I crouch unseen behind the bureau, the guard blocking the only exit from the room. Silently, I reach for a goblet, throwing it to the opposite side of the chamber. As the guard steps toward the disturbance, I emerge, sneaking behind him. With a flick of my wrist, my hidden blade emerges. He’ll never take another step again. Also, his halberd starts fritzing on the floor before fading out of existence, a reminder that this is all virtual reality—or rather, VR within VR, the metatextual framing of Ubisoft’s latest Assassin’s Creed game.
Ubisoft has had its fingers in VR for years now, from early efforts experimenting with the format—think Eagle Flight, an aerial racing game with a literal bird’s-eye view that evolved from a tech demo—to more fully featured games, such as the social deduction title Werewolves Within or co-op space adventure Star Trek: Bridge Crew, both from its Red Storm studio.
Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR is different. It’s bigger, more ambitious, leveraging the success of the publisher’s biggest IP. And while Red Storm once more leads development, Ubisoft committed no fewer than eight studios to its creation. This is a push, one intended to make the case that VR gaming has finally, truly arrived, that it’s at last a format worth bringing AAA properties to in meaningful ways, rather than for gimmicky spinoffs.
It’s a prosecution Ubisoft makes alarmingly well. Playing Assassin’s Creed Nexus on the Meta Quest 3 has that rare distinction of shattering expectations and feeling better than it should. If you’re a longtime VR player, it brilliantly combines the best elements of immersive gameplay into a cohesive whole, allowing you to move, climb, hide, and fight your way around stunningly realized locations. For Assassin’s Creed fans drawn to VR for the first time, it does an exceptional job of placing you in the role of an assassin, with all the stealth and parkour mechanics you expect from the core games translated almost flawlessly to a first-person experience.
That it’s a canon excursion through Assassin’s Creed’s increasingly vast lore doesn’t hurt, either. The story’s present-day framing places you in the role of a hacker, one infiltrating shady megacorp Abstergo’s latest attempt at manipulating the past to control the future. Better still? Gameplay that puts you into the genetic memories of three returning heroes—Assassin’s Creed II’s Ezio, AC III’s Connor, and Odyssey’s Kassandra.
For longtime fans of the series, it’s an absolute delight to revisit these stab-happy leads years after their debuts, and Nexus leans into their different play styles, further justifying the multi-character approach. Ezio boasts two of the series’ signature hidden blades, emphasizing his more shadowy nature, while Kassandra feels like more of a fighter, befitting her mercenary nature in Odyssey. Even Connor, considered one of the less popular of AC’s protagonists, gets a generous showcase, with his use of a tomahawk and a bow and arrow bringing a materially different feel to both combat and stealth.
Simply being in the assassins’ collective shoes provides a whole new appreciation for how tough their actions would be too. The climbing action borrows from the likes of, well, The Climb, VR’s signature climbing sim, requiring you to reach for and grab on to each hang point as you clamber buildings. Parkour demands rapid response times as you use the Quest Touch controller’s thumbstick to grab for swings, pulleys, and ledges on the move. It is a workout. Still, once you’ve reached a high point and taken a Leap of Faith, the series’ iconic free falls into conveniently ever present bales of hay—check your fear of heights at the door—or perform an air assassination on an unsuspecting guard beneath you, it’s all worth it.
If that all sounds a bit disorienting, it can be. Even players who have spent years in VR might find Nexus’ free movement occasionally dizzying. Thankfully, there are a host of comfort and locomotion options to mitigate this, allowing players to slow things down as they get used to embodying an assassin.
The constraints of VR do mean that Nexus abandons the dauntingly vast maps of the core games in favor of smaller, more focused mission areas—and it’s significantly better for it. Wandering around Ezio’s walled Tuscan town of Monteriggioni, the gorgeous temples of Kassandra’s Dolos, or Connor’s New England harbor towns, listening to the hubbub of passersby and the thrum of civilian life, feels incredibly grounding, rooting players in the setting. Plus, there are still plenty of side objectives to explore, parkour and climbing challenges, and historical footnotes to find, explaining the location and culture of each era.
That doesn’t mean Nexus is without letdowns, though they’re mostly small irritations and forgivable oversights (the sort that, hopefully, can be patched). For instance, reaching for your sword as Ezio or Kassandra never feels quite right—you have to grab it from the hip on your dominant hand’s side, where a cross draw from your opposing side will likely feel more natural. Connor’s tomahawk, due to how differently it’s used, doesn’t suffer from this sensation though. Currently, you can switch the dominant hand in the game’s settings, but not which side you draw from.
Similarly, some of the parkour elements are a bit off—a move that’s meant to fling you up to higher ledges more often throws you sideways, while the move to leap horizontal gaps rarely connects—but level design is considerate enough to almost always have multiple ways to reach objectives.
Then there are the visuals. I wouldn’t call them poor—they’re not, overall—but character models are somewhere around PlayStation 3 level, and textures can sometimes be jarringly blocky up close. Ubisoft seems limited here by maintaining the game’s compatibility with the older Quest 2 hardware—the Quest 3 is capable of better than what’s here. Still, locations in particular are stunning, with surprisingly deep draw distance, all aiding that pivotal sense of immersion.
A lot could have gone awry with Assassin’s Creed Nexus VR—at worst, it could have ended up a lazy VR throwaway capitalizing on the franchise’s popularity. Instead, it’s full of passion and dedication, not only to creating an experience that can be delivered in virtual reality, but one that feels authentic, essential even, for Assassin’s Creed fans.
