Assassin’s Creed 3
Producer: Ubisoft
Release Date: October 30, 2012
Platform: PS3, Xbox 360, PC, WiiU
Rating: Mature
Genre: Action/Adventure
Assassin’s MEH
Written by Josh Schilling
After playing Assassin’s Creed 3, I began thinking about my game-playing past. Not because it takes place in the Revolutionary War-era of the United States, but because this game does seem to reach a milestone in gaming for me. I have come to the conclusion that one of the following must be true: either I have become far too jaded to appreciate the magnificence of what the gaming world has become, or that the gaming world as a whole has jumped the proverbial shark. As a gaming consumer, I can’t be satisfied by doing the same thing over and over again. There has to be something new, something exciting and interesting to hold my attention and keep me wanting to run home to grab my controller for another great session. Assassin’s Creed is a franchise that has done that in the past for me because it is unique in many different ways, from its massively detailed storyline to its fairly accurate representation of not-often-used historical locales. This installment presented an especially intriguing aspect of taking place in colonial America, and introduced a Native-American main character that could be seen leaping across the treetops as he stoked the fires of a monumental revolution. But to make a tremendously creative project like Assassin’s Creed 3 work you have to consider some of the easily overlooked things in order to make it an overall success.
This game has a main storyline like no other. From ancient pre-human civilizations, to contemporary high tech science, you span centuries in the guise of many interesting characters throughout the Assassin’s Creed franchise. I am truly impressed by the detail that lies in this saga, and the individual storylines are interwoven extremely well within this ambitious tale. But this game is flawed in too many important ways to cash in on its aspiring narrative. Clunky controls destroy the game-play aspect and glitchy programming breaks the immersion into the story. Desmond, the over-arching main character of the series, is forgettable and the flow of the game is slapped with too many glowing-white loading screens that spring up whenever there is a split between cinematic and game-play, which are entirely too numerous. You even have to play for hours before you finally get to be the main character you see on the cover of the game box, and by then I already begun to ask myself “how much is too much?”
This game has an incredibly sizeable open world, but does it need to be that big? There is a great many different gaming aspects, but does it really need to have the sailing parts? There are many ways to play this game, but do I have to spend five hours playing before I could finally utilize them all? Did you have to put in checkers? Maybe I am too jaded. Maybe I am as guilty as most gamers by crying for “more, more, more,” instead of demanding “better, better, better.” I do know that I did not enjoy this game as much as I wanted to. I feel that it could have been so much better with the critical eye of a solid editor who knew how to trim the fat. I do, however, admire the ambition of Assassin’s Creed 3, but I do recognize that it was that same type of ambition that sent the Fonz out on the water on a pair of skis.