Progresses the AC story but still sometimes rings hollow. A clever twist on AC gameplay can amount to more frustration.
This game represents a split from my tradition: I played mostly through the main story and not much outside the lines. It felt like an AC game, but perhaps it didn't feel like an AC story. Fetching quests and side quests felt like just that – they didn't advance the story. The characters were fairly one-dimensional, so that the few twists and turns in the plot did little to build empathy with their emotions. Terrain was beautiful, but caused severe problems for my horse and made fetch quests tedious. I liked spending more time as Desmond, but especially couldn't stand the ending... more and more games seem to be staging endings where the player's only role is to watch it unfold. Give me a classic boss battle or a choice – or an illusion of choice! – or anything that might reward the player for the skill they've gained through the game.
But my biggest beef is that the optional synchronization challenges require a more thorough mastery of clunky controls. If I missed all points in prior games, 1 or 2 replays of the sequence could get me on track. In this game, pressing for complete synchronization reveals how buggy things can get.
So, in the end, this might be the only game in the series which I wouldn't recommend to a someone who doesn't have the same nostalgia for AC.