➤ The king is dead, long live the king! 🎮

We know how and why Dead Kings, originally conceived as a substantial portion of the inevitable Assassin's Creed Unity Season Pass, has become a free expansion. This particular connotation makes it superfluous in some ways to speculate on which exact evaluation to give to the DLC: it is free, so you can download it regardless. The real question, however, is another: does the addition of Dead Kings to the Unity package make the offer of the latest episode of the Ubisoft series more attractive? In particular in the eyes of the skeptics and / or the disappointed, of those who therefore did not want to give confidence again to the controversial action game based on parkour and commissioned killings, after years of stagnation and lack of news? Let's find out together.

Underground

The events of Dead Kings take place after the conclusion of the Assassin's Creed Unity campaign, but in reality to access the expansion it is enough to have completed the fourth game sequence, although proceeding in this way involves exposing yourself to some inevitable advances on the plot.

Once the package has been downloaded, the scenario that is the background to the new adventure appears on the map as a possible destination next to a carriage: it is the city of Saint-Denis, renamed "Franciade" during the period of the revolution, and it is the place where the remains of King Louis XVI were buried. Once he reaches the place, Arno goes to an appointment with the Marquis de Sade, who asks him to retrieve a mysterious manuscript kept inside the catacombs, right where the sovereign was buried. However, this is only the starting point of a story in which we will see Napoleon Bonaparte, now corrupted by his own power, we will come across a shrewd boy who will make us reflect on our role and finally we will explore one of the Precursor temples in search of a particular relic. The main storyline is well told, although a certain superficiality remains regarding the figures of de Sade and Napoleon, who play the simple role of extras in the plot., focused more on the "redemption" of Arno and on the discovery of artifacts that fans of the series are well aware of, rather than on the "fictional" study of the events of some historical figures who really existed. Of course, there is no doubt that a good portion of the narrative elements that most fascinated Assassin's Creed have been lost with the renunciation of the "contemporary" component, represented in the first episodes by Desmond Miles and his relationship with Abstergo Industries.

Between old and new

Being an expansion, Dead King does not introduce substantial changes compared to the mechanics that we appreciated in Assassin's Creed Unity, and that make the latest exponent of the Ubisoft franchise a solid and convincing episode, capable of remedying most of the limitations history of the series thanks to the introduction of much more difficult combat, well-differentiated weapons, a different approach to missions (more devoted to stealth than to head-on clashes) and a greater variety of the same.

An enhancement of the climbs was lacking and continues to be lacking, which have lost the puzzle element of their origins and which are therefore trivialized, despite the beauty of Parisian architecture and those, not to be underestimated, of Saint-Denis. The new scenario is reduced in size compared to the French capital, but still hosts a good amount of secondary missions in addition to the main storyline. A couple of quests pick up on the welcome theme of the investigations, with Arno having to study various clues to a murder before accusing the one he believes to be the culprit, while others rely on colorful characters entrusting us with certain tasks; or they are devoted to eliminating commanders surrounded by dozens of soldiers, tasks that will require attention and a pinch of strategy to be completed without incurring the game over. However, it is the Dead Kings campaign that constitutes the fulcrum of the experience and introduces the most interesting innovations, taking up the forays into the catacombs that had been seen in some previous chapters and mixing them with the resolution of simple environmental puzzles, based on the use of the lantern (an unprecedented object, which once turned on removes mice, bats and cockroaches to allow us to reach otherwise inaccessible areas) or on the activation of particular switches. In the catacombs there is also a new type of enemies, the workers employed for the excavations. These are relatively weak opponents if taken one at a time, but who bet on the number to overwhelm us should they find us. Their peculiarity, however, is to escape when their "supervisor" is killed, thus giving us the opportunity to resolve the clashes with a bit of cunning and in advance.

Dead Kings undoubtedly represents a welcome giveaway for Assassin's Creed Unity owners

Royal blood

If you have completed the Assassin's Creed Unity campaign, you will start Dead Kings with a special and particularly powerful weapon, and then come into possession of another highly effective tool, the Guillotine, which is a sort of rudimentary grenade launcher that can be used as a ax in hand-to-hand combat.

Both of these solutions, unfortunately, represent an obvious problem for the balance of difficulty, since the clashes end up resolving in a much faster way than when using the arsenal normally available in the base game. Among the various things that the developers had thought to make the Unity experience more complex, in fact, there was also a certain difficulty in finding money and a gradual increase in the costs of "consumables", including medicines, which basically prevented access to objects. too effective and therefore trivialize the new and more difficult system of parries and counterattacks (not to mention the simultaneous assaults of several enemies, also an important novelty compared to the polite waiting for one's turn seen up to Black Flag). In conclusion, you can certainly choose to tackle the Dead Kings missions with powerful weapons, but doing so by limiting yourself to less demanding equipment certainly makes the experience more interesting and challenging, forcing us to sneak in rather than throw ourselves into the fray with our heads down. Of course, that we wanted to "let our guard down" in this expansion is also evident from the disproportionate amount of money that can be found in the chests located in the catacombs, able to transform us into nabobs in the turn of some exploration and then return to Paris. to spend the money as we see fit, restoring the various cafes that are still blocked and buying everything the retailers have to offer.

PC System Requirements

Test Setup

Processor: AMD FX 8320
Scheda video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970 Jetstream
Memory: 8 GB of RAM
Operating system: Windows 8

Minimum requirements

Processor: Intel Core i5 2500K, AMF FX 8350
Scheda video: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 680, AMD Radeon HD 7970
Memory: 6 GB of RAM
Sistema operativo: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8, 64 bit

Recommended Requirements

Processore: Intel Core i7 3770, AMD FX 8350
Video card: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 780, AMD Radeon R9 290X
Memory: 8 GB of RAM
Sistema operativo: Windows 7 SP1, Windows 8, 64 bit

On the technical front

There is a lot of talk about glitches for Assassin's Creed Unity, and after all, the gratuitousness of Dead Kings is due precisely to the controversies, sometimes exaggerated, related to this aspect of the Ubisoft production. Increasing the interactions and the possibilities, as was done for this episode, never so full of NPCs and different situations, inevitably brings with it the risk of running into technical problems of various kinds, although the task of avoiding their occurrence is always up to and in any case to the development team.

That said, during our experience with the expansion, tested on PC, we never encountered any particular bugs, apart from some "anomalous" drop in frame rates within some buildings and an initial startup problem which, however, seems related to Uplay and solved by checking the installation files. Instead, we appreciated the atmosphere of Saint-Denis, the fog that often invades the streets and that marks the evening hours of the city, some of its architecture (in particular the Basilica) and clearly the entire underground area., less beautiful to look at but full of interesting facets in the final part of the story. The soundtrack once again highlighted a serious lack of personality, devoid of epic themes such as those of the first episodes of the series or the peculiarities of Black Flag, while the dubbing in Spanish seemed up to the situation. For the rest, it's back to square one: the expansion is free and the owners of Assassin's Creed Unity will download it regardless. But is this a value addition to the Ubisoft title, capable of increasing its attractiveness? Certainly yes, since it further enriches the offer, providing us with another five or six hours to spend in a new and fascinating location.