour. One of the most iconic features of Main Character is the way he dresses — Main Character’s sense of style and flair really comes across in his tailored outfit, which makes him look distinctive and features a number of clear symbols that can be easily used in marketing and merchandising.
The game takes place in a big open world, with lots of people and maybe even animals living in it. That sounds like it should be a paradise, but it’s not — a Bad Thing has happened and Main Character is right in the thick of it. Or maybe he’s the only one who can stop it? The story in Ubisoft Game is a bit uncompelling, but that’s okay, because there’s just so much to see and do.
When the main story starts, it’s a bit slow and scripted to begin with, but it’s not long before you’re out in the open world doing your thing. Ubisoft really know how to do an open world, and the jungle sections in particular of Ubisoft Game are just amazing. Those guys and gals really know how to do jungle. There’s also some really impressive AI on display, keeping the wildlife and/or people moving and creating a living, breathing ecosystem around you. You can drive cars or possibly horses and run over people too, which is good. This may make guards attack you, which is bad.
A key mechanic of Ubisoft Game is that control points on the map need to be ‘captured’ to unlock particular areas. Each control point is a challenge and gives you influence over that particular area, and allows you do your parkour or whatever without being attacked by the bad guys. When you’re not capturing control points with your Good Parkour Skills, you don’t have to go and do the main story, although Main Character’s skills don’t unlock until you do which is kind of annoying. There’s lots to see and do. Ubisoft Game is filled with side activities such as This Gambling Game, Beating Up Enemies Until You Are Told To Stop, Looking For Collectibles, and Tailing Somebody Somewhere For Some Reason.
You can also do the thing which works offline with your companion app, which you can download. Once you’ve got the thing, you can use your companion app to do it, on your tablet or smart phone! It’s neat and impressive, but does it add much to the game? We’re not sure.
You’ll want to come back to the main story though, because that’s what Ubisoft Game is really all about. The main story introduces a number of people who aren’t the Main Character, and most of them are pretty forgettable but there are one or two in there who are genuinely more interesting than the Main Character, which is strange. Anyway the main story also has a lot of stuff to do, although there’s a lot of really stupid instant-fail stealth missions where you have to reload over and over again, and it seems like Ubisoft kind of ran out of ideas near to the end. The main story goes for approximately 400 years and it probably didn’t need to be that long.
There’s a lot of combat in Ubisoft Game. From the initial trailers we thought maybe there would be more to the game than combat, but truth be told you’ll be spending a lot of time just shooting or stabbing people, possibly while doing parkour or in stealth. That combat is great fun so that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it’s about time for Ubisoft to realise that not every game needs to be packed with as much action as possible.
The message of the main story seems kind of lost unfortunately, which is a shame because Ubisoft have clearly put so much money and effort into polishing Ubisoft Game. It feels like they were afraid to really make a statement in the main story, and Main Character just isn’t an interesting enough White Man Who Is Good At Killing to really deliver on the game’s potentially edgy premise. Main Character often does things which are just as bad as the bad guys in the game, and this double standard isn’t really addressed by Ubisoft Game at any point in the narrative.
Ubisoft Game comes in about 4,027 different editions depending on where you buy it and what phase of the moon you’re in at the time, so it’s hard to know if any of the mountains of DLC, Unlockable Extras, Side Missions and Add-Ons for Ubisoft Game change anything significantly about the main story. What we can tell you though is that Ubisoft Game has some neat easter eggs that also make references to other Ubisoft Games, which is nice.
We also took Ubisoft Game for a quick spin on PC, and it’s a mixed bag. Sometimes Ubisoft Game is good on PC and sometimes it isn’t, and this Ubisoft Game follows the same pattern. It’s definitely meant for a controller though, unless you’re doing some shooting. That’s much better with a keyboard and mouse. For those of you wondering — yes, Ubisoft Game uses Uplay. Sorry.
All in all, Ubisoft Game is a game that Ubisoft have made. You’ll play it if you like that sort of thing, and in fact it has already sold 250 million copies.
Ubisoft also make some absolutely incredible smaller games like Rayman Legends, Child of Light and Valiant Hearts: The Great War, but nobody plays those so whatever.
