Conflicted on where I stand on this one. Overall I think Connor's story was good. I liked a lot of the characters surrounding him especially Haytham. The Homestead missions lowkey should've been main missions. It adds so much to Connor and rest of people interacts with, it was really sweet overall. The remaster for AC3 makes the game's color. Really impressive lighting for the most part but a lot of detail is lost from the OG and the character faces are very unfortunate.

Desmond's story was really disappointing and honestly a lame way to conclude his story. He really deserved better for a character we've been with since the beginning.

Gameplay is fine, same as usual. Hard to engage with its system when I can one shot every enemy with hidden blades. You can ride a pirate ship in this game. It's janky for the most part but it was fun to try. Parkour I will say is the weakest this series so far. I think the setting of this game didn't work well here compared to previous games.

Overall, I like the story of Connor. It was really fun to go through with this game again now having played the previous AC games. Just wished Desmond had a better ending. I'm excited to see what Assassin's Creed 4 has in store!

Assassin's Creed III is one of my favorite games in the series, following the young Assassin Connor during his life as he goes from his early life living with his tribe to becoming a full Assassins during 18th century Colonial America. Assassin's Creed III simplifies and make parkour more fluid being able to climb and run across trees, mountains and clifs. Combat has Connor dual wielding weapons as well as wielding a wide variety of weapons such as muskets, swords, pistols and more. Adding ever more mechanics such as weather, hunting and a homestead which you can help build up and grow makes the world feel much more lived in and believable. Assassin's Creed III is great with a fantastic story, characters, gameplay and alot of side content to do.

93/100

there's very little when it comes to nice things i have say about this game so let me begin with something that i did like before getting into it fully. Connor as a character is interesting and among the best across the series bringing a breath of fresh air to things. i'll go one further and say that Haytham was also solid and i enjoyed their relationship dynamic. if it wasn't for this i'm not sure if i would've been able to finish this, even when rushing the mainline content as i did in the end.

with that out of the way, what the hell happened here? i've never considered myself an Assassin's Creed fan (I was interesting but highly flawed while doing massive damage in terms of influence for the medium, II was a surprise improvement but just fine mainly, Brotherhood and Revelations were solid music listening/multitasking games but gave diminishing returns) by any means but the games had felt mechanically sound for the most part before this. Assassin's Creed III throws everything and the kitchen sink into its gameplay systems and nails nothing.

perhaps my biggest complaint is the setting shift. i'm not going to get into the story or anything of the sort here but from a gameplay standpoint, it was a complete mistake in my opinion. taking a series known for its movement systems and putting it in a place where you have barely any vertical movement options is one of the most baffling decisions i can think of. they attempted to remedy this with tree climbing (which again feels busted as does most of the rest of the gameplay here <3) and scripted movements through buildings when entering a door or window but it's a poor replacement. when you get out of the more residential areas of the map into the wilderness it gets even worse as it's just vast empty space which is miserable to navigate (especially when it is snowy).

elsewhere stuff like the combat takes a step down too. combat in the previous entries was never a strong suit but it was at least painless in the mediocrity. here you can see movements made towards trying to improve everything but it doesn't pan out to me. i'm not sure how much of it is III itself or maybe the remaster being fucked up but the game feels like it has this weird animation priority to all of its movements which leads to problems with counters not even registering half the time. some contextual environmental based attacks were added among other things but as i have brought up like three times now elsewhere, it feels half baked. Connor is an absolute beast in combat so most of it goes by quickly still but i 100% would've taken what we had before still.

this leaves me with the pacing which might have damned the full thing in the end. i have played and loved a lot of slow burn games over the years so know that it doesn't come lightly when i say that this is one of the slowest games i have ever played. you don't even get around to playing as the actual main character for a couple of sequences into the game and then you don't even get your actual assassin's robes for another few after that. i don't mind a build up for things but when the surroundings are so rotten it just was too much. you bounce from one gameplay element to the next constantly in a state of tutorials for what feels like 75% of the game.

somewhere within all the bloat the game sees fit to introduce a half baked hunting system which barely works, naval combat (which i hope is improved in Black Flag or that shit is going to be miserable too lmao), and even a crafting system that i somehow didn't even notice or come across with nearly 22 hours in the game. just a smothering sense of excess. literally don't know how this game even came together, even as it is within Ubisoft's unhinged annual release format of the time period. genuinely feel so bad for anyone who was working there.

gonna need a long break before i move onto Black Flag at this point.