1.

Against better judgment, I always felt compelled to give Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed series the benefit of the doubt, an undoubtedly foolish errand motivated mostly by a long-standing craving for a decent blockbuster open-world action series. I consider these games a kind of equivalent to the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, titillating a base desire for silly, undemanding madcap fun loaded with swashbuckling rogues and propulsive energy. The first few games are amusing at times, bolstered primarily by the easy charisma of Ezio Auditore in his narrative trilogy. At other times, these early games even touted what could be argued as thematic depth or artistic risk, sentiments that emerge when considering the first Assassin’s Creed’s allegory for a post-9/11 political landscape or the underappreciated Assassin’s Creed: Revelation’s Brutalist architectural abstractions.

But these instances are merely outliers that have more to do with capable critics than the games…