Hello minions, if you’re looking for a review of Assassin’s Creed 3 then you’re in the right place. If you’re not then, why the hell are you here? 😛 I was initially going to separate my review into a pros and cons list, but since I can’t think of many things that are good about the game I decided not to. So instead, this will be a rant on how everything that was supposed to awesome about AC3 , wasn’t. I will provide my reasoning so don’t start attacking me! I’m an AC fan myself after all. I was just as excited as any other fan for it’s release, but in all honesty it was an overall disappointment. The following is MY opinion on Assassin’s Creed 3, feel free to disagree. ❤
I cannot tell you how excited I was about Assassin’s Creed 3! I had heard so many great things about it! I was so sure it would be great, I recommended it to so many people, all for a poor excuse for an AC game. This game was actually annoying to play! From the main story, to the side missions, to the hunting in the forest, most things didn’t deliver. I will tell you exactly why.
CAMPAIGN GAMEPLAY: The idea they had for the story line of AC3 seemed great. Revolutionary America, war with over 1,000 non-player characters on screen, half English half Native American Connor, get trained by sensei Achilles, take part in real historical events of the time, interact with historical figures, go hunting in the forest, have epic sea battles, assassinate muh-fuhkas, play as present day Desmond, try to save everyone from Doomsday, IT WAS ALL THERE!
Did it turn out the way they made it seem? NO! (Complaints in no particular order.)
A. First of all, the game is called ASSASSIN’S Creed 3, shouldn’t there be amazing missions during the campaign where I have to actually assassinate important targets? I was so upset when Connor assassinated Charles Lee during a cutscene after all I got to do was chase him. -__- In previous games like AC2 and Brotherhood there were intense missions where you had to stealthily find a key antagonist and assassinate him. In AC3 I feel like the only people I got into fights with were the guards in towns, and that’s just from ME picking fights with them. They are pretty much the only people you fight in the game, when you’re doing Liberation Missions and taking over a fort. I wanted an actual CHALLENGE, I basically easily whooped everyone’s ass throughout the game in the middle of the streets. What an assassin. I didn’t feel like a damn assassin, that’s for sure! Just know the basic combat mechanics for when you encounter a rare moment with action and the campaign is a breeze.
B. Can anyone tell me what’s up with the so called “fast traveling“? That shit is nowhere near FAST. The point of it should be to bring you straight to where your main mission starts, but instead if you’re in the frontier you have to press select to get the map up, select the exclamation point symbol that indicates the main mission, and press x to confirm that you want to fast travel to that location, then you have to wait for it to load. You pop up on the edge of the frontier where players need to run in the direction of the main mission again, it’ll ask you if you want to go to the next location and then you’ll need to wait for it to load again. Finally you might pop at the border of the next place and if you’re lucky, that’s where you’re mission is because sometimes it could still be a location over and you’ll have to rinse and repeat the scenario explained above. -__- Even when you are in the town or area that you need to be in to get to the mission you don’t get to open up the map and fast travel to it again, you have to run across town for another few tedious minutes. It’s just a lot of running for little player reward. You could end up just watching a cutscene of a boring conversation about what’s going on, hell of a mission. Oh, and after that you’ll be sent on a mission back to where you were originally to eavesdrop on someone else’s conversation. Ooo, ahhh…
C. A big part of the campaign I was looking forward to were the missions where I would take part in historical battles and events. I imagined myself, on the battlefield with my fellow soldiers, charging at the enemy. I would go in low, slinking past allies to get towards the middle of the group, sending arrows towards my enemies to distract them while we closed in around them. I would sprint into battle, sawtooth sword in hand and well.. you can see where this is going. This ladies and gentlemen isn’t what happened though, instead I had groups of NPC soldiers taking turns waiting in line for me to shoot cannon balls at them. Seriously I was the only one doing anything, if it’s called “doing anything”, I stood there with groups of my men around me re-loading the canon while I shot at the enemy, whom honestly didn’t seem like much of enemies. Were they even mad? They were barely moving, who gave them their pre-game pep talk? It was the complete opposite of intense. Just saying.
