For nearly two decades, Assassin’s Creed has been reinventing itself, sometimes boldly, sometimes clumsily. This ranking looks beyond launch scores to ask a simpler question: which games truly endured in players’ hands, memories and conversations once the noise faded?
The Assassin’s Creed series has spent nearly two decades in a state of constant reinvention. It has been a historical stealth game, a naval sandbox, a role‑playing epic and, more recently, a negotiation between all three.
Lumin's ranking is not a scorecard of technical quality alone. It reflects how each game landed with players, how long it stayed with them, and what kind of afterlife it enjoyed once the launch noise faded.
5 min read • Jan 12 2026
Unity’s Paris is still astonishing: dense, vertical, alive. But its legacy is defined less by ambition than by timing. Released in a broken state, it quickly became shorthand for a AAA launch gone wrong , a reference point in debates about day‑one patches and unfinished releases. Recovery came too late.
Rogue is thoughtful but quiet. Its reversal of perspective , placing the player on the Templar side , remains one of the series’ more interesting narrative ideas, made more striking by the fact that its protagonist never joins the Assassin Order. Mechanically, however, it rarely escapes the shadow of its predecessor.
Ambitious to a fault. Its frontier setting and early naval experiments hinted at future greatness, but uneven pacing and a reserved protagonist split the audience. It is remembered less for what it achieved than for what it enabled, with its ship combat directly informing an entire future title.
Repetitive, rigid, foundational. The original game now feels like a prototype preserved in amber, but at release it proved that historical stealth could sustain a blockbuster franchise. The project itself began life as a spin‑off concept for Prince of Persia.
Confident and well‑crafted, but cautious. Victorian London is vibrant, traversal is brisk, and the grappling hook reshaped vertical movement. Yet Syndicate arrived when the series was already showing signs of exhaustion.
Vast, absorbing, and relentless. Valhalla succeeded in keeping players engaged for years, supported by the most extensive post‑launch roadmap the series has seen. Its sheer size, however, diluted both stealth and narrative focus.
A game many loved, and some resisted. Odyssey embraced role‑playing freedom wholeheartedly, even launching without a traditional hidden blade , a first for the franchise. As an RPG, it flourished. As Assassin’s Creed, it divided opinion.
Small by modern standards, deliberately so. Mirage rejected sprawl in favour of focus, restoring stealth as the organising principle rather than an optional playstyle. It began life as an expansion before being reshaped into a standalone release.
The reset. Origins restructured combat, progression and world design, replacing counter‑based systems with hitbox‑driven combat inspired by modern action RPGs, and rescuing a franchise that had stalled under its own weight.
Measured and reflective. Revelations closed a long‑running character arc with restraint, prioritising tone and memory over spectacle, and uniquely interweaving the lives of two series protagonists.
An exercise in refinement. Brotherhood took an already strong formula and sharpened it, turning a single city into a dynamic power struggle, while allowing players to recruit, train and deploy Assassins across Europe.
The turning point. Charisma, scope and mechanical clarity transformed the series from an experiment into a cultural fixture, anchored by a protagonist who quickly became one of gaming’s most recognisable characters.
The outlier that became the benchmark. Part pirate epic, part Assassin’s Creed, Black Flag achieved a balance of freedom and structure the series has struggled to replicate since, remaining one of its most replayed entries more than a decade on.
Assassin’s Creed endures not because it is consistent, but because it adapts , sometimes too far, sometimes not enough. The games that last are those that players return to, argue over, and measure everything else against.
Lumin's ranking reflects that afterlife, where memory matters more than momentum.
