I've found time the last two weeks to play and complete Assassin's Creed: Rogue. I've played all of the AC games and I do enjoy playing in the beautiful locations the teams at Ubisoft create, but the same problems that have persisted throughout the series exist in Rogue as well: no challenge in combat, little to no stealth missions, audio/visual bugs, meaningless upgrades, and mechanics and game systems that the player is never encouraged to use.
The combat in Assassin's Creed games have always been a weak point. The simplicity of simply countering and "insta-killing" enemies presents no sense of danger to the player, and enemies become a nuisance rather than a threat. Rogue introduced a new element into the combat, smoke bombs used by enemies, which provided a refreshing change to combat that almost killed me a few times when I took on too many guards at once. As soon as I was getting comfortable with this new combat mechanic, however, the player receives an item that completely negates this power of the enemy: a bandanna that acts as a gas mask, allowing players to walk through the smoke and attack enemies within the radius of the smoke.
Rogue also introduced a new enemy type: the Assassins. These enemies hide in plain sight, waiting for the player to pass them before launching a surprise attack. Failing to counter in time reduces the player's health nearly completely, but the overpowered health regeneration keeps the player from ever truly feeling in danger.
Stealth has always been a controversial part of the AC series as well, and Rogue makes no attempt to hide it's roots as an action game. While Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag missions that forced players to use stealth, I can only recall Rogue have a few, all of which were incredibly easy to complete. Shay Cormac is the most openly aggressive protagonist of the AC series, and his missions suited his character well. Unfortunately, focusing solely on combat is not AC's strong suite.
The AC series has also always been plagued by pop-up textures and glitched audio ques. In my experience with the series, Rogue had the most immersion-breaking bugs. Lines of dialogue couldn't keep up with the pace of the cutscenes, some characters would fall silent when the subtitles would change to their following lines, and some character models would even become invisible during cutscenes!
I believe the best aspect of Rogue is the ship combat, which takes the successful formula from AC III and IV and adds small but interesting changes. The addition of icebergs and blizzards make combat even more intense by limiting maneuverability and visibility, and the new puckle gun allows for more direct targeting while the other weapons are on their cooldowns. The superb ship combat is what kept me coming back to Assassin's Creed: Rogue, and hopefully Ubisoft makes another AC game that focuses on naval warfare.
