Occasionally Ubisoft will send out emails about games they didn’t make. That’s not because they’re jealous or forgetful, but because they’ve quietly started selling the works of other publishers on their Uplay store.
It might never be the centrepiece of your gaming life like Steam is, but Uplay is a perfectly sensible place to buy PC games – especially now, while its Spring Sale is going on.
Here’s what’s on offer: Blood Dragon for less than the price of Total Recall on VHS in ‘91, and Tomb Raider for far under the cost of a gap year gone awry.
That translates as £7.19 and £9.99, respectively.
The deepest, bone-scrapiest cuts seem reserved for Ubisoft’s own stuff – Assassin’s Creed Liberation, the Julian Gollop-directed game of disguises ported to PC early this year, is a fairly tempting £11.99. And Assassin’s Creed III is £8.99. You’ll have heard dodgy things about it, but its ideas are all the right ones: hunting, treetop running and boats. It’s just the scattershot implementation that’s off.
If you’d like to see all of those elements blended beautifully, of course, you can just skip ahead a year to Black Flag – now about £30 on Uplay. But that’s not quite so cheap.
There’s also The Walking Dead Season 1 for a fiver, Payday 2 for 12.5 pounds, and Batman Arkham Origins for £19.99.
Nu-Thief is twenty-odd quid, which sounds about right: wonky city, but hand animations worth paying for. Do you think you’ll pick up any of this stuff? The sales run till April 20.