Assassin's Creed: Unity

Thanks to an untidy scheduling clash, we run the Assassin's Creed: Unity demo session in reverse order, straddling the end of one junket and sitting in at the start of the next in order to play catch up. As such, we go hands-on with a co-op mission first, before hearing how the company's returning to its roots in a single-player hands-off demo. As it is, we wish we'd done it the right way round.

In reverse chronological order then. Cane-clutching creative director Alexandre Amancio (who swears the lame ankle is due to tripping during a late-night run to shake off jet-lag rather than being a victim of a pre-show boozy night) outlines a vision that sees the franchise forcibly return to its roots. Amancio pays homage to the two original Assassin's Creed games, hoping to find a gameplay purity from their inspiration that the franchise either lost in Assassin's Creed III, or deviated from (despite how brilliantly) in Black Flag. This is as close to a fresh start as the franchise will likely get for now. And as such, a good jumping on point for newcomers, or so Ubisoft believe.

As with the E3 reveal, tweaks are plentiful if small. A crouched stealth mode. Easier parkour traversal up and down buildings. Enemies are more dynamic, dangerous; emphasising a stronger need for stealth. The list of alterations runs on. Yet there are also full-scale changes that are welcome.

Eavesdropping missions are still in, but losing your target doesn't de-sync your game. Instead you lose the chance to, say, hear about an alternate path to your next mission, or an otherwise secret meeting point that could make for a stealth kill. We see the last played out in a bloody confessional as we shadow our target from above in the rafters and balconies of Notre-Dame. This also segues into the idea that black box assassinations are richer for the opportunities you take time to discover. Thus the start of each prime kill in the world lists the number of pathways (entrance points both public and secret), number of kills, and other factors that'll make you consider using those mission reloads to test out all possible permutations.

Better still is the deeper customisation for your character, demoed ahead of our hands-on with co-op mode Heist. Choices lean heavy into the hundreds, with outfits and weapons expanding or contracting XP buffs across the four main characteristics of your assassin, and the suggestion is saved load-outs can be switched on the fly during missions to suit your situation. So, you can deck out in better armour and swords for clashes, favour greyed hoods and cloaks for easier fades into crowds when making your escape.

Heist is a sub-set of the co-op missions and lightly echoes Assassin's Creed II's catacomb sequences. You and your party need to infiltrate a heavily-guarded location, steal the goods and flee. Areas have multiple routes, nudging you to working cooperatively in taking down soldiers, one holding back and taking pot-shots while someone else acts as decoy. Our inner-city skills rusty after a year on the sea, we inevitably are spotted all too often, the Heist turning into slaughter nearly every step of the way. These sequences will definitely benefit from having players professional with their abilities. We just feel like a liability for the duration of our time, even if we do make our escape before the session's end.

It's a lengthier and freer hands-on than the tightly-controlled E3 walkthrough, but this still is just the slimmest of gameplay slices. Yet given the emphasis on a return to the classic gameplay, we worry we've seen everything there is to the game already. And as such, four player co-op and a one to one scale Paris aside, there's not enough to give us that itch to keep playing. Black Flag reignited our interest in the series through the exploration of new frontiers. Unity's return to (renewed) basics feels, at the moment, too safe to make this new-gen Assassin's Creed title feel truly distinct from its predecessors, and therefore less exciting than we'd hoped for. Maybe we'll be proved wrong in the months to come. We hope so.