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When I wasn’t killing people, I spent a lot of my time in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic ocean, one of the three geographical areas you’ll explore. The three different grenades - sleep gas, berserk gas, and shrapnel - are great for stunning a group of targets if their numbers start to overwhelm you. Since Ubisoft didn’t change the combat for Rogue (it has the same counter-and-execute system from Black Flag), Shay also felt a little more powerful compared to his predecessors thanks to his grenade launcher. You won’t find stalkers in every place you visit, but not knowing when they’ll pop up was enough to keep me on my feet when entering new towns. If you don’t spot them fast enough with Shay’s X-ray-like Eagle Vision ability, they’ll climb out and stab you before running off to hide again. The biggest change is when you face stalkers, Assassins who hide on rooftops, bushes, and haystacks - the same kind of places you’ve been using for cover in previous games. But when he does cross over to the other side, Rogue introduces some cool features. With two wrist-blades, a ship (known as the Morrigan), poisonous darts, and all the other Assassin weapons at his disposal, Shay’s play style isn’t very different from the Brotherhood’s. By the end, I wasn’t a fan of either side. But all of these elements add some nuance and complexity to what was becoming a tedious conflict. Of course, the Templars have their bad seeds, too, so Rogue isn’t entirely sympathetic to their cause. He’s calm and level-headed, and he genuinely seems to care for Shay’s well-being. Shay’s first Templar mentor isn’t some generic bad guy, either. So for a while, I felt good about kicking them out of towns and cutting down the “A” flags they proudly hung inside of their forts. The Assassins weren’t as smart as they thought they were, and they used some unsavory methods to maintain control of the British colonies in America. Surprisingly, you’ll discover some truth in those words. Instead, the Templars called them “lawbreakers” and “ruffians” who commit acts of terrorism. Consider the way they treat the Assassins: Early on in Rogue, they refuse to mention them and their associates by name. Watching events unfold through that mindset gives you some insight into how the Templars think. He truly believes that what he’s doing is for the greater good, and it’s interesting to watch him wrestle with that idea while tracking and killing his old friends (you’ll recognize some of them if you played AC3 and AC4: Black Flag). The most brilliant thing about Rogue is the way it reverses all of this. The series’ heroes - Altaïr, Ezio, Connor, Aveline, and Edward - all had their own cast of villainous Templars to put down. Before Rogue came along, only two things stayed constant throughout all the different historical settings and plot twists in the AC games: The Templars are evil and the Assassins are trying to stop them from taking over the world.