Assassin's Creed Shadows can wait – I spent 40 hours mopping up the map in the one game in the series everyone skipped

We may take big budget blockbuster games for granted, but everything that goes into operating these heaving behemoths takes gargantuan effort. Landmark releases, like the upcoming Assassin's Creed Shadows are vital moments for the gaming calendar, but a tremendous amount of work goes into making sure everything coalesces for that one grand release date moment. Now, try getting that to happen two times in one go.

That was the fate that awaited Assassin's Creed Rogue, the successor to Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag. Locked to PS3 and Xbox 360 a year after PS4 and Xbox One were on the market (and with no PC port for half a year after), it released on November 11, 2014 – the exact same day as Assassin's Creed Unity, the 'next-gen' exclusive entry. It was overshadowed by its own series.

United release

I've a soft spot for AC Unity, and enjoyed it a lot at the time, but there's no denying its own launch wasn't riddled with issues and bugs. AC Rogue, on the other hand, confidently pulls together elements from all its predecessors to feel like a souped up culmination of them all. Despite being shackled to aging hardware that many players were ready to move on from, it may very well have been the better game at launch.

'May very well' because I can't say definitively. At launch in 2014, with a shiny new graphics card in hand afforded by, perhaps unwisely, my university allowance, it came with a copy of Assassin's Creed Unity. Surely this was the de facto new game, and that AC Rogue was something else entirely I didn't have to worry about? I certainly wasn't going to plug an older console back in to find out.

It took me 11 years to finally give it a proper go, even though I've been an Assassin's Creed diehard since drooling over the power of Xbox 360 over the course of many TV spots. AC Rogue is the first entry I skipped, and it didn't even feel like a conscious decision. As a series so stacked with releases, even the PS4 and Xbox One remaster in 2018 felt too little too late. Why return to a game that felt minimized by its own publisher when it first launched? This, as it happened, was a foolish lapse in my judgment. One I've been unknowingly paying for over the course of a decade and change.

Don't make the same mistake I did. Assassin's Creed Rogue – the first time Ubisoft Sofia led development on a mainline big console entry in the series – is no small stopgap release. It's a fully-fledged mainline entry in the series with an important narrative that not only ties a bow on all the entries that came before it, but lays vital foundations for the story that was to follow in AC Unity onward. Properly playing it for the first time now, I'm not only ecstatic when the likes of Achilles, Haytham, and Adewale pop up; but when I notice the early version of later ideas, like AC Unity's less black and white Assassins/Templar dynamic, through to the gang warfare of AC Syndicate.

With that said, the narrative here does, by game's end, leave much to be desired. The back of the box pitch for Assassin's Creed Rogue is that this time, you're playing as Shay Cormac, an Assassin who defects to the Templars. A novel idea, and one that builds on the incredible opening act of Assassin's Creed 3. But, in the end, it turns out it's because of a whole lot of characters refusing to talk to one another, the Assassin's being uncharacteristically cruel (yeah, more than usual), and the Templars being weirdly benevolent. Rather than wrangling any complex ideas, it ends up doing the opposite – oversimplifying everything. It's fun enough, though, and Shay is a wry and fun protagonist whenever he deigns to actually comment on anything.

Hay stacked

But in play is where Assassin's Creed Rogue really shines, and that's in large part thanks to some neat mechanical twists introduced by the switch to being a Templar. While much of the action does revolve around Shay playing just like you would expect an Assassin to, now some of those tricks are turned back towards him.

At times when exploring, either in the city or in the wilds, your screen may become tinged and whispers begin to build – meaning Shay is picking up on danger. Look up and an Assassin may be waiting to leap down on you as you walk by. Scale a building and go the long way around and you may see one pressed to an alleyway corner that hides a chest, waiting to knife you as you jog towards the spoils. Peer at a haystack below and one might be cooped up in there – after which you can leap right in there to assassinate them in turn. Mechanically, it retools systems introduced in the wonderful PvP Assassin's Creed multiplayer that featured in a few releases from Assassin's Creed Brotherhood on.

What makes AC Rogue great is that it features many such smart iterations. Any long time Assassin's Creed fan will see all the building blocks here, but you can't help but marvel at how they've been implemented. Ship sailing returns from AC Black Flag, but you've new weapons at your disposal, including both a ram to cleave through patches of ice in the North Atlantic and the ability to blow up icebergs near enemy vessels to shake their foundations with the ripple.

Meanwhile, the hefty North American map nods to Assassin's Creed 3's impressive Frontier, except here it's chopped up into discrete little islands, creating a smart mid-space between the overwhelm of the third entry with how small most areas were in the fourth. Even having these dense forests cut entirely through island spaces with multiple docks adds a lot to the scope of the world.

Likewise, the snappy 'Assassination' missions where you'd take a contract from a pigeon coop are no more, replaced by 'Assassination Interception' missions. Shay scoops up a pigeon, revealing a target-to-be, and you must identify them, and then you have a time limit in which to uncover and off oncoming assassins before they can do the deed. For every moment AC Rogue feels like a bit paint by numbers in play, it has another that's able to playfully invert expectation.

Ubisoft Sofia show a real mastery of how the pieces of an Assassin's Creed game all work in unison to admirably create something that feels mechanically fresh out of what seem to be lots of limitations. Not to mention this was all originally on that older hardware! Being able to spot the obvious building blocks – even the inversions are rooted in what came before – may be so apparent that to some AC Rogue may feel like a retread. But we've all seen basic Lego blocks before, and don't we marvel at mastercrafted works made from them?

In retrospect, I even appreciate the idea of releasing two Assassin's Creed games at the same time across two generations of hardware. Conceptually it's a nice way of ensuring those who couldn't afford newer consoles (or weren't able to mooch off their friend's) didn't feel left behind, while also ensuring the most could be made of the new tech. But the reality wasn't so simple.

Every time I talk about AC Rogue with people, they almost all skipped it at launch, with only a few having circled the ol' ship around. The real tragedy is that means too many overlooked this hidden blade gem of an entry, and for some I really do believe it could be one of their favourite Assassin's Creed entries if only they got time to play it. And it's frequently on deep discount too! Shay, as he's always pointing out, makes his own luck. Unfortunately for AC Rogue, he got unlucky. Won't you help him out?

What's next for the series? Check out our massive Assassin's Creed Shadows preview before the game lands, and stick around for our full verdict on launch? And what else? Browse our new games 2025 collection for what to add to your calendars.