Predicatably Dan Brown meets Last of the Mohicans and Dances with Wolves while forming the USA.
Fast forward and now the politics are heavy. This game is promoted as nation building for the USA. The setting should have been background as with previous games (i.e. Ezio did not built city states in Italy, he passed through them and their main players). Add to this an easier climbing ability, glitchy fight engine, and a now cliched animal killing economy (thanks to Red Dead Redemption) the game offers visual niceties but nothing I would consider revolutionary!
The story is very, very predictable and was obvious way too early on in the series. Alien technology hidden in America. Please!! It has been done to death in film and literature for so long. As I stated above, the story is Dan Brown laced with Native American apology films like Dances with Wolves. The risk of depicting Native peoples from a modern/European perspective is that they have been influenced by outside cultures and behaviours that we cannot be certain they themselves practiced pre-European contact. It does make Indigenous people more 'like us' but it should be noted that the ideals Europeans embrace are the ideals often rejected by native people. Most notable is the idea of building the USA while most tribes were keen only to defend their own lands, not their neighbours, which is why tribes often sided with French and British alternatively.
Just as Indiana Jones drifted from the original Raiders film in to, of all things, alien technology in the Americas, AC has drifted from an fascinating historical piece in to a game that is too focused as a recount of the formation of the USA in the 1700s that will sell well with American games for that reason. I will play it because of my love of the series, but I find it too difficult to immerse myself in the Assassin story as per the original setting. I do wish Ubisoft had stuck with the Medieval story line where AC's greatest strengths lay.