Assassin's Creed: Rogue Remastered (PlayStation 4) review "Basically a cut-n-paste of previous games in the series, but still a good time. "

While Assassin’s Creed Rogue is a very fun game, at least if you’re a fan of the series, a person could reasonably ask if it actually fills a necessary role. If you’re the sort of person who feels it is reasonable for one to expect sequels in a particular series to build upon prior entries, you won’t find that here. It’s more a collection of all the optional exploration and sandbox stuff that previous games had — but with a notably shorter story, so you’ll be spending far more time engaging in naval warfare or sacking forts or hunting down collectibles than advancing the story of protagonist Shay Cormac.

Really, if there’s one thing this game does that could be considered an original draw, it involves Shay’s story. He starts out the game as a young member of the Assassins in the mid-1700s, roughly coinciding with the French-Indian War. However, after an early-game mission goes horribly wrong with him inadvertently setting off a city-destroying earthquake, he finds himself at odds with his former comrades. And being at odds with a group of highly-trained and skilled killers isn’t necessarily the best of situations. However, he finds new friends, who wind up being affiliated with the long-standing adversaries of the Assassins known as the Templars. So there you go…instead of controlling an Assassin and killing Templars, you’ll control a Templar and kill Assassins.

In execution, this isn’t really much of a change, though. Roles tend to be mostly reversed, with the average Assassin in this game being either a jerk or involved in some shady stuff like being in charge of seemingly every criminal in a large city. Meanwhile, on the Templars, you’ll mostly associate with the noble-minded Colonel Monro and the affable rogue Christopher Gist, as well as part-time AC III protagonist Haytham Kenway. In short, Rogue is less about placing you in control of a legit villain protagonist and more about turning everything into a “shades of grey” conflict where you’re fighting to save the world from a potential cataclysmic blunder caused by Assassins fiddling with technology they can’t comprehend.

While playing, you’ll have the same sorts of missions that you’ve seen in prior games, although it did seem that those tracking and eavesdropping ones are far less frequent. Then again, that might be because this game only contains a total of six chapters, as opposed to the dozen or so present in III and IV. With fewer missions to perform overall, it does seem logical that there would be fewer containing those annoying “stay hidden or you fail” stipulations.

As I said previously, to make up for the short main quest, you have a huge amount of optional activities to take part in. The game is divided into three large regions: the city of New York, an ocean region much like the map of IV, but farther north and more icy, and a river region with narrower passageways for your boat to navigate to go with larger land masses. In each of those three places, you’ll get to gradually take over their zones by either conquering forts or taking over gang hideouts. And, of course, you’ll have plenty of other ships to battle in order to gain the materials necessary to improve your own vessel in the hopes of being able to challenge a handful of legendary ships.

Virtually all of these optional activities are things you’ve done in one or more earlier games in this series, whether we’re talking about animal hunting challenges or running down every damn sea shanty before the wind blows them away. However, there is one that’s a reversal of what previous protagonists regularly did. Instead of getting assassination quests to take out various Templar agents, you’ll now be intercepting those orders in order to protect the quarry by finding (ie: using your “assassin sense”) their prospective killers and taking them out before they accomplish their task.

Oh yeah! I nearly forgot. You also do have a few modern day segments that mostly play out like they did in IV — including using the exact same setting — where you control the Abstergo employee who’s discovering Shay’s memories and get to occasionally turn on a server or hack computers to get background information. Can’t imagine how I could almost forget to mention that. I mean, it’s as much of a nonstop thrill ride as one might imagine from the words “occasionally turn on a server” and “get background information”.

All of this puts Rogue in an interesting place. Despite the somewhat dismissive tone I feel I’ve taken where the past few paragraphs could be briefly summed up by just saying, “Ho hum, been there, done that…”, I did have a pretty great time, at least when controlling Shay. Over the last handful of years, I’ve become a big fan of this series and found Rogue to be more of what I like. Much like with IV, I did run out of steam before I’d fully upgraded my ship or done all the naval missions, but I did far more optional stuff in this game than I tend to before interest starts to fade. With this being the PS4 Remastered version, it looked really nice and it was a lot of fun to travel the world, liberate regions and find all the goodies.

In the end, I’d say that as far as pure gaming goes, I probably enjoyed Assassin’s Creed Rogue almost as much as I did IV, but it was pretty noticeable this game didn’t truly break any new ground. It was more like Ubisoft was contest to play all their hits, resulting in a game that’s a lot of fun, but completely non-essential to all but big fans of the Assassin’s Creed series determined to experience anything and everything attached to that name.

Staff review by Rob Hamilton (June 27, 2025) Rob Hamilton is the official drunken master of review writing for Honestgamers.