Assassin’s Creed Nexus Is a Captivating First-Person Assassin’s Creed Game in VR

I’ll admit I entered my hands-on demo with Assassin’s Creed Nexus with a bit of pessimism – could Assassin’s Creed work as a first-person VR game? And then I found myself repeatedly answering that key question with “Yes!” for an entire hour. Not only does Assassin’s Creed Nexus seem to be a full-featured Assassin’s Creed game that incorporates stealth, combat, and parkour, but from what I played so far, each of those pieces works surprisingly well and comes together to capture the entire assassin fantasy with shocking efficacy. I brought a lot of skepticism onto that demo floor, but by the time I left it I was grinning ear-to-ear.

There’s perhaps no franchise better-suited for virtual reality than Assassin’s Creed, starting with the fact that strapping on a VR headset bears an awful lot in common with stepping into the Animus. But actually making all that stealth and subterfuge feel good is another matter entirely, and I half-expected Nexus to be little more than yet another half-baked tech demo that had little in common with a proper entry in the long-running series. Instead, I was stunned to find that this is a full-on Assassin’s Creed adventure, complete with a lengthy story mode that has you playing as three iconic protagonists from the franchise’s history: Ezio in Renaissance-era Italy, Connor in Colonial America, and Kassandra in Ancient Greece. As an employee of Abstergo, I was sent on a mission to relive moments from these characters’ pasts to collect data for what must surely be some shady masterplan.

My demo focused on Ezio in Italy, where I went on a series of missions that involved sneaking around to steal things, tailing unscrupulous sorts, running along walls and across rooftops to get from place-to-place, and when all else failed, running fools through with the pointy end of my blade.

Sneaking around is, predictably, a lot of fun. I mean, who doesn’t want to live out the thrill of crouching behind a crate as a baddie walks by or holding your breath as you snatch a key from the hip of an unsuspecting guard? Stealth mechanics can already be pretty stressful, but experiencing the tension of almost getting caught from a first-person perspective is downright nerve-wracking and hilarious. In one section, I even tailed an enemy by climbing alongside buildings and, my personal favorite, using crowds to blend in with the unwashed masses, hiding in plain sight – mostly because it meant I could goof around with dumb NPCs, holding totally not-suspicious conversations with them while I waited for my quarry to turn the corner.

Parkour felt surprisingly natural, as the same auto-jump mechanic found in other Assassin’s Creed’s games applies here, and I could change directions by simply turning my head in the direction I wanted to go rather than worry about fiddling around with a joystick. And because I was playing on the brand new hardware of the Meta Quest 3, I was able to leap across platforms and sidle alongside the sides of buildings without fear of motion sickness from dropped frames or input delay. But the real fun came when it was time to take the leap of faith off the side of a building into a pile of hay that waited below. Performing this rite of passage required me to stand perilously at the far end of a ledge, outstretch my arms to the sides, then let myself drop (while trying my best not to scream like a dork). After 15 years of experiencing this moment from the safety of TVs and monitors, it really felt awesome to be able to finally experience that lump in my throat firsthand. I just hope I looked cooler than Michael Fassbender flying around on that lame robot arm. You guys remember that? Weird movie.

Climbing the sides of buildings might have been my favorite part, as the best practices found in other VR adventures like The Climb seem to have been put to good use here. Lots of VR games have nailed climbing, so this one wasn’t terribly unique, but with all the other stuff Nexus does well, it’s great to see this included and working exactly as I hoped it would.

Finally, there’s combat, and while it definitely worked well enough, it was probably the weakest part of the demo overall. That’s due to the fact that enemies take turns attacking you one at a time, slowly swinging their weapons in the same easily-blocked patterns, before getting tired and opening themselves up to a right shanking. Then again, now that I think about it: that’s pretty much how it works in other Assassin’s Creed games, so maybe it’s not all that surprising. Even though it was the least impressive part of the package, there’s still a fair bit of danger and strategy when I found myself surrounded by a large group who shot arrows and swung swords when my back was turned, forcing me to spin in place and take down each of them one-by-one – that definitely made me feel like a badass.

Assassin’s Creed Nexus comes out next month, and although I was skeptical initially, this has definitely given me a reason to dust off my headset and give it a try.