Assassin’s Creed 3…

Well, I finished the game today.  Played a little side stuff, but not a lot, mostly focused on the story.  Actually, I did a lot more side stuff first, but as my enjoyment of the game waned, I started doing more and more main quest just so I could finish the game and pass it off to my son.

Fans of the series will love it and it probably is the best of the bunch, but for me I’ve been a casual fan of the series so far.  I have found as many things I didn’t like as I loved about the game and the third was no different.

I honestly feel like I truly got to “play” about 25% of the time I was in the game.  About 50% was cut scenes and the other 25% walking/running/riding/whatever from cut scene to cut scene.  This has been something that always bothered me, I don’t mind cut scenes in general, but they should be few and far between.  I don’t want to feel like I paid $60 for a so-so movie.

The naval battles are cool and the hunting is neat.  But not being able to save when you want to pretty much kept me from hunting after a while.  Once you get killed and lose progress by a deer because you can’t pull out a weapon once the game locks you into “animal duel” mode, it all seems silly.

The “open world” is in no way open.  It’s just that the closed portion is much bigger than usual (sometimes - it depends on your “memory” of whatever is going on).  And it also isn’t open in the sense that you travel around do whatever, seasons change, time passes, etc.  Seasons change because memories change and game loads a new version of the world.

The controls are  horrible.  I constantly hit buttons to trigger things and nothing happened.  I still jumped onto or off of objects randomly, falling to my death as per usual AC gameplay, though it was better than previously.  There were several times you have to chase someone and getting it to trigger tackle is a pain, little annoyances like that.  Not to mention the normal AC nonsense of death sentence issued for guards seeing you on a rooftop and the fact that you suck at parkour.. not because you aren’t good, but because everyone, even the shittiest guard is as good as your “highly trained” self.

It’s a shame there aren’t more reviews out there from sites that aren’t given freebies hand over fist by companies and in turn tend to give good reviews.  Combined with the fact that bigger games are bigger hitters for unique site hits b/c of fans looking for info and you also can piss off a bunch of fans.  Yea, well, fans of AC don’t need reviews, they are already buying the game and will love it.  It’s casual gamers that need to know what they are getting into… 

If you were mixed on prior AC games, hold off on this one or rent it. If you don’t like cut scene heavy games, this one will drive you crazy. If you want to just be a Native American hunter, and run around outside of the story, then maybe you’ll get something more from it.  I’d give Assassin’s Creed III an average score and recommend testing it by renting or buying it later used if you aren’t a big franchise fan.  Or honestly, if you want to “play” it, just watch the youtube walk-throughs of the cut scenes and play some AC2 between videos and you’ll get just as much from it.