Assassin's Creed Rogue is the seventh flagship title in the Assassin's Creed series, and the last game in the series to be released in the PS3 and Xbox 360 generation of consoles. Rogue puts on a twist and follows Shay Patrick Cormac, who makes his own luck, or so he likes to tell you multiple times over the course of the game. Shay was originally an Assassin but he ends up becoming a Templar. Rogue is special in that you end up controlling a protagonist who is on the other side of the war, the Templars. With that said, Rogue has huge potential to break away from the standard Assassin's Creed cliches but unfortunately that does not happen. Shay strays and defects from the Assassins too quickly. Just when you start to feel that Shay had grounds to doubt the creed, before it can fully develop, he just went and betrayed the Assassin's. It was a huge missed opportunity since Shay was trained as an Assassin for a while but before we got to know him, the major plot point happened.
Rogue plays extremely similar to Black Flag, it even feels like an extension of that game with the big focus on naval gameplay. While boarding and taking over ships makes sense as a pirate, it's less so here. With the shift in focus to naval gameplay, it doesn't feel like a traditional Assassin's Creed game, straying from its roots and creating massive series fatigue. Rogue does not present many new gameplay mechanics, the biggest addition are stalkers who are enemies hidden in the vicinity, they will jump at Shay and do critical damage once near. The screen will blur when one is near to warn the player, and you can use Eagle Vision to get a marker showing how close their are, similar to how the Multiplayer works in previous games. Speaking of which, Rogue is a pure single-player experience, with no multiplayer mode at all. The free-running remain the same and you will still encounter the familiar control issues where Shay doesn't want to jump where you want him to. Conversely, he likes to jump to his death when you didn't want him to, there's no way to win really. Assassin's Creed had always had great graphics and Rogue is no exception.
The map is huge; it is easily as big if not bigger than Black Flag. You get to explore locations such as the North Atlantic and New York. Considering that Rogue was released at a time when the next-gen Unity was released, it is surprising that so much effort was put into it. The biggest differentiating factor for Rogue is that parts of the game take place in the arctic with icebergs in the water making it more visually interesting. It is also due to the size of the world though that you end up resorting to using fast-travel as much as possible since it's so boring sailing for minutes on end. Unfortunately, even with the latest patches, the game has some glitches. Thankfully they're mostly visual glitches such as detailed textures no loading so you're stuck with the low-res ones (this can be freaky when bystanders have no faces). Sometimes, the game will be stuck on the loading screen, forcing a restart. At least the game saves very often so even when it freezes, you don't lose any progress. The missions feel more restrictive than before. Straying from a specific path that the developer intended will end the mission prematurely and force you to restart it. This is not helpful when what happens is that the objectives are vague right in the beginning and you end up failing not far into the mission as you have no idea what you're doing but the game expected you to already know where to go.
For a game about freedom... Rogue doesn't give you that much freedom. While there are no annoying eavesdropping missions, there are a lot of enemy chases where you have to catch and kill the enemies before they stray too far. It just so happens that the free-running system won't like you at those points so you'll be restarting those sections a few times. The combat remains clunky but enemies seem to be slightly smarter now, as they attack more frequently and seem to do more damage. It seems with each Assassin's Creed game, the developers pack in more and more collectibles. There are way too many collectibles in Rogue. The developers went overboard which makes it a huge drag if you want to collect everything. You'll probably give up without collecting even a quarter of what's available. The sad thing is that these collectibles don't mean much in terms of unlockables, they're mainly just there for collection's sake or it takes a lot of effort to unlock maybe an outfit. Other distractions include returning minigames such as harpooning sea creatures, hunting wild animals for their parts, engaging in naval battles with your ship and puzzles which take place during the present day.
A lot of the side activities in Rogue actually don't add much to the game. They feel like obligatory stuff tacked on because they were in previous games. Surprisingly, the story is short and it does not move the overall plot of the Precursors forward in any meaningful way. Rogue ended up feeling a lot like filler. It was over soon after it just began getting good. The plot mainly focused on Shay stopping the Assassins from accessing other Precursor sites which could potentially destroy the world. The best parts were the reappearances of various familiar faces from previous games. It sets up III and also Unity at the end of the game, and parts of the game takes place very close to before the beginning of III and in the same locations. Overall, Assassin's Creed Rogue felt like one of the more superficial game in the series yet since it does not add anything meaningful to the franchise, whether this be from gameplay mechanics or the lore. Rogue had a lot of potential with a novel concept but the execution doesn't bring anything to surprise you, this is a predictable adventure. That's not to say that it was a bad game since Rogue was still extremely solid but you can't help but feel that the series fatigue is settling in.
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