Assassin's Creed 3 - I expected so much more

Look at the Assassin's Creed series as a whole, and you get what I consider to be an awe-inspiring legacy of games leading to a truly breathtaking visage of miraculous mediocrity.  Assassin's Creed 3 was a fair game.  Not great, not amazing, not even really good.  Fair.  I truly had huge hopes for this game, and brought it home the day it was released (if you know me, you know how cheap I am, me bringing home release-day games never happens).  I played it off an on because frankly, I didn't want to play it.  Finally I beat it this week, because I told myself I really had to so I could publish some thoughts on it.

Ok, ok, I will say that I did not spend all the time I possibly could doing all the little side-quests or minigames.  Why?  Because there was absolutely no reason to.  The gear I started with was more than enough to finish the game with little to no problems in combat.  I only bought gear twice in the entire game, once when a mission made me, and once because I happened to stroll past the shop and got curious.  Yes, I said THE shop, not a shop.  In AC3 you're pretty much never going to have a chance to buy gear without making a special trip to go to the store.  Maybe that was the point, because it was more "realistic" but when the shopping is frivolous at best, why bother?  I have to say that I did buy snares once from a traveling merchant, so that makes a grand total of three purchases throughout the entire game.

To be fair to the game there were a lot of good aspects, most of which were in the gameplay.  At first I was a little put-off because the controls that hadn't changed much since the first game were entirely replaced, but once I got used to them I actually preferred the new controls.  You can control whether to disarm or counterattack an enemy when you parry, or just shove him away.  You won't accidentally dive off a roof that's 15 stories up unless you really want to become road pizza, because now free running has one button that doesn't allow stupid jumps, and another button that does.

They added in Rope Darts which in itself is another pet peeve of mine.  In previous games, every time you got a new weapon they beat it into you, force fed you missions that trained you in using it, then let you choose to ever touch it again or not.  In this game, you get the rope dart.  That's it.  Go, have fun, use it.  Don't shoot your eye out!  If you want to know how, there's this little fricken' corner-of-the-map side quest you only find by using the map and chasing down icons.  Then you find out that it's really neat... and damn gimicky and still likely never use it again.  It's only useful in one specific situation that will take you more time to set up than just walking over and killing your targets.  It's kinda like teaching a monkey to use a whip.  Sure, you might impress a few people, but the third time he cracks you in the junk, you're gonna take it away from him and never give it back.

That leads me to the homestead missions.  You can chase all over the enormous world... no wait, let's stop here a second.

Enormous.  Huge.  Unreasonably big.  It's like they tried to put a sandbox type game map into an action/RPG.  I mean I'm all for huge areas to explore, but when they're all the FOREST give me a damn break.  Let me start by saying that if you have an entire map that has quick-travel icons on every exit, and nothing in the damn map except collection icons, get rid of it, you're just being an ass for putting it there.  Yeah, it looked awesome, had great graphics, amazing looking things that were impressive for the first two or three trips.

I understand that all the other games had these "wilderness" areas too, but you didn't have to run through them every other damn mission, so it just made me hate the damn thing even more.  Your Homestead was your home-base more or less, and after every mission it felt like I had to run back there, get another thing to do, watch a little cut scene, and go back out to another city and I was getting sick of it.

Back to homestead missions...
You chase over that whole stinking map to find these little icons that bring people back to your starting-up village.  If you're a completionist, sure, go for it, but all it gives you is a chance to do more in your little minigame of managing caravans to make money.

Now I'm a programmer so I don't think I'm entirely daft, but I spent 15 minutes on that God-forsaken caravan crap, after the tutorial was finished, and couldn't find out how to make more than half a dozen bucks in 2 hours.  Considering I can get half that amount by stabbing a random rabbit in 4 seconds, I kinda don't see the point.  It's like asking a starving man if he would rather have limitless free meals at a nice restaurant or an oven.  Sure, one way you can make your own meals and be proud of it but who really cares?

And as I said before, why work so hard to make money when there's no reason to buy anything.

*********************  SPOILER  *****************************

Now let's go onto the plot.  Yes there are spoilers here, so skip it if you want.  Look for the other crazy ** like thing at the end of this section, loser.  Go, hide from the truth!  COWARD!

Come on, Connor, what the hell?  Your mother is killed by Charles Lee.  He was sent by Hatham, and you finally meet the dick who was responsible for your mother's murder and you let him convince you to work with him after a 15 second conversation?

To me, there was no development.  Ezio went from bratty kid, to a skilled assassin.  He saw there were things bigger than himself, and became involved in them, started a guild, and eventually was monumental in helping set up Desmond's chance in present-day.  He started off a little twerp and became a dignified leader of men.  Even in each game, there was improvement along that path.

Connor was a bratty kid who got mad because his mom was killed, then got mad because his village was in danger.  He found out that his mom was killed by Hatham, and his village was in danger because of Hatham and his men.  You hear about the templars, but never anything more than the few men Connor learned about when he first started his training.  There was no development, there was no growth.  He set out to kill the men who hurt him and he did.  He never got involved in the "bigger picture" like Ezio did.

I saw him as a punk in the beginning, who somehow was already able to kill better than most soldiers, then he became a slightly better dressed punk that can still kill better than most soldiers.  I mean hell, other than the rope dart I can't off the top of my head think of anything I can do at the end of the game that I couldn't do the first time I could control Connor.

Yeah, the story said that Connor's mom was trained like an Assassin, but if all the character growth happened before the game started, where's the story?

*********************  SPOILER END  *****************************

There are a couple final things I wanna say, call them last nails in the coffin.

You're a god damned assassin, what happened to ASSASSINATING PEOPLE!  Ezio had to sneak into crowded rooms, wait for targets, end them quietly then slip out before guards saw.  Altier would evesdrop, sneak and pickpocket, gather information, then find his target be sure he had to die, and end key Templar players before vanishing into the shadows.  Connor sees someone he wants to kill and just walks over and kills him after fighting his way through men.  I think maybe three times in the game a mission had me kill someone subtly, and even then it wasn't required to do it that way.

I realized something else after I beat the game.  Just look at some trailers for the games.  Go on, I'll wait.  Watch Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood.  Ezio walking through a crowd, calm, quiet, shifting from group to group as his assassins take out the guards as they notice him.  Everything is perfectly skilled, and subtle until the last moment when he clears the crowd and has to face the target.  Now look at the Assassin's Creed 3 trailer.  He grabs a horse and charges across a battlefield towards enemy lines.  Charging the enemy lines?  What half-witted assassin leads a solo frontal assault.  Even worse, if you watch, his success on crossing that battlefield inspires troops behind him.  Not assassins, revolutionary troops.  He's a general, not an assassin.  Assassin's don't inspire, they do what they have to do and leave quietly.

And for those of you that are wondering, yes, I actually did like the ship-piloting stuff, but it was so disparate from the rest of the game I would almost enjoy it more as its own game rather than as a side-mission in this one.

So, my final thoughts... I just feel this game really missed the mark. It was fun at first, but I had to make myself finish it so I could see the Desmond side of things, and when a game becomes a chore, then it's time to finish it and put it away.  I am, however, still looking forward to see if AC4 redeems the franchise in my mind.