I must say, there was one event that I did enjoy playing, which was The Boston Tea Party. It was fun running around dumping crates of tea off of the ship and then booting foes into the ocean as well. I felt kind of badass, as badass as tea can make you feel. :} I just don’t think I should be able to count the good things about AC3 on one hand. 
D. A twist in the story that I really liked was how we got to play as Connor’s dad, Haytham, and find out that he was really a Templar. I was pleased with how it was decided that Connor would have to kill him. :} During missions where Connor spent time with his dad you could see them sort of bonding and a vibe of fatherly love sometimes showed from Haytham. In the end, they were still enemies and players get to fight as Connor against his dad. The let-down is, you fight and it’s not really that difficult. I would think daddy Haytham had more in him than that, being all legendary and whatnot. The game instructs you to counter Haytham near objects to throw him into them. Simple. Do that a few times and he’s done, a cutscene ensues in which Connor stabs his father with the hidden blade. That looked fun Connor, glad you had a good time! Way to include me, the player who paid sixty dollars for an epic assassin game where I don’t even get to assassinate the people! Like I already said, you run a lot and watch a lot of cutscenes and have weak ass fights. Boomshakalaka.
E. When in comes to interacting with historical figures, I wasn’t impressed much either. I got to chat with Washington a few times and I had a feud with Charles Lee, but it wasn’t interesting or fun to play for me… I miss the days where Leonardo Da Vinci was like my bestie and he made the coolest gadgets, like a flying machine, for me. I was able to fly it during a mission that was fun and challenging because you had to go over fire pits set up around the city on the ground so you could stay in the air. What a rush. 🙂
F. Before the game came out I heard talk of Conner being trained as a young man by a former assassin of the Brotherhood. In the game you find out his name is Achilles. He’s a cool guy but at first he didn’t want anything to do with Connor. Eventually he agrees to train him though. I thought I was going to actually learn new moves and game mechanics through “training” but no, all you get is a screen that says “Six months later…” and that’s it, you’re trained. Bummer.
G. The naval missions in the game were ok at first. You get to sail at half-mast, full-mast, stop completely, shoot some type of gun attached to the boat, shoot cannons, and take cover from the other ship shooting at you. Certain missions even allow you to ram into the smaller boats to destroy them. It’s fun at first but after about five naval missions it gets boring. You can upgrade your ship and get different kinds of cannon balls so that was pretty neat but not good enough to make up for the entire game.
H. On Desmond’s side of the story you’re able to follow the ghost/hologram of Juno around the Grand Temple. It was sort of fun, like a puzzle of sorts trying to find the spot where I need to place the artifact. Juno would pop up at certain points, explaining what was going on with the world at large and why. This story was one of the few interesting parts of the game. Come to find out, Juno is actually the villain. Minerva exposed her and explained how she interbred with humans to survive the solar flare by sheer numbers. Desmond is faced with the decision of either letting the sun flare destroy the earth, so that he can then rebuild it with survivors, or release Juno by sacrificing himself and save the world instantly. Even though there’s a risk of Juno enslaving humanity, Desmond decides to die to save the world, probably with the hopes that the remaining assassin’s will ensure everyone’s safety from Juno. This leaves a great story for Ubisoft to start with in the next game, but why don’t they just make a movie instead? I’ll be open to giving another AC game a try, only because I thought AC2 and Brotherhood were amazing. I hope they try to make more interesting missions next time. If they fail again, I’m done.
I. The game campaign ends with an extremely long list of credits. Which only angers me even more! The story mode was shorter than I expected and not even that good and you had ALL of those people working on the game? For 3 years? Whatever, after the credits end there’s an epilogue to finish off Connor’s side of the story. It ends with a short cutscene of Connor having a talk with one of his people about how the government took over their land. Yup, that’s it.
