Assassin’s Creed III

Being as I have played both Assassin’s Creed and Assassin’s Creed II I felt that I should be able to judge Assassin’s Creed III based solely on the merits of the first two games. So my initial review was this:

You will spend a lot of time climbing buildings in a sandbox world built around a specific country during a specific time period with the ultimate goal of stabbing a bunch of people in the back with blades that spring from your wrists. You will assassinate high profile targets, have a revealing conversation with them during their final moments, and whisper a quick prayer over their corpse before unceremoniously dropping their limp body (physics!) in the street, temple, church, villa, or castle where you found them. Only this time it’s in America!

Boy was I wrong.

Assassin’s Creed III is entirely cut scenes! The only time I got to control the character was to walk him from point A to point B between those cut scenes in, what I think, was an entirely unnecessary gesture to give me the illusion of control.

During these scenes I relearned the plots of the previous two games, got a bit of history on both the Templars and Assassins, and learned that Desmond Miles (the protagonist) has a father who is apparently important to the story now. I didn’t even know he had existed. He must have come along during the original Assassin’s Creed III or IV – Brotherhood and Revelations, respectively.

“What?” you ask, “You haven’t played those?” To which I respond, “Leave me alone! I don’t have money or – as you are probably aware by now – time to play all these extra games they keep throwing at me!”

The worst cut scene was the awkward moment in the van when nobody spoke or moved or really seemed to exist at all. It’s like that family car ride when your parents suddenly and way too casually mention that they are getting divorced.

So I walked the character into some cave, which was really an ancient temple with super high tech future computers – yeah, let that sentence sink in for a bit – and then my character passed out and was dropped into a world made of geometric shapes of varying hues of white and gray. I finally had the ability to free run! But I could not tell for the life of me what surfaces I could latch onto so I was mostly just guessing, which when you guess wrong means you fall into forever and have to start all over. I left my character hanging from a wall and turned to write this review:

The controls are sloppy and, apparently, unnecessary considering most of the time I wasn’t even playing. I miss the tight demanding controls of the previous games where every action had a separate button (or combination of buttons) whereas now you basically hold down one button and it does everything for you. This is particularly annoying when your character goes to jump when you didn’t tell them to and, for whatever reason, they jump in the direction of immediate death even though you were clearly pointing at the wall with what looked to be a groove for climbing, but apparently wasn’t and I thought I saw a bar sticking out that was meant to be grabbed…but I digress. The game also felt more linear than the previous titles and there was no sandbox in which to play.

And where was my cool assassin getup? I didn’t want to play as some modern-age punk in a crappy hoodie with no peak. I want to run along the rooftops of an ancient city and “accidently” stab the innocent musician that keeps running in front of me.

Happy Thoughts: The plot and writing for the game were significantly better than the previous games with pacing being more appropriate and characters more interesting. Desmond is getting a little grumpy, but on the up side that weird blonde lady with the super huge mouth from Assassin’s Creed II is nowhere to be found. Where did she go to anyway?

Sad Thoughts: The action feels simplified and a little too loose and I can’t always tell where the stupid ledges are!

Bottom line: This game didn’t take within the ten minute limit. It was too much plot and not enough game play and I felt like I was being railroaded.