I’ve been playing a lot of Assassin’s Creed 3 lately, and the phrase that best sums up this experience is “Why did I even bother”. The game starts off alright enough. You start off playing Haytham, who’s a man of mystery and parkour, and the controls feel tight, and the plot seems interesting right from the start. The first 2-3 hours are downright enjoyable: you get minimal Desmond, you’re in a cool ruin when you ARE Desmond, and you’re in a somewhat content-rich era of history, involving two present-day superpowers (British and France) and one future superpower (‘MURICA). The game feels like it has potential. It feels like maybe, maybe this game is a worthy successor to Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. That feeling is a lie. A filthy, filthy toilet of a lie.

Like this, but after you’ve been to Taco Bell and eaten 12  under-cooked Gorditas.  You know, a typical Tuesday.

First, let’s talk about the environment.  Having a wilderness (easily the most expansive area of the game) to run around in is a wonderful idea.  The idea of moving from tree to tree is brilliant, and makes nature free-running actually possible.  No longer is horse-riding essential for getting around!  Ah, if only these words were true.  Alas, they are not.  You see, Ubisoft inserted snow into this game.  What’s wrong with snow you might ask?  Normally, there’s nothing wrong with it.  I like snow in real life.  It’s fun to ski over, or have fun snow shenanigans with friends and family in. Like that time I got turned into a snowman.

In this game though, it’s horrible.  When you don’t have a horse, you move at a rate approximating a turtle trying to outrun a particularly threatening banana.  When you do have a horse, the environment actually works against you.  There will be hills hidden under the snow you cannot see, and this means you will either run into an invisible wall your horse cannot climb, or your valiant steed will bravely fling itself off of a 5 foot high cliff and… die, for some reason.  I wasn’t aware horses were made of stained glass back in colonial times, but there you are.  So you’re forced to stick to the roads if you want to get anywhere quick.  Which kind of negates the point of giving the player a wilderness to explore, don’tcha think?

“But Aaron” I hear you say, lip aquiver, “it’s not winter ALL the time!  Surely, it can’t be winter for more than a part of the game?”  And you’re right, it’s not winter all the time.  Just during the interesting sections of the game that take place in the wilderness.  Now, I hear some folks waving their hands and blowing raspberries.  While this is a fun group activity, bear with me for a minute.

Wha- No, no, not literally!  Back in the closet, Cinnamon!

“Why not just do your exploring in the summer, and then stay on the roads for the winter story missions?” I hear you ask, lips flapping in your self-generated breeze.  Excellent question!  Because then, what’s the point of having an expansive wilderness to explore in the first place?  You either spend all your time wandering through it completing side quests while avoiding the main plot, or you’re prohibited from doing any meaningful exploration/using alternative travel routes to the main quest by the game’s actual environment.  The previously mentioned tree travel is hard to access during wintertime, due to the also-previously-mentioned snow cover that tends to cover up landmark areas where you’d access this network, and running through snow on foot feels like you’re running a mental marathon of boredom.  It’s like the game is testing whether your fingers or your attention span runs out first.  The inclusion of unlockable fast travel points (a la fort liberation) to move from point to point quickly is nice, but then we return to the original question: What’s the point of having an expansive wilderness to explore in the first place?  Especially if you’re either going to zip on by it when possible, or it actively discourages you from exploring.

The answer is simple, and actually hearkens back to Assassin’s Creed 1 (though done much worse).  It’s artificial gameplay extension, plain and simple.  Except instead of giving you a mechanism that’ll always work to help you move around the map more quickly (a horse), the map is designed to slow you down for the reasons stated.  Hidden hills, an environment that can only be explored when the main plot has nothing to do with it, treetop travel that’s either circuitous or hidden, it all adds up to gameplay that’s pointless, drawn out, and boring.  It’s a problem in the cities too, though it’s not as clear as in the wilderness.  The streets of towns have been moved closer together, making rooftop travel more viable than in older games, and horses have had their speed drastically reduced as well, encouraging you to free-run your way through Colonial Boston and New York.  No, seriously, you run faster on foot than you do on a horse, and there are many more alleyways horses cannot venture down than in prior games.  And yet, frequently, you’ll find areas of town where the game seems to intentionally screw with you.  Randomly, streets will widen for a couple hundred feet in either direction and you’ll be stranded like Tom Hanks in Castaway. Or you’ll hop from a roof to a town tree that can be interacted with in the wild, but unbeknownst to you, some merry prankster lubed the tree up with Vaseline and before you know it, you’ve fallen out of the tree and into a squad of British soldiers.

Handle the idiot George, I’ve tea to fetch.

This brings us to the second major issue: There are only 3 areas, and they’re all boring.  You have two colonial towns, and a massive wilderness.  Sure there’s history surrounding each location, but once you’ve pushed past that, who cares?  Boston and New York are functionally the same, and the wilderness has the previously discussed issues.  So when you get down to it, what’s there really to explore?  The sailing portions of the game are also basically nonexistent, and they’re some of the most fun I’ve ever had playing a video game.  Why cut them so short? Why fully explore New York when it’s just the same re-arrangement of buildings as Boston? Why go fully explore the wilderness when it has no bearing on the plot?  Why not break the wilderness up into several areas, all accessible through fast travel instead of one sprawling area you have to traverse for hours upon hours upon hours to fully explore (if you care to?) Just skip the whole thing. You’d be better served going to the real cities/wilderness and wandering around for an equal amount of time.  It’s a more enjoyable experience.

Except for Cinnamon.

Which brings us to the third major issue: Pacing.  The game’s fine through most of its plot, but the climax (arguably the most important part of a game) is paced horribly.  Caution, spoilers ahead!  First off, Desmond’s Dad gets captured, so you have to go and save him.  Yay, hooray.  Except this is modern day, so why doesn’t Desmond get shot by one of the several dozen security people you fight? Why does the counter-agent who’s been hounding you on each other modern day mission suddenly have a violent and unexplained crazy episode right when he’s about to take Desmond out?  Why does this whole segment last only 10-15 minutes, including loading times?  These are all excellent questions that, rather than answer, the final two Animus sequences instead chose to imitate.  The penultimate Animus Sequence has two missions, most of which involve walking and not pounding your forehead against one of the many brick walls in the game.  The final sequence is a disjointed, blurry series of events that are nigh-on impossible to relate to due to the lack of anything resembling plot structure.  For some reason, Charles Lee and not Haytham (Connor’s Dad) is the final villain.  For some reason, the only times you actually get to fight Lee are during cutscenes.  It feels like Ubisoft reversed the final two sequences for some reason and then cut out 50% of the content.

When you get right down to it, playing Assassin’s Creed 3 feels like watching an episode of Seinfeld.  It’s a game about nothing, that ends with really poor pacing.  Also, maybe something funny happened.

 

2/5, would not play again.  For more like this, stay tuned.