Okay, so, you've made it through the first two games in the Assassin's Creed series, and then you played the offshoots Brotherhood and Revelations, and now you're ready to get down to this final installment in the series, at least as far as Desmond Miles goes. You've survived the constant "world leveling" of Brotherhood and the not-so-fun castle sieges of Revelations, and, if you're like most people I know, you're hoping for some "back to the basics" from this latest in the series.
There are some good things and some bad things about AC III, but just know that the good far exceeds the bad...until sometimes when it doesn't. Let me explain:
A brief rundown of this series: You are a guy named Desmond Miles, a young man that comes from a lineage of Assassins that have existed down through the centuries and have been searching for Pieces of Eden (which are old bits of technology from some race that predates modern Man), and you are placed into a machine called the Animus, which allows a person to relive the lives of their ancestors via memories that have imprinted into their DNA.
Got all that?
This series more or less created the parkour-style of freerunning gameplay, a genre that allows you to climb just about anything in the game. The story calls for your character to be highly skilled at stealth, assassination, theft, and evasion, and each game in this series has given ample reason to to make players feel like badasses.
With all that being said, I feel you must first understand a little about my views on gaming so that you'll understand my verdict of this game.
Love Me Some Stealth
First, I love stealth. Not just stealth kills, but stealth. I love evasion. I love pitting my brain against anyone, be they man or computer, and outsmarting them or seeing how they outsmarted me. Anyone can mash buttons on a controller and blow another player's head off, and while this does require some hand-eye coordination, it is nowhere near the level of cleverness required of a player in a stealth game.
This is proven by that fact that every time you stealth-kill someone in an online game, such as Call of Duty, real-life players will immediately try to have to you banned from the server. The reason for this is simple: you've humiliated them. You've exposed them for what they really are and that's a button-masher, not a tactical thinker, not the brilliant badass they thought they were, just another run-of-the-mill button-presser with average hand-eye coordination and zero awareness of their surroundings.
Stealth requires getting inside an opponent's head. Indeed, this is the only real mode of gaming available in modern video-gaming that requires you to get inside your opponent's head.
I can prove this. I actually have trained with wilderness survival experts and two of them focused on Native American scouting techniques, with new information brought in by a newer, modern comprehension of how the mind works. These are the kind of guys who actually study "splatter-vision" in real life, a method of seeing everything instead of just what's in front of you (these guys are hard to sneak up on, even in a casual setting when no one's after them). They also study the "psychology of the search," meaning how people tend to search for others in darkness, in a crowd, in an empty room, et cetera.
These are the kind of men who understand more than just the fundamentals of stealth, they understand their principles and the vast amount of tricks one can play on human perception. (For example, did you know that if you're outside at night near a lamppost on the street, and wish to remain hidden, it's best to be just on the other side of the light coming from the lamppost because the person searching for you is even more handicapped looking through the light into darkness? Did you also know that, when trying to disappear in a crowd, it's best to bend about two inches at your knees and lower your head about two inches? That's because, in a crowd, most people unconsciously search for a person by their height first. Lowering yourself four inches does a great deal to effectively "disappear.")
I've learned that stealth is about patience, and paying attention. It's about knowing when to lie still for prolonged periods of time, and when to go mobile. It looks cool and fast in films, but in real life most people find the study very tedious, and very boring. It means standing or lying down in one position for hours on end, waiting for that perfect moment to move.
It's because of all this knowledge that I've come to greatly appreciate the Assassin's Creed games. In an industry where Splinter Cell and Metal Gear Solid seem to be straying from their stealthy roots, it's nice to see at least one series staying true to his stealth genre origins.
Most video games force the player's hand, urging you to fight, fight, fight! Fight now, or die! FIGHT!!!
The Assassin's Creed games encourage and often reward patience. What other games actually do that?
When a video game's stealth system is fully realized and developed, there is nothing that even comes close to its ability to make a player think, at least not in video gaming--yes, yes, chess is probably still the king of making people think.
In the Assassin's Creed series, crowds are always moving. You can blend in with those crowds, or quickly select a bench to sit on and hope that it works well enough to blend you in. You may dive into a haystack, or climb onto a roof to be above normal eye level...however, the guards may abruptly look up without warning, which is exactly the case in real life. You may also cause a distraction, either by whistling or paying a group of courtesans to go over and flirt with the guards.
