For some reason everyone in this game that recreates virtual France speak with British accents.
What it's about: Arno Dorian is a Frenchman rising through the ranks of the Assassins order and trying to make time with his childhood squeeze Elise De LaSerre.
Why we should care: Ubisoft shifts its annual historical fiction series to the French Revolution and exclusively to next-generation consoles for the first time.
Genre: Open-world action-adventure.
What happens in the first hour: The intro tells us we're now using Helix, a game-like product from Abstergo Entertainment, the weird, quasi-meta company of the Assassin's Creed universe that is loosely based on Ubisoft itself.
Helix uses Animus technology, which has allowed modern-day characters in all the previous games to experience the memories of their ancestors.
Its first new feature comes in the form of a grid of missions to choose from, which is indeed novel for an Assassin's Creed game. Unfortunately, all but one mission is locked, so here we go.
We're in Paris, circa 1307, and our protagonist is a Templar knight who looks a lot like Christoper Lambert in the 1986 movie Highlander, mullet and all. His temple is under assault and he's charged with retrieving a book from its upper chambers.
Alas, an assassin has got to it first, so the chase is on. This ends in a sword fight and, holy crap, did our character just kill the assassin by shooting lightning at him? Before I can figure out what happened, the scene shifts and another assassin kills our be-mulleted character.
Fast forward a few years and the head of the Templar order is being burned at the stake. And now we zip into modern times where a woman tells us Abstergo, which we know from previous games is a front for the Templars, wants to use us for nefarious purposes.
Once again, we zip into the past. We're now playing as Arno Dorian, the game's main character, as a boy. I have no idea what's going on, but I'll say this – that certainly was a fast and information-dense intro.
Arno and his father are hanging out in a luxurious hallway of the palace of Versailles. The graphics are immaculate, with sunlight streaming in the large windows and glinting off the gilded surfaces. It looks virtually real.
Arno takes off to chase Elise and the duo engage in a playful game of stealing apples. But playtime is over and the youngster returns to meet his father in the hallway, only to discover a crowd. Oh dear, it turns out someone has murdered dear old dad.
The boy gasps and drops his father's pocketwatch, with slow-mo kicking in for dramatic effect. This is all starting to feel like Assassin's Creed: Batman.
A bunch of cutscenes and long load times later, we cut to Arno as an adult. He's still a thief, but a lovable one at that. Shades of Ezio from earlier Assassin's Creed games.
Once again, Arno finds himself on the run and we're introduced to some new parkour moves. Assassins can now vault over or duck under obstacles such as tables. It's cool, but it's not exactly a ground-breaking innovation.
Of course, you can't really play an Assassin's Creed game for long before you end up climbing up an obscenely high building to get a bird's eye view of your surroundings. And so I hop up the nearest church and get a good gander on the town of Versailles. It's an unremarkable vista, but the leap of faith down is as good a rush as ever.
In that vein, Unity has one great new innovation: controlled descent. Simply hold down the right trigger and B button and you can jump, hang and drop your way down a building. It's a fantastic addition, given how difficult it was to get down from places in previous games.
More new stuff: building interiors! In previous games, you could quickly jaunt in an open window and slide through a building to escape the authorities, but the developers obviously didn't have the time or the resources to flesh those interiors out. Not so here. There are a lot of insides to explore, and because this is pre-revolution France, many of these interiors are lavish.
Also new: big crowds! Ubisoft has steadily ramped up the number of people inhabiting its virtual cities, to the point where it's now positively crowded.
That said, much of this first hour in virtual France is pretty dull. It's an impressive technical display, but the action now has us looking for Elise at a party. Yawn.
The action finally picks up as we leave the soiree, only to come across a murder, which we're promptly framed for. Arno ends up in the Bastille, where he learns about his assassin heritage. Oh, and wouldn't you know it, the revolution is just now beginning. Talk about good timing!
Highlights: The game oozes technical and graphical accomplishments. It's the most real virtual world yet.
Lowlights: For some reason, Arno, Elise and everyone else in this virtual France speak with British accents.
Time-suck Factor: It's an open-world with tons of side missions and collectibles, plus co-operative multiplayer. It's going to take dozens of hours.
Worth more than an hour? Open-world games are difficult to judge after just an hour, given their length and expanse. Assassin's Creed games often take a long time to get moving, though Unity does improve several long-standing issues with the series, which fans will doubtlessly appreciate. Still, this is a series and a game that's really only suited to players with a lot of time on their hands.