Paris in 1798, what a time to be alive. The streets are filthy with mud, blood and gunpowder smoke. Starving citizens bully perceived enemies of the state to hungry guillotine stands. Guards grapple violently with roaming anarchists. Above, you see burning effigies and spiked heads. Below, French Tricolor flags lie stamped into the dirt. Assassin's Creed Unity recreates all of this with astonishing clarity and sets it within the most detailed city I've ever seen in a game. If Unity was a game about absorbing the ambience of a remarkable period of history I could stamp a big "YES" on it and go home. Sadly, the truth is more problematic.

Assassin's Creed Unity is a game about exploring the city, scaling towers to unlock missions, jumping and stabbing. The professional killer of this adventure is Arno Dorian, a devilish young rogue with floppy hair and a grin that could melt wax. Born of wealth, he's quickly driven into the Assassin order by personal tragedy and there uses his remarkable skills of stabbing to seek revenge and win the affection of his cherished childhood friend, Elise. Naturally, there's also a convoluted plot involving the ongoing battle between the Assassins and the Templars, who are both manipulating the revolution for increasingly confusing reasons.

This is complicated only slightly by the return of the ongoing Assassin's Creed metaplot. In this game you're playing a VR product produced by the evil Abstergo company, who are searching for the death site of a certain figure in Arno's life. The best thing about this is that it's delivered in brief and very infrequent cutscenes and voiceover skits from a couple of characters based in the present-day. No longer are you pulled out of your exciting assassin adventures to roleplay a more boring person. Instead, the present-day plot influences several quick but very entertaining interludes that leave your assassin faculties intact. I won't spoil them.

Almost the entire game is set in Paris. The return to a single-city setting reflects Unity's desire to strip down a series that's entertained many tangents over the years. There's no sign of the tower-defence of Revelations, or the assassin-training of Brotherhood, or the sailing of Assassin's Creed 4. Instead, Unity is about assassinations, and they're great.

The act of hunting and efficiently dispatching an important target has been incidental to the series for too long, so I'm glad Unity does it justice. Targets are hidden away in in sandbox locations—castles, prisons, palaces—that you have to crack like a violent puzzles. At the start of the mission Arno, poised like a fancy Batman on some dark rooftop, assesses the area to pick out gaps in the target's defence and note local disturbances that could serve as a distraction. When the mission starts you're free to find your way in and approach the target however you wish.

These missions remind me favourably of Hitman: Blood Money. The levels lack the complexity of IO's sandboxes, but manipulating them is great fun. I whipped a cover off a hidden stash of food in front of a starving crowd. They flocked angrily to the cart and offered cover that got me closer to my target. I've set fire to sniper towers to expose targets, dabbled with poison and done other terrible things best left to discovery.

These missions are facilitated by a new stealth system. Unity finally has the crouch-walk the series has always needed, which means you can dart between cover spots without standing casually upright in full view like a gleaming beacon of guilt. There's also a clunky cover system that I found far too fiddly to use, and a new weapon—the phantom blade—a wrist-mounted miniature crossbow that lets you kill targets silently at range or send them berserk to cause a distraction.

Assassinations may be good, but the campaign is padded out with numerous set-up missions. While these are generally fine, and Arno puts in a good turn as an affable diet-Ezio, you're still following NPCs along dramatic rooftop routes, stealing things from heavily guarded areas, tackling street thieves and saving civvies from criminals—very familiar stuff for series fans. The close focus on everyday assassin business also puts more pressure on Assassin's Creed's core traversal systems, and while the freerunning moveset has been expanded for Unity, it can't quite handle the artfully crooked geometry of Paris.

There are now separate commands for freerunning up and down buildings, which is useful, but movement in all directions lacks precision. Simply climbing into a window can be a nightmare. Arno will vault across the gap, scrabble above it, drop below it, anything but get into the damn room. The window dance only grows angrier under fire.

There are dozens of simple manoeuvres like this that should be effortless, but aren't, and the streets of Paris are littered with detritus that can cause Arno unexpected indecision. Look out in particular for the assassin's greatest enemy, the small box, which Arno will sometimes mount as though it's the highest point in the world and take some coaxing to leap off. Attempting to climb a lumpy object like a market stall will cause moments of mid-air shivering as the movement system seems to shuffle through its library of thousands of animations for a solution. The 'leap into distant hay bale' command is the same as the 'climb down building' command, which has caused annoyance more than once.

I could list more. 80% of the time things work quite nicely, but for a game so reliant on traversal there's too much frustration. The system can make impossible leaps and spins look natural and beautiful, but it too often fails to divine the player's intent while executing the flair. Assassin's Creed has always had these problems, but the complex higgledy-piggledy streets and rooftops of Paris compound them. After a while I came to recognise certain angles and asset arrangements best avoided for the sake of speed.