Infiltration and exfiltration are complex arts, they require an array of skills, and are therefore tough to put into a video game. This is because so much time can be focused on giving a player options to assassinate/hide that they don't give the player a depth to the world, which would allow them a vast arena to try out this smorgasbord of skills. In other words, a stealth game often becomes very linear, and then all the fancy moves and abilities to hide become kind of "meh" because you're required to use them at certain junctures, and you have no say in it. Therefore, you're not using your creativity, which is what the stealth genre is all about. (To me, at least.)
The AC series presents a new and perfectly bloated sandbox world for the player to disappear into, utilizing all of the tricks I just mentioned and then some. This is why I love stealth games, and this is why I like the Assassin's Creed games, and it is in the straying from these fundamentals that these games can sometimes flounder (in my opinion).
Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Revelations both strayed further and further away from the fundamentals of this series, but, thankfully, AC III has brought it back to (mostly) the basics.
Assassin's Creed III
I'm also a history buff, and if there are any games out there that's at least trying to educate your kids while also allowing them to slay hundreds of armed men, it's the AC series. In the first Assassin's Creed, you were in ancient Jerusalem, where you learned all about the Templars and key historical changes and religious upheaval taking over that sector of the world at that time. Then, you were in Rome, and you learned a lot about the church, the Rennaissance, Leonardo da Vinci, and a myriad of other happenings during that time.
In those games, you leapt from rooftop to rooftop, through the Colosseum, into deep sewers and graveyards, to famous churches and arenas, all while evading down any street you pleased and diving through, over, or around bazaars and marketplaces.
And now, in Assassin's Creed III, we have...George Washington! The Boston Tea Party! Paul Revere!
The American Revolution!
You play a half-English, half-Native American man named Ratonhnhake:ton, or "Connor" to those who know him. Honestly, it's about time video games had a positive Native American character in a main role. The history and culture of the Native American peoples are ripe for the plucking in the hands of any adequate storyteller: like when Connor slams his tomahawk into a wooden column and explains that, for his people, it is traditional to bury an axe at the start of a conflict, and only once the threat has ended can the axe be removed.
We've needed this voice and this culture in video games for quite some time now, and it's good to see it finally done so well. The language is beautiful, the clothing is beautiful, and...oh yeah, it's fun as hell to run through the trees and disappear in bushes instead of just climbing over buildings all the time!
I wanted more of Connor's story. For me, the story of Desmond Miles is nowhere near as interesting as what's going on in the "flashbacks" to his ancestors, which are the bulk of these games. This is just me, but I would much prefer it if the writers and developers did away with the Desmond storyline and just focused on various Assassins throughout history--the ninja, the hashashin, the Thuggee cult, et cetera.
The culture and incendiary nature of the American Revolution, for instance, is vastly more intriguing than whatever the hell Desmond is going through inside his temple. I believe the writers could do more if they told the story without the Animus, and that way they and the developers could focus on filling the American Revolution with even more stuff to do, and not have to worry about fitting in Desmond's story somewhere. I want more intrigue with George Washington and the Boston Tea Party, and less of this Desmond "daddy issues" stuff and the December 2012 prophecy (see my article from back in September to read my thoughts on bothersome prophecies in storytelling).
This may sound like sacrilege to some AC fans, but that's just my opinion.
Some Glitches?
Yes, it wouldn't be a modern video game without tons and tons and tons and tons and tons and tons and tons of glitches. This is a problem with modern gaming, and we've pretty much resigned ourselves to the fact that there are going to be glitches from day one of launch, and we expect a patch later. This "release now, patch later" philosophy needs to die a thousand deaths, I think. Fix the game before you launch it, or else you're knowingly releasing a broken product.
FUNNY GLITCHES
It's kind of a sad state that we're in that we accept this and shrug. Super Mario Bros. didn't need a patch, and neither did Zelda. They worked on Day One. I know, I know, those games didn't have as much content, but they still cost a pretty penny and employed hundreds of designers and programmers.
THE VERDICT:
There are times in this game when things are going so good you can just shrug off the occasional glitch, even if the game straight up freezes on you, but then it does something like freeze, and freezes again after you restart the game, and creates "triplets" of people in the street, and causes your targets to become frozen inside of a tree so that you can't kill them to complete the quest...
If these things begin to compound, you may feel yourself becoming less enamored with the game's great graphics and setting. However, some patches have already come out, and the game seems to be running a bit more smoothly.
All in all, a great stealth game that fills all the requirements I need to feel like I'm getting to use my brain, and not mindlessly pressing buttons.
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