Summary
- Assassin's Creed 2 provided players with a challenging combat experience, requiring concentration and skill to navigate through enemies and survive.
- The original Assassin's Creed game still presents a surprising level of challenge due to its difficult controls and combat mechanics.
- Assassin's Creed Valhalla is a divisive entry in the franchise, with long, boring, and difficult missions that make it feel more challenging compared to other games in the series.
The Assassin’s Creed franchise has a huge list of games for a series that only began relatively recently, with twelve main entries in the franchise already released and available to gamers. There have been some tough challenges and some more accessible games over that time, with the style of the franchise and the focus changing a number of times.
Updated November 13th, 2023: The Assassin's Creed franchise is still keeping strong with new releases on the way. Despite the recent reception with the new Assassin's Creed: Mirage entry, the classic games still remain a thrilling, and sometimes difficult experience for gamers everywhere.
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While the Assassin’s Creed franchise games have all been made in an era when AAA games focused more on accessibility than providing challenges, there are still some games in the franchise that provide a great deal more challenge in missions and puzzles throughout than others.
6 Assassin’s Creed 2
The second game in the franchise is still regarded by many fans today as one of the very best, but it didn’t make the combat too easy for players. While the controls from the previous game had been improved upon, giving some players an easier time than they’d had before with the franchise, there was still quite a bit of a challenge when finding oneself surrounded by enemies.
Despite there being a wider variety of weapons, the counters still weren’t easy to hit, making some of the enemies especially difficult to tangle with. Some of the later entries would make it quite difficult for players to die, even against a swarm of enemies, but with a circle of Assassin’s Creed 2 enemies gathered around, players would have to concentrate to make it out or attempt a desperate escape. Even those could be challenging at times since there were some enemies able to keep up with and catch the legendary Ezio on the ground in a footrace.
5 Assassin’s Creed
The original Assassin’s Creed game was a fascinating play, which was filled with excitement and a fresh style of game that blended stealth with interesting combat and a crazy story. One of the things that it hadn’t quite mastered was the controls that would become native to the franchise. While later games, even the direct sequel Assassin’s Creed 2, would improve on them, they didn’t make some of the free-running and combat easy in the original game.
All of this means that despite there being many more challenging individual missions and enemies throughout later titles in the franchise, the original Assassin’s Creed still makes for a surprising level of challenge that players, unfortunately, don’t go back and revisit often anymore, having mostly moved the franchise to European settings over this original Asian one.
4 Assassin’s Creed Valhalla
Valhalla has become an entry in the Assassin’s Creed franchise that is hugely divisive among fans. Despite a grand open world and a sweeping story, there is much about Valhalla that doesn’t feel like an Assassin’s Creed entry. The switch to RPG comes with more runtime, but in much of Valhalla that leads to missions that are long, boring, and difficult, as well as having too much combat.
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Players can work around some of the difficulties in the main campaign missions by completing other tasks in between, as with most RPGs, but there is still a lot of grinding to be done throughout Valhalla’s elongated runtime, which makes it feel like more of an overall challenge than the majority of games in the Assassin’s Creed franchise.
3 Assassin’s Creed Odyssey
Another of the other recent entries focused more on the side of being a great RPG with a particularly dense map than a stealth game, Odyssey was another well-renowned game and had various difficulty options, but as an early attempt by the franchise to make an RPG-like game, it was hard to balance the difficulties right away.
Fortunately, players were able to lower the difficulty settings without experience points being affected, so this is one game that gave players a choice. In general, though, the normal difficulty settings that the game was auto-set to were much more difficult to tackle than other entries, particularly early in the game when most enemies couldn’t even be assassinated in one shot with the hidden blade.
2 Assassin’s Creed Origins
Assassin’s Creed Origins was the first game in the franchise to actively encourage players to remain stealthy throughout because the combat was difficult to the point where they were unlikely to survive if discovered in a lot of situations. Earlier Assassin’s Creed games usually made the stealthy aspects more of a choice in combat situations, and only required stealth to be kept throughout occasional quests.
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Instead, Origins made players really feel the consequences of discovery, prompting most players to focus a lot more on stealth. Despite being one of the bigger, more RPG-like games in the franchise, Origins may be the best of Assassin’s Creed games for stealth, and many still think it was better than either Odyssey or Valhalla.
1 Assassin’s Creed Unity
For some of the wrong reasons, Assassin’s Creed Unity is undisputedly the most difficult game in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Unity is set in a beautiful version of Paris during the French Revolution, which has been regarded as one of the best maps in the franchise. However, the game was criticized on release for difficult controls and glitches throughout the game.
While much of this has been fixed over time, Unity remains the hardest game in the franchise by far, particularly since attacks are much less damaging against most enemies than in other games that came both before and after. The way that players could drive through a series of enemies had vanished and meant that the combat became much more of a tedious grind for many players. Unity was an ambitious attempt to change much about the franchise, but it ended up irritating quite a number of fans by producing a far more challenging open-world stealth game.