Assassin’s Creed Nexus really surprised me. Granted, I didn’t really know what the virtual reality game from developer Red Storm was prior to playing it. Was it a glorified tech demo? A cinematic movie-like experience with interactive elements? Turns out, Nexus is shaping up to be pretty much what I’ve always hoped for: a first-person Assassin’s Creed game. I got to play about an hour of Nexus at a preview event on a Meta Quest 3 headset, experiencing two levels of Ezio’s sections, and I was amazed by how much it felt like playing Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood. Given how different Connor and Kassandra’s games are from Ezio’s, I’m curious as to how their respective sections in Nexus will play, but I’m intrigued to try them after enjoying my time with Ezio.
In Nexus, you play as a spy working with modern-day Assassins Shaun and Rebecca to infiltrate Abstergo Industries. Abstergo–a front for the Templar Order, an organization hellbent on controlling free will–has uncovered that Ezio, Connor, and Kassandra all encountered a commonality over the course of history and are trying to identify it. Not wanting the Templars to get a leg up, the Assassins send you in undercover to partake in the search, hoping you’ll be able to sleuth through history faster than anyone and get the information back to the Assassin Brotherhood first. Your trips into the past will see you play as Ezio about two years following the events of Brotherhood, Connor during Assassin’s Creed III, and Kassandra almost 20 years after Odyssey’s conclusion.
I didn’t get to see much of this story play out. It certainly sounds very interesting–I think the modern-day elements of Assassin’s Creed are at their best when made into a spy thriller. Hunting for answers through history is a fun gimmick, but it’s not all that exciting on its own because, without an outside force adding urgency, it doesn’t feel like there’s a need to figure things out quickly. Adding a dose of subterfuge and tense espionage has helped boost the quality of the modern-day storyline in the past–with Black Flag being the best example–so I’m hopeful the same is true here.