Assassin's Creed Utopia for iOS is a new take on the world of Assassin's Creed. As previously mentioned, you build a 17th century colony and watch it develop right up to the American Revolution. And best of all, it's pretty damn good.
At my hands on at the Tokyo Game Show, the city building elements weren't anything new to this type of game. You collect money, and then build new buildings and upgrade existing ones. To collect money, you tap on the coin bags as they appear above the buildings.
However, this isn't just a regular colony. It's a colony of assassins. So you can send your assassins out and have them fight. You select their formation during the battle, and then can choose "guard" or "attack". The combat, likewise, isn't anything groundbreaking—it's turn based combat. However, it was really well done, looked great, and was fun.
I liked the mix of city building with turn-based combat—not to mention the colonial setting. As ridiculous as a colony of assassins sounds, the game seems to make it work. While not utopian, all of those elements help make this Assassin's Creed spin-off worth checking out.
There isn't a bad shot of Assassin's Creed III in this new hype video for the late-October game. Which feature impresses you most? The tree-running? The jumping off roofs into rolling carts of hay? The Boston Tea Party?
I like the pigs waddling through the city streets, myself. More games need that.
We already knew that main character Connor would be meeting historical figures in Assassin's Creed III, since the game is set during the Revolutionary War. And now, we get a chance to see what some of those founding fathers will look like in the next installment of this franchise. The teaser also highlights the efforts to surround Connor with authentic-feeling Native American characters. And bloodshed. Lots and lots of bloodshed.
I don't like most gamer clothing. They're usually tacky, or have a huge, ugly logo plastered everywhere. Plus, personally, they're usually all too large. I have a zillion gamer sleep shirts, but nothing I would actually ever wear outside the confines of my apartment.
This, though. This.
I've been following Volante Design for awhile now. He's an incredibly talented designer and tailor, a one-man show that's just recently taken on a few helpful hands. But this Kenway Jacket, designed after Assassin's Creed III's protagonist—Connor—is fabulous. And it's got just the right amount of subtlety and yet obvious connection to teeter that fine line that often tumbles over to horrendously ugly or obnoxiously over the top.
Also, zippers. You can't go wrong with a couple snazzy zippers.
Unfortunately it's $320, and while I don't find the price unreasonable, I can't cater to my whims. If I did I'd have nowhere to put all the things I'd buy. Like a pool. I live in NYC, guys. Where would I put a pool?
Readers who, like me, get most of their TV on a recorded delay may not have seen this ad starting to pop up on their local airwaves just yet. So here it is. It premiered during a football game.
This Assassin's Creed 3 commercial doesn't exactly give the redcoats a badly-needed break, but it does have shots of my beloved Boston, so I like it anyway. Plus, it's nice to see some glimpses of Connor without the hood.
There have been a bunch of those Assassin's Creed spin-off games. But this newly revealed one offers a new spin. It's a strategy sim.
Dubbed Assassin's Creed: Utopia, the game is set during America's colonial era and allows players to build their 17th century colony—and then, watch it flourish over 150 years, right up to the American Revolution.
But this isn't just Sim City for AC. In Utopia, your colony is filled with assassins, who take on their enemies in "limited time epic battles".
Assassin's Creed: Utopia is slated for the a winter iOS release.
In interview with Rock Paper Shotgun, Stephanie Perotti, Ubisoft’s worldwide director for online games, has said that the company has decided to remove the need for a permanent connection to play its PC titles.
In fact, she claims the decision was made way back in June, after which point Ubi’s singleplayer games have only required a one-time activation upon install.
Ubisoft’s approach to DRM has been widely lambasted by gamers, partly because of the inconvenience for the consumer, but mostly because it often didn’t seem to work, dropping connection to the server mid-game, booting you out and erasing progress. And now, finally, it seems Ubisoft have heeded this wail of despair, with Perotti explicitly confirming that the singleplayer component of Assassin’s Creed 3 will not require any online connection.
She also suggests Ubisoft will be doing more to get their games onto PC quicker - so good news all round. We’ve got a man in the field, chinwagging with Ubi bigwigs as we speak, so we’ll be bringing you more news on Ubisoft’s plans for PC, and specifically their intentions with uPlay, very soon.
