Assassin’s Creed The Ezio Collection Switch Review: Taking a Leap of Fate

The Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection was released back in 2016 on the PS4 and Xbox One and now the game has come to the Nintendo Switch with improved graphics, lighting, and texture improvements. It includes all the DLC content for the single-player games, as well as two bonus short films.

The collection has now been ported to the Switch. Since this is a review of games that most agree are good, I’m going to write more about how good it is as a port. Does the Ezio Collection run well on the Nintendo Switch? 

When in Rome

This collection includes three of the best games in the Assassin’s Creed series: Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations. While these games are over ten years old, they still look incredible. The city of Rome and Constantinople in Revelations feel alive which great attention to detail.

The stories of the three games revolve around Ezio Auditore Da Firenze, an Italian nobleman turned assassin in Renaissance Italy. Ezio starts off as a spoilt brat only to mature and grow throughout the entire trilogy. There’s a reason this character has become so iconic, he’s witty, charming, and become more world-weary and responsible throughout his trilogy.

This ends with the two short films, Assassin’s Creed Lineage which stars Ezio’s father, and Assassin’s Creed Embers, starring Ezio himself as an older man going on one last adventure. The two shorts add a great sense of finality to the character’s saga, the cherry on top of three great games.

The game mostly runs smoothly on the Switch much like the other versions. I guess Ubisoft has improved a little bit since the terrifying launch of the collection on PS4 and Xbox One.  

Way of The Hidden Balde

For the most part, the games controlled fine, acting more or less the same as previous versions but there were a few problems involving lag.

We noticed that there was occasionally some input lag in handheld mode. Assassin’s Creed II is the most serious one out of all three games with controls occasionally feeling sluggish as a result. Trying to jump from rooftops with around 0.5 seconds of delay really is no fun. Brotherhood and Revelation were more manageable but even they had a couple of hiccups.

There was also a glitch I encountered early on in the game where I knocked a boss down at the beginning of the game and he couldn’t stand back up meaning I couldn’t finish the fight, essentially soft locking me. It was a huge pain to reset the game but it didn’t happen again so it wasn’t too big a problem overall.

A new feature exclusive to the Switch is that you can use the touchscreen control to navigate the menus. This can be really helpful for quickly navigating through the map in handheld mode.

Synching The Collection

Another issue I have with the collection is that only Assassin’s Creed 2 is available on the cartridge/ initial download. To get the other two games, you need to log in to your Ubisoft Connect account. Ubisoft really couldn’t help but make sure you were signed up with their website before they handed the games over. It’s annoying but it admittedly doesn’t take too long to log in/register. Altogether, the games in total also take up a file size of 35.3GB so make sure you’ve got enough space for them on your memory card. 

Verdict

The three games on this collection are three of the best action-adventure open-world games of all time and (in my opinion) the peak of the Assassin’s Creed series. They shaped how open-world games should be with well-written stories, amazing visuals, and compelling gameplay.

With this port in particular, however, it’s just ok. The games run pretty smooth and look nice in both handheld and docked mode but then there’s the issue of the input lag. While not ruining the game, it does bring it down a little in quality. You do wish it was given a little more time for polishing in development before being put on to Switch. 

Nevertheless, I would still recommend Switch owners to pick the Ezio Collection up if they’ve never experienced these games before. There is no question that they are well worth playing. 

Assassin’s Creed: The Ezio Collection is available for Nintendo Switch as well as Playstation 4 and Xbox One.

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