Assassin’s Creed III is a wrap. Thanks to a head cold and slight fever, I had the joyous privilege of being awake at 3 a.m., and what kind of self-respecting gamer would I be if I didn’t take advantage of the quiet house and lack of distractions to put in some quality play time? I was able to finish up Assassin’s Creed III, and to be honest, I almost opened this write-up with a “well that was quick” intro, but I’d be lying. While the game time I put into it was relatively short, it felt like a friggin’ eternity.
I was aware going in that ACIII was one of the lesser regarded entries into the series, and that protagonist Connor didn’t nearly measure up to the former Assassin, Ezio. Fair enough, I thought. We spent three whole games with Ezio, and even the straightest dude on the planet would probably be guilty of having a slight man-crush on his suave Italian accent and his general badassery. Ezio didn’t make a huge impact on me at first, but over the course of three games, I felt the developers really had the time and opportunity to allow him to grow, and wrapping up his story arc as an older, wiser man was great. But now it was time to move on to new blood and new setting, so enter Connor and his American Revolution background.
I am willing to give Connor a little more slack than other people. Granted, he was as shallow as a puddle and had a mind like the Disney monorail (always looking forward but ultimately just going around in circles). Hold on, give me a moment. I’m kinda diggin’ that Disney monorail analogy.
Okay, moving on. As I said, I was willing to throw Connor a bone, as his personality is largely a product of his upbringing, and since that was kinda shit, of course he’d be a stick in the mud. Is there much fun to be had when everyone around you is plotting and killing and dying, with your tribe sitting in the middle of the entire thing like a flock of sheep?
That being said, I don’t buy these time jumps that Ubisoft puts into these games. Sure, Connor got older, and his father Haytham Kenway was now gray-haired, but aside from that, nothing has changed in the 20-ish year span in which the game takes place. Just as Claudia never changed clothes, and Ezio’s mother never left the bedside for ten years in ACII, everything else in the world seems stuck in a time loop. Now, we could argue and say it’s all part of the Animus simulation, like it’s only simulating what’s important, but my money’s on developer oversight.
Story aside, which I did find intriguing, the game is a giant fucking technical mess. I’m aware that after the Ezio trilogy they moved over to a new game engine, and that always brings with it a few bugs, but many of these bugs should have never made it out the door. One big gripe were in-game cutscenes that overlapped with other things going on. On several occasions I had the game action kick off before cutscene was done, resulting in failed mission objectives and overlapping conversations, to name a few. I had quest triggers that wouldn’t happen, leaving me wandering around wondering what I was supposed to do.
The traversal gets a little bit of a pass, mainly because if I was a programmer and someone told me I’d have to make an entire forest with fluidly navigable tree branches, I would’ve said “Sure, okay” and then proceeded to dance around that person and play a kazoo. It works, for the most part, but it can still be pretty janky. I stopped hitting up the Synchronization points in the frontier because they were mostly in trees, and getting back down without killing yourself became too much of a pain.
Speaking of Sync points, holy crap are they useless in this game. Climbing to the top and syncing an area grants you access to a radius of about 50 yards, which speaking in terms of an entire map, ain’t shit. Come to think of it, a large, large number of the optional side quests type stuff, like building up the Homestead, crafting, chasing down almanac pages, and such are hugely inconsequential. The only side quest line I would highly recommend is the Capt. Kidd treasure hunt. Not only do they offer some more classic AC/Tomb Raider-ish dungeon crawling, but fulfilling the entire thing gets you a Pre-cursor artifact that deflects bullets. That came in really handy later in the game when Connor is getting trounced by fifteen British soldiers and every five seconds one wants to pull out the rifle or pistol. It was really nice to just ignore them.
I ended up playing the story almost exclusively, and I have to say the game came off as extremely disconnected. Suddenly not having to buy weapons or armor or own businesses took away from the game’s grounding, and the cities of Boston, New York, and the surrounding areas were nothing more than static obstacle courses. My interest in the growing amount of AC filler “fluff” is waning as I put more and more time into the series, but this was the first time I wasn’t even the slightest bit interested. (By comparison, I sneaked a little peek of AC Origins for a little while the other night and was instantly enthralled in Bayek and his surroundings.)
I’ve said more about this game than I ever intended to, but after spending 20-ish hours getting through the story (which in typical AC fashion, stretched out way too long), I had to vent. I’ve even thought about including some of the screenshots and videos of all the glitches I encountered, but that would be giving the game even more attention than it needs.
