5 games you should totally try during the UPlay+ free trial

Assassin’s Creed: Chronicles

Including Chronicles here is kind of cheating because there are three of them. China, India and Russia were released in a ten-month span from April 2015 to February 2016. Unlike the rest of the Assassin’s Creed series, these games are 2.5D platformers that attempt to adapt the series’ trademark stealth mechanics into a flatter setting.

They don’t necessarily succeed. The Chronicles are a less fluid Mark of the Ninja, replete with explicit lines of sight and plenty of boxes and plants to hide in. However, movement in Chronicles is stilted and clunky and doesn’t allow for the fast-paced madness of Klei’s 2012 masterpiece. Using non-stealth weapons, like the Berdan rifle in Russia, is also super slow and throws the timing off the action.

The Chronicles are on this list purely for Assassin’s Creed completionists. The series has an incredibly deep lore and these games help to fill in some of the gaps that aren’t explored in the main games. Each game features a protagonist introduced in some other piece of Assassin’s Creed media and finally brings them and their time periods into the gaming world.

The time periods are interesting too! 16th century China, India under the British East India Company and Russia after the October Revolution could all be a lot of fun to play through and the weapons each protagonist is given could be spectacular in a 3D space, but 2.5D just doesn’t do these characters justice. Their stories are worth experiencing anyway, especially for free.