Parents' Guide to Assassin's Creed Rebellion

This strategy game packs in lots of favorite characters from the franchise, but its team and base management misses the target every time. The war between the Templars and Assassins has found a new battlefield on mobile devices, courtesy of Assassin's Creed Rebellion. What's interesting about this free-to-play entry in the AC universe is that it tosses aside the history of the series to give fans an ultimate team-up of sorts. Despite many characters existing hundreds of years apart, Rebellion pulls together characters from across the spectrum of games, movies, and other media, and puts them all in the same place at the same time without any real explanation or rationale aside from simple fan service. The game's art style is also questionable, because it takes a cutesy route while still trying to maintain the signature violence and themes of the franchise. That's the problem with most of the game … it tosses together a bunch of interesting ideas, but none of them make any real sense.

Assassin's Creed Rebellion starts off by borrowing some elements from games like Fallout Shelter. Players must constantly build and upgrade a main headquarters with various rooms to maintain their Brotherhood troops. This is done by buying rooms connected together in a central compound for your troops to live out their daily lives. To make progress, players go on missions to either grab resources or to advance the paper thin plot in some way. These missions are turn-based side-scrolling action sequences where players choose which actions a team member takes to pass through a given room. This is another area where the game falters, as players are shown a chance of success that never seems to line up right. You might succeed often with a less than 25 percent chance, but fail just as much despite a supposed 85 percent success rate. Instead, every action you take feels more like a 50/50 coin flip. It all winds up feeling like a disjointed mess that can't decide what sort of game it wants to be. The elements are there for an interesting experience, especially for fans of the series, but overall, this is one time the assassins have just missed their target.