Assassin’s Creed: Rogue’s bad boy isn’t enough to break the series’ creative rut (review)

I lived through the Third Crusade. I knocked out the pope in a secret basement underneath the Vatican. I even sailed with Blackbeard in the Caribbean. But until now, I’ve never waged war as a Templar knight.

Assassin’s Creed: Rogue (out now for PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360) is the first game in the long-running action series to feature a member of the Templar Order, the immortal enemy of the Assassin Brotherhood, as its main character. Developer Ubisoft flirted with the idea back in Assassin’s Creed III, so I wasn’t sure if the Templar angle would end up as another short-lived ruse. But that isn’t the case here. Our antihero, Shay Patrick Cormac, is a former Assassin who’s hellbent on stopping the Brotherhood from achieving its goals.