Tag: Ubisoft

Feature

The Division doesn’t want you to think about 9/11

When I entered Ubisoft’s The Division press event on February 2nd in New York, I was greeted by a display of an NYPD patrol car that had crashed into a lightpost, with smoke bellowing from its engine and its lights still flashing. Machines in the rafters vigorously blanketed the room in snow. Caution tape separated visitors from the staff-only areas. A street marker for Madison Avenue with a “Closed” sign attached to it overlooked the game’s demo stations. A Do Not Enter sign sat in the distance. I had entered a New York that felt like it had been thrown into…
News

We watched Ubisoft’s 30-minute The Division short so you wouldn’t have to

When Assassin’s Creed II was released in 2009, it was accompanied by a 35-minute live-action YouTube miniseries titled Assassin’s Creed: Lineage. Low-budget, hokey, free-to-watch, and largely peripheral to the story of Assassin’s Creed II, the miniseries’ promotional nature was clear, but the sheer length and novelty of the project gave it a sort of “official fan film” charm that made it seem at the least harmless. It wasn’t revolutionary television by any means, but the glorified cosplay nature of the project made it difficult to stay mad at it. Seven years later, after a whole generation of live-action trailers, a…
Review

Rainbow Six Siege isn’t happy playing pretend soldiers

I unfurl a breaching charge like a gift, placing its sealed canvas against a boarded-up wall and letting the adhesive do its work. I huddle flat against a clear section of the same wall, switching the zoom on my scope, and pull the trigger. The glorified garment bag of an explosive bursts in fire and shrapnel, cleaving a roughly man-shaped hole through the splintered wood. I peek through, inching my crosshairs into the opening, watching for motion. My teammates circle around the other side, preparing their own breach using not an explosive but the messy precision of a sledgehammer, courtesy…
Review

The gorgeous, empty dystopia of Anno 2205

Beginning with its first release, Anno 1602: Creation of a New World (1997), the Anno series has distinguished itself from a crowded field of strategy games by making economic competition, rather than military action, the focus of its simulation. Though Anno looked to the past for the first decade of its existence, the series turned towards the near-future with the excellent Anno: 2070 (2011), which tread new “historical” ground in familiar, materialist footwear. Anno 2205, the latest release in Ubisoft’s dependable series, picks up where 2070 left off; humanity is on the verge of interplanetary colonization and a rush for…