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Designed with last-gen consoles in mind, Assassin's Creed Rogue slipped under the radar somewhat owing to the controversy surrounding its Unity stable-mate's bugs, glitches and questionable performance. Built using the same technology behind Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag, Rogue may not deliver the same graphical punch as the next-gen Unity, but some might say that it offers a more liberating gameplay experience when freed from the shackles of on-land exploration. Perhaps more importantly, it doesn't suffer from as many bugs - even if it still features a few random glitches of its own, such as enemy characters disappearing in battle.Rogue was released late last year on Xbox 360 and PS3, but has only just made its way onto PC - as good an opportunity as ever to revisit a game we didn't have the resources to cover in the deluge of Q4 2014 releases, and to check out the last-gen engine's twilight outing on PC. Well, to cut to the chase, there's good news and there's bad news here: PC owners get to enjoy all of the engine enhancements made for the PC/Xbox One and PS4 versions of Black Flag - features that simply aren't present on the last-gen releases. However, of the existing versions, the Xbox 360 release falls a little short, with some bizarre visual downgrades that lead to poorer image quality, without necessarily bringing about a consistent increase in performance.
What's clear is that the PC version of Rogue offers up the most technically advanced Assassin's Creed experience out of the bunch. Plumes of volumetric smoke flood the screen when cannons and handguns are fired, leaving thick clouds floating across the battlefield (these elements are displayed as flat 2D alpha sprites on consoles), while physics-based foliage reacts with the wind and characters, swaying and bending when disturbed. The ocean is also graced with another layer of waves and shader effects compared to the 360 and PS3 versions, more realistically replicating how the water surface appears. All of these effects are enhancements to AnvilNext made for AC4's debut on current-gen consoles, added to the PC version by default and very welcome here in Assasin's Creed Rogue.
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