The Top 10 Games of Christmas 2014

05. Assassin's Creed: Rogue

ESRB Rating: M (for Mature)

Price: $59.99

The newest offerings in the Assassin's Creed Series number among the most difficult inclusions in the list - not because they are unworthy of that inclusion because they are oh-so-massively-worthy! No, the qualms that they raised - and there were some serious arguments about this in the Bullpen - have more to do with the message that they send and certain elements of game play mechanics that are viewed as bad in a certain manner - elements we will shortly cover.

The principal development work was accomplished at Ubisoft Sofia, and the game was published by Ubisoft on 11 November 2014 - that being a traditional target period for the release of AC games. With versions specifically for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, and Windows PC, AC Rogue was clearly targeted at the previous console generation - and for good reason! Its spiritual brother is the title Assassin's Creed: Unity, and it was created for the current generation of Xbox One, PS4 and Windows PC!

The story in Rogue is that of a protagonist who while we can easily generate sympathy for, and in fact we do as we play in their shoes - nevertheless represents the enemy in the end. Because Assassin Brother Shay Patrick Cormac, who is himself a stereotypical product of the poverty and uncertainty of the mid-18th century New York City from which he sprang, began his career as a moral Assassin and ended it as a Templar!

The first essential point that needs to be made in the judgment of both the story and the game is that it is not really something new. Rogue is basically a leveraging of the model of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag that is used to provide the cover and mechanics to tell a different story - and it succeeds admirably in doing just that.

Fans of Black Flag will relish the return of the evenly-divided momentum of ship-based exploration and combat, and the traditional land-based and city-based skullduggery for which the series is quite well known and even famous.

There is plenty of parkour-like action, plenty of awesome Assassin gadgets, and plenty of strong personalities and characters to be found here. The presence of the non-human first civilization is felt throughout the entire game, even as the player works out new twists in that sub-sub-plot on their own.

The juxtaposition that is presented by the Animus is also present here - but just as was the case with Black Flag the wizards that created Rogue manage to balance it out so that it does not interfere with the suspension of disbelief and permits the player to sink into the role of Shay Patrick Cormac with very little in terms of the disturbance that reality can often inflict.

The story is set in the mid-18th century during the French and Indian War, but it is more than simply a continuation of the ongoing saga because it immediately turns personal, as it communicates the feelings and the outlook of Shay, who is concerned that all is not right in the world of the Assassin Brotherhood.

You know that old saw that too little information can be as bad and destructive as too much? Well that is the situation we find with our good friend Shay - he knows just enough to understand that something is wrong, but not enough to connect the dots to tell what it is.

The consequences of that combination of failed intelligence is his choice to do the unthinkable, and switch allegiance to the Templar Order. The circumstances behind that decision are very much the meat of this story - and it is an oblivious player indeed who does not grow to understand and even respect the decisions that Shay makes, even though we know what Shay does not.

It certainly does not help matters that the period in time that this story takes place also happens to be the period in time when the Assassin Brotherhood was infected by a Jesuit-influenced belief that the ends often really do justify the means. The result of this brief but regrettable alteration of the Assassin Philosophy was that the Brotherhood was in fact guilty of many of the lapses in judgment and crimes that Shay was concerned about.

For example the Brotherhood had in fact aligned itself with the criminal elements in New York City that would later be famously grouped together as the Gangs of New York - among the worse of which being the largely Irish-influenced Forty-Thieves who were based out of the infamous neighborhoods of Five Points, Hell’s Kitchen, the Fourth Ward and the Bowery, and who helped to make life hell on earth for the lower economic classes who could not afford the price of protection from their like.

As the foibles of the era mounted, the justification for changing his loyalty seemed to Shay to be an obvious necessity - circumstances that the blame for which clearly fall upon the Brotherhood, and just as clearly on its leader in that part of the world, Achilles Davenport, who should have understood the path that was being followed and moved to correct it and did not.

While the above nicely explains the circumstances of the story that we are playing through - and its importance in the canon of the series - it is only half of the reason for Rogue and its brother Unity gaining the popularity across gamer cultural lines as it were, that it does.

The other half of the story is the inclusion of the best elements of the game series so far, and the leveraging of those elements to create what is clearly a game with massive addiction potential!

Because the best of the elements of each of the previous games in the series were cherry-picked to ensure that game play and the game play mechanics were of such a quality so as to recruit new fans for the series from new players, while achieving a sort of planned retention rate among veteran games that defies description.

We suspect that there is a reason for those efforts, and that it will likely become more plain with the next generation of the games we see coming down the pipe in 2016/2017.

