Assassin's Creed III (2012)

I am on a journey to beat 360 random Xbox 360 games. Here's my next adventure

Game number 54 was Assassin’s Creed 3. After 3 games with the legendary Ezio Auditore, we move away from the Italian Renaissance and move to the American Revolution. Maybe it’s because I’m an American, but I have always thought that this was an incredible setting for an Assassin’s Creed game and love the idea of secretly controlling the time of certain historical moments.

The story in Assassin’s Creed 3 (AC3) is definitely the best part of the game… and my favorite AC story so far. I thought that there were a few sparks of genius in the storytelling and was mostly glued to the TV when playing any main missions. The first quarter of AC3 is played from the perspective of Haytham Kenway, a mysterious British man who is ordered to come to America to sort things out during the French and Indian War.

Haytham spends a lot of time recruiting people to help him and assisting the natives with the goal of finding a site from the First Civilization which he has a pendant connected to. You eventually achieve all these goals only to receive the best plot twist in AC history: Haytham is actually a Templar and you have been playing through many missions that assist the Templar order. I absolutely love this twist! I don’t think there are many people nowadays who don’t already know that this twist is coming, but it was amazing back when I first played AC3.

The rest of the game is told from the perspective of Connor, the son of Haytham and Ziio (a Native American woman). Connor grows up right as the American revolution starts and needs to guide his tribe through a war where both sides will end up antagonistic to them.

As with the other AC games, all the historical sections are actually taking place inside a thing called the animus. This lets a modern day man named Desmond look at the memories of his ancestors. The modern plot revolves around an impending apocalypse and Desmond needing to figure out a way to save the world. He has to get into the First Civilization site that Haytham was looking for in order to get the answers he needs.

There is a lot of story to discuss, but it mostly devolves into a plot about a father and son who have vastly different points of view in the past and a plot about the end of the world in the present. It takes lots of twists and turns and ends up being really intriguing. I have heard a lot of hate towards Connor, but I think that’s just because he isn’t Ezio. Ezio was great and Connor isn’t even close to as cool as him, but that doesn’t mean he’s bad either.

Other than the story, I think AC3 falls slightly short in comparison with the previous games.

The combat in AC3 is probably my least favorite in the series. Seriously, I don’t think I ever enjoyed getting into a combat encounter. The biggest issue is that it feels like dealing with enemies is all or nothing. You essentially deal a killing blow or you don’t feel like you are doing anything. In ACBH or ACRev the combat actually forced me to think about what I was doing, but AC3 devolved into counter killing everyone. I hated how 90% of the combat encounters ended up being the exact same thing.

Another issue with AC3 is the entire stealth system. Stealth is overall less present in AC3 and it feels a little wonky when it is here. This may have to do with AC3 having a different engine than the earlier games. I imagine that the team hadn’t perfected the AI for enemies yet. Getting out of combat is also a real pain in the butt. It just feels like there are a whole lot less hiding spots in Boston and New York than there ever were in the Italian cities.

The side content in AC3 is generally awful. The exceptions to this are the Homestead missions and the Naval missions. The Homestead missions are essentially required reading if you want to get the most out of the game. In these, Connor helps people around his Homestead and they mainly serve to flesh out the world and build up Connor’s character. I always enjoyed playing through a couple between main story missions. The Naval missions see Connor controlling a ship and defeating the British Navy in sea battles. I did a couple of these… then realized I was going to play AC4 as my next game and decided I would have enough AC Naval combat there lol. Still, they are pretty good.

The rest of the stuff is EXTREMELY TEDIOUS. There are forts in AC3 that you need to liberate, but you have to do 10 side missions for each fort in order to do them. It’s just not worth it. The actual missions to take over the forts are cool and you get to recruit named Assassin’s that are actually pretty cool. It’s just miserable to do this stuff. The rest of the side quests are all just garbage and have you running to random points and pressing “B” on things or killing a couple guards. They are not worth your time.

The “Feel” of AC3 isn’t bad, but it is certainly not as optimized as the earlier games. I firmly believe that the AC games are best done in urban environments. The frontier is an interesting novelty, but I would be kidding you if I said that it was cooler than Venice, Rome, or Constantaople.

