Despite the cool setting and stylish presentation, Ass Creed Russia is an absolute disaster on the gameplay front, to the point it's nothing but a frustrating trial and error experience from start to finish.
An unholy marriage of slow, unresponsive controls and timed sequences calibrated to the fraction of a second, the result is that even the slightest mistake will prompt a restart of an entire section. Especially egregious are segments where you have to catch a train, or a truck, or escape from a chasing vehicle, which are so punitive in their demand for perfection that you can be expected to try them over and over and over again until you finally do everything without the slightest mistake: get stuck for the briefest of moment on geometry while trying to vauilt over a box and it's back to the start for you. There is no sense of accomplishment when succeeding, only irritation.
The rest of the game is fairly pedestrian stealth puzzles you have seen man times before, only these are worse: here too there is only one possible solution in most cases and you have to keep failing and trying again until you figure it out and get it right. Or... you can just exploit the overabundance of rifle ammunition to just skip the tedium and just blast enemies in the face from a mile away, with all that's suffering from that being your score and the unlocking of upgrades you don't need.
The story is ludicrous, with the Bolshevik revolutionaries hilariously being a front for the templars (prompting the question if the Tzar is in his turn a front for the Assassins), and with the revolution setting in motion a Disney-esque plot involving Anastasia, now possessed by the Chinese assassin lady from a previous spinoff. It's bad, and even worse when you realize that all the guards in the game, Bolshevik or Assassin, keep repeating the same three conversations to the point of literal nausea. You will be sick to your core of hearing about how their family is "coping with the holes in the roof" or how "the smaller states have declared independence but Estonia want to remain closer" or "your hometown, isn't that where the anti-Bolsheviks are located?" How hard could it possibly have been to record a dozen conversations, instead of looping the same three over and over for the entire game?
There is some fun to be had in Ass Creed Russia if you manage to look past the mountain of flaws the game has and learn its levels by heart, compensating for its clunky mechanics to the point of perfection, but really, who would want to do that, aside from the most compulsive of achievement addicts?
An unholy marriage of slow, unresponsive controls and timed sequences calibrated to the fraction of a second, the result is that even the slightest mistake will prompt a restart of an entire section. Especially egregious are segments where you have to catch a train, or a truck, or escape from a chasing vehicle, which are so punitive in their demand for perfection that you can be expected to try them over and over and over again until you finally do everything without the slightest mistake: get stuck for the briefest of moment on geometry while trying to vauilt over a box and it's back to the start for you. There is no sense of accomplishment when succeeding, only irritation.
The rest of the game is fairly pedestrian stealth puzzles you have seen man times before, only these are worse: here too there is only one possible solution in most cases and you have to keep failing and trying again until you figure it out and get it right. Or... you can just exploit the overabundance of rifle ammunition to just skip the tedium and just blast enemies in the face from a mile away, with all that's suffering from that being your score and the unlocking of upgrades you don't need.
The story is ludicrous, with the Bolshevik revolutionaries hilariously being a front for the templars (prompting the question if the Tzar is in his turn a front for the Assassins), and with the revolution setting in motion a Disney-esque plot involving Anastasia, now possessed by the Chinese assassin lady from a previous spinoff. It's bad, and even worse when you realize that all the guards in the game, Bolshevik or Assassin, keep repeating the same three conversations to the point of literal nausea. You will be sick to your core of hearing about how their family is "coping with the holes in the roof" or how "the smaller states have declared independence but Estonia want to remain closer" or "your hometown, isn't that where the anti-Bolsheviks are located?" How hard could it possibly have been to record a dozen conversations, instead of looping the same three over and over for the entire game?
There is some fun to be had in Ass Creed Russia if you manage to look past the mountain of flaws the game has and learn its levels by heart, compensating for its clunky mechanics to the point of perfection, but really, who would want to do that, aside from the most compulsive of achievement addicts?