Review: ‘Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR’ brings players closer to franchise’s iconic experiences
Ubisoft adroitly adapts the gameplay from the series into virtual reality bring players closer to the life of the Assassin Brotherhood
“Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR” has a certain synergy coursing through it. It’s a game where the virtual reality medium and the narrative meld together to create seamless fiction. In the video game franchise’s lore, a shady company called Abstergo uses a device called the Animus to let people experience the lives of people in the past using information from their DNA.
The Animus is essentially a VR device and Ubisoft cleverly uses that as a vehicle for a compelling adventure on the Meta Quest platform. In the 16-mission campaign, players take on the role of an unnamed hacker whom the Assassin Brotherhood hires to infiltrate Abstergo, which is working on a project called the Nexus Eye.
Led by Dominika Wilk (played by Morena Baccarin), the program is after pieces of the Antikythera mechanism, aka “The Dial Destiny” for Indiana Jones fans. Using the Animus, Abstergo has traced parts of the device to the experiences of three assassins from the past: Ezio Auditore, Kassandra and Connor Kenway. They also happen to be three protagonists in some of the bigger entries to the series.
THREE DISTINCT PLOTS AND TIME PERIODS
“Nexus VR” transports players to the protagonists’ three time periods — each one having a distinct feel and vibe. With Ezio, players explore Renaissance Italy, tracking the cult of Hermes that infiltrated and stole artifacts from his home. Kassandra is a mercenary who plays a role in a conflict between Sparta and Athens and does a little treasure-hunting on the side. Lastly, Connor is drawn into a conspiracy and espionage plot during America’s Revolutionary War.
What the developers do well is adapt the touchstones of the “Assassin’s Creed” franchise to virtual reality. Everything takes place in the first person as players parkour their way across rooftops and sneak by enemies. Gameplay elements from the console titles translate surprisingly well to VR. Players can climb the tallest buildings by gripping ledges and window sills until they reach the top, where they grab an eagle icon that lets them survey the surroundings. They can then perform the iconic Leap of Faith.
All of this is done comfortably so that players won’t toss their cookies from plummeting from towers or performing an air assassination from above. The developers took care to make the experience comfortable, offering several options for newcomers to the medium as well as veterans who have their VR sea legs.
IMAGINATIVE STEALTH GAMEPLAY, COMBAT NOT SO MUCH
Jumping into the campaign, “Nexus VR” has an intuitiveness to the gameplay, especially when it comes to stealth. Players can crouch to move quietly through hallways so they can creep by enemies undetected. When dealing with patrolling guards, they can grab one of many objects lying around and toss them to distract foes so that players can sneak by.
When it comes to accomplishing a mission, it’s all up to the players’ imagination. They can hide in the bushes and whistle to attract foes and eliminate them quietly or they can toss a dagger at a rope bearing a crate so that it crashes atop an unsuspecting adversary. They can sneak up behind an armored guard and push them off a tower or climb underneath and yank them off a parapet. Virtual reality offers an array of tactics on the map.
All of this creates a concreteness to the settings as environments are filled with people operating on a cursory logic. Walking through the streets of New England, players can knock into some passersby and they’ll react in a way that makes sense. If you murder a guard in front of them, they’ll panic and call for help.
Those are the best parts of “Nexus VR.” Unfortunately, the effort isn’t perfect and players will run into bugs and frustrating moments. Sometimes an attack doesn’t exactly register and that leads enemies to call for backup. That puts players in a situation where they have to engage in hand-to-hand combat and that’s an area where “Nexus VR” fails.
Swordplay is all about reading enemy movement, and then blocking and countering. That’s easier said than done because sometimes weapons inadvertently go from being held with the blade pointing up to it being pointed down as if the character were Ahsoka Tano. It serviceable with Ezio and Kassandra because they have swords but Connor is another matter with his tomahawk. It just doesn’t feel right and leads to frustration, especially toward the finale.
The campaign also runs into problems when players don’t go toward the scripted path. It can be hard to trigger certain plot points. I had to attempt and re-attempt a mission where I had to trail a target, but I had a hard time getting that started. In some situations, players can hear the same conversation repeated twice because they aren’t in the right place, pulling them out of the spell that VR casts.
With any virtual reality project, there’s bound to be miscues and experimentation that don’t go right. It’s new frontier after all, but what “Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR” does well is capture the feel of the console games while using the strengths of VR to suck players deeper into intricate and compelling worlds.
‘Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR’
2½ stars out of 4
Platform: Meta Quest 2 and Meta Quest 3
Rating: Mature