Get yourself a partner who says your name the way Connor says Charles Lee's ~
This is a big one, so if you want a summary just skip to the end. Minor gameplay related spoilers, but nothing directly plot related.

AAA development is hard. Ever since the HD era of gaming brought standards up to new levels, studios and big publishers have had to go to immeasurable lengths to ensure that they can make videogames to such ever-increasing standards, while meeting tight deadlines. I'm not a living encyclopaedia of gaming history, but I think Assassin's Creed III might be one of the earliest examples of how overambition got mixed with abhorrent planning, and led to complete disaster. Of course, the game sold amazingly and probably recouped costs - but I don't think anything will recoup the souls of the people who worked on this.

I'll clear something up off the bat: the story. This is where I see the most negativity, particularly surrounding the Assassin you get to control: Connor. He's been called bland and uninteresting - and while he couldn't be more different from the charming Ezio (if you're into that), I think he's massively underappreciated. His thirst for vengeance can descend into comical levels of obsession and the writing absolutely fails to bring his background, relationships and characterisation to their full potential. But his bluntness, dedication to his people, overall mannerisms, are all very well-conveyed to the player. Is it the voice acting? Because yeah, I will admit - a lot of line reads are chuckle-worthy. But I think it's deeply unfair to simply pin all of this game's issues on "Connor bad".

The story itself, on the other hand, misses multiple marks. Certain events in American history are essentially reduced to footnotes, with a little encyclopaedia pop-up at the end to basically say "Hello! That was the <notable historical event> you just participated in!". The supporting cast...they exist, but they genuinely do very little else. Achilles, Connor's mentor for most of the game, is meant to be a father figure of sorts - but everything to do with their bonding and gaining any kind of respect is skipped over in favour of only focusing on their disagreements. Skipping might be the most offensive thing here - after each major story event, there's suddenly a minute or so of narration and timeskips of up to several years at a time. Don't do this. It's pace breaking, and disconnects me from whatever narrative there was. You can tell things were cut out, and that the writers had no idea how to naturally make the different parts flow smoothly into each other.

I don't think I need to say much of the modern story, as the big deal is entirely regarding the ending. So as not to spoil it, I'll refrain from saying anything other than how utterly pathetic an ending it is - and that's right after an ending that's arguably almost as stupid during Connor's story. The rest of the modern story though...undercooked wouldn't even begin to describe it. Undercooked would imply that Ubisoft put a damn thing in the oven to begin with. It's a goddamn oxygen sandwich. Eat your bread, it's all you get. The hub world is just a mass of black rock that is almost impossible to see in and inspires nothing. Three people are there, and once in a blue moon they even have a line of dialogue, but mostly stand around repeating one of three animations. Sometimes you even get to solve a mediocre parkour puzzle in the dark and watch a cutscene. It's mesmerizingly miserable. There are a handful of proper, modern gameplay segments that utilise the proper game mechanics in a modern setting, which is very cool until you realise it adds up to about 15 minutes of gameplay total. Another one of many ideas that clearly had grand plans, only to be scaled back dramatically when the game had to be dialled down to ship on time. There's an entire antagonist who shows up for only this game, but is on screen for no more than 5 minutes.

This is all a range of mediocre to poor, but the real meat of the game is the bit where you actually hold your controller. And I have never felt so much dread from holding a controller than the prospect of having to play this game.

The sad thing is, the combat is, while clunky and full of bugs, the main thing that keeps me going. Rather than the standard combat from the AC2 trilogy that was simply mashing attack and countering, you're now basically waiting to enact a counter on an enemy at all times. This triggers a brief bit of slow motion that lets you either attempt a counter kill, disarm them, or throw them away. Different enemies require different manoeuvres, and I like that this somewhat keeps you on your toes, in spite of how it's not much deeper than rock paper scissors (but each opponent only plays one of these in their lifetimes). You can also shoot, which is an instant kill...uh, sometimes? Usually if they're not aware, gunshots tend to kill in one hit, but not always in combat? And the less said about the inconsistency of your bow, the better. You get a lot of cool and creative sub-weapons, but most simply are not practical. Rope darts are pretty brutal, but you're not using them outside the forests. Trip mines...just, don't bother. Combat works, but just barely.

As for the rest, you get the biggest world yet to explore...and it's horrible. Colonial America consists of a huge, sprawling frontier with multiple cities to enter. And by multiple, I mean two. That's a multiple. You can traverse a huge forest with small settlements, but the most you can do in any of them is accept a meaningless side quest or two, or maybe have an optional conversation with a bored NPC. The main thing you'll be doing there is hunting - yes, there's an entire chunk of the game dedicated to grinding resources from hunting animals. You'll then want to craft the drops into important weapons and items, and then use the trading mechanic to sell the surplus off. But be careful, because the British will attack your trade wagons, forcing you to ride there in person to stop them from taking everything. It's needlessly complicated and shockingly user-hostile, with the entire thing run from a poorly organised menu. You can't really ignore it either, as the game's pricey economy expects you to trade resources as your primary method of income. Beyond the hunting, quests and collectibles, there's just a handful of forts that you need to infiltrate, kill the leader and liberate from within. Of course, this just descends into a bloodbath because the stealth in this game continues to be a joke. Overall, just a dull, lifeless timesink.

