When comparing Assassin's Creed Unity vs L.A. Noire, the Slant community recommends L.A. Noire for most people. In the question“What are the best open world games on Steam?” L.A. Noire is ranked 32nd while Assassin's Creed Unity is ranked 35th. The most important reason people chose L.A. Noire is:
Every single character in the game looks true-to-life because of how their faces look and move. The developers used some neat motion scanning technology to capture the voice actors' faces as they gave their lines. You get to see every wrinkle, every shift of their jaw lines, and every twitch of their mouths as they speak and emote. There's so much attention to detail that it looks like you're watching a movie with real people. It's really stunning and stands out as a great example of advancing technology in video games.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Crouch walk finally implemented
Assassin's Creed Unity has finally added in a method for players to crouch-walk, allowing them to remain hidden going from cover to cover. It makes the stealth controls much more fluid, giving you the freedom to stalk your target from a closer distance instead of relying on you blending in with the crowd or staying on a rooftop. This was an often asked-for mechanic and is now finally implemented into the game series.
Pro Four-player online co-op
Assassin's Creed Unity features up to four player online co-op. You can join up with three other friends or get matched with others to play through certain assassination missions together.
Pro Intuitive stealth gameplay
The stealth mechanics feel natural and fluid in how strategic they are.
While tracking your targets, you blend in with each city's citizens or climb up to the tops of buildings to perch there and avoid getting spotted by the templar or their guards. You can either wait for the perfect opportunity to strike with a hidden blade up your sleeve that silently assassinates your target, or you can go all-out and have a sword duel with them if you'd rather take a more aggressive approach. After they're dead, you make your escape and become incognito again.
Everything goes together nicely in a way that feels satisfying.
Pro Impressive recreation of Paris to explore with buildings to climb freely
The city of Paris is beautifully done. The level is massive and dense with detail, with well-designed areas from the era such as towers, open plazas, religious buildings, and recognizable landmarks. You can climb anything, anywhere, and run along the rooftops as much as you want. Scaling the tallest places gives you an amazing bird's eye view of the city and the mountain ranges beyond, along with a vantage point to plan out how to assassinate your targets. The realistic architecture makes Assassin's Creed Unity feel like a true period piece set in Revolutionary Paris.
Pro Wide range of customization
There are lots of options to customize your character. You can change your weapons and your appearance, down to the individual hood that you prefer to wear. The sheer amount of things you can choose from is pretty impressive, helping you feel like your character is really your own.
Pro Incredibly realistic facial expressions
Every single character in the game looks true-to-life because of how their faces look and move. The developers used some neat motion scanning technology to capture the voice actors' faces as they gave their lines. You get to see every wrinkle, every shift of their jaw lines, and every twitch of their mouths as they speak and emote. There's so much attention to detail that it looks like you're watching a movie with real people. It's really stunning and stands out as a great example of advancing technology in video games.
Pro Great story set in 1940s Los Angeles
The detective drama in L.A. Noire is creative and intriguing. Playing as an honest cop named Cole, you get to see the magnitude of crime and racial tension in Los Angeles in the years after World War II, told through the stories of the authentic cast of characters you meet.
As a cop, you solve crimes and nail crooks, moving up the ladder in the police department. Each of your investigations take you all around the great rendition of the city in the 1940s, rich with the styles of cars, fashion, and music from the time period. It's a unique experience and setting that not many other games explore.
Pro Detailed crime investigation gameplay
Investigating crime scenes is great because of the attention to detail in each mission. Looking over murder victims for patterns in their wounds, for example, gives you an idea of how or why they might have died, which you then jot down in your handy notebook that keeps track of all the information you collect. Observing tire tracks, bloody murder weapons, business cards, and even picking through trash cans leads you to new clues to find and paths to follow. It's up to you to pick out which details may or may not be important, keeping you in control of where each investigation leads.
Pro Interrogating witnesses and suspects is a fun challenge
During investigations, you interrogate suspects in a cool, interactive way. After collecting clues, you use your notebook to decide which questions to ask witnesses and suspects. You read their facial expressions, body language, and their tone of voice to judge if they're telling the truth or not. Using your instincts to guess correctly gets the person to open up more, giving you the information you need. If you get it wrong, they shut you down and you're out of luck. The technology used for facial expressions gives you a lot of leeway to truly spot the shifty-eyed or nervous liars just like in real life.
Cons
Con Generic premise of a revenge story
The revenge story has been done to death, and Assassin's Creed Unity doesn't really add anything new here. From the beginning of the plot, you see some of the major cliches that often pop up in these types of tales. And while Arno's cause is just, it's hard to care on an emotional level about his mission to kill Paris' high-level templars. But if you're not one to care too much about stories in games, then you probably won't even notice that anything's off.
Con Unsatisfying ending that ends on a lame note
While the story itself is passable, the ending may leave a bad taste in your mouth. After a a generic final boss and an unnecessary and frustrating character death, things just end abruptly. There's no closure, and there isn't a real sense of satisfaction at the end of your journey.
Con More of the same
The gameplay of Assassin's Creed Unity is just more of the same from previous titles. If you've played one Assassin's Creed up to this point, you've pretty much played them all. It's the same type of revenge story of an assassin seeking out the templars, the same bloat of icons and little things to do across the map, with the same type of stealth gameplay, and the overall same structure to the missions. Aside from the new crouch mechanic, the customization, and the location in Paris, this is too similar to other games in the series.
Con No real consequences for failing to solve cases
Even if you continually mess up with the cases, you still get promoted in the police force. You could be the worst cop ever, making terrible decisions and getting yelled at by your superiors. But then in the next cutscene, your bosses tell you what a great job you did and that you're moving up to a more important department. It doesn't make any sense and gives you no reason to do your best during investigations.
Con The finale is bland
After all the excitement and gritty realism in the story, the final mission and the ending are a real drag in comparison. The momentum from the plot gets sucked out at the end as you play through an uninspired and predictable sequence of events. It looks too much like the developers phoned this part in for the sake of having an ending that wraps up everything nicely.
Con Not a lot to do in the big open world
L.A. Noire's open world in Los Angeles is huge, but there isn't much to do in it. There's a bunch of space that's just there for the sake of it. Sure, you can take on really short cases as side missions that you find around the map, like taking out bad guys that are about to rob a place, though that's about all you can do. Including period piece locations like jazzy clubs or laid-back diners to visit whenever could have been a lot of fun.