Project Stream hands-on: Assassin’s Creed Odyssey plays great in Chrome

The idea of streaming new games has always seemed like a difficult, even impossible challenge. With high-quality graphics and the need for precise and responsive controls, it’s always been a tall order to get a game running that felt good to play over just an internet connection.

The latest, and perhaps most confident, player to get into the game-streaming market is Google, with the company’s newly announced Project Stream service. Announced last week, and just a few days into its first public testing phase, Project Stream is currently exclusive to a few invitees and is only compatible with the new Assassin’s Creed Odyssey.

Testing out Project Stream during the beta, I came to understand why Google felt able to drop a major project like this out of seemingly nowhere. Because playing a game as intensive as the new Assassin’s Creed felt great — and might even be the ideal way to play on PC.

Participating in the trial requires both Google and Ubisoft accounts. Then all you have to do is open Chrome. Once the browser is open you’ll also undergo a test that checks the quality and speed of your internet connection. This check occurs each time you load the game — but it doesn’t take long. Odyssey launches just like it would if you were using UPlay, Ubisoft’s official PC client, and you can play it directly from your browser, no addition downloads required.

Ubisoft

The first, and most surprising, thing you’ll likely notice when the game loads is that it … works. Assassin’s Creed Odyssey runs about as well from the cloud as if you had just installed the game normally. Movement is responsive, and combat feels fluid. Even dodging enemy attacks was easy, and I never fell victim to the kind of input lag that has often plagued game streaming in the past.

As for visuals, the stream was almost equally impressive. The game’s visual options menu is bereft of its usual choices and instead offers brightness as the only option, everything else is handled dynamically by Project Stream. With nothing else happening on my home network, it comfortably ran at 1080p on what would likely pass for medium — or occasionally high — settings in the standard PC version. Even in the game’s opening — minor spoilers for Assassins Creed Odyssey I guess — with dozens of enemies on screen on a rainy battlefield, the game never so much as stuttered or dropped it’s resolution at all.

The only consistent downside to the streaming version of the game, which I found across all hardware and connections I tried, was some fairly aggressive audio compression. This was, at its very worst, a noticeable issue, and that was only during some of the game’s louder cutscenes. For the most part, while wandering around the world and completing quests, the audio was perfectly fine.

Ubisoft

When I loaded my network down with streams and downloads, the game slipped slightly, muddying the textures slightly or even sliding down to a slightly lower resolution. But Odyssey never fell too far below what you would expect out of the game’s performance on the minimum-required PC hardware, and it still never dropped frames or struggled to keep up with my button presses.

Speaking of hardware, Project Stream managed to perform well on a variety of systems on that front as well. To start with, I tested the game on a computer more than capable of maxing out the standard version of the game: I’ve got an NVIDIA 1080 graphics card and a gigabit internet connection, as close to the ideal circumstances as possible. Then I moved everything to a 2017 Macbook Pro and a wireless connection to the same network. I was able to pick up my save right from where I had left off, and it ran just as well.

Google

In fact, the only place I could find that wouldn’t allow the game to play was the local coffee shop, also known as Starbucks. When I took the same laptop there and signed onto the in-store internet, Project Stream wouldn’t load the game at all. It turns out, Starbucks Wi-Fi wasn’t quite cut out for the rigors of streaming a new game released last week.

To say that the streaming service and its presentation of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey were impressive would be an understatement. Given the choice between playing the standard PC version of the game and the Project Stream version, I’d probably choose streaming. With Project Stream, the game launches a little quicker, and you only really lose the top end of quality. For those with the internet connection to play — but without a suitable computer to handle the traditional install — it’s hard to imagine a better setup than Project Stream, even in these early days.