Innovation is a tough thing in the gaming industry. Not just coming up with something new and exciting that will get fans of all ages to line up to play, but once you have those fans you must innovate to keep them. This is something that the Assassin’s Creed franchise has had great success with. With the original release of Assassin’s Creed, it was something that gamers had never seen before and it was awesome. The gameplay got a bit repetitive and bland at times, but Ubisoft quickly improved on it with the next installment in the series giving gamers more things to do and a more in depth storyline. After that followed multiplayer and countless hours of online fun. I am extremely excited for this review of Assassin’s Creed 3 because it is set around the American Revolution, a time that has not been looked at before in the franchise and an interesting piece of history in my eyes. Sit back and grab your muskets because “The British are coming, the British are coming!”
Game: Assassin’s Creed 3
Published by: Ubisoft
Review Sample Provided by: Nvidia
Developed by: Ubisoft Montreal
Platforms: Xbox 360, PlayStation 3, Wii U, PC (Review Sample)
Genre: Action-Adventure, Stealth, Open World
Release Date: October 30th, 2012 (PS3 and Xbox360) November 20th (PC)
MSRP: $59.99 on all platforms
Written By: Brennon
Screenshots By: Brennon
Story
The fifth installment in the Assassin’s Creed series picks up with Desmond, his father and the rest of his team as they discover an ancient animus in a temple in New York. Desmond faints and is placed into the animus so that work may begin. Desmond is slung back in time to the 1700s where he takes the place of one of his ancestors named Haytham Kenway. Kenway immediately gets to work as he assassinates a target at an opera house and takes a key to a room of the ones who came before. With this key he seeks passage to the new world and sets out on his journey. He gathers a small group of men dedicated to his cause, slaying many along the way. He enlists the help of a Native American woman by the name of Ziio to help him discover this room.
Upon the discovery of the temple, Haytham finds that what he holds is not actually the key to open the door, but something else. He is disappointed but finds solace in the arms of Ziio who bears him a son who later becomes known as Connor. Connor sets out on his journey at the direction of the elder of his village to protect the land they live on and the temple that is beneath it. The majority of the story follows Connor as he learns much of the Templars and the secrets they protect, while trying to protect a secret of his own.
Gameplay
The gameplay of Assassin’s Creed 3 and others in the series is what distinguishes them from everything else out there. It is an open world action-adventure, but it is also very heavily stealth focused. One moment you may be stalking an enemy sticking to the shadows or ease-dropping on a conversation to gather information, and then the next you may find yourself faced by multiple enemies in melee combat, or even facing a firing squad. Both types of gameplay are very suiting and well placed and spaced out throughout so that the game doesn’t get stale. The combat itself is quite fun as there are multiple options. You can approach any situation stealthy or full steam ahead. When approaching it from a stealth aspect, you may take out four or five enemies before they even know that you are there. If you don’t want to seem a coward however and give your foes a fair chance there is always open combat.
For melee combat alone there are swords, tomahawks, hidden blades and bayonets. For ranged you have pistols and muskets, both of which are only single shot and take a while to load, but can be incredibly effective in either picking off a more difficult enemy prior to starting battle, or to defend yourself against an impossible situation during battle. You are able to loot those who you have slain to collect money, ammo, or extra special items like smoke bombs.
In Assassin’s Creed 3 the movement is highly improved from previous versions. Movement is now much more fluid and feels a lot more like free-running. The new movement system makes the game feel more responsive in my eyes and certainly leads to some more exciting chase scenes and battles. The free-running is best demonstrated when tracking down almanac pages. The pages are only on the screen for a short amount of time, and have a predetermined path that you must learn over the course of a few attempts at grabbing it, but once you have perfected the path and are able to snag the pages, you can turn them into Benjamin Franklin for a little bit of extra pocket cash, or quid I suppose. On top of all this there are disguises in Assassin’s Creed 3. You can cloak yourself as one of the British and walk right into their camp and wreak havoc. Keep an eye out for the officers though, as they have the ability to see through your disguise and ruin everything.
One final point, though not really an issue with gameplay is that my save file became corrupt. I don’t know how, but I can only assume it happened when Uplay decided to do an automatic update. Since then I have been keeping a backup of my save and haven’t had the issue again, but there are multiple reports of people’s saves becoming corrupt or even being removed all together with the download of a DLC so be weary and backup your data!
Multiplayer
Multiplayer in the Assassin’s Creed series has always been some of the most fun, unique and addicting multiplayer that I myself have enjoyed. There is one basic game type that has different unique game modes surrounding it. The basic idea of Assassin’s Creed 3’s multiplayer is that there are targets and pursuers. Your target is who you need to kill to score points, the better you are at staying hidden and stealth like when tracking and killing your target, the higher your score will be if and when you kill them. You also have pursuers who are out to kill you and you can score points by stunning a pursuer or by contesting their kill. You may have more than one pursuer on you at any given time, and your target may also have other pursuers than yourself. The areas in which you walk around are rather small, and you are the only model of your character in the entire zone. You get a portrait of your target, but only indicators of how many pursuers you have so you must constantly be on your toes. When a pursuer is close you start hearing whispers to let you know so that you may at least attempt to defend yourself. If you kill a civilian however you are temporarily not allowed to kill your target.
