Assassin's Creed Identity

~ the obit ~

Ubisoft soft launched Assassin's Creed Identity on the New Zealand and Australian App Stores in 2014 and left it sitting there for seventeen months. Pocket Gamer noticed when it quietly came off those two storefronts, which is usually how a soft launch is buried. Instead it came back: worldwide on iOS on 25 February 2016, Android on 18 May. Blue Byte built it, and it was the first Assassin's Creed on a phone with proper third-person traversal rather than a side-on runner.

Underneath, it was a mission grinder with loot. You built an Assassin from a class, took campaign missions that moved a story along and contract missions that did not, and the objectives were mostly tailing somebody or killing somebody, with items and XP at the end. Guards worked on a visible alert system, and being Wanted meant every guard in the district came for you. Reviews were mixed to positive for what it was, a 6 from Destructoid and a 4 out of 5 from Pocket Gamer.

All of it ran against a server. There was no offline mode and no local progression, so the app without Ubisoft's backend is an installer with a tutorial attached. The online services went dark in October 2021 and the store listings came down two months later. Asked about it afterwards, Ubisoft Support put the date in plain text: services shut down on 21 December 2021, and it is no longer possible to play the game.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what is left on the phone ~

People who kept the app report the same thing. It installs, it launches, and it runs the prologue, and then there is a guard who will not die, because whatever decided that your attack landed lived in a data center that got switched off. No contracts and no progression, just a corridor with an immortal man in it.

~ the rental question ~

Identity went out in the same stretch of years that Ubisoft spent decommissioning online services for a long list of older titles, and the mobile ones got the least attention because nobody tracks a phone game's death the way they track a console one. There was no campaign, no petition and no coverage beyond a support reply on social media.

Phone games in 2016 were sold to people with a commute on a train. Mine was a car in Ankara, and a 3D Renaissance Italy driven with a thumbstick on glass was never getting installed. What makes this one worth recording is not that I missed it, it is that the people who did buy it have an app on their phone that still opens and still cannot be played.

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