game review: Assassin's Creed 3

[MaDuce]

Normally I wouldn't bother, but given the subject matter, I chose to post this here.

Previews:

Trailer

Gameplay preview

Assassin's Creed 3 is great It's not perfect in any way but still very well balanced. I'll warn you though that it's much more involved in open combat then any of the previous titles.

But my favorite NEW feature is the sea combat. At first sight I was highly skeptical but very quickly fell in love with it. Ubisoft needs to make an entire game around it!

The game starts out from the bad guy's perspective and is very slow to get to the point where you are playing as the native and a full fledged Assassin.

As one would expect from previous Assassin's Creed games, it doesn't just put you in touch with the very well known founders of America, but some of the much less known individuals as well. It also crosses paths with other well known people from the time outside of the revolution. Most notably is probably Daniel Boon. The one person I've been waiting to see who hasn't shown up yet (unless I missed him somehow) is Johnie Apple Seed.

Anyway, this game starts decades before the revolution and slowly works it's way up to it. So far, it has taken you through almost everything, including but not limited to the Boston Massacre, Boston Tea Party, night ride with Paul Revere, Battle of Lexington, Battle of Bunker Hill, signing of the Declaration of Independence, and I am currently running errands for George Washington in the Valley Forge dilemma.

I knew from the start that the Valley Forge dilemma was going to get portrayed in this game. It' is too important and fits too well. But I was hoping they would do a good job on it. It's a sequence that has a great deal of potential yet can easily get messed up. They definitely could have done better, but I though they did a good job overall. If anything, they could have made it more populated and dirty, but it generally gives (at least weather and terrain wise) a decent insight in to the winter hell some of these guys were trapped in.

Another thing I hoped and expected from Ubisoft which they delivered well was battle sequences that involved the same tactics of the time we all know about, but not in the clean and structured way that Hollywood has become grounded in showing us. If you've seen the movie, "Gods and Generals" (one of the few exceptions I can think of), then you probably know what I am talking about.

The graphics are great, the realism is typical of the Assassin's Creed series and; as the game's makers promised, they seamed to have really done a thorough job of working out what kind of people our forefathers really were and portraying them as such. There were a few surprises, but it all makes sense when you really put everything known about them together. For instance, Paul Revere kinda reminds me of Chris Farley, with a calm, soft demeanor who can be taken for naive at first, but turns out to be a sharp and careful planner. Daniel Boon acts like he's been isolated from civilization too long. At first sight, he seams like a tweeker, but turns out to just hysterically tell it like it is. As one might expect, Sam Adams is a man's man. I haven't seen much of John Hancock but I though I was the only one joking about his last name until this game came out. LOL

The story is like everything else in the Assassin's Creed series. You are living out a secret mission, woven in to the gaps of known history. From what I have gathered so far, the events surrounding the story seam to be accurate to history. Of course, the individual story is portrayed as that "missing from the record". Think of Saving Private Ryan. The individual story is fiction, but everything happening around it was real. Same thing.

And of course, my favorite feature in the Assassin's Creed series, you are given a guided tour of Boston, New York and surrounding towns and villages, with the feature that allows you to read about the history of each notable building you come near and each historical individual you come across, both major and insignificant.

For those of you who are seasoned Assassin's Creed players, you may have noticed over time that hte Templars are not just a group of rich men who want to take over the world for their own selfish ambitions, but a people wit a philosophy, morals of their own and a mission not dissimilar from the Assassins. You have only gotten glimpses of it in previous games but that comes out in the open in Assassin's Creed 3 and the "good guy, bad guy" distinction between the Assassins and Templars begins to fade, revealing that; even among the Templars, good and evil varies as much from person to person as in any other group.

As another review of a previous Assassin's Creed title pointed out, the open world, interactive nature of the Assassin's Creed series and their painstaking effort to accurately recreate ancient cities as they were at the time, building for building, is proving that video games are the next frontier of historical education.

If you have and use an Xbox 360 or a Playstation 3, I highly recommend this game.

[shepp]

I'm interested to hear the reviews on call of duty the last one really didn't suck me in like past titles, need a new combat game

[MikedaddyH]

Side note: FPS Russia was in a TV ad for video game release.

[Robocop1051]

http://www.youtube.com/user/callofduty?v=4wIZp_E2CxQ

[edgecrusher]

that's a funny commercial, robert downey flying a plane, and a chubby boris said? launching a strike missile

[shepp]

Side note: FPS Russia was in a TV ad for video game release.

Lol I saw that,even my gf was like isn't that the YouTube guy you watch lol

[MaDuce]

I'm not in to 1st person shooters at all. And especially not COD. Everything since Modern Warfare 1 was too paintball for me. But 1st person as a whole is something I can only take for a few minutes before getting claustrophobic. Kinda weird since I don't get claustrophobic in the real world. Only when playing 1st person video games.