Combat has been refreshed, too, with good intent but mixed results. In Black Flag and Assassin's Creed 3, you were immortal. You could chain execution moves together to dice up entire regiments without taking a hit. Not so in Unity. The counter button has been replaced by a parry command. Time the parry perfectly and Arno will execute a countering blow that will put the enemy off balance and open them up to follow up strikes, and brutal kill-moves when they're damaged enough. Arno can only suffer a few blows himself before being unceremoniously run-through, and can quite easily be shot to death in the middle of a fight.

I liked Arno's fragility so much that I didn't take any health upgrades until the final boss fight—combat should feel dangerous, but it shouldn't feel quite so out-of-control. Ubisoft have said that the new combat system is inspired by fencing, and while it has a little of the back-and-forth parry and riposte structure, it's remarkably sluggish. My button presses seemed lost amid long, complex animations, as though I was shouting combat instructions to Arno from a mile away, repeating myself occasionally for emphasis. On the plus side there's quite a bit of variety to the weapons at your disposal, even if the system itself feels sparse. You can choose to fight with swords; long weapons like spears, polearms and halberds; big weapons like axes and clubs and even rifles, which Arno uses as shooty clubs in close combat.

The wide range of weapons slot into an overwhelming suite of customisation options that let you choose Arno's hood, gloves, trousers and coat independently. Different items confer varying bonuses to your toughness and stealthiness, but these don't make much of a difference until the twilight stages of the game.

These are bought with in-game money, which you can earn by renovating and expanding your pet theatre, or by completing side missions. These vary widly in quality. Some are dull escort chores that have you fighting waves of guards as your charge relocates with the urgency of a dead slug. Better are the detective missions, which present you with clues in a crime scene so that you can correctly accuse one of several suspects. Solving crimes is easy when you have magic eyes that make clues glow.

You can skip all that and buy weapons and armour right away with real money via a microtransaction system that's cheeky at best and just depressing at worst. After buying the game for 40/$60, you're invited to spend more money to play less of the game. Fortunately it's easy to completely ignore this, but the same can't be said for the awful in-game chests and items ties into Unity's companion app and Initiates webgame. Initiates chests are littered all over Paris. If you try to open one the game minimises itself, opens your browser and attempts to connect to the Initiates site. It's intrusive, shatters the fantasy, and holds back items and features from players who don't want to waste time on webgames or apps. Horrible.

It's especially disappointing, because there's real beauty to be found in Unity. If you like to wander and become absorbed in a game world, Paris is stunning. I rarely gasp at things. I used to think that gasping was a theoretical action that people used in a purely illustrative sense, but one came unbidden when I climbed to the top of a spire to see a patch of golden sunlight moving over the Notre Dame cathedral. A haze rose up from the streets, and I could see every building for miles. Whether you're striding through dilapidated slums or royal palaces Unity realises urban filth and glittering opulence with equal devotion. The streets are packed with people, singing, fighting, kissing, dancing. I stood up after finishing the game and felt like I'd visited another place.

That makes me dearly want to recommend Unity, but unless you have a seriously good graphics card, I can't. It's fluid and gorgeous on my GTX 970, but on mid-range cards like a 670, and even better cards, expect low and choppy framerates that worsen greatly during cutscenes. While my experience has been relatively clean, Unity is rife with widely reported bugs. I've seen the odd floating pedestrian, a few times I've seen Arno perform a finishing move on the air as his victim six feet away crumples and dies. The game also occasionally pauses for fifteen seconds or so at random points before resuming as normal. It's also crashed a few times. Others have reported disappearing faces, floating NPCs, ragdolls glitching into themselves and more severe stability problems.

The other huge failure is co-op. The new mode lets you summon up to three friends into your Paris to run around exploring, or to engage in a collection of heist and assassination missions. I almost had fun coordinating attacks with friends in these varied and lengthy missions, but not one co-op game has passed without a disconnection error, or a wrongly placed objective marker, or a target not spawning, or numerous other mission scripting errors. It just doesn't work.

If Ubisoft get it patched up, Unity could become a perfectly enjoyable part of the Assassin's Creed canon. It's a solid campaign elevated by quality assassination missions and an extraordinary setting that might just push the big number at the bottom of this review into the 80s, but with a big selling point out of operation, a raft of technical issues, performance problems, microtransactions and stilted combat and freerunning systems, Unity—in its current state—can only be considered a failed revolution. What a shame.

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Next up, in the category of "Ludum Dare games that are now 'full' games," here's The Sun and Moon. It's a platformer in which you can go through the platforms—flipping gravity to build momentum, and thus increasing the height of your jump. Here, watch the trailer to see what I mean.

