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Editor's note: This is an impressions piece on Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China, the first of a three part series. In accordance with our review policy, we'll be posting a full review once all episodes are out.How do you maintain a sense of cohesion and unity across a video game series that straddles continents, centuries and, in Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China (the first in a new trio of 2.5D, side-scrolling stealth games) even physical dimensions? Developers Climax begins, wisely, for a game of weaponised parkour, with consistency of movement. Your character, Shao Jun, a former concubine of the Emperor Zhengde, has a familiar range of nimble abilities. She can sprint, skulk, wrestle, clamber and dangle (before dropping, knife extended, onto the back of an unsuspecting guard) in much the same way as the other Assassin's Creed stars. No surprise: she was, according to the somewhat implausible backstory, trained by Ezio Auditore, the famous Italian assassin who has fronted the series four times to date.
At the start of the game Jun returns to China, which, in the mid-1500s, is witnessing the collapse of the Ming dynasty. As well as sharing muscle memory with the brotherhood of Ubisoft's assassins, Jun also shares their taste for vendetta. "Until you have experienced the thirst for vengeance, you cannot know the rage it fuels," she says. That vengeance must be meted out on a number of key targets, most of whom loiter at the end of the game's stages. You have no choice over whether to kill or spare these marks, but it's up to you as to whether you take down their plentiful guards en route to the final showdown. There is some room for mercy within this crusade.
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