Assassin’s Creed 3 is the last in the Desmond saga and first in the Kenway saga.
This was supposed to serve as the series big finale sorta, wasn’t the case as we all know but at least for Desmond’s story this is the end.
And it is felt in certain areas, it definitely feels like they were working on this for a long time and wanted to make this game huge, not just in world size but also in it’s features and the things it gives you to do. Almost to a fault, actually scratch that, very much to a fault.
No simple way to say this, there’s too many features and mechanics here:
There's the homestead which you can upgrade by doing homestead missions and there's 37 of them, there’s supplies such as wood that you can get, also you have a trading system for your supplies, a weirdly in depth hunting system where you can hunt and skin animals then sell that for money, a ship system with combat included, little board games, a downright awful pick lock minigame and I don't say that because I suck at it...well also because of that but it is really boring and tedious and your average AC shit, combat, stealth and parkour. I probably missed a lot of stuff like the liberation and fort missions and how you can use your allies not just to assassinate but also riot, disguise as enemies and pretend to take you in and ambush enemies.
After certain missions you can interact with characters that were part of set mission to get some dialogue and it does help flesh out the characters and their stories in places where it'd just feel like useless exposition if they were part of the main story and not optional, I do appreciate that.
Let’s get to my complaints now:
In the story all the battle missions are terrible and way too scripted and linear, one is just you on a horse going from 3 different points and pressing E when the enemies come near, it’s practically impossible to lose if you know how to move…Another one is just the scene from brotherhood where you defend your place with cannon’s except worse here.
There’s also the one that at first I thought would be like in the trailer but instead it’s just you going from cover to cover waiting for enemies to reload and it’s so lame...you most likely won’t even care about what’s going on during these battles, they’re here just so you can say they’re in the game.
Viewpoints have been entirely nerfed as they don't reveal the whole area or even a big chunk of the area you're on, just like a small-ish circle around it, to reveal the map you just have to walk around, I like the fact the map can be revealed by you just walking around though, it makes sense and if you don't want to do the viewpoints it means you won't always be lost as after a while you'll have discovered enough of the map by just walking and running around to not feel the need for the viewpoints but I still wish they revealed a bigger part of the map overall as they feel kinda useless.
Obvs there’s the stupid useless collectibles. Too many of them to count but one of em is essentially collecting pages for some book and for some fucking reason they just fly around and you have to catch them?
I get that they wanted to make collecting collectibles more engaging than just walking to it and either pressing E or walking into it but man it just made me not want to collect em, tbf I don't see why anyone would want to collect these like they are still collectibles in a ubisoft game but still I'd sometimes pick em up if I ran into em in previous games, here I just ignored them 100% of the time.
Now...the bugs, this game is fucking broken even now. I’d often see enemies just spawn in front of me in the open world, if you finish someone off near a wall there's a chance they'll just clip through the wall and glitch out.
One time near the start of the game, the mission marker disappeared so I had to restart the game although soon I discovered just fast traveling fixes it sometimes.
Wait, did I say “one time”? My bad I meant AFTER EVERY 1-3 MISSIONS IN THE GAME. It’s so annoying and I lost so much time just having to fast travel and hope the god damn mission marker would appear again, it almost made me quit the game after a while.
I hate how everytime things get interesting you have to do one of those shitty modern day missions, seriously, fuck Desmond, especially in this game, best part of the modern day bs is when Desmond's dad punches him because he was being really whiny and annoying.
Also these missions just feel like very generic action set pieces, they don't belong in an AC game imo, it doesn't have to strictly be stealth and/or fighting a few dudes but this shit gets stupid fast and it takes me out of the experience when one minute i'm hunting a target or doing a mission with Connor and then another i'm jumping from a building and parachuting onto the enemy base as Desmond for some shit I don't care about.
Well at least Shaun continues to be a sarcastic asshole so there's one positive to these parts.
There's this part at the start of a sequence where Connor is narrating and as he does he's also talking with Achilles and it's a bit of a mess as you don't know what to focus on, idk what happened there but it often times overlayed the narration with the dialogue (though the narration was quieter ig) and idk if it’s a bug or just really bad audio design but something was def wrong.
When you're tailing an enemy (ofcourse there's tailing missions here and yes they are as tedious as before) you actually just have to look away from them for a second for that stupid timer to appear where if it reaches 0 and you aren't looking at the dude again you lose,
fr just look away during a tailing mission and it'll appear, who even thought that was a good idea? Ik i'm nitpicking really hard rn but it genuinely bothered me especially when I was above the guy I was following and I’d have to move and risk getting spotted and having to restart.
