Assassin’s Creed III

The ambition of Assassin’s Creed III is both its strength and its Achilles heel. The scope of its world and the number of activities available for the player is certainly impressive, since in one moment we will be bombarding ships during a storm on the high seas and, in the next, we will be hunting foxes with hand-made traps in a forest. With so much variety, it is at least understandable how such moments were not crafted with the complexity they deserved.

Finally abandoning the Renaissance aesthetic, the franchise here moves to the period of the American Revolution. The premise of Assassin’s Creed, after all, has always allowed a huge change in the setting: we play as Desmond Miles in present times, a man who can use the Animus machine to relive the memories of his ancestors and uncover their secrets. That is, nothing has prevented each new title from featuring a new hero in a different historical period besides Ubisoft’s unwillingness to move on from fan-favorite Ezio Auditore.

The American Revolution, with its political battles (“No taxation without representation!“), important figures, armed confrontations, and wasted tea, fits the franchise like a glove. The Assassin’s Creed series has always been about conspiratorial plots, emphasizing an atmosphere of mystery by focusing on the existence of secret societies that manipulate major events in history. Desmond and his ancestor Connor are Assassins, a sect that worships free will (“Nothing is true, everything is permitted“) and stands for freedom. The Templars, on the other hand, advocate that freedom invites chaos, that without a strong and rational hand controlling the fate of humanity, we will inevitably bring about our own doom. In other words, while the Assassins stand for free speech and free will, Templars point out that people often abuse these freedoms to harm others.

The main conflict in Connor’s plot is directly related to this clash of ideologies. He’s a Native American who has set out on a journey of revenge through Revolutionary America after watching his village be burned to the ground by Templars. He doesn’t need much convincing, them, to join their sworn enemies.

However, if in previous Assassin’s Creed games, Templars were the clear bad guys and the Assassins, the heroes, here, things are more complicated: they both share the same noble goal – peace – but believe the way to achieve it is different. Connor’s characterization, then, reflects this more nuanced approach and is more morally complex than that of his predecessor, the Italian Ezio.

Ezio’s mission seemed fair, for it really was: his enemies, the Borgia, were horrible people thirsting for power and capable of committing horrible atrocities. Connor’s foes, however, are not moustache-twirling villains; on the contrary, sometimes they are so reasonable that they make Connor himself look like a religious fanatic who prefers to bring war to the people even when there are better alternatives. Connor believes that complete and total freedom is the most primordial right and he attacks his enemies with an axe because they dare to think differently.

Unfortunately, despite having the most fascinating story in the series so far, Assassin’s Creed III suffers from serious narrative problems. Connor’s journey leads him to so many big events of the American Revolution that it practically turns him into the Forrest Gump of the era – a comparison that certainly doesn’t fit the tone of the story or the character’s nature. In addition, it’s normal to say that very large prologues are detrimental to any story, but when one lasts more than four hours, authorities on the subject no longer call it a prologue but a tumor. The duration of the one present in Assassin’s Creed III is absurd: we begin the game by following the journey of a mysterious and pragmatic Englishman named Haytham Kenway and will only control the true protagonist when the story of Haytham finally reaches an interesting point (after four hours, which can still be extended for much more if the player makes the mistake of exploring and being meticulous).

This transition is also easily noticeable when it comes to gameplay. The beginning with Haytham doesn’t present anything new to the franchise. His missions are uninspired copies of those shown in previous games and take place in an uninteresting environment. Playing the prologue and exploring the wide streets of Boston, outlined by a few small houses and churches, the player has no choice but to reflect if this change in environment was actually harmful to the game, since Assassin’s Creed has always cherished exploration of the verticality of their environments and, in the case of Boston, such verticality is nowhere to be found.

It’s only when Connor finally appears in the story that the game starts to take advantage of the new setting: now, we can climb trees and mountains on the Boston border, observe the fauna and flora of the forests and marshes, hunt animals, and ambush caravans of soldiers – in other words, exploration is fun again.

Walking through the canopy, jumping between tree branches, feels special because the gameplay changes subtly. The layout of the elements that can be used during parkour in a forest is drastically different from the one in a town: while the roof of houses is easily visible from a distance, which allows us to plan our path in advance, trees in a forest are close together, forcing us to adopt a different approach, more based on instinct. Now there are also mountains and rivers blocking the path, demanding improvisation during intense escapes.

Modifying the geometric structure of the environment also amplifies the sense of novelty: while the Italian cities were almost completely flat with vertical structures, the Frontier presents thousands of small hills and curvatures in the ground – and it is certainly interesting to note that an evolution of level design that occurred in 2D Mario games twenty years ago is only taking place in one of the most famous franchises in the game industry in its fifth entry.

