The Dead Kings DLC takes Assassin’s Creed: Unity somewhere the series has rarely gone before: underneath the streets as well as above them. Arno’s adventure in the dark and sometimes disorienting catacombs beneath Franciade changes up the established AC formula and provides some excellent opportunities for stealth, though Ubisoft once again fails to prop it up with a solid narrative.
What most surprised me about this first DLC pack (other than its apologetic price tag of $0) is the sheer size of it. I'm not only referring to the scope and scale of the new city of Franciade (modern-day Saint-Denis), but also to how densely packed its streets, rooftops, graveyards, and catacombs are with new missions, activities, and collectibles.While the new location itself is large - easily one-fourth the size of Ubisoft's Paris and bigger than the starting area of Versailles - the above-ground sections don't feel all that different from the areas that we left behind in Paris. Arno will still shove his way through the same crowds of repeated NPCs (that occasionally float over one another) and clamber over similar rooftops, so the only thing that separates these streets from those in Paris are the permanently overcast skies and a haunting layer of fog that blankets the city. It provides an interesting new aesthetic, but I was glad to see the familiar setting disappeared almost entirely once I descended into the labyrinthine tunnels that make up two of Franciade's five districts.
Exploring the maze-like crypts and catacombs of Dead Kings is, at least at first, both entertaining and a refreshing spin on Unity's gameplay. These subterranean areas are much larger than I expected, and the tight, narrow passageways that give way to huge underground caverns help create a genuinely tense feeling of never knowing what’s around the next corner. Couple that with some of the simple-yet-satisfying puzzles found underground, and I half-expected Arno to don a whip and fedora and start grumbling about Atlantis.
However, some of the winding corridors and overlapping pathways of this decidedly unique setting make it a bit too easy to get lost in the darkness, even when using map waypoints. After finding myself hopelessly lost for the fourth or fifth time, I realized that I had no desire to return to the underworld of Franciade after completing the main story missions (aside from my borderline compulsive need to collect everything).The story certainly didn’t give me a reason to replay the new missions. Dead Kings’s plot spends its roughly two hours focused on Arno retrieving an artifact from deep within the tombs beneath Saint-Denis for the Marquis de Sade, but this simple heist becomes much too complicated much too quickly. Former allies become enemies with hardly any explanation, supernatural forces appear, and Arno even has his very own annoying Robin-style kid sidekick. It almost feels like four or five different storylines were shoehorned into one.
Even so, these story missions provide some of the best stealth segments in recent Assassin’s Creed history, due in large part to the addition of a new enemy Raider faction. These treasure hunters for hire are individually weak, but only appear in large groups. The only way to avoid fighting each and every Raider is to locate and assassinate the group leader (or spending hours painstakingly avoiding detection). A foreman's death will cause the rest of the group to panic and scatter, which allows you to freely explore each cave and cavern. That’s a great incentive that created several exciting cat-and-mouse moments in almost every mission.Dead Kings also whips up some new equipment for your Assassin's arsenal, and they feel specifically engineered to deal with these new threats. Items like the Guillotine Gun, with all the functionality of an axe duct-taped to a grenade launcher, provide fun and unique (and loud) solutions to the new combat scenarios. I'll admit that as a stealth-minded player I found it essentially useless while sneaking, but I can't deny the satisfying feeling of sending a whole group of flaming Raiders soaring through the air with one well-placed mortar bomb.
Unfortunately, Dead Kings also introduces a refillable lantern which, outside of serving as an obscure plot device, is overused as a tool for navigating and unlocking many sections of the underground passages. While the use of fire and light adds a few clever puzzles to later missions, I couldn't help but roll my eyes every time I had to pull out my lantern just to scare away a group of roaches so that I could climb to the next ledge.