Overall, AC3 gets by on having an absolutely awesome story that you should definitely play through… but it takes a few steps back in some other areas. Combat and side quests are iffy at best and Colonial America may not have been the best place for a traditionally urban parkour game. Either way, I would still recommend any AC fan to play this. It is definitely worth your time! (7/10)

I spent a total of 13 hours 17 min and 13 seconds on Assassin’s Creed 3.

I have spent a total of 574 hours and 21 minutes on the Road to 360 challenge so far!

Next Game: Assassin’s Creed 4: Black Flag

The Good the Bad and the promised game. Assassin's Creed III was an incredibly ambitious project by Ubisoft studios in follow up of a tried and proven formula of video games that the fans loved. It took many of the positive aspects of the games and tried to enrich and complexify them. The characters in this iteration are more grey in their moral compass, the story has more nuance in its objectives thus being more similar to the plot and intentions of the first game. The mechanics have been slightly tweaked making it for a more streamlined free running, and more objective and simplified fighting. For the regular player who might just focus on the story and the cities gameplay (yes cities as in this game we play in both colonial Boston and New York), the game is bland, tedious, lacking activities and fast-paced. And this is a fault of the player as the game is sprawling with activities, side missions, side stories, fetching quests, clubs, naval battles, crafting, etc... Yet non of this is pushed or nudged in the player's way besides a simple tutorial more than 40% into the game.

If there is one main flaw to this game I would say pacing and too many ideas killed this game. The game focuses on being much more story driven giving you a prologue with Haytham for about four sequences, it is only when one gets to sequence six that one plays as the main character becoming an assassin. This paired with the late tutorials on crafting, homestead, naval battles and all these side quests makes a player feel pressured by time to complete some of these things. I keep mentioning that Assassin's Creed has a Completionist DNA to it, the side objectives that appear, the bonus material and collectives are very much in AC's style, with this odd choice of pacing the usual completionist gets pushed into spending hours doing side tasks all in a row instead of being able to pace them with the story. The homestead missions are some of my favourites as it presents the renovating city mechanic that was present in the three previous games but this time with more heartfelt characters, and more interesting missions rather than just buying every monument and shop in a city.

Before any concluding remarks, I would like to give a small comment on the bugs, I played this in the original release for PC and the bugs were not horrendous but every time they happened it was a very non-enjoyable experience. Constantly getting stuck on walls, with the horse or in a tree, it is obvious that the game and the team undertook a project bigger than they could fill in, and thus the bugs are a part of the lifelessness that the game has when looked from afar and away from tasks.

In conclusion, I still give this game four stars many of the ideas present in this game end up marking the continuation of the series such as the naval battles and ACIV Black Flag. It is a promised video game with plenty in it but flawed in its practice.

I've been playing Assassin's Creed in order, play one, wait some time (sometimes years) and play another, and this game has a good story, the best villain characters so far in the franchise, though 2 and Brotherhood still keeping with the best protagonists (and forgettable villains) did a good job of building the villains this time around, making you literally step into their shoes.

Gameplay is the same as always, clunky, very automatic... with some cool side quests (the ship's ones are really cool, one of the best parts of the game) and hundreds of uninteresting Sides like... come on... run after of papers floating around town...really? And the chase and run scenes is where Ubisoft's art direction really shines, I love those parts.

So far, AC games are just "Ok" to pass the time, it's not a franchise I love, the trailers are way more exciting and epic than the games themselves and I'm one of those people who usually says "Heh, I prefer the Prince Of Persia" -q

The ambition of Assassin’s Creed 3 is both its strength and its Achilles heel. The scope of its universe and the number of activities available will certainly impress players, since at one point they will be bombarding ships in a storm on the high seas and, at the other, will be hunting foxes with traps in a forest. With so much diversity, it is at least understandable to attest that the developers have been unable to craft such activities with the complexity they deserved.

