Review: Assassin's Creed III

Assassin’s Creed III is an action-adventure sandbox game for the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, PC, and the Wii U. It was developed by Ubisoft. Presumably the Wii U version has extra features that the other systems do not, but I played the 360 version so this review will not cover those.

Protagonist Connor slowly travelling through Boston.

As in previous Assassin’s Creed games, there are two stories going on III. In the present, four members of the Assassin order, including newcomer Desmond Miles, have found the location of a vault built by the First Civilization, which should contain a device that will save the world from an incoming solar flare. Unfortunately it is locked. To find the key, Miles has to use a device called an Animus to relive the life of one of his ancestors who knows the location of the key.

That ancestor, Ratonhnhake:ton, is an Iroquois native living in New York a few years before the American Revolution. Ratonhnhake:ton receives a vision from the First Civilization, telling him to stop the Templars, or else the world will be destroyed. The Templars are a secret order that is trying to control the world, are backing the British during the Revolution, and were the ones responsible for burning down Ratonhnhake:ton’s village and killing his mother. Taking the name Connor, Ratonhnhake:ton becomes an Assassin with the intention of killing the leaders of the Templars in America so his village can remain safe.

Assassin’s Creed III retains a lot of the gameplay mechanics of older Assassin’s Creed games, which are wasted here. In older games the player controlled an Assassin who would sneak past guards by using the environment and hiding in plain sight, assassinate someone, and escape back into the crowd. In III most of the missions do not involve sneaking around cities, and the few times you have to escape guards you can just outrun them.

Instead most missions follow a couple of specific formulas spread over Boston, New York, and a area called the Frontier that represents the New England countryside. More commons parts of a mission include travelling somewhere with an NPC via the most complicated route possible, sneaking through an area (highlighted in bright red to indicate that the guards are not screwing around) to find someone or something, and fighting some guards. Less common parts are tailing a couple of people conversing or doing something that you can only do for that one mission, like shooting cannon at soldiers.

Most of these missions are okay, though not exceptionally fun. The sneaking missions are terrible since the guards are practically omniscient, making it more like random luck if you get through a place undetected. The moment a guard looks in your direction they will spot you. Speaking of the guards spotty AI, if you kill enough people in regular areas guards will start to harass you whenever they see you, but sometimes they will start chasing you even if you have not done anything, though that might be a bug.

Mark my words the moment Connor moves every one of those  Redcoats will be on his ass.

Combat has one button to attack, one button to break an enemy’s defense, and one button works as a counter attack. The combat is mostly button mashing, though when to use the break defense and the counter attack requires. The counter attack only works when a red triangle appears over the enemy, but it does not activate a lot of the time, especially when Connor is fighting several people at once.

You also have access to a pistol and a bow and arrow set for those quick and silent kills.

Main missions have optional requirements to complete; completing them is called getting a 100% synchronization rate. These requirements are along the lines of sneaking through a place without being spotted once, or killing a couple of redcoats in a certain way. Most of them are merely frustrating, necessitating a restart of the mission several times for missing one little thing. A few of them are actually impossible unless you exploit flaws in the game itself. They are all optional, but I am obsessive bastard and I find the big red mark next to all the mission objectives impossible to ignore. I really should have, since like all the other optional challenges in Assassin’s Creed III the rewards are disappointing and the feeling of accomplishment is not worth it. These should have not been included in the game and do not enhance it at all.

Assassin’s Creed III has numerous side quests you can complete. In fact finishing all of them could take more time than playing the main story. Almost all of them are unrewarding to complete, but they are less annoying than the main missions and their 100% synchronization objectives.

A large number of the more complicated side missions are tied to the trading system. You stockpile materials, and then use those materials to build other things. You load the things you built onto a convoy and send it off to one of the stores you had earlier on the map, and in twenty minutes to an hour you get a couple hundred bucks. The thing is you do not know how much stores are going to pay for items until before you send them off, so you can waste resources on guessing what will actually make enough money to buy something. It is also a pretty boring process in general.

An even bigger problem with the trading system though is that you do not make enough money to buy weapons or upgrades for your ship, which cost several thousand dollars, but is the only way to make recurring money since you get nothing for completing main missions. Fortunately all the weapons are available near the beginning, and you can just buy one you like and use it for the rest of the game.

To get resources you have to recruit citizens for Connor’s homestead. You find potential citizens on the map and do a simple mission for them, like fighting a couple of people or escorting them somewhere, and they move to the homestead and make materials for you. Completing more missions for the citizens gets them to make more materials. The missions are simple, but they are nice little stories and it is actually enjoyable to see Connor’s homestead grow into a community.

