Assassin’s Creed Nexus review: an exciting addition to a blockbuster franchise

There’s a moment, early in Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR, when you’ll walk onto a small balcony in Venice and survey a bustling scene below. Decorations are everywhere—a festival is taking place—and people line the streets, chit-chatting, going about their daily business. Fireworks launch into the sky. This place has a buzz, an energy, indicating the world we’ll inhabit in this addition to the smash-hit franchise will feel busy and lived in. Lots of VR games in the present era present empty environments echoing with solitude; it’s clear this isn’t going to be one of them. 

As Assassin’s Creed fans would know, the worlds we enter are historical recreations powered by the Animus, which is in effect a virtual reality machine, making the game another twist on the simulation-inside-a-simulation concept (see also: Superhot, Virtual Virtual Reality, Accounting+, Job Simulator). If you’re unfamiliar with the franchise, which has pumped out more than two dozen installments since the first arrived in 2007, think of the 2011 movie Source Code, starring Jake Gyllenhall as a hero who returns to a simulation of the past to find the identity of a terrorist.

Before entering these recreations we arrive in a sterile-white environment: a kind of virtual waiting room or meeting space, where we’re briefed about the impending mission. Sometimes, in order to activate the mission, the game switches from virtual reality to mixed reality, displaying objects and basic puzzles in our physical world space. Released at a time when colour passthrough headsets were a relatively fresh novelty, this gimmick brought some wow factor, despite feeling detached from the main experience. It’s an interesting challenge: how do you introduce a mixed reality element into a virtual reality production in a way that feels seamless, or at least germane to the broader experience? 

The characters and worlds we inhabit are Ezio Auditor, in Renaissance Italy; Kassandra, in Ancient Greece; and Connor Kenway, in Colonial America. Scrambling the storylines reduces the clarity and impact of a single, continuous narrative, but the location changes are welcome. 

Nexus isn’t an open world game, but contains explorable neighbourhoods that offer a fair amount of room (through which we can parkour) while pushing the drama into contained spaces. About an hour and half in, during Connor’s narrative, we arrive at a wharf town that includes an underground prison, a large office-like building from which letters are retrieved, and a ship with a person to assassinate on it. At another point, as Ezio, we visit Venice, where the citizens are gearing up for the “Carnivale”—the festival mentioned above. 

There are some highly effective examples of space being blocked off and used for dramatic purposes. In the opening minutes, for instance, we emerge through a series of tunnels and see, through a locked iron gate in an inaccessible area, a woman in a canal speaking to a servant. You can keep walking, but chances are you’ll stop and listen to her conversation, in which she hurriedly declares “I must leave the city tonight!” This small touch heightens our excitement and infers a politically fraught world around us. 

During another early moment, navigating a series of underground passages, we can look up and, through the slits of the floorboards above, observe the person we’re chasing, and hear them speaking to their guards. These touches convey narrative information without having to deal with our behaviour within the scene—particularly the possibility that we might simply walk away. Many experiences address this challenge by cheating: freezing the player on the spot, breaking immersion by rendering us impotent and immobile. 

One scene in Nexus, during which we survey a city in smoking ruins, got me contemplating how the famous “suspension of disbelief” process extends beyond narrative implausibilities into environmental details. When a particular plot event strains credulity, so the logic goes, we apply some generosity and push aside nitpicking, applying a protective layer to the imaginative universe. This process can also be applied to unimpressive graphics. The look and textures of Nexus may be impressive within a particular context—the limited hardware capability of the Quest 2 and Quest 3 headsets—but there’s no getting around that the graphics, generally speaking, are pretty crummy.

The more we study the aforementioned scene, the more we can see that the smoke is just some tufts of grey, and nothing looks genuinely destroyed. But at first blush, we get it; we know this is a city in smoking ruins. Suspending disbelief helps us remain immersed. It’s harder to do this when we’re being asked to actively participate in the game universe—and the poorer the activity gets, the harder this becomes. Many reviews of Nexus have rightly pointed out that the combat gameplay is very disappointing: fidgety, clumsy, unengaging. Why didn’t the game’s publisher, Ubisoft, headhunt people who worked on Blade & Sorcery, or at least find ways to emulate its far smoother and more satisfying sword fighting? 

Despite its flaws, including a piecemeal narrative that never truly sparks, Nexus kept me engaged throughout its 15-ish hour runtime. More impactful than any of the game’s individual achievements or missions is an overarching scent of possibility; a sense of where AAA VR games might be headed. Nexus proposes a future that’s not all that different, in many respects, to console games—but it’s nevertheless exciting.