WHAT WE’RE PLAYING
Join a new kind of Assassin’s Creed
Assassin's Creed Rebellion
An Epic RPG Adventure Quest
Besides the newly chunky, cartoonified look, the first moments of Assassin's Creed: Rebellion make it seem like you’re on familiar ground.
When famed series favourite Ezio dives from a great height – in slow-mo – into a conveniently placed cart of hay, you get the sense that this might be a mobile version of the console games you are familiar with.
And yet it’s not – Rebellion is very much its own game, one that has been built for iPhone and iPad. It’s got the stealthy missions and loot gathering that these games are famed for, but it is all neatly chunked out into nice, accessible bite-size pieces, viewed side-on.
So while Assassin’s stalwart Ezio is the star here, there’s a mix of support characters drawn from the series’ many different universes – even the movie.
Starting out, you’re dropped into the assassin’s Spanish base and asked to build it up into a formidable HQ. This means completing stealth and heist missions to earn loot and new recruits, before heading back to base to buy new bits and bobs for your HQ.
The real excitement is in the missions, though. It’s wise to pick three characters with a useful mix of abilities: so you can use your assassin to sneak about the place, taking guards out, or send your lock picker into a room you know is full of booby traps and loot. Conversely, asking a bulky hand-to-hand combat expert to walk along a plank connecting two rooms is not wise – best send in a fleet-footed assassin instead.
These missions are about taking it room by room – assessing the dangers within each space, assigning your best troop to the job and then reacting fast when things inevitably go wrong. But there’s no need to go in blind; before you enter a room you can tap each of your troops to see how they’d fare against each hazard or enemy, and you can plan your moves from there.
Complete the mission and it’s back to base, where you can use your ill-gotten gains to buy new rooms or upgrade existing ones. It’s no coincidence that these base-building elements look and feel like Fallout Shelter – Rebellion is made by that game’s developer, Behaviour Interactive, in collaboration with Ubisoft.
So this is a canny and confident distillation of the series’ stealth, heist, combat and adventuring into a game that works beautifully on iPhone and iPad. Want a new way to play a blockbuster console series? Join the Assassin’s Creed Rebellion.