The first thing I'm gonna say about this title before going any further is this: Amazing graphics don't make a game awesome!
That being said, the game starts just as Black Flag did, directly with the story of the main character without any trace of the story that ended so abruptly in AC III. It's just like the Final Destination franchise, that as the movies came up they had more than little connection with the original story just the same plot over and over again. The same case is here. The story is not bad, but the beginning and the end are just the same themes that were seen in the Assassin's Creed series over and over again. The father or mother or mentor of the main character dies at the beginning, and that turns him to the path of the Assassin's, has been done before, and as strange as this may sound this series is starting to look more like the "Doctor Who" series and what Moffat has done with that, repeating the same ideas and themes over and over again, without adding anything new to the product, something original. And the main thing that made the other games good was the story involving the pieces of Eden, the confrontation between the Templars and the Assassins, and the story of the ones who came before and all the mysteries surrounding that story, other unanswered questions of the previous games. It's just plain simple that Ubisoft is making the games of this series since IV Black Flag only for money which is painful for the true fans of the Assassin's Creed series. The only good thing and also new was the love between Arno and Elise which ended tragically maybe just as this game was: a tragic result. People who say that this game can be compared to the story of Ezio or Connor, are out of their minds, those stories were amazingly original and captivating, while here all the story is a personal vendetta of Arno against the killer or killers of Mister De la Serre. There were also some very convenient coincidences like Bellec somehow knew Arno's father and that they both were assassins and that Arno was imprisoned in the same prison as Bellec. It's just too unrealistic.
Having said that about the story, the gameplay was modified and improved but also has some failures like the air assassination where sometimes Arno jumps all the way down to the ground and then assassinate the thugs, or the way Arno falls down sometimes landing directly on his feet, maximum on his feet and hands, but in reality you sometimes roll over when falling from high places. What was good were the thing that guards were following your last seen position or the running very real and specific for each person. The killing was also good and original and realistic with that optional finishing kill. Another good addition to the gameplay was the scenes Arno saw after killing every target revealing the last memories of the deceased, finding out more about the Grand Master in the process.
The graphics at last were amazing at some points although there were moments when they looked like cardboard shaped like human, one of them being the last scenes where Arno went to the graveyard with a flower and then the scene with him on top of a tower at the end and many more scenes during the game.
All that being said, it almost makes me sad to see that such a promising story of a game with such amazing graphics is ruined by catastrophic writing that mainly copied everything that was good with the previous series. In the end I for one don't expect that the story of Juno and all the mysteries behind her and her kind would be explained any time soon, 'cause Ubisoft only cares for money now. This is why I hope Assassin's Creed the movie will correct all the mistakes the game developers have made since Black Flag.
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