Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India Review

Last year, Ubisoft showed off a different kind of Assassin’s Creed, foregoing the big-budget open-world the series is famous for and embracing a 2.5D world with striking art and an emphasis on stealth gameplay. While the initial effort Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China from developer Climax Studios was decent, its follow up is one of the worst Assassin’s Creed experiences that I’ve ever had. The formula seems simple enough, but unfortunately Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India is a frustrating, poorly designed mess of a game.

It’s interesting to see these unique locations like India and China get the secondary treatment from the Assassin’s Creed franchise. One has to wonder if, in the grand scheme of the AC universe, these games were supposed to be fully-fleshed out products further down the line. If Ubisoft saw the inevitable writing on the wall for the series and is now churning these potential future locales into a fraction of what they were meant to be. An alternative idea is that Ubisoft thought these games would be cheap to make and sell well enough branded by the Assassin’s Creed name to warrant a trilogy. China had me believe in the former of those theories, as it really felt like it could have been branched out into the standard Assassin’s Creed universe. But India has made me think it’s the latter. The setting feels so out-of-place; almost shoehorned into the franchise.

The biggest problem with Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India is that it’s not fun to play. While China might have gotten some leeway for feeling like a unique experience, this goodwill has dried up by India’s opening moments. The gameplay of India is designed to be challenging right off the bat, as the game tests your reflexes and creativity with the controls from the get-go. This would be great, seeing an Assassin’s Creed game take off the white gloves and try to get players on their toes, if the controls weren’t so awful. Instead of pushing back and giving players a real challenge, the game shines a big bold spotlight on how poorly the controls in Assassin’s Creed Chronicles really are. They might have been bad in China, but China felt like a more forgiving game, aware that its controls weren’t well-suited toward a higher difficulty.

The real dagger in the back for the gameplay is how poorly the levels are designed. Stealth is always at its best when a game presents the player with options, even if those options are as simple as kill everyone or kill no-one. India constantly feels like it is only giving the player one way out. Its narrow-minded level design never hints that there might be secondary routes or more creative ways to handle an encounter, and instead just shoves the next scenario in your face and shrugs if you’re uninterested in what it is presenting. These problems are exacerbated by the game’s clumsy mechanics which continue to needlessly grow in number throughout the game. The biggest offender is a shooting sequence where the player is forced to kill nine Templars in rapid succession so the alarm is never raised. There’s no escalation to the sniper sections and it’s never used again. It just dumps an unintuitive challenge right in the middle of a late-game level because developers don’t seem to know quite what else to do. The game is constantly introducing mechanics, deciding it doesn’t like them and then never using them again, forcing players to learn half-baked concepts only to immediately forget them.

Even worse, there’s almost no reason to care about the action in India. The game opens with a long explanation to the setting and the characters involved. About half of the information in the game is shoveled into your lap with three paragraphs of text. The rest of the experience is strung together by unmotivated plot points which, when connected, make up a skeleton of story with no meat on the bones.

Players assume the role of Assassin Arbaaz Mir. There is nothing further to Arbaaz besides the fact that he is an Assassin with two relationships the game introduces us to. We don’t know how he came into this line of work, we don’t know if he really enjoys it or how he feels about it. We don’t know if he cares about the British who are slowly taking ahold of India. The one piece of information we get about Arbaaz is that he is love with recently deceased Maharaja's daughter and he has a mentor who tells him where to go sometimes. Again, there’s no information about these relationship other than they exist. We don’t know how they came to be, or how they are special to Arbaaz, we just know they exist.

With a game as simple as Assassin’s Creed Chronicles, a large and invested story isn’t likely something Climax spent a lot of time fussing over. In these situations, less is generally more. Sending your protagonist on a simple quest to “collect three stones” or “win back the Super Stick” would be more than welcome. But India makes the story more convoluted than necessary. It introduces multiple villains, tries to tie in yet another magical artifact, but all it does is make the plot more fragmented. Even with your expectations about as low as they can be, India still manages to sink lower.

If there’s a redeeming part to Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India, it would be the art. Much like China, the art of India is well done and the 2.5D world Climax have built is definitely serviceable. Some assets from China have been reused, and the color scheme still leans heavily on the violent red that was so prevalent in the first game, but there is some difference in the palette. India boasts a lot of sunset hues and light blues to highlight the exotic world of India. There are also subtle changes to the tile work and decorative accoutrements scattered throughout the world. Sure, there’s stuff that looks the same, but India feels subtly different - and appropriately so.

The downside to India’s presentation are the lame cutscenes. While the shifting frames may remind some of a graphic novel, it reminded me more of illustrations in a book. These cutscenes feel lifeless and dry. Climax pours blue and orange shades over the screen to try and wow your eyes, but the action is so uninspired that the art feels empty and devoid of life. Maybe it’s the surrounding elements that leaves these moments lacking, and the art isn’t solely to blame. But it proves that bathing the game in pretty colors isn’t enough to distract you from its shortcomings.

Assassin’s Creed Chronicles: India is relatively stable. The frame-rate remains consistently solid. I had it crash on me a few times, but there are enough checkpoints so that there wasn’t a lot of progress lost. The checkpoints and fast loading times are good enough so that you’re not retracing large amounts of the game or sitting on black screens for too long.

The concept of Assassin’s Creed Chronicles trilogy is intriguing, but the execution is lacking. There’s so little to like and nothing to love about India, the second chapter. While China wasn’t a masterwork, it felt like an efficient package to explore an idea the main series wouldn’t have time for. By comparison, India feels like a rush-job, indecisively slapped together with very little redeeming qualities. It all makes me very nervous about the upcoming final chapter set in Russia.