This game is mostly like, incredible. Its a huge leap in gamefeel and presentation over the Ezio games, and also a largely successful shift away from swashbuckling coolguy adventure towards something more serious and tonally ambitious. But it feels weirder and more ambitious than your usual "prestige" game from this era. The revolutionary war period American colonies are a surprisingly unique setting for any game that isn't a hex based strategy game for 90s dads, and they did an amazing job realizing that setting. Boston and New York are really dense and detailed and alive feeling, and the wilderness zone really does feel like a New England landscape. It takes AC2s commitment to the details of the setting and premise much further. Stuff like how it handles the prevalence of muskets, or the unlocking of fast travel by searching the tunnels under the city, or the more constant presence of squads of troops due to the war. I really respect the commitment to turning period detail into gameplay in this game.
The broader, less vertical terrain in AC3 with more natural elements like trees and cliffs, and largely much shorter buildings was actually quite refreshing coming from 4 games of slower vertical climbing, and Connors agile movement feels and looks fantastic and fits perfectly within this landscape. The animations in this game are wildly good, there's so much speed and power and momentum in them. The combat ones especially. The combat in general is much better, its a bit simple but it feels and looks great, and it has none of the issues with the previous games where you would sometimes just get parried or dodged forever. It feels much more focused and polished, and the details like environmental interaction being woven into combos and executions is neat too. The running assassinations though are my favorite addition, I have to imagine it came from the idea of a musket charge and they just applied that to every other melee option, but being able to sprint through, take out a guy or two before they knew what hit them, and just keep running, is fucking sick. The long reloads of firearms is also a great bit of period detail. Outside combat, the side missions are better here than in previous games, and the only ones that really feel like busywork are some of the hunting missions. The rest are either interesting, funny, or tie back into the homestead storylines. I really liked the ones where Daniel Boone rants about some wild cryptid or ghost he saw and then it turns out to just be an umbrella caught in a tree or something. The homestead stuff is great too, it really does feel like a living, growing town, and the characters there are fun to follow through their lives. The amount of detail put into animating them working is also really something. The naval missions are fucking awesome as well, they are just long enough and just simple enough that it nails the fantasy of naval combat without being too much or too little to learn or deal with. And the presentation during them is so rad. The Pegleg/Captain Kidd "dungeon" missions were also a lot of fun, great setpieces that explore other parts of the setting farther from the main sites of action in New England, and get into some interesting naval exploration and pirate lore.
The story is pretty well written for AAA games and while a bit hamhanded at times it gets a lot right about how shitty the founding fathers and the British were, how much things sucked for indigenous peoples (or anyone who wasn't a white man), and comes to some surprisingly progressive conclusions about it all. The commitment to accuracy with representing the Kanien'kehá:ka people is really great (as far as i can tell), and I love how much of the dialogue is in their language. Connor is a great character too, he's a lot more subtle than Ezio but his anger and frustration about everything happening to him and his people, and the way he grows out of naivete of youth, and his relationship with his father was all really compelling. Haytham and Charles Lee are fantastic villains as well, and the MGS2 style bait n switch where you play as Haytham in the beginning is really good. The present day stuff here is the best its ever been up to this point in the series, with way more time spent with the characters, and the location of the precursor site it takes place in is used really well. Its also just incredibly cool to finally get to go on real assassin missions out in the world with Desmond, and those are all rad setpieces.
AC3 isn't perfect though; it has the same layer of jank behind the whole game as all the other ACs, and it also kind of drops the ball a little in the final act, not nearly as badly as Revelations did, but it definitely feels like they ran out of time trying to hit their pre-2012 "apocalypse" Mayan calendar date, had to cut some stuff, and couldn't quite polish up the last few missions the way they needed. I still liked the ending narratively, despite the issues. The biggest problem with the game, though, is the enemy AI and the stealth mechanics. On paper it should be the best yet in this regard, cause it introduces a lot of new options for stealth (trees, bushes, hiding around corners, whistling to attract attention, assassin recruits can do more complex stuff), and the AI has more stages and more behaviors. But in practice, the AI has superhuman eyesight and aim, massive peripheral vision, and worst of all, when open conflict is triggered, enemies literally can spawn from nowhere just off camera to swarm you, so its much harder to break line of sight and hide from them. Once you learn to work with the messiness of this its not so bad, and sometimes it comes together into something that feels really cool, but it can also create a lot of frustration. Its worst in the far-cry style forts, and when trying to escape a chase in the cities. Luckily the combat is fun so when you do get caught, its not all bad.
