Assassin’s Creed Unity Review | High Score Reviews

November guarantees us colder weather, longer nights, the unveiling of the John Lewis Christmas advert and, most inevitably of all, a new Assassin's Creed.

In fact this year we have two: Rogue for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, Unity for the PC, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One. Unity is the one Ubisoft really needs to deliver, as they look to launch their most popular triple-A franchise into the current generation with a game built from the ground up to take the series forward.

Assassin's Creed has become stale in the eyes of many, with last year's Black Flag a surprise hit because of how it embraced its piratical theme rather than because it took the core mechanics of the series forward. Unity is far more rooted in the traditional Assassin's Creed formula, with a huge city to explore and a bounty of assassination targets to take down.

This back-to-basics approach is intriguing because of how it focuses on the series' core concepts and ambitiously seeks to escalate them. This ambition helps to make Unity admirably open-ended, and it comes with glimpses of evolution. Unfortunately, there are too many aggravating pitfalls to make Unity a recommendable purchase amid such fierce open world competition this holiday season.