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Editor's note: This is an impressions piece on Assassin's Creed Chronicles: India, the second of a three part series. In accordance with our review policy, we'll be posting a full review once all episodes are out.Surely the most enjoyable aspect for anyone working on the Assassin's Creed series, Ubisoft's time-travelling murder tourism franchise, is imagining to what era and continent the series should travel next. Every history book offers a host of alluring options: feudal Japan, gangster-land Chicago, Soviet Russia. It's fun to imagine how the series' characteristics of quasi-historical spy-craft and weaponised parkour might translate to the architecture and culture of any particular time and place.
Turning the thought into a commercial product is another thing entirely, however. Assassin's Creed games might arrive with reliable and wearying regularity but they are costly mass productions and must, therefore, favour only popular destinations: Renaissance Italy, Ripper-era London and so on. Chronicles, an emerging trilogy of digital spin-offs, of which this is the second entry following 2015's sojourn to 16th century China, are more modestly produced and priced affairs that therefore offer the chance to visit some less worn points in time and space. So here we arrive at Amritsar in Northern India in the 1840s, where the British-run East India company is at war with the Sikh Empire, a skirmish that presents an opportunity for Arbaaz Mir, assassin and diamond thief.
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