AC3 is a game that swings bigger and stranger than any of the other games up to this point in the series —which in their own right were games that often swung bigger and stranger when it comes to AAA!— and I think its my favorite of the series so far.
The broader, less vertical terrain in AC3 with more natural elements like trees and cliffs, and largely much shorter buildings was actually quite refreshing coming from 4 games of slower vertical climbing, and Connors agile movement feels and looks fantastic and fits perfectly within this landscape. The animations in this game are wildly good, there's so much speed and power and momentum in them. The combat ones especially. The combat in general is much better, its a bit simple but it feels and looks great, and it has none of the issues with the previous games where you would sometimes just get parried or dodged forever. It feels much more focused and polished, and the details like environmental interaction being woven into combos and executions is neat too. The running assassinations though are my favorite addition, I have to imagine it came from the idea of a musket charge and they just applied that to every other melee option, but being able to sprint through, take out a guy or two before they knew what hit them, and just keep running, is fucking sick. The long reloads of firearms is also a great bit of period detail. Outside combat, the side missions are better here than in previous games, and the only ones that really feel like busywork are some of the hunting missions. The rest are either interesting, funny, or tie back into the homestead storylines. I really liked the ones where Daniel Boone rants about some wild cryptid or ghost he saw and then it turns out to just be an umbrella caught in a tree or something. The homestead stuff is great too, it really does feel like a living, growing town, and the characters there are fun to follow through their lives. The amount of detail put into animating them working is also really something. The naval missions are fucking awesome as well, they are just long enough and just simple enough that it nails the fantasy of naval combat without being too much or too little to learn or deal with. And the presentation during them is so rad. The Pegleg/Captain Kidd "dungeon" missions were also a lot of fun, great setpieces that explore other parts of the setting farther from the main sites of action in New England, and get into some interesting naval exploration and pirate lore.
The story is pretty well written for AAA games and while a bit hamhanded at times it gets a lot right about how shitty the founding fathers and the British were, how much things sucked for indigenous peoples (or anyone who wasn't a white man), and comes to some surprisingly progressive conclusions about it all. The commitment to accuracy with representing the Kanien'kehá:ka people is really great (as far as i can tell), and I love how much of the dialogue is in their language. Connor is a great character too, he's a lot more subtle than Ezio but his anger and frustration about everything happening to him and his people, and the way he grows out of naivete of youth, and his relationship with his father was all really compelling. Haytham and Charles Lee are fantastic villains as well, and the MGS2 style bait n switch where you play as Haytham in the beginning is really good. The present day stuff here is the best its ever been up to this point in the series, with way more time spent with the characters, and the location of the precursor site it takes place in is used really well. Its also just incredibly cool to finally get to go on real assassin missions out in the world with Desmond, and those are all rad setpieces.
AC3 isn't perfect though; it has the same layer of jank behind the whole game as all the other ACs, and it also kind of drops the ball a little in the final act, not nearly as badly as Revelations did, but it definitely feels like they ran out of time trying to hit their pre-2012 "apocalypse" Mayan calendar date, had to cut some stuff, and couldn't quite polish up the last few missions the way they needed. I still liked the ending narratively, despite the issues. The biggest problem with the game, though, is the enemy AI and the stealth mechanics. On paper it should be the best yet in this regard, cause it introduces a lot of new options for stealth (trees, bushes, hiding around corners, whistling to attract attention, assassin recruits can do more complex stuff), and the AI has more stages and more behaviors. But in practice, the AI has superhuman eyesight and aim, massive peripheral vision, and worst of all, when open conflict is triggered, enemies literally can spawn from nowhere just off camera to swarm you, so its much harder to break line of sight and hide from them. Once you learn to work with the messiness of this its not so bad, and sometimes it comes together into something that feels really cool, but it can also create a lot of frustration. Its worst in the far-cry style forts, and when trying to escape a chase in the cities. Luckily the combat is fun so when you do get caught, its not all bad.
AC3 is a game that swings bigger and stranger than any of the other games up to this point in the series —which in their own right were games that often swung bigger and stranger when it comes to AAA!— and I think its my favorite of the series so far.