4/5 ★ – kubachowicki_'s review of Assassin's Creed: Rogue Remastered.

Assassin's Creed: Rogue (Remastered) is a very strange and quite difficult game to talk about, purely because of the "what" factor. I liked what we got, maybe even more than some did, but I am always scratching my head at the fact that I liked it, while simultaneously knowing what could have been if we got more. It is a strange debacle saying that I enjoyed something a lot and yet at the same time saying I wish we got more because what we got was not enough. We scratched the surface with Shay Patrick Cormack, the Colonial Assassin Brotherhood and the Colonial Templar Rite, but the game does not go into anywhere near enough depth. Shay' transition from Assassin to Templar is so sudden would have greatly benefited from more development. There is a clear internal struggle and conflict within Shay and his sense of morality, which for me is what makes him such a fascinating character, but once again, that fascination and conflict would have been greatly bolstered by diving further into it. Furthermore, I really wish the game explored more of the Templar purge of the Colonial Brotherhood. There is so much more information that was omitted from the story, and would have made the story even better and more brutal, which reflects the lore of this Assassin's Creed time period. Despite all this, Shay is one of the most interesting characters in the whole series in my opinion, despite knowing that we could have had even more. The world is nice, do not get me wrong, but it does not have the beauty to make it not feel somewhat repetitive when it comes to exploration and clearing out the map. It feels like a blend of both Assassin's Creed III and Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag. The only thing here is, however, that both Colonial America and the American Revolution backdrop of III and the Caribbean and the West Indies of Black Flag are far more fascinating to dive into and explore. With Rogue's exploration, it feels like we have already seen it to a certain degree, making it far less appealing than III and Black Flag did, even though I actually prefer Rogue to III as a game in general. That being said, I do really love how Rogue serves as a middle gap between the three games which all either make up or in one way, shape or form correlate to the Colonial sub-trilogy. I can not really complain about the gameplay because it is literally a copy and paste of the Black Flag gameplay mechanics. It would be quite hypocritical of me to say that Black Flag has arguably my favourite gameplay in the whole series to then downplay Rogue for using Black Flag's gameplay. The only criticism I can give is that there is literally nothing new from a gameplay perspective. Of course, the reasoning for all of this is the elephant in the room, the fact that this game was developed last minute in roughly eight months to be released on the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3, while Assassin's Creed: Unity was released on the same day for the Xbox One and the PlayStation 4. The side content is where I will reluctantly criticise the game. For a game with such a short story, there is a really large amount of filler side content, making it feel disproportionate. For example, there are 28 hero upgrades in the game, some of which can be quite a grind to obtain without just buying all the animals from a general store, and yet by the time you finish the very short story, you most likely do not even have half of them. It feels like they wanted to make up for the fact that the story is very short by inflating the game's size in other ways. Overall, Assassin's Creed: Rogue feels like a story that is already great, but could have been truly special, and side content that would have been slashed in half and the difference would not really be missed. It was very fun revisiting it, though! Getting the platinum trophy was fun, too! On to my replay of Rogue's sibling game next, Assassin's Creed: Unity! 100% synchronisation time - 62 hours Platinum trophy time - 64 hours