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It's rare for a renowned series such as Assassin's Creed to get tagged with middling review scores, but we slammed the disappointing Assassin's Creed Unity when it deployed last year. While there was a reasonable experience buried at the release's beating heart, the Parisian escapade also had a laundry list of flaws – the title's copious bugs and glitches securing the most column inches. With the forthcoming Assassin's Creed Victory – thought to be subtitled Syndicate officially – the French publisher needs to respond by righting its predecessor's many wrongs. But what are the five most important things that it needs to address?

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Fight for the right of critical acclaim

There was a time in Assassin's Creed games where you could stand on the spot and slaughter what felt like entire armies of enemies, but that came to an end with Arno Dorian in Unity. Whether it was to encourage stealth or to simply make combat seem more difficult, Ubisoft stripped away many of the mechanics that had come before, and the result was a system that felt horribly undercooked. Arno didn't feel powerful or even very threatening, especially when he was getting torn apart by off-screen enemies with guns. The likes of the Batman Arkham games and Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor put Assassin's Creed's combat to shame, and that's damning when the franchise has been around since the early days of the PlayStation 3. We need to feel like a badass Assassin again, and that means crafting combat that's actually worthy of a AAA action game.

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A not-so samey structure

There's no doubt that the Ubisoft production line is a thing of management mastery, but it comes at the expense of individuality. Ever since Altair scaled his first tower in the inaugural Assassin's Creed, the French publisher has shoe-horned its sandbox formula into virtually every game under its umbrella. It's time, then, for the smog to stop protruding from the organisation's factory line, and for the firm to invent a different type of structure for its flagship franchise. Exactly what that altered format should entail is difficult to envisage, but the organisation employs just shy of 10,000 employees, so we're hopeful that at least one of them has a different kind of gameplay flow in mind. Indeed, if we end up being forced to scale Big Ben just to add a muddle of icons to our minimap, then we may perform a Leap of Faith of our own – minus the perfectly positioned hay stack.

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Running smoothly out of trouble

Here's a novel idea: how about Ubisoft releases a game that doesn't require several huge patches to run properly? Unity was an absolute mess when it launched, and even now, the title's still rife with small glitches and weird bugs. There's no doubt that Arno's adventure suffered from numerous gameplay and design issues, but the title's technical performance was its most heinous crime. Crashes, huge frame rate drops, and a virtually unplayable co-op component all serve as stark reminders of what happens when a clearly unfinished product is rushed to market. With any luck, the publisher has learned its lesson, although there's little doubt that the next game's launch will be watched over with much scrutiny.

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A story to kill for

Oh how we wish for the old days, when Ezio Auditore toed the line between charming and terrifying. Ubisoft hasn't come close to topping the Italian stallion's narrative arc with any of its subsequent outings; Edward Kenway was likeable, but his piratical foray was marred by a plot in which very little actually happened. Most recently, the cheeky Arno showed signs of Johnny Depp-esque promise – his guyliner and razor tongue setting him apart from the fuzzy headed archetypes so common in an industry dominated by alpha males. But his revolutionary yarn lost all focus as soon as he donned the Assassins' iconic hood. With Victorian England among the most renowned periods in world history, the French firm needs to dream up a period protagonist befitting of an Oscar Wilde novel, but it also needs to embed that character into the big events of the time. And no, casting Jack the Ripper as some kind of pantomime villain will not suffice.

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Money can't buy success

There are arguments for and against 'pay real money and you can unlock things faster' microtransactions, but Unity's attempts at additional monetisation felt sickeningly out of place. Jump into the upgrade or skill tree menus, and you'd find an intrusive little option that tempted you to purchase stuff with premium currency. To make matters worse, Arno's arsenal was cut down considerably when compared to what was on offer in previous titles, meaning that you were essentially being asked to cough up for some of the most basic tools in an Assassin's locker. Oh, and while we're here, we may as well mention those bloody locked chests, too. Initially, they could only be opened through the use of the game's official app, because yes, that's exactly the sort of immersion breaking tosh that we want in our otherwise historically accurate adventure. Let's just focus on making a good game this time, eh Ubisoft?

[ Words: Robert Ramsey and Sammy Barker ]

What do you think that the next Assassin's Creed needs to do to get back on form? Are we being unfair on the franchise in the above points? Stab us in the back courtesy of the comments section below.