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Revolutionary Paris asks for more than livres. Work through the unlock conditions on Arno's wardrobe and his armoury and you find a list that keeps stepping outside the console: a body slot filled by a phone app, a polearm handed over by Assassin's Creed Initiates rather than by a shop, a hood that only exists if somebody else joins your session, a waistcoat sealed inside a DLC pack. That is the shape of this game, and it is the shape of this page. Everything below is grouped by how much of the world outside single player each thing needs, starting with the parts you can finish sitting alone with a controller.
What Arno can finish on his own
The strongest side content here is the detective work, and it is the deepest thing we have written up. Fourteen investigations are solved in our murder mysteries walkthrough, each one a list of physical clues and witness statements followed by the explanation underneath. Some are domestic, like the poisoned cocoa in Hot Chocolate to Die for; some are historical set pieces, like the stabbing in the bath that closes The Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat. They are worth doing correctly the first time, because a clean accusation pays more than a corrected one.
The riddle chains are the other solo obsession. Our Nostradamus Enigma solutions take each of the eighteen chains from its opening verse to its final symbol, sending you to the base of the rose window at Notre Dame, into the Temple crypt, under the Luxembourg Gardens and along the Champs-Elysees. The payoff is a sealed chamber in the basement of the Cafe Theatre mansion, behind three separate locks: a symbol-matching puzzle, a switch sequence that wants ten Fragments, and a steam-blasted climb that wants eighteen.
Around those sit the property errands on Ile Saint-Louis, five of them in our Cafe Theatre missions guide, which is what gives Arno the hideout that basement sits under. The optional Paris work is set out together in our side missions and co-op guide, and the loot it produces is catalogued in the weapons unlock list, a hundred and ten blades and firearms across five classes.
What needs somebody else in the session
Eleven operations are built for a group, from a rooftop break-in at the Grand Chatelet to sabotaging a line of cannons at the end of Women's March, and they are covered in our co-op missions guide. Bringing people changes the design rather than just the difficulty: escorts need one player silencing an alarm bell while another walks the target out, a hedge maze wants somebody calling directions from the ropes above it, and a sewer escape needs three gates opened, two of them buried inside heavily guarded zones.
It also changes what you own afterwards. Thirty-three pieces of equipment exist only as co-op payouts, three per operation, and they run from the first Handmade belt all the way up to Legendary. There is no shop entry for any of them and no livres price attached. Heists on the same side of the game pay a set amount for finishing, with a large extra payment for getting through one without being seen.
What needs a second screen
Unity shipped with a phone app that behaves like a small strategy game of its own, and our companion app guide covers both halves of it. You rotate a building and spot glyphs on it with timed Eagle Vision pulses, which earns in-app currency, then spend that currency on a roster of assassins who are sent out on missions resolved by dice rather than by skill. Send them at less than full odds and they can die for good.
What comes back crosses into the main save. Chests and artifacts can be collected in either place, and completed mission sets are repeatable three times over for a different prize each go. The clearest sign of how deep the hook goes is in the wardrobe: there is a Tailored Phantom piece for every one of the five body slots, and the app is the only thing that unlocks them. Artifact collections do the same job for a matching Bourgeois set and for a pair of weapons.
What needs an account rather than a skill
Then there is the gear that never asks you to play well at all. Three starting-grade pieces are listed as Ubisoft Club rewards, and at the far end of the catalogue twenty-seven Legendary items give a Club reward as the alternative to a six-figure price tag. Two weapons came from Assassin's Creed Initiates, four more from Club Competitions, one from an Uplay reward, and another twenty-two arrive with DLC packs or pre-orders. Our outfits and equipment list records the condition on every one of them, and our gear and unlocks guide explains the Creed Points bill that lands afterwards no matter which door a piece came through.
The fourteen outfits are a good illustration, since they are cosmetic and stack over whatever you are actually wearing. Four are guest costumes from earlier games found in chests around Paris, one is the reward for finishing every main story sequence, two belong to a DLC pack, and one is waiting behind the Nostradamus chamber. Another is the prize for collecting every artifact in the modern-day simulations.
What happens outside the animus
Three Server Bridge missions in the campaign open the present-day layer, where the job is to gather data and cut loose the assassins trapped inside the simulation. Our Helix Rifts guide handles the Belle Epoque, Occupied Paris and Medieval runs one at a time: a score target, a countdown, data to sweep up on a planned line, and a fellow assassin to cut loose before the portal. Belle Epoque has a cyclone touring the map, Occupied Paris has searchlights over gunmen, and the Medieval runs throw a rolling boulder and incoming projectiles at you. A bad run costs you the attempt and nothing else, and the data harvest that follows each one is described as the part that makes real money.
Paying for it
Two currencies are in play and they are earned in completely different ways. Livres buy gear and blades outright, and our fast money guide ranks the reliable sources: renovated cafes and Social Clubs bought cheap in Faubourg first, the strongbox in the Intendant's Study that tops itself up every twenty minutes, Templar-protected chests worth roughly five thousand apiece once your Lockpicking is high enough, co-op heists, and the data harvests at the end of a Rift. Creed Points, meanwhile, are what upgrade gear, raise weapon damage and buy those Lockpicking ranks, and every one of the hundred and ninety-five equipment pieces has a Creed Points figure attached. The wider picture, and the argument for setting your property up before anything else, is in our systems guide.
The Dead Kings expansion
Ubisoft handed the expansion out free to everyone who owned the game, and it moves Arno out to the graveyards and the Cemetery District of Franciade. Its collectible chain mirrors the main game's riddles at smaller scale: our Suger Legacy symbols guide works through five optional sets of three verses each, past a plague street, a windmill, a balefire and a sunflower window on the Basilica, and notes that two further sets arrive through the story and cannot be skipped. Finish the optional ones for the Eagle of Suger sword and the Defender of Franciade award. Two more outfits sit in chests out there, a third comes from one of the expansion's own missions, and a fourth is paid out for a Napoleon-themed collectible hunt.
When it will not run
Unity is a resource-hungry game and the PC build came with a list of its own problems, so our performance and crash fixes page is the place to start when it misbehaves. It works through eleven numbered problems, among them the 0xc000007b failure to start, which usually means a broken .Net framework install, save files that keep corrupting, which is worth attacking by reinstalling Uplay and switching cloud sync off, and the stutter that clears up when a laptop is plugged in and using its dedicated video memory. For frame rate specifically, TXAA and the soft shadow options are the first two to switch off, and dropping Vsync is described as doubling the frame rate at the cost of a blurry picture.
Pick whichever thread matches what you have available tonight. A controller and an evening gets you the murder cases and the enigmas; a group gets you the gear ladder; a phone gets you the Phantom set. None of it is locked behind the others.