Back in the 18th Century, armies had all kinds of polite rules about how they waged war. The American Revolution was won, in part, by breaking those rules with what we know call guerilla warfare. Ubisoft's developers took inspiration from those old-timey hit-and-run tactics to develop an all-new fighting style for Assassin's Creed III. The video above highlights the evolution of the threequel's combat and looks at the weapons that main character Connor will be using in the upcoming game.
Assassin's Creed 3 isn't all about the new setting and locations, it also contains many new ways to hit people. Hatchets, bayonets and rope darts are a few of the more brutal tools at Connor's disposal. Capturing those kill moves takes a lot of time, effort, and serious stuntmen men in ball suits. The latest Assassin's Creed 3 gives us a look at the processes that go into realising all that on-screen violence, and contains a few tips for British troops from historians.
'Don't walk down open roads in bright red suits' being the soundest pearl of wisdom of the lot. Watch Connor break people in ways you couldn't imagine in the trailer below.
Like a few other writers here, I've been enjoying Sleeping Dogs this week. But not necessarily for its combat, or driving, or story. No, I'm enjoying it mostly because of where it's set.
The game, in case you don't know, is set in Hong Kong. Not a photo-realistic recreation, but a caricature that's close enough. Being an open-world game, it lets you explore, chat with random strangers, see the sights, soak up the virtual atmosphere.
It's not the same as actually being there, of course. It's not even close. But it's something. For a few hours, you can turn off the lights, lie back, and pretend you're actually walking the streets of one of the most vibrant and fascinating cities on Earth.
You can be, for want of a better term, a virtual tourist.
Maybe you don't game like that, and that's fine. We all play for different reasons and get different things out of the medium. But me, I don't play for a challenge, or competition. I play to escape, and prefer a game where I can lose myself in another world, one that doesn't involve the boring, everyday and mundane.
Sure, that means I love my epic fantasy games or sweeping sci-fi extravaganzas, but I also enjoy games like Sleeping Dogs, ones which let me visit places in my world that I wouldn't otherwise be able to get to. At least not easily or on the cheap.
It's a big reason I love the Yakuza series. Tokyo is one of my favourite cities on Earth, and while I've been there plenty of times, I always look forward to going back. It's nine hours and $1000 away, though, so that's usually out of the question. But when I slide a Yakuza disc into my PS3 I can, for a night, make a half-assed trip, complete with karaoke-laden adventures and endless runs to convenience stores for snacky treats.
It's not that the game is simply set in Japan that makes it useful as a tool for virtual tourism. There are tons of games set in Japan! It's that the Yakuza games manage to capture the trivial so well. That makes it sound awful, but it's the trivial, incidental stuff that really encapsulates your experience of a foreign country. I never associate famous landmarks or events with an international city. That's the stuff of postcards. I remember them for the immediate experiences and sensations I feel; the sound of their train chimes, or the smell of a dining district, or the way the average person the street was dressed.
All things Yakuza games get just right.
The same goes for Far Cry 2, if for slightly different reasons. Now, the middle of a conflict-stricken African state is not somewhere I've been, nor somewhere I'd really want to go in real life. But it's somewhere real, and more importantly, somewhere different, a place and time that video games rarely venture outside of themed platformers or racing games. It's the other side of the virtual tourism experience, at least for me.
Yakuza, Sleeping Dogs, the GTA series and even The Getaway let me visit places I like to go. Far Cry 2 takes me somewhere I probably should see, a real place with real problems that don't involve drug lords or super-villains threatening the same old American cities. Which is just as important as idle tourism!
There are other games I'm not mentioning, and there's no doubt obvious ones I overlook (maybe because they're not as foreign to me as they might be to you!), but I know that there's always room for more. Not every video game with an open and vibrant world needs to take place in a big American city. It's a big world out there, and while there are millions of people who enjoy and can identify with the USA, it'd be great if more publishers took the risk of bankrolling adventures set somewhere else. Especially for Americans! GTA IV isn't exactly foreign if you happen to live in New York City.
Assassin's Creed Utopia for iOS is a new take on the world of Assassin's Creed. As previously mentioned, you build a 17th century colony and watch it develop right up to the American Revolution. And best of all, it's pretty damn good.
There have been a bunch of those Assassin's Creed spin-off games. But this newly revealed one offers a new spin. It's a strategy sim.