J. There’s one last thing I wanted to touch on about the campaign of AC3 and it’s the Optional Objectives. I think the idea of performing missions the way Desmond’s ancestors did to get full synchronization is cool. I just thought a lot of the optional objectives were pointless. Like having to shoot 3 barrels in the middle of a chase on horseback just to get full synchronization. If I accidentally didn’t notice one do you think I want to re-do that crappy mission just to fully synch? No. I would like to get 100% completion but not when it isn’t even fun doing it. Make clear what you want to be done and make it complement the game, don’t add annoying optional objectives to an already annoying mission. I’m not bashing the OO’s because I couldn’t do them, I did them when I felt like it but I just didn’t think they were good.
SIDE MISSIONS:
For side missions there are Liberation missions, citizen missions, courier missions, and Frontiersman missions. In a nutshell, Liberation missions are just fighting guards around town. Citizen missions sometimes involve killing someone but it’s not that interesting, and courier missions are just Connor running all over the place to collect mail from people and then deliver it to whoever the recipient is. He’s basically a carrier pigeon in human form. The Frontiersman missions literally consist of Connor traveling to East Bum F*ck just to hear old folk tales about sea monsters and Bigfoot. In one instance, a group of people tell me about a UFO sighting that recently happened. I go on to disprove it by traveling to the location where it was apparently seen to investigate. What I find is an umbrella in a tree. -__- Obviously the frontiersman are bored Connor, this is the only way they keep their group alive, don’t ruin their fun.
CLUBS/SOCIETIES:
Okay, so in AC3 there are a few different “clubs” that you can “join”. A few examples are the Hunting Club, the Boston Brawlers, and the Thieves Club. It was said that if during the game you hunt in the forest a lot, or fight a lot, or even pickpocket people enough, you’ll be approached by someone who invites you to join a club. Well, I hunted during the game, and hunted, and hunted, and I was never “approached” by anyone. So, I went online and searched on google, “Where is the hunting club?”. Sure enough, there were tons of other people asking the same damn question. Apparently I wasn’t the only retard who couldn’t find it, but wait I’m NOT a retard because there really ISN’T a freaking hunting club. While I had been hunting animals in the frontier, things would pop up on the side of the screen telling me what I had acquired from each kill. For example, if I killed an elk I would get elk antlers and it would say “1/3 elk antlers acquired”. This my friends, is the Hunting Club. You don’t go around with a group of people hunting, the game just has a list of things you can get from animals and they check it off for you as you go along. Come to find out, I did 100% of the Hunting Club things, and I didn’t even know it. (Go to the DNA tracker at the start menu and you can see all of your stats.) I was also a member of every other club without ever having a clue. So my peeps, I can truthfully tell you that there are no clubs that you go out and do fun stuff with. They just call them “clubs”.
Oh, and by the way I think they did a really crappy job with the pick-pocketing in this game. I wouldn’t join the Thieves Club even if there really was one. Pick-pocketing in previous installments of the AC series was done by simply walking by a citizen and pressing x. Ezio would pilfer the persons money with a quick pat on their pockets. You know, all quick and unnoticeable like a real thief would do it. In AC3 however, you have to walk next to, behind, or even right in front of someone while holding x until the symbol above their head fills up. It takes forever and is quite obvious. I know it’s just a game but not only was it more quick before, it was more believable.
