Assassin's Creed III Review

FREEDOM AT A COST

By: Ryan Gilliam  

Since 2007, the Assassin’s Creed franchise has wow’d the gaming world with their freedom of motion, and unique historical settings. While the first game brought a new system of movement and combat, it lacked a variety of interesting missions and felt repetitive. However, when Assassin’s Creed II arrived in 2009, all seemed to be repaired, and it was met with outstanding praise from both critics and consumers. Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood (2010) and Assassin’s Creed: Revelations (2011) brought some interesting new features, but didn't quite reach the high point that the series did in 2009. Now three years after the second game landed in stores, Assassin’s Creed III has just been released and unfortunately, it finds itself lagging even behind the eldest in the franchise.

In this Assassin’s Creed, the player is placed in the shoes of Connor. He is a mestizo (half native-american, half Caucasian) and he is completely unlikable. In the first Assassin’s Creed we had Altair, a pompous, rude assassin who nobody, not even the player, liked. Ubisoft remedied this by giving the player Ezio in Assassin’s Creed II, Brotherhood, and Revelations. Ezio was smooth, lovable, fierce, and charming. Connor is written to be stern yet sympathetic , but instead comes off as heartless and emotionless. I often found myself rooting for the game's antagonist, not because he was a great character, but because Connor is such a bad one.

In the beginning, the game takes control away constantly. Play for two minutes, cutscene, play for three minutes, longer cutscene, play for thirty seconds, cutscene. This changes once the game really gets started, but it changes far too drastically. While it was frustrating when the game kept going to cutscene, it was completely infuriating when the game forced me to do something utterly stupid that should have been a cutscene. At one point, the game forced me to hold a redcoat at gunpoint and push him every few feet until we reached our destination. This would have been just fine in a cutscene, but actually playing it felt contrived and pointless.

Speaking of the beginning, this game decides to begin twice. Without giving anything away, I can say that you do not play as Connor for the first four hours of the game. The first four hours acts as a tutorial. Unfortunately, this first character cannot climb the trees and rocks that Connor can. This, of course, causes frustration in traversal. When you are finally placed into young Conner's moccasins, you are treated to another four hour tutorial. While both of these beginnings are “cool” and are important to the story, one of them is unnecessary.

When the game is finally done teaching the player, it begins throwing you into missions. Unlike other Assassin’s Creed titles, these missions are lifeless, uninspired, and again, frustrating. The missions are rarely fun, and often times feel like work rather than play.

The story and setting of the Assassin’s Creed games has always been a key feature to the series. Assassin’s Creed III doesn't meet the high standard set up by the other games in the series. This iteration is set in the American Revolution. Whether talking to George Washington, or meeting crazy old Ben Franklin on the street, the game feels like it's constantly poking the player saying “Haha, see what we did here? Remember these guys? Look! Look!” Unfortunately, this often falls flat. The game also fails in being a series finale with an end cutscene that makes little sense, and is incredibly anti-climactic. It feels like it's leading to an epic mission set in the future, but instead ends in a cutscene that leaves the player feeling unfulfilled.

Sadly, the game runs very poorly. With frustrating loading times and some unimpressive graphical textures, the game feels surprisingly dated for having only come out a month ago. Connor is also unresponsive and rarely does what you want him to do. This often leads to instant failure as “DESYNCHRONIZED” pops up on your screen, sending you back to the last checkpoint.

While Ubisoft has added some very interesting traversal mechanics this time around, Connor is very stubborn. Many of the missions that require quick movement, following targets, or chases will force the player to retry over and over again because of one misstep. There are two chases in particular that are so agonizing, they may cause the player to set down the controller for good.

Traversal may be frustrating ninety percent of the time, but on the rare occasion that Connor gets in the groove, flying through tree tops feels great. The addition of the wilderness environments somehow caused the city environments to feel spread apart and completely breaks the fluidity of movement. The mere fact that you are forced to jump to street level and re-climb when you change street blocks is enough to make you utilize the quick-travel system rather than deal with the map.

Assassin’s Creed III’s combat is where it finally excels. With quick and brutal kills,  you will find yourself purposefully picking fights with guards just to leave their corpses in a bloody pile seconds later. You always feel rewarded after a fight, and you always want more. The combat has a kind of brilliant fluidity to it that is very reminiscent of Batman: Arkham Asylum. The addition of guards with guns forces the player to use enemies as human shields. This adds some much needed stress to the combat, requiring players to either break their combo and run, close the gap between you and your attacker, or grab the nearest guard to you and hide behind his unprotected body. There is also an intense variety of weapons, all with their own unique play style.



Multiplayer:

In 2010, Brotherhood added multiplayer into the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Assassin’s Creed III keeps the unique “hide-and-seek” multiplayer and makes it feel better than ever. Hunting another player while avoiding your hunter never gets old and makes for many fun chain kills. The new co-op mode, Wolfpack, lets you and your friends work together to kill AI, and it is surprisingly fun.



Conclusion:

Assassin’s Creed III still keeps enough of what makes Assassin’s Creed II great to keep it alive, but with some frustrating tweaking of key mechanics, Ubisoft has damaged their flagship franchise. For hardcore fans of the series, Assassin’s Creed III is worth playing eventually, but casual players and new players shouldn't be told this game exists until they are too sucked into the franchise to ignore it. Assassin's Creed III is in a word, disappointing. Not because of its predecessors, but because somewhere, buried under some near unforgivable problems, is a good game just trying to breath.



6.5/10