Connor is pretty disliked as a character from what I’ve seen and for good reason since for most of the game he is really boring and dull though I do feel the need to say that later on, around sequence 9 he does get much better and more compelling and while near the end of the game his dialogue just becomes WHERE IS CHARLES LEE, it’s still better than when you meet him as a kid or when he’s a somewhat whiny teen.
I’d say it takes too long to become an actual Assassin since it happens at the end of sequence 5 I believe (there’s 12 in the game so it’s just about halfway through it) but ig it does make it so you feel like it’s earned and you do spend the first few sequences as Haytham, who is a much more interesting and likeable character, part of me wishes he was the main character, idk maybe they could have made him an Assassin that went...for lack of better term, rogue. It would probably be more interesting than what we got I guess.
Also the game is too focused on the american revolution side of things during the middle of the game, yeah it takes place in that time period ofc it can’t just skip over it but still, it doesn’t feel like you’re seeing and experiencing Connor’s story but merely being bored by a shitty documentary or like you’re in the middle of History class. Just not as interesting, fun and exciting as it should be.
So is that enough whining?
Okay let’s get to what the game does right because there’s a reason the score isn’t a 0.5/5
The combat is also a lot more satisfying even if it continues to just be press E to win when there’s a red triangle above the enemy and space near an enemy when it’s yellow, though there really is nothing like going Rambo on 10+ guards, getting a kill combo then seeing 3 of them aim their guns at you just for you to grab one of their friends and use him as a meat shield just before running straight into the others and killing them. It is much easier to pull off than it sounds but it still feels really satisfying.
I like how in New York you can burn blankets with smallpox, kill rabid dogs and carry civilians that have it to a doctor, it’s cool to see stuff like this in the game, makes the side content stand out a bit more even if it's just either pressing one button or pressing one button walking a bit then pressing it again. You can go to a group of civilians and press “E to riot” (laughed the first time I saw that tbh) and I think this would be really cool if you could use it to help you escape from guards but you can’t use it while in combat, I tried it once but it didn’t work idk maybe it was just a bug but there was potential for something really cool there if it just let you start a riot while in combat.
The parkour is a bit watered down but still works really well and feels good to use, the parkour system for the trees is mostly cool to use although a bit inconsistent, nothing game breaking. The open world feels alive as per usual and there’s a lot of detail everywhere making it fun to run around and explore in between missions.
This is the first game in the main series that is on a different engine and it shows, the graphics obvs look better but also the whole feel of the game is different and it really feels fresh for the series, especially coming off of 3 essentially identical games.
I said there were too many features but that’s not too say they are all bad, all of the stuff the game tries to do (safe for the lock pick minigame) is either just fine or good, and yeah I do wish it was more focused and we got like 5 amazing features and mechanics instead of 30 decent ones but managing to not make all of them feel subpar is an accomplishment in a way so there’s props to be given.
The first part where you play as Haytham is great, you see him slowly fall in love with who will become Connor’s mother and it really humanizes him as a character and his sense of humour and personality shines through, even later on when he meets with Connor he’s still really enjoyable, prb one of my fav characters in the whole series honestly. Achilles is also a pretty good character, he’s the former Assassin that trains Connor and he really brings life into the story whenever he’s on screen.
I also like how they try to portray the Assassins vs Templars issue as a more morally grey thing than simply good vs evil...well it is still good vs evil but a little less, Connor just kinda says u wrong in different ways after every assassination when the target explains their reasoning and how “it’s for the greater good”. At least they tried to do something more interesting I guess.
The liberation missions are cool, at times they feel like filler content just put on the map at random, and they probably are, but I like how if you do enough of these you’ll unlock special liberation contracts where you also meet a new character in each one that you can then summon to help you fight.
Guess in a way you can see this like the brotherhood mechanic but with actual characters that you can interact with and aren’t just random people you meet on the street. You also get to do homestead missions for them I believe, there Connor also shows some more personality, life and humour which is nice, wish it was in the main story more than in these missions but it is what it is.
The game does get better as it goes after you become an Assassin though the middle part of the game drags on a bit. Last few sequences are great imo and almost make up for how awful the middle can be at points, almost.
This was my first AC game back in around 2015-2016, it got me interested in this series which at this point I’ve been a fan of for years so in certain aspects it does hold a special place in my heart but revising it now I can’t help but feel underwhelmed and it’s issues are a lot more apparent now, I can’t call this a bad game, it does too many things right to be a bad game imo, and even mediocre I don’t know if it fits with it because I still enjoyed more things about it than I didn’t even if my review would imply otherwise, but a good game it is not, it’s disappointing in a lot of ways but as a whole it’s just decent.
