A triumphant return for one of my favorite franchises in gaming held back by baffling steps backward.

User Rating: 7.5 | Assassin's Creed III X360
I am a huge fan of the Assassin's Creed franchise. AC1 was the first game I ever played for Xbox 360, and it was love at first sight. The crisp visuals, badass climbing and parkour mix, the intriguing and unique plot, and the fresh and grisly combat mechanics made the game an instant hit with me. It encouraged you to roam and explore, while grounding you in a narrative that you felt connected to, even if it was a bit far-fetched and confusing at times (seriously, I still don't understand everything and I've played through it half a dozen times). The main character of Altair Ibn la'Ahad was deep and interesting, and you felt him grow as a person through the course of the game. Other characters mocked and teased him for his lack of faith to the creed, but on his quest of redemption, he earned the respect and admiration of his fellow assassins back, and had to face down his own ignorance in a climactic final battle with the person he trusted most. It was, to say the least, an extremely gratifying adventure. Juxtaposed against the modern-day struggle of reformed assassin turned prisoner Desmond Miles, the plot felt honed to an edge, and the cliffhanger ending made me punch a wall. I wanted more. Much, MUCH more.


Then Assassin's Creed 2 dropped and outdid the first game in every conceivable way. The new character of Ezio de Auditore da Firenze was brash and boisterous, funny and charming. A yin to Altair's yang. The story moved forward in time, and led me on a journey to Renaissance Italy, with Leonardo da Vinci as a supporting character. The gameplay was tighter, the controls were more responsive, and the dual hidden blades led to cooler assassinations. The whole game was bigger, looked better, felt better, and told a more compelling story, both in the past and the present. Desmond played a bigger role, and Ezio's quest for revenge culminated in a satisfying (albeit ABSOLUTELY ABSURD) crescendo of awesomeness that left me craving a new game more than the superb first game.

Well, we got that new game with Brotherhood. This was the first time I noticed something fishy was going on with the series. It was a fantastic game in its own right, but I felt like I was getting more of an update than a new adventure. The story took Ezio to Rome, where he started up a new chapter of the Assassin's Order after his homestead was destroyed by Templars in a well-scripted opening scene. The game played well and felt good, primarily because it was just Assassin's Creed 2 in Rome. The story didn't feel as edgy, and it wound up leaving me with more questions than answers. The addition of an absolutely fascinating competitive multiplayer system was a welcome diversion, and I lost countless hours online playing the fantastic game modes, but Desmond's modern-day segments were aggravating at times during the campaign, pushing me to play multiplayer to break up the monotony. But playing through the whole adventure led to a jaw-dropping cliffhanger finale that left me craving answers.

Unfortunately, the fourth game in the series, Revelations, didn't answer those questions for me. Desmond's mind is trapped in the Animus (the device he uses to dive deep into his genetic memory to relive the lives of ancestors in his assassin bloodline), and he has to resynchronize with the Animus and accept help from the shadowy Subject 17 to get ahold of himself and put his shattered psyche back in his body. For some reason, this involves playing through a series of Ezio's escapades in the enormous city of Constantinople just as the Renaissance is winding down. The game flips back and forth between Desmond, Altair, and Ezio at such a rapid pace, I got lost pretty easily, and the plot felt similar to the game before it. A few setpiece moments jarred me out of complacency, and the core gameplay was still just as fun as ever, but the narrative left a sour taste in my mouth. The ending wasn't as memorable, and neither was the game that preceded it.

Ubisoft needed to knock the next one out of the park.

When I first saw some screenshots of Assassin's Creed 3, my first reaction was trepidation mixed with guarded enthusiasm. A new (and woefully underused) setting and a fresh new character piqued my interest. The screenshots looked good, and each new gameplay video or screenshot got me more and more interested. I picked the game up on launch day and got to playing. Well, the credits are rolling and I have to admit, this one is a mixed bag in a lot of ways.

On the one hand, the new setting is amazing, the new character is cool and unique in a gaming landscape rife with tough guys with guns and knights wielding swords, and the controls have been tightened up to offer fantastic gameplay moments. On the other hand, the game is unbelievably slow to get off the ground, and the narrative is jam-packed with so many characters that pop in and out of the story that I wound up being confused as to who my allies were, who my enemies were, and why I should really care about any of them. Add in some odd new graphical elements and you're left with a game that didn't quite live up to the hype- at least not for me.

First, let's get the good stuff out of the way. This game is huge. Like, real huge. Perhaps not exploration on par with games like Skyrim, but you won't be left wanting more exploration on this adventure. You've got a huge sandbox to play in, and there's all kinds of cool stuff to see and do. Play checkers in a tavern in Boston, sail ships to Martha's Vinyard, and stalk bears (or Redcoats) from treetops, only to silently bury your tomahawk into their skull when you drop from a branch. There's so much content here, it's intimidating at first... and later on.... and pretty much right up until the end. More on that later.