The cities themselves are far more concentrated, with a lot of enemies to fight, more opportunities to evade pursuit, and way better quest design. Traversal, however, is limited by attempts to make Boston and New York as accurate to how those cities looked during the American Revolution as they could, while still making it work within the parkour system. The result is a precise balance of the two that looks historically inaccurate and sucks to parkour in. While the parkour within the frontier is at least entertaining within the forests, the building placements in the cities makes parkour a bothersome chore, and it's usually faster to stick to the ground.

Mission design is pretty atrocious here, particularly in the optional objectives you're pressured into doing to reach "full sync". These can simply be a case of not taking damage, or using a certain assassination method. They can also border on the completely unreasonable, such as only killing a single specific enemy within a large crowd, while also not being detected in the process, on a tiny boat with one spot of cover. They break any immersion the game may have pretended to have, and pursuing 100% sync becomes an exercise in frustration. There's another reason that the full sync sucks, but all in good time. Other gameplay segments simply ask you to walk a distance without any real dangers or combat, or perhaps escorting an NPC while they talk. A good quarter of the gameplay could've probably been relegated to more cutscenes, as they simply allow you to move your analog sticks and press buttons during dialogue before suddenly cutting into another actual cutscene. Assassin's Creed's pacing has always been like pulling teeth, and 3 is no improvement in that regard.

One last notable aspect of the game are the sailing sections. These have you steer a ship around, use cannons to blow away other ships, basically a very simple and arcadey distraction with its own stories, upgrades, and rewards. It's a neat distraction, but you need to buy the expensive upgrades very quickly as it's easy to get stunlocked by enemy ships without them. I don't think much of it - and getting full sync is also very stupid and unfair here - but it's not a bad distraction and it's unsurprising that it resonated with players enough for Ubisoft to make sailing the main attraction of the following game.

So, the story sucks, and the gameplay is pretty bad. But what drags these down even further...are the bugs. Now, I played Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered, because Ubisoft hate game preservation and wiped the original game from everywhere. Beyond this point, I'm not sure which of these flaws are directly associated with the original, and which are with the remaster. But holy shit, this is the buggiest AAA game I've ever played. Let's start with horses: you'll be riding them a lot as you have a huge barren open world to traverse. Here's the problem: these animals cannot deal with anything other than smooth ground. The instant you run into the slightest imperfection in the floor, the horse jolts to a dead stop, and persuading it to move in any other direction takes way more than it should. This can be critical if you're avoiding detection. Combat can also freak out and animations constantly fail. Cutscenes are ruined when certain entire voice lines don't play. The actual scripting for missions breaks frequently and forces some kind of restart to ensure you can even finish them. Almost every aspect of gameplay, I found myself being stopped in my paths by a bug that disrupts gameplay entirely.

Graphically, I can definitely say that the remaster is directly responsible for many new problems. While models are much improved, several textures are untouched from the PS3/X360 originals. This creates immense juxtaposition with the new lighting engine. Upscaled models and water can look amazing in this new lighting engine from certain angles, but then pan over to the worlds worst grass texture of all time and it becomes the textbook definition of putting lipstick on a pig. The lighting itself, while responsible for some breathtaking landscapes, also introduces problems in darker areas. These are made overly dark, to the point of being unable to see a single thing in caves, and the theater in the opening sequence. They also cast shadows on characters faces, obscuring almost every detail whenever they're facing away from the sun. Subtitles have also been changed in the remaster for some reason, and these are the most offensive thing of all; the subtitles in Remastered just outright lie to you, on multiple occasions. Infrquently, the subtitles will read out a different line to the one spoken, sometimes with the same meaning or other times just wrong. More offensively: it repeatedly attributes dialogue to the wrong character entirely, leading to Desmond apparently talking to himself a whole lot if you happen to have impaired hearing. It's disastrous and shameful that such a mistake could be made and never once addressed post-launch.

Overall, to summarise my lengthy commentary of contempt for this miserable waste of 35 hours... The story is too afraid to tell history exactly how it was, ideas are forgotten and wasted, the gameplay tries to do literally everything that was trendy and collapse under it's own weight. And while the visuals were fine for their time, impressive even, the remaster has done a shockingly bad job at improving it, doing the opposite in most cases. Abhorrent remaster of a poor game, and one I never hope to revisit. Except I will, because I still need to play the DLC, which has it's own page on Backloggd. I will review that if I live to tell the tale.