K-SCORE: 4
Developer/Publisher: Ubisoft
Writers: Thousands of incompetent people
Spoiler Level: Minor (only spoilable if you have a less than 3rd grade understand of the American Revolution)
“garbage collage”
“you literally stand next to common townsfolk watching them... squash berries in a bucket”
The evolution of my appreciation for this franchise is as follows: “Hey, cool game concept. Unique. A lot of potential,” to “Alright, yeah! That’s a fun game,” to “Okay, a little dry. Basically the same thing they gave me last time,” to “Uh… that was measurably worse,” to “I wasted my time and money on a broken product. I’m never playing an AC game again.” That last one - that represents Assassin’s Creed III. This is a game so boring, so bloated, so poorly written, so poorly constructed, that it can only possibly appeal to players that have game tested it for twenty minutes and looked at screenshots of the graphics. How is anyone having fun with this?
You play as a grumpy brick named Connor, as he travels around, single-handedly solving all of the crises of the American Revolution by taking really simplistic actions like chatting up George Washington or killing a few people to start The Boston Massacre or throwing tea overboard in Boston harbor or carrying Paul Revere on the back of his fucking horse. Who knew Connor was responsible for the fifteen most important events surrounding the foundation of our nation. You’d think I would have heard of him before. But whatever. I guess that’s fine if you want to suspend your disbelief that the Assassin-Templar conflict is secretly the driving force for human history.
“Eventually I’m sitting there, holding the controller with one hand, idly flicking the control stick, staring at the screen as my eyes got glassy and my thoughts wandered to dark places.”
The writing is excruciating. The game has hundreds of cutscenes and I suggest investing in earplugs before sitting through any of them. In most of them, Connor stomps around yelling at an old black guy. None of the characters have a sense of humor. There are no attempts at witticisms, no attempts at any emotion that isn’t rage or misery, and nothing passably realistic. The voice actor they got for Connor reminds me of people at my sixth grade summer theater camp. Sometimes you do nothing but walk ten paces between cutscenes and every single one is expositional, telling you to do yet another simple, mindless task that supposedly is necessary to win the USA’s foundational war. Place those crates over there and we defeat the British!
So know what I’m saying when I say that I would rather sit with my eyelids taped open watching the cutscenes on loop for dozens of hours on end then play through 99% of the gameplay again. Yes, they successfully inserted a lot of different activities. No, none of them are worth a damn. The best one is the boat. In a better game, it would be an obvious choice for something to cut from the final product. It’s clunky and weird and doesn’t blend with anything else. The worst things you do: how about the underground exploration where the game makes you slowly walk through copy-pasted dark tunnels with a dim torch, solving puzzles they give preschoolers for cognitive development, to unlock shortcuts through the boring and sprawling world? How about placing little traps and waiting around trees for a bunny to walk by? (Connor is Native American / environmental monster, seeking to eradicate the world’s non-human species for his own sick satisfaction.) How about investigating rumors about Sasquatch by standing next to people gossiping in taverns listening to them talk about nonsense? How about The Encyclopedia of the Common Man, where you literally stand next to common townsfolk watching them do things like dry clothes on a clothesline, squash berries in a bucket, and chop the same blocks of wood every day of their pointless - digital - lives. How about herding animals? This is the fourth time in video games that developers have had my player character doing this. The best it was done is in DK64, in an brutally annoying mini game where you play a little alligator trying to get beavers to fall in a hole in the center of the screen. It’s the worst mini game in that experience. Next best, Red Dead Redemption, where they took cowboying a little too literally, forcing you to herd cattle on horseback. It’s not fun, but I guess it adds to the spirit of the old west. Then there’s The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, where you have to run around a collection of animals to get them in a pen by a certain time. This game is notorious for having an introductory section that is way too long and this is the most useless element they put in there, and they did not give you any tools to help you with this simple task. It’s an embarrassment for any game, let alone one made by Miyamoto. Dead last on this list of shame is Assassin’s Creed III. I seriously thought about stabbing myself while trying to get those fucking pigs in their fucking pen. All you can do is run awkwardly in a semi-circle. There’s no trick to it, there’s no skill, there’s no time limit… you just keep running about randomly hoping that something triggers in their programming that they finally acquiesce. I looked up videos online, read forums about it, tried to move every way I could think of, but they didn’t want to go. Eventually I’m sitting there, holding the controller with one hand, idly flicking the control stick, staring at the screen as my eyes got glassy and my thoughts wandered to dark places. What am I doing with my life? Make it stop. Make it stop!
I think the whole game might be some clever form of torture. They got six hundred sadists to program as many useless objectives into a fat game as they possibly could, teasing you by making you think maybe around another corner there’s something resembling something fun. There are leftover shreds of assassinating from the previous entries in the series, so at least you get to kill people, but it’s no-stakes, no-challenge work. Connor’s life regenerates automatically and the AI is so bad that I’m confident that I could have been plopped into London with the entirety of the Great British navy aimed squarely at my shoulders and it merely would have taken a while before I sliced them all with hatchets. They assume a player skill level of “random button masher.” I was an expert at it in the nonsense prologue (that followed one of the most annoying douchebags the world has ever known), and by the end, I didn’t even know what to do with my fingers since every objective dropped dead without conscious thought. Mostly I wandered around the wilderness, feeling sad that I kept murdering deer, hoping I’d finally discovered the last climbable big tree, hoping I’d agreed to deliver my last letter. You cannot divide game design up this way, giving so many people a single meaningless task and then stitching it all into an abomination at the very end.
The frame narrative with Desmond is what makes the story in the Assassin’s Creed franchise unique, so naturally Ubisoft utilized Assassin’s Creed III to murder it. Whatever they were slowly progressing towards was cut off completely with no explanation. It’s bad enough that this game is so terrible, but to ruin the stories of the other games I kind of liked… good God! I read an interview in Game Informer with the new creative director where he said they wanted to do away with the modern-day Abstergo story because it was “too complicated for gamers to understand.” Thank you for treating your audience like idiots, you vile, worthless, storyteller who hijacked a successful franchise from a talented man (Patrice Desilets), burned it with weak torches and ripped it up with blunt hatchets.
The positive critical reception for Assassin’s Creed III is strong evidence that two things are going on with video game reviews. It can’t just be either given the quality of this game. It has to be both. 1) Reviewers are reviewing their games before they finish them. Anyone who actually played through the whole ACIII story (especially with the platinum trophy I got (because evidently I'm a masochist)) couldn’t have liked it. It’s not possible. None of it is fun. There’s nothing interesting about it except when you consider that so many people got together to make something so bad. There’s no good writing. I suppose it could be used as a screenshot generator for people who like the notion that assassin’s yanked from an Arab tradition had a hand in the formation of America and want to put posters of such fiction on their walls. That’s the best I got. 2) Developer and reviewer collusion. Someone’s being paid off. My usual trusted sources gave this game really high ratings, otherwise I wouldn’t have bought it. It’s an egregious miscarriage of journalistic responsibility.
Everything about Assassin’s Creed III is broken: the gameplay, the characters, the world, the minigames, the pacing, the story, the voice acting, the challenge level, the cutscene frequency, the history, the exploration, its integration into the rest of franchise. I hated it. That I finished playing through it indicates something very strange about my personality and life that I’ll have to spend years studying. Do not play Assassin’s Creed III. Do not let developers decide that this garbage collage is the future of game design.