This was supposed to serve as the series big finale sorta, wasn’t the case as we all know but at least for Desmond’s story this is the end.
And it is felt in certain areas, it definitely feels like they were working on this for a long time and wanted to make this game huge, not just in world size but also in it’s features and the things it gives you to do. Almost to a fault, actually scratch that, very much to a fault.
No simple way to say this, there’s too many features and mechanics here:
There's the homestead which you can upgrade by doing homestead missions and there's 37 of them, there’s supplies such as wood that you can get, also you have a trading system for your supplies, a weirdly in depth hunting system where you can hunt and skin animals then sell that for money, a ship system with combat included, little board games, a downright awful pick lock minigame and I don't say that because I suck at it...well also because of that but it is really boring and tedious and your average AC shit, combat, stealth and parkour. I probably missed a lot of stuff like the liberation and fort missions and how you can use your allies not just to assassinate but also riot, disguise as enemies and pretend to take you in and ambush enemies.
After certain missions you can interact with characters that were part of set mission to get some dialogue and it does help flesh out the characters and their stories in places where it'd just feel like useless exposition if they were part of the main story and not optional, I do appreciate that.
Let’s get to my complaints now:
In the story all the battle missions are terrible and way too scripted and linear, one is just you on a horse going from 3 different points and pressing E when the enemies come near, it’s practically impossible to lose if you know how to move…Another one is just the scene from brotherhood where you defend your place with cannon’s except worse here.
There’s also the one that at first I thought would be like in the trailer but instead it’s just you going from cover to cover waiting for enemies to reload and it’s so lame...you most likely won’t even care about what’s going on during these battles, they’re here just so you can say they’re in the game.
Viewpoints have been entirely nerfed as they don't reveal the whole area or even a big chunk of the area you're on, just like a small-ish circle around it, to reveal the map you just have to walk around, I like the fact the map can be revealed by you just walking around though, it makes sense and if you don't want to do the viewpoints it means you won't always be lost as after a while you'll have discovered enough of the map by just walking and running around to not feel the need for the viewpoints but I still wish they revealed a bigger part of the map overall as they feel kinda useless.
Obvs there’s the stupid useless collectibles. Too many of them to count but one of em is essentially collecting pages for some book and for some fucking reason they just fly around and you have to catch them?
I get that they wanted to make collecting collectibles more engaging than just walking to it and either pressing E or walking into it but man it just made me not want to collect em, tbf I don't see why anyone would want to collect these like they are still collectibles in a ubisoft game but still I'd sometimes pick em up if I ran into em in previous games, here I just ignored them 100% of the time.
Now...the bugs, this game is fucking broken even now. I’d often see enemies just spawn in front of me in the open world, if you finish someone off near a wall there's a chance they'll just clip through the wall and glitch out.
One time near the start of the game, the mission marker disappeared so I had to restart the game although soon I discovered just fast traveling fixes it sometimes.
Wait, did I say “one time”? My bad I meant AFTER EVERY 1-3 MISSIONS IN THE GAME. It’s so annoying and I lost so much time just having to fast travel and hope the god damn mission marker would appear again, it almost made me quit the game after a while.
I hate how everytime things get interesting you have to do one of those shitty modern day missions, seriously, fuck Desmond, especially in this game, best part of the modern day bs is when Desmond's dad punches him because he was being really whiny and annoying.
Also these missions just feel like very generic action set pieces, they don't belong in an AC game imo, it doesn't have to strictly be stealth and/or fighting a few dudes but this shit gets stupid fast and it takes me out of the experience when one minute i'm hunting a target or doing a mission with Connor and then another i'm jumping from a building and parachuting onto the enemy base as Desmond for some shit I don't care about.
Well at least Shaun continues to be a sarcastic asshole so there's one positive to these parts.
There's this part at the start of a sequence where Connor is narrating and as he does he's also talking with Achilles and it's a bit of a mess as you don't know what to focus on, idk what happened there but it often times overlayed the narration with the dialogue (though the narration was quieter ig) and idk if it’s a bug or just really bad audio design but something was def wrong.
When you're tailing an enemy (ofcourse there's tailing missions here and yes they are as tedious as before) you actually just have to look away from them for a second for that stupid timer to appear where if it reaches 0 and you aren't looking at the dude again you lose,
fr just look away during a tailing mission and it'll appear, who even thought that was a good idea? Ik i'm nitpicking really hard rn but it genuinely bothered me especially when I was above the guy I was following and I’d have to move and risk getting spotted and having to restart.
