Mechanics

Three earning systems sit alongside the campaign, and the useful way to tell them apart is to ask what happens when one goes wrong. One of them cannot go wrong at all. One costs you a few minutes and a retry. The third can take something away permanently, which is easy to miss given that it is running on a phone rather than on the console.

Property, which cannot fail

Buying into Paris is the surest money of the three and the slowest to notice. Our fast money guide puts renovation first: work through the Cafe Theatre's own errands, renovate cafes across the city, then start picking up Social Clubs, beginning in the cheaper quarters such as Faubourg and moving into the wealthier ones once the early ones are paying.

The part worth knowing is the strongbox in the Intendant's Study at the Cafe Theatre, which takes a deposit every twenty minutes and keeps doing so whether or not you are doing anything. Leave the game sitting for a few hours and the notification that it is full will be waiting. Nothing is at stake here, which is exactly why it should be set up early: once the deeds are yours the income needs no attention at all. The five errands that unlock the place are in our Paris side missions guide.

The same page makes two spending arguments alongside the earning ones. Buying weapon after weapon is called out as a luxury, because damage on a blade you already like can be raised instead. Lockpicking, by contrast, is worth every rank, since the red Templar-protected chests scattered around the map scale their contents with their difficulty. The figure quoted from fifteen or more of them is around 5,000 livres each, with 6,500 the best single haul recorded.

Rifts, where failure costs a retry

Three Server Bridge missions in the main campaign open up the modern-day layer, and from there the Brotherhood is rescued through simulations set in several eras. Our Helix Rifts strategy guide walks the Belle Epoque, Occupied Paris and Medieval sets one by one. The structure is the same every time: a score target and a countdown at the top of the screen, a trapped ally to free once the target is beaten, and a portal to reach before the clock runs down.

Scoring rewards route planning rather than combat. The guide's advice is to commit to a line through the clusters instead of detouring for isolated pickups, and to treat guards as optional bonuses rather than obstacles, since a running Arno is difficult to pin down.

Each set has its own nuisance. A cyclone wanders the Belle Epoque map and knocks Arno flat on contact, taking a little health and a couple of seconds of recovery with it. Occupied Paris runs on searchlights, and the enemies there carry firearms that can desynchronise you outright, so anticlockwise laps of the tower that stay out of the beam are the recommended route. The Medieval quarry throws a boulder down the run and wants you behind a wall when it passes, while its battlefield marks incoming projectiles with red circles on the ground. None of it takes anything away for good. The ally's position is randomised in most of these, the quarry being the exception where he is waiting directly in front of the exit, and the data harvest at the back end of a Rift is the part that actually pays.

The phone, where failure is permanent

Only one system here can take something away for good. Our companion app guide splits it in two. The first half is glyph hunting: rotate a piece of architecture, burn a limited Eagle Vision pulse, and tag as many symbols as the pulse exposes at that angle before it fades. Running out of pulses is harmless, since the puzzle can be restarted for nothing or extra pulses can be bought, and every solved glyph pays in-app currency and opens a batch of Nomad missions.

The second half is where the risk lives. Nomad missions are resolved on odds rather than on skill. Assigning recruits fills a success bar, and anything short of a full bar carries a chance of failure, which returns nothing and kills the assassins you sent, with no way to get them back. Heal them before they go out, match them to the stats a mission asks for, and accept that the better recruits cost more in-app currency to hire. Brotherhood capacity starts at four and only grows when you synchronise more viewpoints in the main game, so a bad roll early is genuinely expensive.

Feeding the app at all requires work on the console side, Nomad Points earned in play, investment in the theatre and clubs, and viewpoints opened to widen the recruiting map. What comes back is delivered into the main save: chests, artifacts and companion missions, with the first two collectable either in the app or by walking Arno to them. Each set of missions can be run up to three times, giving something different each time. Those artifacts are not decoration either. Finishing a district's collection is the unlock condition on one Tailored Bourgeois piece in each of the five body slots, one of the doors into the ladder that our gear and unlocks guide prices up, and the Bisento and the Heavy Cleaver come the same way once Les Invalides and Le Louvre are cleared.

Running all three at once

The sensible order follows the risk. Set the property up first so it accrues in the background, treat the Rifts as a short top-up you can run in a spare few minutes, and touch the Nomad roster only when the success bar is full. Where all three lead is priced out on our Assassin's Creed Unity hub.