Following adventures in the new world and on the high seas, Unity marks a return to the familiar for Assassin’s Creed – a bustling city steeped in history, culture and handily placed wall protrusions. The series’ leap to more capable hardware also brings with it plenty of welcome additions, most obviously its ability to present an enormous increase in population, which really bring the chaos of the French revolution to life.

Assassination missions offer numerous inventive ways to dispatch targets while encouraging patience and keen observation skills. The expansive drop-in multiplayer mode is woven seamlessly into the adventure too, featuring unique side stories that feed into the grand, big-picture, alternative history tale.

Equally, the late 18th-century Parisian architecture is a breathtaking sight to behold, presented on a vast scale and, as is usual for the series, fully interactive, from cellar to steeple. All of which comes at a price, however. The game engine is crippled by this ambition and suffers from numerous glitches and an unstable frame rate that smacks of an unfinished product.

The new “free-run down” mechanic fails to work as intuitively as might be expected too. An exceptionally ambitious title, then, that aims high, but that feels like it’s a few patches away from really hitting its mark.