The other way to get resources and make money is hunting animals on the Frontier map. Connor sneaks up on animals and kills and skins them, then you can use the pelts and meat for items to craft, or you can sell them on their own. Even though you can look on the map to see what parts of the Frontier animals spawn in, it is still tedious to run around the giant map and find the animals you want to kill, since the map is so large and the animals spawn randomly. Like with the trading system you cannot make much money off of selling animal parts, not enough to buy anything serious.

The frontier is beautiful, it is just that is so boring.

You can also collect a bunch of shit lying around the maps. Feathers, pages of Poor Richard’s Almanac, people to assassinate, people to deliver letters to, and treasure chests. Except for the treasure chests, which have decent amounts of money in them, these collections are all filler meant to eat up time.

Chasing down paper is sadly one of the few times the game puts Connor's Parkour skills to good use.

One side quest that is actually fun are the ship sailing segments. You pilot a ship, and try to sink other ships by lining up your sides of the ships so they can hit the other ships, and duck when the other ships fire at Connor’s ship. You can upgrade your ship and buy different types of cannonballs that work better on some ships than others. Most of ship missions only unlock new place to sell crafted items, but one section of the main game is all ship levels. It is all pretty fun, but is so far removed from the rest of the gameplay that I wonder why it is even in the game, like Ubisoft had the basic parts for another game and just attached them to Assassin’s Creed. They do have the same 100% synchronization problem that regular missions have though.

I remember when this series was about assassinating people. It was fun then.

The final big sidequest is recruiting six additional assassins, by performing a couple of small tasks and one mission for them. You can use your assassins to fight enemies for you, but they only work on the Boston and New York maps, which make them useless in all the missions that take place in the Frontier and ones where you need to remain incognito. That covers a lot of missions.

The story suffers heavily from the developers trying to shoehorn Connor into as many important moments in the American Revolution as possible, even when it is only tangentially related to his personal quest. Connor spends most of the time doing all the heavy work for the Founding Fathers in return for information, information that is not worth it for the amount of work Connor does. Eventually Connor starts to sound like he has forgotten his original plan is participating in the American Revolution because he believes all of the Founding Fathers talk of freedom for everyone. Historical knowledge tells us what really happened to Iroquois, knowledge which Connor could not have, but he still comes off as a chump and a yes-man, dutifully going along with any order or request given to him with only the mildest of complaints. He gets a bit better by the finale, but by then it is too late to matter.

Samuel Adams telling Connor to fetch his groceries, or some equally trivial task.

The game’s attempts to fit Connor into the American Revolution wastes the Boston and New York maps as well as screw with the story, since a lot of important points in the Revolution happened in the countryside. Whole sections of the Boston and New York maps go unexplored at Connor runs around the Frontier.

Desmond’s story meanwhile is actually a conclusion to the entire Assassin’s Creed series, as far as I could tell. As such it tries to wrap up a few dangling plot threads, but does it in a haphazard manner. The ending is confusing and unsatisfying too.

The game is incredibly glitchy. Markers appearing on the map that lead to nothing, horses spawning in inaccessible areas when you call one, icons disappearing, command prompts not working, Connor jumping to the wrong ledges or unable to grab ledges he should be able to grab, important character models appearing in two places at once, people’s hair disappearing, and everything clipping. There is no reason for a game to be released in this state, nor is there a good reason to not release a patch. It makes me think Ubisoft rushed the game.

There is a multiplayer mode, the basics of which are you hunt down another player in an arena while someone tries to hunt down you. You are supposed to look like the dozens of NPCs walking around and stealthily sneak up and kill your target. You get bonus points for not doing anything like running and jumping before you kill your target. If you do things like running and jumping the game will alert your target and they will be able to defend themselves, either completely stopping you or at least keep you from getting as many points as you could.

What it looks like when one player successfully sneaks up on another player.

While the offense part of the multiplayer is okay, the defense part has problems. You do not have a proper way of defending yourself. You can see your attacker, who if they do enough running around will have a red arrow over there head, and they can still kill you. It is unclear why sometimes you can stop your attacker and other times you can only reduce their score.

There is also a problem with people who played longer unlocking weapons and decimating new players. There is no point in trying and blend in and sneak around when older players can run up to the roofs and fling poison darts at you from wherever.

On its own Assassin’s Creed III is a disappointing game that does more things wrong than right and is frustrating in every way. As an Assassin’s Creed game it is a travesty that is inferior to all the previous games. It is terrible. Any respect I had for Ubisoft is gone; they should be ashamed of this game. Only diehard fans of the series should consider even looking at it.