Assassins Creed 3

Game Info

Assassin’s Creed 3 (or, more accurately, 5 not counting the handheld, social media, and various other iterations) has been Ubisoft’s most pre-ordered game of all time.  Its multi-million dollar marketing has made people salivate over the thought of facestabbing redcoats.  Story trailers have introduced us to Connor, the half-native, half-British protagonist whom we will use to vanquish our enemies.

Ubisoft has pulled so much wool over our eyes, we’re all wearing sweaters on our heads.

Those of us who pre-ordered this game all know the story.  Desmond, Templars, solar flare.  Got it.  The last key to save the world is somewhere in New England, so the bumbling team of idiots in the present are off to set up their equipment in a cave and track it down (also, you’ll drive a van to Brazil).  This time, though, Desmond Miles’ Animus adventures take the historical thrust of the game to a new setting, with a new main character – finally done with Ezio, we move on to Connor and guide him through his life.  I never realized just how tedious being a Native American was until Ubisoft held my hand through setting a snare.  After a half-game-spanning prologue, you’ll eventually get to participate in the American Revolution, meeting key players and changing the world, while tracking down a group of New World Templars, reminiscent of the first game.

The game holds your hand tightly through all this, making sure every scripted event is completely explained (and desynchronizing you if you fail).  Everything gets so overly explained and touched upon, that the first 6 game sequences are basically tutorial missions.  “Let’s play hide and seek, find us using your eagle vision!” your friends tell you.  “Collect 4 feathers and three animal pelts,” your buddy will say.  “Send out a caravan,” your tutor instructs.  Even the multiplayer primer is over an hour long and three different sequences.  Really, guys, I just want to stab people.  Thanks for the rope dart tutorial, but the controller only has so many buttons.  I’ll figure it out, I prom—oh, I didn’t kill all three guys the exact way I needed to?  Alright, I’ll try again.  Not like I have a choice.

I feel bad for poor Connor in all this.  His native name, phonetically as Rah-nah-kah-hay-ton, gets mishmashed into “Connor” because the tutor thinks he looks Spanish (I’ll let you stew on that one).  Our new hero sets out to save his people’s land – a losing battle – and gets thrust into this world of assassins and templars.  Connor just wants everyone to be free and equal, but his naivete is so vast that he can’t see any big picture.  Gone is moody, egotistical Altair and womanizing idiot Ezio.  This time we actually have a character we can like.  You can even pet animals as him (which is the theme for the selected images for this review, if you hadn’t noticed).  Facestab lobsterbacks.  Pet a dog.  Get into a melee with a dozen redcoats – when the camera zooms in, you can see Connor’s face, locked in a silent, raging scream.  Pet a cow.  He’s a downright likable protagonist, just because he’s so darn nice when he’s not murdering hundreds of British soldiers.

There’s been a lot said about the new setting, with the frontier and new cities a huge departure from the European architecture of the first 4 games.  Boston and New York are completely different, and have an interesting personality.  They’re not pretty, by any means, but at least it’s a change of scenery.  There are no towering minarets anymore, but what is there generally suffices.  The frontier segments are disappointing, though.  Although the snow and weather effects are novel, the frontier itself is bland.  Animal hunting is a tedious chore, and fights with predators are relegated to QTE button pushes.  Circle, X will kill a wolf.  Circle X circle square has you downing bears.  It begs comparison to Red Dead Redemption, where if you heard a cougar, you knew it was about to get messy.  Here, the camera zooms around and button prompts flash on the screen.  Cougar dead.  It’s bland and painfully tedious.

But you get a boat!  An aside to the secondary homestead building stuff, the ship missions could have been their own separate game entirely.  Midway through the plot you’ll get the command of a ship, and the naval combat is the greatest part of this game.  Without massive crowds, the new AnvilNEXT engine shines – rendering explosions, water, cannon-fire, and landscape beautifully.  If this is Ubisoft’s apology for the horribly awful Den Defenses from last year’s AC installment, I accept.  These missions, while generally short and numbering only a dozen or so, are hands-down the best part of the game.

Added to that are the Desmond parts, which once again are the lowlight once again of the AC universe.  This time, to power your cave, you need to get ancient alien batteries from various locales around the world.  One has you climbing a half-built skyscraper with no guards or elevator, making it a tedious vertical climb in the dark.  Another has your team driving in a van to Brazil to steal a woman’s bracelet, in what has got to be the ugliest, buggiest section of the game.  They’re unskippable (and lengthy) this time, too, so get used to crowds of people who look like they were designed for a PSOne game.

Which is baffling, considering the new engine, AnvilNEXT, is supposed to be so great.  Although it can render hundreds of characters onscreen at once, it does it very poorly.  I’ve seen crowds of people with square heads and only three different models – but you can walk right through them.  A firing line in the Continental Army, made up of the same 8 guys.  The battle of Bunker Hill, with its massive wall of redcoats – of which there are only two faces.  It creates a host of graphical glitches as well, and poor collision detection with objects means there’s a lot of ugly clipping.  Some faces are rendered very well and are instantly recognizable, but background characters in crowd scenes get 5 pixels and a bitmapped face drawn on their dumb heads, making them stick out like a hideous sore thumb.

Not helping the situation is the slightly altered control scheme, as well.  Although the parkour stuff has had all sorts of new animations to make it feel more fluid, free-running is now controlled with one button instead of two.  This takes a bit of the control away from the player, which invariably sends Connor running up a tree when he wanted to just run past it.  You’ll try to charge around a corner, chasing someone in a silly footrace, but instead you’ll stick to the corner and lose your target.  Moving eavesdropping missions are particularly frustrating, as you need to walk, listen, and make sure you don’t bump in to your targets accidentally hit R1 and go running up the side of a building.  Firing weapons has changed, and a loose lock-on system (coupled with the period realism of a 15-second reload time) renders muskets and pistols nearly useless.

It’s a good thing the rest of the combat is so damn good, though.  Although the ballyhooed two-weapons system is a bust (a dagger magically appears in your off-hand), the free-flowing nature, cinematic slow-downs, and visceral kills are great.  It’s not something easily describable and really has to be seen.  But it does make it fun to use weapons again, as opposed to going barehanded and winning every fight without taking damage.  Watching an effortless takedown, followed by a vicious beating to death with an axehandle, creates a beauty in the brutality that you’re unleashing.

Multiplayer makes a return, and if you can chore it through the hour-long tutorial, you’ll probably have a decent time at it.  The interface has been slightly updated, making spotting your quarry easier.  But the defenders are given more escape options and abilities, so there’s a good balance.  It’s like a backwards Turing Test, where people pretend to be AI.  It’s clever stuff…  until it devolves into the usual “people running on rooftops” goofiness that the other ones became.  New though is the Wolfpack mode, a semi-co-op team mission where you kill AI targets with a small group of other assassins.  This is the new highlight of multiplayer, and although it starts out a little manic with sometimes too-little time and too-far objectives, good matches are common.

I wanted to love this game.  I really, really wanted to love it.  But I can’t.  I’ve given so much money to these people on the hopes that these games will be as good as the first and second ones were.  But Assassin’s Creed 3 misfires on so many levels, that its very legitimate flashes of brilliance are vastly overshadowed by overwrought video game tropes and really bad design decisions.  It’s better then Revelations was, but only marginally.