Assassin's Creed Unity's heist missions require stealth and your utmost cooperation

Navigating Assassin's Creed Unity's two-player heist missions requires you to work in tandem with your partner and avoid charging into the thick of things head-on, we learned during some recent hands-on time with the game.

Assassin's Creed Unity offers a single-player campaign mode, which follows the story of assassin lead Arno, as well as Brotherhood missions, or narrative-driven co-op quests for up to four people. Side-missions are present as well in the form of assassination contracts or heists.

Speaking with Polygon during the demo, producer Lesley Phord-Toy said that heist missions are "more systemic" with less of a focus on narrative. The idea is that you can play them again and again, she said, but each time the conditions will be slightly different — a variation on guards, treasure placement and so forth.

We ran through one of the game's heist missions with Phord-Toy and discovered that total cooperation was key to success. Venturing off on our own or even just attacking too early resulted in disaster. By coordinating our attacks, however, we were able to take down problematic guards with stealth and sneak past the rest with ease. If players perish during the game's co-op, it won't result in an automatic desynchronization that forces a restart. You can revive your teammates, if the situation is safe.

During the co-op experience, players will be able to customize their assassin through different skills: Deadly, Resilient, Unseen or Agile. The Deadly skill, when raised, heightens attack, while Resilient focuses on defense, Unseen on stealth and Agile on your assassin's navigation abilities.

Unity also features skills specific to co-op, which can be shared among your party. If one person has the disguise skill, for example, they can spread it among their friends to help the whole party sneak through an area dressed inconspicuously. Players can tailor their assassin to their choosing, Phrod-Toy said, and then combine their skills for complimentary playstyles.

Assassin's Creed Unity will launch Nov. 11 following a delay. The game is being developed for PlayStation 4, Windows PC and Xbox One. For more on Unity, check out our in-depth preview from E3 2014.