Finally got to experience my childhood dream.
By Ameer Ammar
I’ve been playing AC since I was 7 years old on AC1. I would literally dream about how cool it would be to parkour and be an Assassin, especially in Renaissance Italy. AC Nexus allowed me to basically live that childhood dream, in an overall flawed but very fun game.
It can’t be understated just how freaking cool it is to embody an Assassin in VR and have that work. From the second I first used a hidden blade, I knew I was about to have the time of my life regardless of the actual quality of this game.
AC Nexus is split across three protagonists: Ezio, Connor, and Kassandra. It should come as no surprise that the Ezio memories by far are the strongest. One of them is a faithful remake of the entirety of Monterigonni post-Brotherhood, which was incredible to just run around in and explore, especially as we never really got context on what happened to that city after the Borgias, but this game gives us that.
The rest of Ezio's missions all take place in beautiful Venice, which is a parkour haven. It never got old to traverse these levels and do some assassinations. Connor’s missions are almost as good as Ezio’s. It feels like Connor may have been the devs’ favorite out of the protagonists as he gets what feels like the most amount of story between the three, and his levels are pretty big and varied, across Boston, swamps, and New Rhodes Island. Kassandra’s levels, in my opinion, were the weakest. Like AC Odyssey itself, these levels don’t complement the parkour design at all for the most part, and as a result, I wished I could skip them. I ended up nearly 100%'ing all Ezio's levels and most of Connor's, but not even close to doing that in Kassandra's. I wish the developers went with Edward instead of Kassandra as being able to sail a ship would've been an incredible addition to this game.
It’s kind of crazy how AC Nexus is the most complete “Classic AC” experience in many respects of the last generation of AC games. It has a proper modern day that’s exciting and utilizes the VR format in a genius way, especially the ending which did something that only AC could pull off in this format. There’s social stealth and it works exactly like how you imagine, tailing missions, assassinations, but unfortunately the combat is the weakest link of the gameplay. Combat here is pretty disappointing, not relying on physics which the best VR melee games utilize, but instead Nexus employs a system of basic counters and attacks that get repetitive quite fast. Thankfully, combat can be avoided for most of the game as the stealth works great and is the most fun part by far.
All these mechanics coming together in the VR format manage to satisfy that fantasy of being an Assassin, stalking your prey, free running across rooftops, and getting the jump on your target.
It is a shame that AC Nexus misses the mark in some major aspects however. First, the stories of Kassandra, Ezio, and Connor are just bland. There’s not enough screentime to be attached to anything going on, and Connor’s story especially suffers from this as I completely forgot what was happening because of how much gap there is between missions as you are constantly swapping protagonists. Ezio suffers the least from this because his side cast is all established characters from his games, so it worked out better there. Ezio/Connor/Kassandra are all voiced by their original voice actors which is just fantastic, these guys have always nailed it especially the legendary Roger Craig Smith as Ezio. The modern day is the only story here that was genuinely interesting as it’s constant and does not take breaks as each protagonist does, Shawn and Rebecca are back here and finally get something to do post Desmond games, and the antagonist Dominika is the first time in years that MD has had an interesting rival to the Assassins.
Replaying this game but doing each protagonist on their own would likely result in a much better-told story, which I likely will do on a replay. The constant switching of protagonists definitely let the story down of each one.
Another major flaw is that Nexus has a real level of jankiness at times where simple things like mantling randomly don’t work, messing up parkour far more often than I would like. It’s such a constant presence and issue that it drops the game a whole point. When everything works, it really works beautifully, but when these issues happen, especially since it’s in VR rather than on a flat screen, it can be seriously infuriating.
The visuals are beautiful on my Meta Quest 3, its running natively on the headset so obviously its no Half-Life Alyx but they are seriously great visuals considering this whole console runs on a mobile chipset, the main flaw here is character models which don't look good at all, especially when compared to their original games but this was something I was willing to overlook considering its in VR, I still do wonder what a photorealistic Venice would've looked on here though.
FINAL VERDICT
Overall, AC Nexus is a fun game that’s a must-play for AC fans who have always been looking to live that Assassin fantasy. There’s nothing like it. However, as a game, it has some major flaws such as jankiness and a weak storyline outside of modern day. I can see a sequel doing wonders if that ever happens.
AC NEXUS - 7.5/10 - GOOD