There is another game mode called wolfpack which is a type of co-op mode. A team of up to four players go against computer controlled enemies. The team has assassination targets that they must track and kill together. The points add up into a total pool to try to keep advancing stages. If your team manages to meet the point requirement for the next stage you get an additional 30 seconds to a minute to track down and kill more targets. If players fail to meet their goal time expires and that is the end of the round. Along with each other, the players get special abilities to help them track and kill their enemy, but the target will also have special abilities. Depending on the difficulty of the wolfpack game the enemies will use their abilities and wits better to evade players.
Controls
I absolutely love the way the game handles, the fluidity of the movement system is quite possibly my favorite improvement in the Assassin’s Creed franchise. The controls themselves however do not feel right on the keyboard and mouse in my eyes. They work as you would expect, W, A, S, and D move your character around while the mouse changes the direction which you are looking. Spacebar is used to jump around and grab onto ledges and such, but that’s where it stops being simple and starts getting a bit confusing. Left mouse button is used to attack with all of the melee weapons or special abilities such as smoke bombs and coin distraction that you might use, but right mouse isn’t used for combat at all, it is used to sprint. To fire the rifles you must reach all the way over to the Q button and the E button for actions and letting go of ledges and so forth. You can quick switch through your weapon set by selecting 1-4, but can only have 4 items active at a time. To change out these items you must hold R, not just hit it, but hold it down why you select what you want to swap in and out.
Everything IS customizable however, so if the keys are not to your liking, you can adjust them as you wish and this is a nice addition, but I feel like the controls are just not designed for keyboard and mouse very well. I had much more fun while playing with my Xbox 360 controller, which the game fully supports, but I wasn’t able to use both methods at the same time as I was in other games. If you want to use keyboard and mouse, you must use your Xbox controller to go into the menu and select keyboard and mouse as your input device and then start using them. The same goes the other way around. This became increasingly frustrating when I wanted to play with my controller, but then needed to take a screenshot of something. The constant switching back and forth became a bother and eventually I just ended up sticking with keyboard and mouse.
Graphics
Assassin’s Creed 3 is a visually stunning game. When I first started playing the game looked great and ran amazing on my mid-range computer build. It ran at about 60 frames per second, I never really experienced a drop in performance, and the game looked amazing. Then I realized I was only on medium video settings! I turned everything up as high as I could and the world around me became even more beautiful. The most notable differences between the medium and high settings were the texture detail and the lighting and shadows. Even on maximum settings on my pc the game still ran at a solid 30 frames per second with no performance slumps.
The world itself is amazing and each area has something different to offer. The cities have haystacks strewn about and random broken boxes through the street as would be typical of a city during that time frame and the wilderness is filled with trees and snow that seem to never end. Another great thing about the graphics is that the seasons are constantly changing. With many games the environment never changes and it is always snowy, sunny or rainy. In Assassin’s Creed 3 you get to experience all of the temperatures and seasons that Mother Nature has to offer.
The game uses Direct X 11 technology which gives certain performance boosts and enables Tessellation. The enabling of Tessellation is the most notable DX11 feature. Tessellation allows more polygons on the screen to allow for more realistic rendering of the environment. This is best seen when you are wandering through the wilderness and you leave a path in the snow behind you. Each step you take leaves an imprint in the snow, and doubling back pushes down more snow as well as pushing it down further. This is all thanks to DX11.
The game also supports TXAA which is a brand new Anti-Aliasing technology for Nvidia Kepler based GPUs. It offers a higher quality image at less of a performance hit. The Nvidia developed FXAA has also been made available to all players through the option menu, though the TXAA option is only available to those with a 600 series Nvidia based Graphics Card.
Audio
The sounds in Assassin’s Creed 3 are also very good. The voice acting is pretty good and I didn’t really find myself hating it or thinking it was cheesy. The voices all seem to fit the characters pretty well and everyone seems genuine. I didn’t really buy Ziio’s voice acting as a Native American, but she wasn’t in the story for very long, and it really wasn’t even that I disliked her voice actress, I think I was just being picky. The music is also well done and properly placed. When you are fighting multiple enemies head on in a big battle, the pace of the music picks up and gets your heart racing as it should. When you are sneaking around and playing the part of the stealthy assassin, it slows down and goes at roughly the same pace that you are. The best part of the audio though was the environments. When you are in a city, it FEELS like you are in a city, you can hear mumblings of people talking, horses neighing, and the sounds of orphans running through the streets. When you venture out into the wilderness you can hear the sounds of animals howling or growling, the wind blowing through the trees and the crunch of snow underneath your feet. That is the most impressive part of the game in my eyes, the fact that a tavern feels like a tavern, the wilderness feels like the wild. It takes a lot to remove a player from in front of their screen and place them in the environment within the game, but Assassin’s Creed 3 has done so successfully.
Overall and Final Verdict
All in all I think Assassin’s Creed 3 has a little bit of something for everyone. For returning fans, the new scenery and time frame should be a welcome change. The story is well written and exciting while still keeping true to the series and managing to tie the plotlines together. However, new players to the series will still be able to enjoy the game as it gives a brief synopsis of everything that came before. The combat and movement are some the best that I have experienced in the series. While the controls do feel a bit odd for the PC, they are completely customizable and there is also Xbox controller support for anyone who might prefer the gamepad. The multiplayer is very addicting and exciting and I do not believe it possible to just play one game. The graphics and audio are amazing and the game manages to take you through every season and location that it has to offer and it feels like you are actually there. My gripes with the game are minor, and the biggest issue I had was losing my save which is unclear how or why it happened. I would definitely suggest that everyone get out there and see what the world of Assassin’s Creed 3 has to offer.