Among the tried-and-true features that return is a crafting system that plays nearly half the role of character development in the story and game. Like much of the rest of the different mechanisms for game play, crafting is organized as a compartmentalized system and scheme that sees the player actively interrupting their primary path through the story in order to strengthen the position of their character so as to achieve a better success rate in the story missions!

For crafting that means spending some time reviewing the different recipes, then seeking out the various resources that are required for the making of them. A perfect example of that pattern is the resource capacity recipes like the Health Upgrades, and Pouch System for Rope Darts, Smoke Bombs, Pistol Ammo, the different types of Bombs, and the different types of Grenades that are launched using the Air Rifle. Oh yes, and the ammunition capacities for that Air Rifle!

Take the recipe for the different Pouches. They may require hides from Arctic Hares, Deer, and the odd Polar Bear - resources that the player will quite literally need to travel the world in order to hunt down and obtain - and when we say hunt down and obtain we mean HUNT the various animals, kill them, and skin them!

There are additional benefits to that hunting focus however, because while the player obtains the needed resources for crafting the object of their desire, they also obtain ancillary resources like Bone, which is the generic resource required for crafting the things that go INTO those Pouches! Rope Darts? Sleep Darts? Berserk Darts? Firecracker Darts? Sleep, Berserk, or Shrapnel Grenades? They can all be crafted from Bone alone - so you are going to needs lots of it.

The rub here is that the player can obtain almost all of those resources just as easily by visiting the Traders / Stores found in the different towns, cities, and villages of the world - they just trade money for the act of self-sufficiency. But that is a compromise most players are not willing to make, despite the fact that money is very easy to obtain and in large amounts!

Another strong element in the game is the naval combat and exploration system that also doubles as the primary transportation mechanism in the game. It is not really clear if Ubisoft understood when it first introduced the piratical naval focus in the earlier games that they had a tiger by the tail... Did they know that this particular mechanic would strike a chord with gamers? Did they understand just how significant the element and the draw of one captain, one ship would be?

We suspect not. But they are not so thick so that they were incapable of recognizing after the fact that they have stumbled onto something significant. The manner in which this mechanism has been used again clearly illustrates that fact.

A case might be made that the inclusion of naval combat in each of the current line of games was too much too soon - we don't buy that. In fact it is just the opposite - had they eschewed including that element in the game that would have been a primary rally point for protest!

By combining the naval elements with the well-established territory control scheme (in Rogue that takes the form of battle with the different gangs and the taking of their headquarters in each neighborhood, and on the frontier in each town), the result worked out to be a combination of game play features that instantly resonate with the players.

In the end, and thanks to the game including a mixture of the known and liked features, and new elements (though to be fair many of those are simply a re-interpretation of existing elements) when all of that is combined what we get is a game that earned its place near the top of the list.

We cannot discuss AC Rogue without also discussing the elephant in the room though. That would be the fact that this game was created exclusively for the previous generation of console - Microsoft's Xbox 360 and Sony's PlayStation 3.

The important point - and one we think should be made - is that the expenditure of funds and effort to create a new game in the AC series whose platform focus is the previous gen console says a lot more about the position that the seventh generation game consoles still holds in the gamer community than anything else.

When the X1 and PS4 were first launched a lot of people within the gamer community - and to be fair that includes a fair number of games journos - decided that the launch of the next gen heralded the death of the previous generation.

We are not claiming that we were omniscient with respect to that question - but a learned examination of the market, and the public published release schedules from the core of the major studios appeared to conflict with those claims. In simple terms, the industry was signaling that it was not finished with the seventh generation, and what was more, it still considered it a viable platform in terms of profit potential.

That is significant for a couple of reasons, but seeing how it is that the industry could arrive at those conclusions is not the product of a crystal ball or omniscience of any sort! The writing is on the wall - while the gaming public has been rather quick to adopt the new generation of console, they have also been very very reluctant to surrender the old generation.

The fact that seventh generation games cannot be played on eighth generation consoles may have had a particular influence in that regard - but the fact that gamers were buying new consoles while holding on to their old ones was a new trend in gaming culture and worthy of notice. The fact that the major studios intended to continue to support those old gen consoles may be a lesson already learned from Sony's PS2, which stayed vital and profitable long after the PS3 launched.

Either way though, here is what you need to know: if the gamers on your Christmas list have held on to their Xbox 360s and PS3s then that should tell you all that you need to know, which is they will very much welcome a game and a romp through an established series no matter what console gen it happens to exist on!