Ubisoft's Misguided Attempt at Promoting Assassin's Creed: Unity with Four Minute Snuff Film

Hype is building for Ubisoft’s upcoming title Assassin’s Creed Unity. So, of course, Ubisoft enlisted the help of Rob Zombie and The Walking Dead illustrator Tony Moore to create an animated short showcasing the terrors of the French Revolution. This was done to…uh…preface the story of the game. Maybe? It isn’t clear because assassins don’t really feature into the short at all. In fact, I’m not sure if they got around to introducing the good guys here. Rich people let poor people starve, then poor stab the rich people in their eyes, then Robespierre comes to power and starts killing everyone, and then he gets killed. Geez guys, spoiler alerts. Some of us haven’t gotten to that page in our history textbook yet. Oh, and at some point a guy’s face gets ripped off. And there is a lot of blood. And maybe an assassin in there somewhere. I’m not positive on that last part yet, though. It was hard to see through all the blood, honestly.

The very end of the video shows an assassin on a rooftop watching all of the madness unfold like some sort of creepy peeping tom. Good job being late to the party, Mr. Assassin, but you already missed an angry mob rip a man’s face off. The way he’s positioned makes it looks like he’s been there the entire time, like he saw the mob tearing at the man’s face and just thought to himself, “Eh, maybe I’ll just wait this one out.” He’s just thrown on the end there like an afterthought, and it feels like Rob Zombie finished the first four minutes of the short before he was like, “Wait…what was I supposed to be doing again?” The assassin is hinted to be part of some larger secret history, but unless that history involves cleaning up the tsunami of blood that seems to be filling the streets of France, he doesn’t look like he’s that involved in anything that is going on here.

It makes me wonder what the whole point of this was supposed to be. Was it to get me excited for Assassin’s Creed Unity? Throwing in the world’s laziest assassin at the end of a four minute snuff film just makes me confused with what his role is supposed to be. He looks to be just overseeing all of this madness and isn’t in any sort of rush to correct anything. “I’ll wait until this mob is less angry and more mildly perturbed,” he seems to be saying. Was it to remind me the French Revolution was bloody and terrifying? Thanks, but I figured anything that had a period known as the “Reign of Terror” was most likely not exactly smooth saying the entire time. Was it to remind me Rob Zombie most likely has a murder shack in his backyard? After seeing House of 1,000 Corpses, I have never stopped thinking otherwise. It all just seems to be a showing of violence for the sake of violence, which is great and all but I have no idea why this is meant to get me excited to purchase Assassin’s Creed Unity. They might as well just showed me a four minute excerpt from a documentary on the History Channel and crudely pasted a picture of an assassin over the last frame as it would’ve been just as an effective marketing tool and it would involve considerably less eye stabbing.

I hope Unity winds up being better than this short. I mean, it couldn’t possibly be worse. And if you would like more images of eye ball stabbing, please contact your local police station and let them know you are a sociopath.