Finally abandoning the Renaissance aesthetic, the franchise moves on to the period of the American Revolution. The premise of Assassin’s Creed, after all, has always allowed similar modifications of scenery. Desmond, the protagonist, uses the Animus machine to relive the memories of his ancestors with the intention of discovering the secrets that they kept. That is, nothing prevents each new title from featuring a new hero in a different period of time. Who is to blame for the franchise having stagnated for three titles in the same character is quite clear: it is Ubisoft itself and its policy of releasing a game per year.

The American Revolution, with all its political battles (“No taxation without representation!”), important figures, armed confrontations and wasted tea, fits the franchise like a glove. The Assassin’s Creed series has always been about conspiratorial plots, emphasizing an atmosphere of mystery, by focusing on the existence of secret societies that manipulate the major events in the history of mankind. Desmond and his ancestor Connor are Assassins, a sect that preaches the appreciation of free will (“Nothing is true, everything is permitted“) and stands for freedom. The Templars, on the other hand, advocate that freedom is an invitation to chaos; that without a strong and rational hand controlling the fate of ordinary people, they would inevitably be manipulated by other smaller forces or go to war.

The main conflict in Connor’s plot is just that. He is an Indian who has watched his village being burned by the Templars and sets out on a journey of revenge through Revolutionary America. He is then converted into an Assassin and begins to interfere in the events that led to the independence of the Thirteen Colonies.

Wisely, the writers do not give in to the temptation of only positioning Connor among the revolutionaries and the Templars alongside the English, creating an easily identifiable good and evil. Both groups, in fact, strive for the same end – peace – but are based on distinct ideals. In this scenario, Connor is a considerably different character from his predecessor, the Italian Ezio, who was a charming, passionate man. Ezio’s mission seemed fair, for it really was: his enemies, the Borgia, were horrible people thirsting for power and capable of committing horrible atrocities. In Connor’s case, it is easy to see that it is the circumstances that make him a completely different individual. Unlike Ezio – whose tragedies only struck him when he was practically an adult – Connor grows as a child being consumed by revenge. His enemies are not unidimensional and evil as were the Borgia; on the contrary, they are so reasonable and rational that they make the protagonist look like a religious fanatic who prefers to bring war to the people even when there are better alternatives – all in the name of his beliefs. Connor is an unusual protagonist in the gaming industry not because he is closer to being the villain of the story than a hero, but because he does so in the name of a theoretically noble cause: Connor believes that complete and total freedom is the most primordial right and attacks their enemies with an axe only because they dare think differently.

Assassin’s Creed 3, however, despite having a great story, suffers from serious narrative problems. Connor’s journey is so marked by the major events of the American Revolution that it practically turns him into the Forrest Gump of the era – a comparison that certainly does not fit the tone of the story or the character’s nature. In addition, it is customary to say that very large prologues are detrimental to any story, but when one lasts more than four hours, authorities on the subject no longer call it a prologue but a tumor. The duration of the one in Assassin’s Creed 3 is absurd: the player will begin by following the journey of a mysterious and pragmatic Englishman named Haytham Kenway and will only control the true protagonist when the story of Haytham finally reaches an interesting point (after four hours, which can still be extended for much more if the player is meticulous).

This transition is also easily noticeable in the gameplay departmant. The beginning with Haytham does not present anything new to the franchise. His missions are uninspired copies of those shown in previous games and take place in a considerably uninteresting environment. Playing the prologue and exploring the wide streets of Boston, outlined by a few small houses and churches, the player will have to reflect if this change of environment was not harmful, since the games always cherished the exploration of the verticality of their environments and, in the case of Boston, such verticality is nowhere to be found.

However, when Connor appears in the narrative as an indigenous boy and the player has the opportunity to climb trees and mountains on the Boston border, observing the fauna and flora of the forests and marshes, as well as hunting animals and ambushing caravans of soldiers, the change is suddenly justified and the exploration becomes fun again. The difference in quality is so noticeable that it is astonishing that the prologue has not been completely discarded during development.