The combat, however, continues to be one of the most recurring flaws in the franchise. It’s absolutely “broken” in the sense that it is ridiculously easy to dispatch over four hundred enemies together without taking any damage. Half of the enemy force dies with one block and one counter-attack, and the other half must receive two or three disarming blows to fall to the ground. In fact, the first half would also succumb to this strategy, but doing so would make the fights even more boring. Connor, then, becomes an immortal superhero capable of decimating the entire English army without sweating. The combat has negative implications on the mission design, as players will wonder why they need to bother to stealthy break into places and plan ambushes if they can just walk through the front door and kill everyone.

These forced stealth sequences are also problematic, since the rules by which they operate are one of the game’s greatest mysteries. Here, the same action taken under the same circumstances can lead to different results. In a certain mission where Connor needed to kill the crew of a whole ship without being noticed, pushing a guard that was on the edge of the ship on the water made two other stationary guards, who had their backs to the Assassin, spot him… but just sometimes.

Assassin’s Creed III, nonetheless, also decides to stage naval battles. Connor will eventually be able to command vessels on the high seas and approach other ships. These clashes provide an incredible visual spectacle: seeing our crew setting sail and racing across the deck in the middle of a storm, while cannonballs fly overhead is thrilling. The gameplay in these segments is undoubtedly simple: we just have to align the ship with the enemy’s and order the crew to open fire. While this mechanic could have been easily developed by adding more different types of ammunition, for example, the sea battles remain a good diversion.

We can also hunt in Assassin’s Cree III. Connor can hide in shrubs and put baits to lure animals to the slaughter, plant traps on the ground, hit them from trees, or even kill larger animals, like bears, with quick-time events. But little reason to do so. Here’s the problem with most Assassin’s Creed games: they give us a lot of things to do but no motivation to do them. Hunting animals generate resources that lead to new weapons, for example, but since the combat is too easy, we will never need them, making the activity irrelevant. Recruiting Assassins becomes an exercise in futility for the same reason. The combat being broken is a huge problem precisely because of this: in a snowball effect, it infects all systems related to it. And Ubisoft, instead of revamping the combat, adds more and more activities and systems with each game.

Here, can also explore underground labyrinths, for example, but their design runs counter to the game’s primary mechanic – parkour –, as narrow aisles and dead ends limit Connor’s movement. Delivering letters provides no challenge whatsoever and is an even more irrelevant task. There are still challenges that involve brawling, board games, missions to unravel the myths of the time, forts to be liberated, and dozens of feathers and pages of almanacs scattered around the environment waiting to be collected. Assassin’s Creed 3 offers many things to do, but little real content.

Sometimes, it gets things right, though. The recruitment of assassins, for example, remains useless, but far less than it was before, as the ten generic recruits are gone in favor of specific ones, each possessing their own ability: one pretends to make Connor prisoner to pass unnoticed by guards, other hits them at a distance with a firearm, and a third can be used to distract them – thus opening new strategies. And the missions’ optional objectives have become more varied, too, often encouraging us to analyze the level design and strategize.

Regarding its presentation, the game is consistent with the franchise’s history. It boasts great art direction, a competent soundtrack, and a universe of bugs and glitches to rival any Bethesda game: characters get stuck in objects, horses get stuck in everything, sometimes Connor will fly instead of jumping, change direction in the air, and cross a wall only to assassinate two guards that we were not even aware were there, among many other problems.

It’s worth noting, however, that the missions in the present with Desmond don’t appear to have been developed by the same team as the rest of the game, lacking both logic and care. On one mission, for example, Desmond will climb the structures on top of a fighting ring, without anyone seeing him. In another, he may take more than ten gunshots and remain alive. Even the art direction is absurd, as the “Wanted” posters in English on a subway in Brazil prove. To make matters worse, his ending is too sudden and should have been better developed.

In the end, Assassin’s Creed III is an unquestionably huge game. While running from one point to another in the city to activate a mission, players are likely to be distracted by all the markers on the map and see themselves two hours later sinking ships on the high seas with seven more feathers and pages collected without remembering what they were supposed to do in the first place. The story discusses great themes, and the efficient art direction faithfully recreates the period of the American Revolution. However, in trying to live up to its great scope, the game offers so many irrelevant tasks that it forgets to perfect its main mechanics, becoming a curious case in which the secondary activities, instead of being a fun complement, become the main activity.

January 05, 2025.

Originally published in Portuguese on March 12, 2015.