Difficulty:

Hard

Time Spent:

40 to 100 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Hard to describe"

Assassin's Creed III is for players of previous games in the series, familiar. The main character plays fairly similarly to Ezio and Altaïr, jumping around, stabbing, and occasionally shooting people. The game takes place in three broad categories of terrain, urban, deciduous forest, and ocean. the latter two impress more than the former. The cities in the game are without doubt stunning technical achievements, unfortunately our familiarity with the period makes the cities feel less exotic to players. The forested areas of the game are just the opposite of the urban areas, these areas are stunning, full of animals to hunt; Oregon trail players will love the nostalgic feel, and full of interesting quests. The open sea areas are also impressive dynamic regions. Despit this the naval missions start to feel like shooting galleries pretty quickly due to a lack of track down the enemy ship quests, and too many just sink X number of ships. The story of Assassin's Creed III takes a while to get interesting, for nine of the game's twelve chapters the story is forgettable, and the characters little more than archetypes. There's the salty sailor, the noble savage, the true believer flag waving rebel, the obvious bad guy, the all knowing master, and so forth. None of whom are particularly memorable, the lack of dissent or of an "English" accent amongst the rebels and the apparent only bad guys sound like Englishmen leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The difficulty has been bumped up in AC III, guards are more alert, and there are more instant fail missions, if you're into that sort of thing. I have yet to complete the game or I'd give an estimate of the game's longevity and replay value, but right now I'm not anticipating replaying the story. I'll probably load it up for a diversion now and again for a bit of escapism, but not a second playthrough

PROS:
1: Naval quests, not something we've seen before in an Xbox game in this time period with this much control of the vessel.
2: graphically impressive
3: Nice character interaction moments, some of the cutscenes are well written
4: Imaginative side quests, Sasquatch, UFO's and sea monsters, oh my.
5: Distraction, it does a good job of distracting players from the outside world

CONS:
1: Difficulty has been increased. Not in a good way, players fight the mechanics as much as they fight the enemies.
2: Quest weapons, so you have two double barreled .71 calibre pistols? that's nice, this quest requires you have one single shot .22, surprise!
3: Load out, players are expected to carry a pistol, a sword, hidden blades, and a tomahawk, using anything else will cause random resets
4: Sticky, Connor attempts to climb everything he touches while in free run mode, in chase segments this is annoying.
5: Too much filler. This game takes a while to get going. The story and characters are dull as dishwater until fairly late in the game.
6: Rah Rah 'Merika. All bad guys speak with British or Irish accents, good guys don't, beauty shots of colonial flags, no quests to help "good" loyalists, etc, make the game feel like it wants to explode in a jingoistic explosion of Americanism, but it has to restrain itself.