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Assassins use a variety of gadgets for infiltration and escape, including money for crowd manipulation, parachutes for gravity-defying jumps, and hookblades for improved climbing and ziplining. Assassins rely on non-lethal tools to achieve their goals, including an ingenious variety of bombs with powerful crowd-control effects. The Animus, a recurring background gadget in the series that allows users to experience the lives of their ancestors in a fully immersive simulation, is an underrated and miraculous technology.
The hooded brothers (or sisters) of the Assassin’s Creed series are known for taking down their targets with every conceivable weapon, from simple blunt objects to the most sophisticated (and anachronistic) firearms. But how do Assassins infiltrate their target’s base and escape after the kill, other than by climbing the nearest railed structure?
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The answer is gadgets, and there are heaps of them in this series. Whether used to distract attention, control crowds to your advantage, or move through the city as swiftly as an eagle’s shadow, these gadgets ensure that all is permitted for those who wield them.
7 Money (Assassin’s Creed 2)
Brotherly love can’t be bought, but it can be useful
Assassin’s Creed 2
Released on November 7, 2009
In the original game, completing assassination missions was incredibly frustrating as the player would tremble when they saw an enemy they couldn’t push aside in high profile mode, but in Assassin’s Creed 2, dealing with such obstacles becomes a piece of cake as Ezio can throw his cash on the ground and let out a scream of joy. If Ezio and his wallet are up to the task, he can chase off street beggars, congregants, and even some of the opposing team’s hired thugs.
While it may seem low-tech compared to other tricks in Ezio’s and other assassins’ arsenals, it is a form of social engineering, and (for Ezio) it is fun and amusing to be able to manipulate a crowd by tossing coins from his pocket into a ditch. From another perspective, the coin flip is a more humane method of escape than the usual methods of stabbing an eye with a smoke or stabbing a vital organ with a hidden blade.
6 Parachute (Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood)
The Obvious Answer to the Gravity Problem (Other Than Screaming)
Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
Released on November 16, 2010
The idea of being able to climb almost any surface is such a powerful idea that it’s sold every game in the Assassin’s Creed series. But once players reach the top, the obstacle to this semi-psychic ability always becomes apparent: getting down. Everyone enjoys taking a leap of faith, but when jumping from a great height, there aren’t always conveniently placed bales of hay to cushion the fall. As a reward for helping Ezio destroy the war machine in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Leonardo da Vinci handed Ezio a solution to the gravity problem (and one that was super compact, capable of carrying 15 at a time): the parachute.
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Once the parachute proved useful, knowledge of it spread throughout Rome, where most tailors were able to make them (presumably keeping some in stock for Ezio, the only person brave enough to use one), and even further afield, to the Otterman Empire. After Apocalypse, the parachute was not used for several hundred years. Although the parachute seems to be part of the basic equipment of an Assassin, it could be said that the knowledge that the parachute will always be there to help could undermine the instincts of a new recruit and prevent them from fully embracing the fearlessness required of an Assassin.
5 Hookblade (Assassin’s Creed Revelations)
A hook, and a blade too!
Assassin’s Creed Revelations
Released on November 15, 2011
It’s a blade, but it’s also a hook. The hook blade has plenty of potential to be a great weapon, but it improves movement in small, but important ways. When climbing buildings, Ezio can reach a little higher. Not only that, but retracting the hook blade throws him a little higher, keeping the climb feeling fluid, real, and grippingly tense.
The hookblade came at the perfect time, as Ezio is nearing the latter stages of his life in Assassin’s Creed Revelations, and he needs all the help he can get to save his bruised and frayed joints. Aside from its killing and climbing capabilities, it allows Ezio to use it to zipline across the skyline of Constantinople in style and at high speed, making it easier to get to regular mission locations.
4 Bombs (Assassin’s Creed Revelations)
A non-lethal tool with explosive versatility
While explosives may seem at odds with the Brotherhood’s penchant for quiet, stealthy killing, bombs are an essential tool, even when used non-violently (or indirectly violently). In Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Ezio learns to make the most of bombs. The Constantinople-built bombs borrow ideas from some of the series’ most useful tools, such as fool’s gold, smoke, noise, and sulfur distractions.
While some can be crafted with weapons, Ezio’s own brand (even when used in busy parts of the city) stayed true to the first tenet of the creed: to ensure the blade doesn’t hit innocent flesh. Some of the more interesting non-lethal bombs include the stink bomb, which is useful for dispersing crowds, the lightning bomb, which non-lethally takes down anything that isn’t bolted, and the blood bomb, which covers the target in lamb’s blood, making people think they’ve been seriously injured and run away in fear.
3 Grappling Hook (Assassin’s Creed Syndicate)
Hook and grapple!
A good grappling hook is great for any situation, in real life or in video games, so it’s surprising that it took Assassin’s Creed, a series all about climbing to great heights, nine games to finally incorporate it into players’ tool belts (or gauntlets). Sure, climbing the ornate decorations of buildings with your hands and feet is part of the franchise’s fundamental appeal, as most architects and architecture enthusiasts feast their eyes on, but either way, it’s nice to have the option to pull the trigger and shoot straight to the top whenever you want.
Assassin’s Creed Syndicate
Released on October 23, 2015
Early versions of the grappling hook appeared as rope darts and rope launchers, but the gauntlet-mounted grapple is arguably its coolest form. The grappling hook appears in Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, but the series’ soft reboot and return to a much older era in human history meant the gadget has been around for some time. Thankfully, the grappling hook is not only borrowed from Syndicate’s dueling protagonist, but it also makes a spectacular comeback in Assassin’s Creed: Shadows.
2 Animus (All games in the Assassin’s Creed series)
Ultimate gaming immersion and historical reenactment
This gadget may be the only one that appears in every Assassin’s Creed game, even if it doesn’t allow players to fully experience the outside world. An invention of Abstergo Industries, aka the Knights Templar, the Animus not only allows people to access their genetic memories (a miracle in itself), but also allows them to live out the lives of their ancestors in a fully immersive simulation.
Abstergo eventually released an immersive gaming product, Animus Omega, which was actually distributed to expand the search for the powerful Isu relic, but despite its true purpose of nefarious data collection (and the potential side effect of driving you crazy with lingering bugs), the opportunity to use such a gadget would be hard to pass up, especially for historians, gamers, or anyone simply curious about their family’s past.
1. Apple of Eden (Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood)
The key to the paradise of illusion
Though the Brotherhood mostly specializes in acts of assassination, they ultimately fight against evil figures and forces to bring peace to the world. What better way to spread peace quickly than with the Apple of Eden, which has the power to manipulate people’s minds and create grand illusions? Unfortunately, the Brotherhood also aims to give freedom to humanity, and enslaving the world with the power of the Apple would be crossing that line.
But in Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, Ezio takes a bite of the Ith Relic’s power by using it to overwhelm his troops, shifting their loyalties and even burning their minds. The relic was so dangerous that Ezio couldn’t roam Rome with it in his pocket (though roaming freely with it equipped might be fun), so he sealed it away in the Colosseum in Rome for Desmond and future Assassins to find.
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