The plot revolves around Connor, a young Iroquois who has a vision quest that causes him to seek out a very particular symbol (the de facto logo of the Assassins). According to Connor's vision, this symbol will help him stem the coming tide of colonists bent on removing the Iroquois from their ancestral lands. This brings him to a freed slave named Achilles, who reluctantly decides to train Connor to be an Assassin. Connor then sets out on a mission to pursue and assassinate the Templars responsible for the subjugation and murder of his people. It's a fantastic setup, one that gets you to care by pulling at your heartstrings. Connor didn't choose this conflict, he was conscripted by fate to be the change that he wanted to see in the world. As a main character, he slicks up the storytelling with his fish-out-of-water mannerisms. He speaks perfect English as he is half British, but as a native, he is scorned by some in society. Putting the player on the receiving end of this bigotry is a cheap trick to get you to care, but it works, and I appreciate the effort that obviously went into finding the perfect balance between edgy and offensive.

The controls, graphics, and audio are all top-notch for the most part. A few graphical hiccups here and there, and an irritating experimental concept for fighting the series' notorious texture pop problems can harm the immersion, but the game does a good job to put you in the middle of things, especially in the frontier environments. You can hear wildlife all around you, and you can climb up into the trees to stalk prey from above. It's a good balance of new and old to keep you interested in finding out new possibilities while keeping you grounded in the canonical mechanics of the games of yesteryear. The combat is much the same as games past as well; however, counter kills have received an update. No longer do you simply hold block and wait for an enemy to attack, then press a button to initiate your instant-kill moves. Now, you have to time your block to throw an enemy off balance before you can counter. Aside from that, it's not the overpowered nonsense that it was in the other games. You are by no means guaranteed a kill with counters anymore. In fact, relying on counters too much will result in getting yourself a beatdown, as enemies can easily counter your attempts to throw them off balance. A mix of attacking, switching targets, and blocking is the order of the day here. It manages to be at once new and feels familiar, which is much appreciated.

Now on to the not-so-good stuff that irked me about this game. To start, the plot was just as baffling as other games in the series. There were too many characters, some of which apparently played pivotal roles in the story, but appeared so infrequently that sometimes I would mistake a returning character for a new one. This often forced me to attempt to navigate the cluttered Animus database system to hunt down information about the people I was talking to and the places I was going to; but, unlike previous games, the database gets so frustratingly full of stuff that it can be a chore to locate the file on the one person you want to learn about, because everything is stored chronologically. When was the last update in the database on that person? Don't know? Best get to scrolling for a while then. Add to that the fact that someone at UbiSoft was asleep at the wheel, because the database is literally pockmarked with spelling and grammar errors. Perhaps the worst part about the database (I mean aside from its failure to adequately compartmentalize and organize information for later retrieval) is the fact that the wise-ass character who writes the entries (a character named Simon who is British) puts way too much sarcasm and snide remarks in the database entries, making them 2 parts useful information relevant to what you're doing, 1 part sarcastic quip about some nonsense or other, and 2 parts "I'm British and I'm going to make ridiculous comments about American colonists." I understand that, as a British character, it seems like a good idea for him to weigh in on the goings-on in the politically charged setting in Desmond's past, but it's shoved down your throat at least once or twice in every database entry, making it just plain annoying.

I mentioned a graphical oddity earlier, and I have to give it a few lines to describe. Anyone who has played any of the games in this series are well aware that the game's engine, while wonderful and full of great mechanics and texture-rendering technology, has always been plagued by horrific texture pop. It's something you just can't avoid. You see textures fade into fidelity all the time in the other games. well, it does the same in this game too, but they tried to mask it with a bizarre particle effect that makes the textures ultra noisy while they are popping in, making it MORE NOTICEABLE THAN IT WAS BEFORE. Just play any segment of the game and you can't help but notice it. It's actually distracting at times. It draws more attention to the limitations of the engine, which I'm sure wasn't the point.

Lastly, there is the homestead management. I was expecting something similar to AC2's villa management. Receiving money from opening shops around the world and updating the buildings on the property. Boy was I wrong. You have to do homestead missions to bring people to your homestead to gain access to crafting materials. Then you have to find or purchase recipes for items. Then you have to purchase, make, or find those crafting materials to craft items. Then you have to craft the items (or just pack up the raw materials) and send them on a convoy to be traded, and you would receive payment some minutes later. It was never clear why I could make one thing but not another, or where I was supposed to get a certain ingredient for a recipe, or how I unlock more vendors to trade with. What's more ridiculous is that you can only put three different items on a convoy. You could ship lumber, barrels, and bear pelts. Or you could ship rabbit pelts, elk tails, and arrows. There was no rhyme or reason to convoy capacity, and it was infuriating. In all, the whole management system was confusing and frustrating, and I barely bothered with it at all.

In all, I like this game. I almost love it. It lacks a few things that I was expecting, and still suffers from a few flaws that I'm becoming convinced that I will just have to accept in this series, and that includes convoluted and confusing storylines. The game that you play is great, but the parts of the game that play you are disappointing. This game does have a magical quality to it though. It paints a compelling picture and retells a few key events during a very charged time in history. While this may not be the Assassin's Creed we were expecting, this is definitely one revolution worth taking a look at, be you a devoted fan or a newcomer to the series. It has its flaws, but those rough edges may be part of what keeps me coming back.