Over the recent break, I played and completed assassin’s creed 3. Without giving away any spoilers the first 4 sequences were surprising to say the least, and was an incredible step up from the disappointment that was assassin’s creed revelations.
The Desmond sequences return and a lot better from the previous parkour training and brief combat sequences. You go through large parkour challenges, stealth sections and surprisingly satisfying combat sequences that are somewhat fully fleshed out levels. Along with some long awaited questions being answered there are a lot more brought up, like how can they make a sequel and is this the end of Desmond. Well for that last question there may be an answer out there, for a long time it has been rumoured that this is Desmond’s last game it is very possible that it is, they do hint as to how they can make sequels but it is all up in the air at the moment.
The main story of the game is strong, but some of the sequences seem short as they contain one or two long missions instead of six or seven shorter ones. We meet our new assassin Connor a few hours into the game and ubisoft give you reason to warm up to him straight away as tragedy and misfortune are forced upon him, and like Ezio Auditore, his story is about revenge. The story pans across around 30 years, both before and after the American revolution, and even though we were promised that we would not just be killing redcoats, I think I only got the chance to kill a few, as most of them take no caring to your notoriety level until the epilogue. Throughout the game the story stays strong right up to the end, but I could not help myself from ploughing through all of the assassin recruit missions and homestead missions. I have always been a fan of the meta-games in assassin’s creed and ended up incredibly rich and fully levelled up assassins near half way through the game.
Visually, the game is rather beautiful, although there are some buggy glitches. A lot of the time textures would not pop in until you got incredibly close to the object and characters continuously disappeared and reappeared from the screen randomly. Some of the early cut scenes also have very bad texture issues, in one the background had a huge green smudge across the screen, and this happened every time I saw this cut scene. Another issue is horses; even though they are great means of travel they frequently get stuck on rocks and refuse to cross shallow waters.
The world is huge, in some cases too huge. The frontier is enormous and there are very few fast travel points. That is the only real issue I have with the frontier though, all of the cities are reasonably sized and full of collectables that are surprisingly rewarding.
Overall the game is very fun to play, and it does a good job to keep you interested for the thirty plus hours it has to give you. but it does kind of feel a little lackluster in some parts, still worth playing though