Final review of Assassin's Creed 3

After making an extensive recap of the Assassin's Creed 3 game that covered almost exclusively the story of said game, it is time to do a proper review of the title. It is no secret that I really wanted to play the title, and I preordered it a year before it came out in some special super special duper edition. I gave it enormous credit beforehand, because of the previous titles that managed to really mean something (opposed to, say, the Modern Warfare series). However, Assassin's Creed 3 left me really unsatisfied, both on a storytelling and on a game mechanic level. At first, let give me a brief summary over my grievances with the story, which you can read in great detail in my recaps.

Looking at his nemesis: a critical review

There are two main problems. The first is the structure of the story itself. It starts with a really great idea, letting you play the main antagonist for quite a while before allowing you to do your own training. But in the end, it comes down to the character and how he interacts with the world. Connor is a hollow shell and doesn't possess many character traits that made Ezio such a compelling figure. Even Altair had much more character development, growing from a youthful hothead into a somber, responsible man. Connor is a youthful hothead when the story requires it, and he is somber at the same occasions. Worst of all, he's never responsible. The deeds you commit as Connor, such as helping a cook slaughter about two dozen guards because he grieves over the Quartering Act, or the murder of several dozen soldiers at the Boston Tea Party just to hit the enemy's purse don't breath any of the thoughfulness behind the previous assassin goals. At no point in the game can Connor coherently articulate why the Assassins should prevail over the templars. That the historic events of the period are slapped into the story degenerates the whole thing to a tour-de-force through the history of revolutionary America.

Bam! Boom! Explosion! Never mind why.

The other problem is the means by which the story is executed. The game heavily relies on lengthy cutscenes to deliver its dialogue. Even things that can be told by the environment and gameplay, which is after all the superior technique in a video game, are delivered by heavy-handed expositionary dialogue. Everything is spelled out exactly and in so many lines, the whole storytelling just becomes very bloated. It's not the cutscenes per se - if the dialogue would be written well, I wouldn't take so much beef with it. I refer you to Assassin's Creed Revelations as an example of how it can be done. But alas, the dialogue is very poorly written. The over-exposition seeps into it way too often, and worse, the dialogue was conceived to be the number one medium to tell you what to do next. This leads to people explaining to you just how stuff works - in game terms, more or less. Any immersion in the world gets blown by this.

Connor and Washington, presumably talking

But again, read detailed critique of this in the recaps and let's move on to the gameplay. It's Assassin's Creed, so you climb stuff and kill people, right? Yes, and no. There's way too much other stuff. The game never exactly delivers on the assassinating part. Since many assassinations are woven deeply into the story, you don't have any agency of how to perform them. This is most laughingly executed in the execution scene, where your only element of interaction is to walk a few steps before the next lengthy cutscene cuts in, in which the assassination is performed. The path is set out for you. This doesn't extend to the assassinations only. In fact, the game details almost every step for you, taking away most agency you might have. There are almost no choices.

Connor's favorite choice: how to kill a redcoat?

 Now, in a straight shooter like Call of Duty, this lack of choices doesn't matter because the game wants to make you feel like the protagonist of an action movie, and it delivers on that part. But Assassin's Creed 3 is supposed to be about assassination attempts and, most ridiculously, it's designed as a sandbox game. It does seem like the misperception was lost on Ubisoft, so let me spell it out: if you have a sandbox game with huge environments to discover, discovering them should somehow be part of the game. In Assassin's Creed 3, there isn't any need at all for discovery. The game doesn't even promote it, because following the main storyline gets rewarded with big shiny quest markers on the map. There are so many elements in this game - minigames, a whole economy system, naval battles, ... - but none of them connect to the main game. It feels like there are two seperate games at work simultanously.

Depicted: a scene from the better of the two games

This negative impression is tied together by the fact that the game poses almost no challenge. It is ridiculously easy. When you get frustrated with it, then because you run into one of the many glitches that plaguen the game since the first installment: your character runs across a fence instead of jumping down, you suddenly jump from a rooftop into thin air instead of grabbing the next ledge, you auto-target enemies randomly instead of being able to focus, and so on. This adds to a rather dismal view of Assassin's Creed 3, which fails to live up to the high expectations. Much wasted potential here, unfortunately. Let's hope the inevitable add-on will make amends for it.

I have an idea for a protagonist.