Assassin's Creed Unity may have released back in 2014, but it has aged like fine wine. Admittedly, it may not have been ready for launch, but every update since then has only made the game that much more replayable. It's no longer a buggy mess, which may have been what turned off a lot of fans to begin with. When AC Unity was given away for free and Ubisoft donated a ton of money after the Notre Dame fire, that was the first perfect time to replay the game since launch. 2 years later, there's another.
While it's nowhere near comparable to the efforts and support that came from the community after the Notre Dame fire, Assassin's Creed Unity does have one big reason to be on everyone's mind right now: Assassin's Creed Valhalla's Siege of Paris DLC. After all, everything that the DLC does well was done in AC Unity first, and perhaps the biggest thing Valhalla doesn't do well enough is perfected in Unity.
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Because of Assassin's Creed's time period and location-hopping that occurs with every game, there's hardly every overlap in areas, but there are areas. Assassin's Creed 3 and AC Rogue, for example, share a few locations, but are set some years apart. Assassin's Creed Valhalla players can travel to Lunden, nearly a 1000 years before players can checkout Victorian London in Assassin's Creed Syndicate. Now, AC Valhalla's Siege of Paris DLC has players return to the same location as AC Unity: Paris. In each of these overlaying areas, there are clear differences because of time period and technology, but that has little reason to do with AC Unity's Paris.
In short, the best parts of Siege of Paris were first done by AC Unity, with its worst parts not being an issue in the latter. For example, while the Black Box Missions and city design are pros in Siege of Paris, the fact that there's hardly any "Assassin's Creed" content is heartbreakingly unsurprising for many fans. As such, if it's Black Box missions, a tightly designed Paris, and Assassin's Creed content fans want, there's Assassin's Creed Unity.
Hoods, hidden blades, intrigue, and conflicts with Templars are all par for the course of a classic Assassin's Creed experience, one fully realized in AC Unity, but there's also one big gameplay element that stand out. Stealth and parkour in AC Unity is some of the best defined in the series, coming just before parkour became clunkier and clunkier. While Valhalla tries to bring back elements of social stealth and classic gameplay, the parkour in it is far more limited than it is in AC Unity, which is extra shameful. This remains true of the DLC, which while the city design helps parkour quite a bit, it's still rather clunky in comparison to many games in the franchise.
While, of course, Assassins have been free running and utilizing parkour for hundreds, if not thousands of years in-game, parkour really began as a discipline or was at least popularized in France during the late 1980s. As such, there's a connection here that makes parkour in France hit just a little different. And if it's parkour in Paris that fans want, Assassin's Creed Unity did it first and did it better.
Assassin's Creed Unity is available on PC, PS4, Stadia, and Xbox One.
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