HUNTING:
Also not as good as I expected was the hunting. With the bow and arrow it was extremely easy because once you’re locked on to your target animal it automatically aims for you. This pretty much guarantees the kill unless the target runs behind an object, breaking the line of sight. I did like that there were different kinds of animals in various regions of the map. The way the animals could detect Connor when we tried to sneak up behind them was also a nice touch. You could also use traps and bait to catch and attract animals. With the bigger or more dangerous wildlife creatures like bears, wolves, and elk, you have to press the button sequence that shows up on screen in time. It’s cool the first time but after you see that it’s always circle followed by x, square, or triangle it gets old. You can’t just have your own kind of battle with them, it’s always pretty much the same. Which I think is whack. /:
Which brings me to this. Now I will tell you one of the most disappointing things about the game in one word, trees. I bought the game thinking, hell yeah I’m going to assassinate all types of shit from trees! I don’t know if it’s too much to expect that we would be able to climb most of the trees in the game but I guess it is because you can’t. I mean I thought the forest would be all trees you could climb. Nope. A lot of trees in the game are actual not climbable, if that’s a word. You will be able to air assassinate some animals and targets from trees but only if you both are around trees you can actually climb (or if you bait an animal towards a spot). The trees you can climb are fun to maneuver though, just wish I could do that across the whole forest! Or at least most of it. 😦
COLLECTABLE ITEMS:
Collectable items, along with side missions and naval missions, take up about half of the game. You guys already know how I feel about the last two set let me explain the first. Collectable items like almanacs, treasure, trinkets, and that kind of hooplah, are strewn all over the entire AC3 map. At first it might only show a few icons, but once some are collected another set pops up. The almanacs are kind of a chase but if you know where they are on a roof you can pop up right next to them and grab them right away. The way you get to pick the locks of treasure chests with the analog sticks and R1 button is cool but not after a couple of times. They give you a lot of money though, which is why I thought they were great at first. Until you realize when you go to the general market that there isn’t really anything you want.-__- The Peg Leg Trinkets and almanacs only get you “recipes” to make things that really have no use in your game life. Like a glass harmonica. I mean if you would enjoy having to run all over the map countless times to keep doing the same thing over and over and get nothing for it then hey, maybe this game is for you but not for me.
GRAPHICS:
The graphics in AC3 are overall really good. The people walking around are much more lively, but I wouldn’t say they interact with Connor much. With the exception of the little beggar boys that never leave him alone. I enjoyed being able to virtually pet the animals roaming the streets. I also saw improvements in the “view” of the game, meaning the third person feel. It was third person but I still felt rooted and kind of small in a big world, which was nice. The facial expressions in the cutscenes were more realistic, but not perfect of course. The fluidity in Connor’s movements when fighting was good and they made him look epic and badass but like I said, all you really do is pick fights with guards. Also, the windows and doors in the buildings you’re supposed to be able to go through are rare to find. I think there should have been more of them. Viewpoints are another part of the past games that I used to really like because they always looked so detailed and beautiful. In AC3 I don’t really like the view from the viewpoints, am I the only one who sees something wrong with that? The background always looks so foggy and obscure, but that’s one of the only things I didn’t like graphically.
MULTIPLAYER:
The ONE thing I actually thought was really great about AC3 was the multi-player. It had all the greatness from Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood, only more refined and with extra awesomeness. I say extra awesomeness because it was much more customizable. Players can change various things about the look of their online characters, from weapons, to clothing, to face paint. You can also still choose from different ability sets and game modes. The cool thing with the ability sets is now you can “craft” them in a couple different ways to make them better. An example of this being, you can craft your ability to become invisible to last longer. It might initially last about 4 seconds, but with crafting you can bring it up to 8. Of course, AC3 still has all the different modes you know and love, with Manhunt still being my favorite. ❤ I personally love the multi-player because I get a rush trying to figure out who my target is, deciding how I want to kill him, and from stunning multiple opponents when I’m hiding. It’s a cat and mouse game that I rather enjoy.
An extra about the online that I enjoyed were the videos you can unlock through leveling up. They were creepy ads for citizens by Abstergo and they gave off the vibe of trying to brainwash people. One video then reveals how it’s indeed all corrupt. I guess I just liked how they added a little extra to the multi-player with that.
ALLYOUCANGAME RATING:
On behalf of AllYouCanGame, I give Assassin’s Creed 3 a 6.5 out of 10 ! The multi-player and graphics of the game were pretty good so that earned it some points. I also REALLY loved the concept of that game, I just don’t feel it was executed well from a players point of view. It’s the fourth in the AC series and it should be getting more epic and interesting, but instead it fell flat. The missions weren’t fun. Put it this way, I’m playing Devil May Cry 1 right now and it’s more intriguing than AC3.
That’s my review, thanks for reading AllYouCanGamers! Say anything you want in the comments, and feel free to leave suggestions for things you want me to write about! A Black Ops 2 review will be coming up soon! Love yous ❤ 🙂
allyoucangame 