Walking through the canopy and tree branches is special because the gameplay changes subtly. The layout of the elements that can be used in parkour is drastically different from that used in cities: while the roof of houses is easily visible from a distance, which allows players to prepare their path in advance, the trees are extremely closed together, forcing them to adopt a different approach, based on instinct. Now there are even mountains and rivers blocking the path, demanding improvisation during intense escapes. Modifying the geometric structure of the environment also amplifies the sense of novelty: while the Italian cities were almost completely flat with vertical structures, the Frontier presents thousands of small hills and curvatures in the ground – and it is certainly interesting to note that an evolution of level design that occurred in Mario’s 2D games 20 years ago is only taking place in one of the most famous franchises in the games industry in its fifth entry.

It is a shame, therefore, to notice that one of Assassin’s Creed’s main mechanics continues to have its potential deterred by the developer’s dogma of “offering too much, simplifying everything.” In other words, the player will cross the entire Frontier and observe its magnificent sights, but will do so almost without thinking, holding two buttons and the analog stick.

The combat also continues to be one of the most recurring flaws in the franchise. It is absolutely “broken” in the sense that it is ridiculously easy to kill over four hundred enemies together without taking any damage. Half of the enemy force dies with one block and one counter attack, and the other half must receive two or three disarming blows to fall to the ground. In fact, the first half would also succumb to this strategy, but doing so would make the fights even more boring. Connor, then, becomes an immortal superhero capable of decimating the entire English army without sweating. The combat has negative implications even in the story, since players will wonder why they need to bother to quietly invade places and plan ambushes, if they can just walk through the front door and kill everyone.

These forced stealth sequences remain extremely problematic, since the rules by which they are governed are one of the game’s greatest mysteries. Players will simply not know why certain actions make them be discovered by the enemy while other extremely extravagant ones do not. Besides that, the same action taken under the same circumstances can have different results – something clearly frustrating in any game based on stealth. In a certain mission that Connor needed to kill the crew of a whole ship without being noticed, throwing a guard that was in the edge of the boat in the water sometimes made two guards who were standing with their backs to the protagonist see him, but sometimes not. This lack of certainty about the consequences of your actions is the main crime that a game based on stealth can commit, since its mechanics only make sense and work if players can plan ahead or understand why they failed.

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The beginning of this game seemed like it had some serious promise with Haytham getting all murdery in an opera house. Everything seemed so well-choreographed and looked great for a PS3/360-era game.

Then you switch over to Connor on the other side of the pond, and it all goes downhill. The main Assassin storyline is little more than a lame revenge checklist, and the overarching Desmond storyline for these first 5 games ties itself up with a whimpering whoopie-cushion fart.

The parkour and climbing controls that seemed to be getting more refined with each previous game completely fall apart in AC3. Buildings are too far apart to easily traverse the rooftops, and climbing trees rarely ever works how you'd expect. That means you spend more time on the ground; but almost anytime a city soldier even sees you on the ground, they all go on 5-star GTA alert. And with 20 guards constantly chasing you, there is no hiding. So, you go swim out into the middle of the ocean, wait for things to cool down, rinse & repeat.

The game is packed with side missions like hunting and treasure hunting that I had zero motivation to complete. Near the end of the game, I discovered that there were optional ship missions & upgrades I could've been doing; but by that point I was so sick of the game that I didn't touch them.

This is not a good game.

Oh, and the PC port. It's a mess on Windows 10. I own all of the DLC, but I couldn't even play it. I tried finding a solution for about a half-hour after watching the credits, then gave up. It just isn't worth it.

Played on PS3, April/May 2017

Pros: Introduced tree running and naval combat gameplay elements. Both were well done and interesting additions to the series. Haytham and Connor's story was also interesting.

Cons: Some huge pacing issues: slow long winded story that tried way too hard to shoehorn Connor into the American Revolution; slow introduction that felt like I was playing a five hour long tutorial with very little gameplay. Buildings were spread a little wide for effective rooftop running. Drab looking cities. If you alert one enemy, dozens come from blocks around, I guess they had walkie-talkies or something. Charles Lee two extra sequences at the end, forced slow walking, ugh. I really don't care about the modern day story at all, but I did think the gameplay of it was alright.

Do not replay.