I really enjoyed the Ludum Dare version, as did free games aficionado Tom Sykes. Hopefully this expanded version can further push and iterate on its clever core idea. We'll find out in a few hours, when the game launches onto Steam.

Right now, Far Cry 4 reviews are popping up all over the internet. It is, by all reports, a great game. Unfortunately, we can neither confirm or deny that assessment. More troubling, given the launch state of Assassin's Creed: Unity, is that we can't tell you how it performs on PC. The reason is simple: we haven't yet received code.

If you're getting a sense of deja vu, it's because exactly the same thing happened with Unity. For Far Cry 4, Ubisoft held a console review event; giving multi-platform outlets the chance to have their reviews in place for today's embargo. We, naturally, need to play the game on PC. Last night, we were informed that code wouldn't arrive until Tuesday, the date of the game's launch.

Ubisoft are, of course, free to restrict pre-release access to their game in whatever way they see fit. We aren't entitled to review code, and could still offer a judgement—albeit a less timely one—without. However, it's a disappointing development when it comes in the same week as Assassin's Creed: Unity's launch. That game has since caused Ubisoft's share price to drop as much as 12.8%, and yesterday its more spectacular bugs caught the attention of the BBC.

In that news post, a Ubisoft spokesperson clarified the way the company was approaching reviews. "The nature of games themselves and the way they are being reviewed is changing, as evidenced by games like Assassin's Creed Unity, Destiny and The Crew—games that have significant online components," she said.

"Having the online elements available and having populated worlds is essential to creating a representative and complete experience for reviewers. Achieving this prior to launch is incredibly complex, which is why some games are being reviewed much closer—or as was the case with Destiny, even after—the game launches."

The difference, to my mind, is that Destiny is an MMO. Assassin's Creed: Unity is not. Far Cry 4 is not. They have online elements, yes, but they are not predominantly online games. As the gap between high and mid-range PC specs widens, as system requirements become increasingly more demanding, and as pre-order bonuses are marketed more aggressively; to also restrict reviews to being conceivably days after a game's launch is a worrying trend for consumers.

We asked Ubisoft for an official statement, which you will find below:

"The reason why we did not provide review code until now is that there is a title update which won t be available before Monday prior to launch. However, we will officially communicate on the title update prior the release of the game so consumers are aware."

The only thing I need from a map editor is the ability to stack thousands of explosive barrels, so I can then explode them to the chagrin of my graphics card. But others treat map editors as a tool for editing maps, and its this group that seems disappointed with the news that Far Cry 4's editor won't support competitive multiplayer.

The limitation was noticed during a recent Twitch stream. Viewers spotted that only challenge maps had editing options—leading to a now 129 page forum thread about the omission.

That restriction was then confirmed over Twitter by Alex Hutchinson, creative director of the game.

"I direct the game but I don't set budgets or timelines," he said. "We always squeeze in as much as we can, but we're always prioritizing.

"We're going to keep supporting the game so hopefully we can get it done post release. No promises but we will try."

I'm almost surprised at the ferocity of the fan reaction. But the forum thread suggests a sizeable competitive community exists—one that sees custom-made maps as an important part of the experience. Hopefully, Far Cry 4 will one day be able to serve them.

Ta, Eurogamer.

If you think about it, geometry is mankind's greatest enemy. It's the study of shapes and stuff, and, when you really get down to it, everything is made up of shapes and stuff—including the things that kill us. Maybe we should go to war with geometry. We'll chip off the acutest of angles, and exterminate the most threatening fractals. It will be hard, laborious work, but eventually we'll have victory within reach. Until one day... one terrible day, when we realise the truth. WE were geometry all along.

It'll be a Euclidean nightmare, and no mistake.

Probably best to keep our geometric rage focused into videogames—and the upcoming Geometry Wars 3 could be the perfect outlet. It's got a trailer. I probably should have mentioned that in the first paragraph.

It looks pretty sharp, but I do have some concerns. The biggest: Bizarre Creations is sadly no more. This sequel is being handled by Sierra—the resurrected studio now tasked with handling Activision's indie concerns. There's always a danger in these cases that the new studio won't be able to capture the same magic—and Geometry Wars is a game that needs the magic.

As for the new 3D level layouts, it'll be interesting to see how they play. Either way, the game retains a 2D "Classic" mode.

Geometry Wars 3: Dimensions is out, on Steam, on 25 November.

Blizzard has a near impeccable record when it comes to smooth World of Warcraft expansion launches, so it's a surprise that Warlords of Draenor has encountered numerous problems since its launch overnight. In addition to a DDoS attack, the servers are currently unable to withstand the sheer amount of players attempting to access the expansion from the same location.

