Assassin’s Creed Recollection review

Which came first: the pacy and inventive collectable card game, or the thick coating of brand extension that’s been enthusiastically smeared on top? While Assassin’s Creed has undoubtedly raised the App Store profile of Recollection by several orders of magnitude, it’s also lumbered it with obscure jargon, unnecessary narrative, and a nasty, cluttered interface built of shifting layers of Animus grey. It’s a knife that cuts both ways, as Ezio Auditore might say, with much faux profundity.

As a CCG, though, Recollection remains extremely clever stuff: a tightly focused battler in which you use your deck to take control of various territories scattered throughout Renaissance Europe. At heart, it’s fairly straightforward. Agent cards can be dispatched to increase your influence points in specific regions or cancel out the gains of rival agents, while Site cards allow you to score a set amount of additional points every few minutes, and Action cards deliver a range of one-shot effects, either boosting your own hand or messing with your enemy’s. The twist, however, is that the whole thing plays out in real-time, adding a welcome dash of urgency to your scheming, and forcing you to consider the length of each move as well as the resources it will cost whenever you’re juggling your options.

The single-player campaign is fast-paced if rather unforgiving on occasion, and the online community is refreshingly vibrant given the game’s steep learning curve. Recollection’s only real problems exist in the form of a handful of irritating crash bugs and server disconnects, along with an unwelcome over-eagerness to drive you towards in-app purchases as you seek to bolster your sickly starter deck. The famous name may not add much to the overall experience, meanwhile, but if Ezio can convince more newcomers to make this their first CCG, it’s probably worth having him around. [7]