Connor is pretty disliked as a character from what I’ve seen and for good reason since for most of the game he is really boring and dull though I do feel the need to say that later on, around sequence 9 he does get much better and more compelling and while near the end of the game his dialogue just becomes WHERE IS CHARLES LEE, it’s still better than when you meet him as a kid or when he’s a somewhat whiny teen.
I’d say it takes too long to become an actual Assassin since it happens at the end of sequence 5 I believe (there’s 12 in the game so it’s just about halfway through it) but ig it does make it so you feel like it’s earned and you do spend the first few sequences as Haytham, who is a much more interesting and likeable character, part of me wishes he was the main character, idk maybe they could have made him an Assassin that went...for lack of better term, rogue. It would probably be more interesting than what we got I guess.
Also the game is too focused on the american revolution side of things during the middle of the game, yeah it takes place in that time period ofc it can’t just skip over it but still, it doesn’t feel like you’re seeing and experiencing Connor’s story but merely being bored by a shitty documentary or like you’re in the middle of History class. Just not as interesting, fun and exciting as it should be.
So is that enough whining?
Okay let’s get to what the game does right because there’s a reason the score isn’t a 0.5/5
The combat is also a lot more satisfying even if it continues to just be press E to win when there’s a red triangle above the enemy and space near an enemy when it’s yellow, though there really is nothing like going Rambo on 10+ guards, getting a kill combo then seeing 3 of them aim their guns at you just for you to grab one of their friends and use him as a meat shield just before running straight into the others and killing them. It is much easier to pull off than it sounds but it still feels really satisfying.
I like how in New York you can burn blankets with smallpox, kill rabid dogs and carry civilians that have it to a doctor, it’s cool to see stuff like this in the game, makes the side content stand out a bit more even if it's just either pressing one button or pressing one button walking a bit then pressing it again. You can go to a group of civilians and press “E to riot” (laughed the first time I saw that tbh) and I think this would be really cool if you could use it to help you escape from guards but you can’t use it while in combat, I tried it once but it didn’t work idk maybe it was just a bug but there was potential for something really cool there if it just let you start a riot while in combat.
The parkour is a bit watered down but still works really well and feels good to use, the parkour system for the trees is mostly cool to use although a bit inconsistent, nothing game breaking. The open world feels alive as per usual and there’s a lot of detail everywhere making it fun to run around and explore in between missions.
This is the first game in the main series that is on a different engine and it shows, the graphics obvs look better but also the whole feel of the game is different and it really feels fresh for the series, especially coming off of 3 essentially identical games.
I said there were too many features but that’s not too say they are all bad, all of the stuff the game tries to do (safe for the lock pick minigame) is either just fine or good, and yeah I do wish it was more focused and we got like 5 amazing features and mechanics instead of 30 decent ones but managing to not make all of them feel subpar is an accomplishment in a way so there’s props to be given.
The first part where you play as Haytham is great, you see him slowly fall in love with who will become Connor’s mother and it really humanizes him as a character and his sense of humour and personality shines through, even later on when he meets with Connor he’s still really enjoyable, prb one of my fav characters in the whole series honestly. Achilles is also a pretty good character, he’s the former Assassin that trains Connor and he really brings life into the story whenever he’s on screen.
I also like how they try to portray the Assassins vs Templars issue as a more morally grey thing than simply good vs evil...well it is still good vs evil but a little less, Connor just kinda says u wrong in different ways after every assassination when the target explains their reasoning and how “it’s for the greater good”. At least they tried to do something more interesting I guess.
The liberation missions are cool, at times they feel like filler content just put on the map at random, and they probably are, but I like how if you do enough of these you’ll unlock special liberation contracts where you also meet a new character in each one that you can then summon to help you fight.
Guess in a way you can see this like the brotherhood mechanic but with actual characters that you can interact with and aren’t just random people you meet on the street. You also get to do homestead missions for them I believe, there Connor also shows some more personality, life and humour which is nice, wish it was in the main story more than in these missions but it is what it is.
The game does get better as it goes after you become an Assassin though the middle part of the game drags on a bit. Last few sequences are great imo and almost make up for how awful the middle can be at points, almost.
This was my first AC game back in around 2015-2016, it got me interested in this series which at this point I’ve been a fan of for years so in certain aspects it does hold a special place in my heart but revising it now I can’t help but feel underwhelmed and it’s issues are a lot more apparent now, I can’t call this a bad game, it does too many things right to be a bad game imo, and even mediocre I don’t know if it fits with it because I still enjoyed more things about it than I didn’t even if my review would imply otherwise, but a good game it is not, it’s disappointing in a lot of ways but as a whole it’s just decent.