"Europe was our first region to launch, and we encountered a few issues due to the sheer number of players attempting to enter Draenor from a single location," Blizzard wrote in an initial statement. "We worked to add multiple new ways to access Draenor, and this helped ease some of the initial rush into the new expansion as players were able to access it from their capital cities, as well as from the shrines in Pandaria."

In addition to these, users are reporting servers timing out, which is affecting both performance and players' ability to access the game at all. In its most recent update, In its most recent statement, Blizzard says it's tackling the problem by lowering the realm population cap in problem areas. 

"We re continuing to work toward greater realm stability and address the service issues impacting latency. Our current biggest hurdle is the concentration of players in specific areas and zones, and an unexpected effect of that concentration on the realm stability," the studio wrote.

"We re continuing to maintain a lowered realm population cap to help with the stability, which is resulting in increased queue times. We re seeing some increase in individual zones drop which are causing localized player disconnections as we get into primetime in the Americas, and if someone is disconnected they will quite likely run into a queue to log back in. Work is progressing on improving realm stability through fixes targeting individual in-game issues, as well as on the backend game and network services."

Look out for our Warlords of Draenor review-in-progress coverage tomorrow.

Announced earlier this year, Never Alone (Kisima Ingitchuna) is a puzzle platformer based on the folklore of the I upiat people of Alaska. It was originally scheduled to come out earlier this month but was pushed back to November 18, and with that date fast approaching, a launch trailer has now been turned loose on YouTube.

Never Alone sets players on a quest to seek out the source of a devastating, eternal blizzard, as both Nuna, a young I upiat girl, and an arctic fox known simply as Fox. It will support both single-player with character switching, as well as a two-player co-op mode, and will be interspersed with "stories and wisdom" from nearly 40 Alaska Native elders, storytellers, and community members who contributed to the development of the game.

It's tough to get an exact sense of the gameplay from the footage alone, but it's got atmosphere by the ice truckful, so I'm hopeful Never Alone can live up to the promise of what developer Upper One Games describes as "an exciting new genre of 'World Games' that draw fully upon the richness of unique cultures to create complex and fascinating game worlds." Find out more on Steam.

The launch of Assassin's Creed: Unity has not gone particularly smoothly. There have been an awful lot of bugs, performance issues, and sub-80 scores, which are bad news for a triple-A game in the era of Metacritic. Ubisoft has acknowledged the problems and appears to be pushing hard to correct them, and also says that it's looking at ways to change its reviews policies to better serve its customers in the future.

The Assassin's Creed: Unity bugs are bad enough in their own right, but Ubisoft made the situation look even worse with a bizarre review embargo that didn't lift until nearly a full day after the game went on sale. (Our review was delayed because of late-arriving review code, but should be up tomorrow.) The reasons for the embargo remain a mystery, but the combination of a buggy game and held-back reviews means the optics aren't good; Ubisoft, however, insists that there was nothing untoward going on.

"The nature of games themselves and the way they are being reviewed is changing, as evidenced by games like Assassin's Creed: Unity, Destiny and The Crew—games that have significant online components," a Ubisoft rep told the BBC. "Having the online elements available and having populated worlds is essential to creating a representative and complete experience for reviewers. Achieving this prior to launch is incredibly complex, which is why some games are being reviewed much closer—or as was the case with Destiny, even after—the game launches."

"We are working to adapt our services and communications with consumers accordingly, both by changing the way we work with reviewers and by offering customers open betas or other early access to some games, all so that they have the information they need and want," the rep added.

More open processes are certainly welcome, but it fails to address the question of how the Unity embargo served any purpose other than to keep a lid on reviews during the first several hours of the game's release. That's got nothing to do with the difficulty of reviewing a connection-dependent game, which is admittedly a tricky business, it's just a dodgy policy—and hopefully one that won't be repeated.

Riot has taken a number of steps this year to combat toxic player behaviour in League of Legends, ranging from blocking offenders from joining ranked queues through to outright bans. While the measures have been well-received, those in the habit of behaving themselves are about to get a substantial reward in the form of a 4-win IP (Influence Point) boost. The reward, which will be granted to each player with a clean record, will roll out over the next week.

All the recent headlines about League of Legends disciplinary measures paint a bleak picture, but stats provided by Riot indicate otherwise: as of this week, 95 per cent of players have never received any punishment, while fewer than 1 per cent of players have been on the receiving end of a ban.

Still, Riot promises it is still "focused on addressing extreme cases of verbal toxicity, and will soon be testing additional systems that address gameplay toxicity like leavers, AFKs, and intentional feeders."