The player mostly controls a Native American of mixed heritage named Ratonhnhaké:ton or, as he is referred to mostly in the game, Connor. Connor is not the charmer Ezio was. He's actually rather irritable and not as fun a man to be as his assassin ancestors. But his journey is a moving one and is ultimately, supremely satisfying.

You control Connor from his childhood all the way into his assassinating prime. Yet AC III has some surprises in store. In this case-and without giving things away-the game's extended early sequences will allow you to put off playing as Connor for as many as five hours (which is as long as I held out), if not even more. For the sake of readers sensitive to spoilers, I'll skip mentioning just what it is you can do in the game for so long before you assume the role of Connor. The answer emerges within 15 minutes of playing the game yet masks even more twists, each of which is wound throughout the rest of the adventure.

There is, however, a necessary warning surrounding this part of the game: AC III is a slow starter and much of what is most commendable about it, as with last year's equally grand The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, is held back during what some might view as the game's lengthy interactive prologue. Eventually, Connor's training is complete and, in chapter six of a 12-chapter game, the world finally opens up in grand fashion.

Advertisement

I am, perhaps, already going in too deep in my explanation, such is easy to do with what is probably just one of the biggest games ever made. There are simply more parts to this game than most. (Warning: another extended list of features coming!) …

The core of Assassin's Creed games is the hunt-and-be-hunted gameplay. That's Connor's main deal. Like Altair and Ezio, he is a member of an ages-old order that fights an ages-old battle against the Templars. Theoretically the freedom-loving Assassins are the good guys, but that's always been a bit murky and made even murkier in this game, the most morally gray, by far, of the series.

Advertisement

As his predecessors could before him, Connor can walk, run, scale the face of a building, creep up on his targets, engage them in melee or ranged combat (he's good with a tomahawk, pistol and bow, mostly), or sometimes just eavesdrop or sidle in for some pickpocketing.

The Assassin's Creed games have never controlled much better than a mostly-trained dog, so at times Connor will seemingly defy the player's inputs, scaling partway up a building instead of running down the alley next to the building. Sometimes his horse gets tangled up in the forest bushes instead of galloping down a path. Sometimes standing up out of cover will ruin a mission when all you wanted Connor to do was prowl, crouched, to the next hiding spot. Most of the time, though, the game plays fine and Connor's two-handed fighting techniques make him a vicious and fun action hero to control. A ring of enemies still mostly take their turns attacking, but they are far better at blocking, countering and resisting Connor's chain-killing moves and attempts to disarm them than Assassin's Creed enemies of the past. In this game, players will die much more than in the last few games, mostly through faults of their own.

The game's creators do a good job of mixing up Connor's missions (that's a full one in the video above, from about two-thirds into the game). Sometimes you're just tasked with assassinating someone in Boston. Other times, you're riding a horse with Paul Revere to warn people that the British are coming. Sometimes you're commanding dozens of troops at war with Redcoats. And then there are missions like the Boston Tea Party, which are made clumsy by the game's box-throwing controls or the late-game mission that requires a rapid gallop through the forest yet is nearly ruined by the terrible tendency of the game's horses to go off the beaten path. Despite the abundance of AC games, though, the mission design feels fresh and is full of new turns. There is also lots of historical tourism, so when you're not meeting Sam Adams or Ben Franklin, you're witnessing the Boston Massacre firsthand or running around the battle of Bunker Hill.

Advertisement

WHY: Because it may not be the best Assassin's Creed but it is a refreshing recharge to a well-made series. It's an important game about America, about killing bad guys and about climbing beautiful trees.

Advertisement

Assassin's Creed III

Developer: Ubisoft
Platforms: PS3 (reviews), Xbox 360
Released: October 30

Type of game: Historical tourism / American Revolution assassin adventure / Daniel Boone errand-doer / Modern-day end-of-the-world preventer / Third-person action

Advertisement

What I played: 43% of the game over the course of 20 hours, 49 minutes and 27 seconds, finishing the main campaign, doing a small amount of all of the numerous types of sidequests and barely touching the multiplayer. (Note: This review will be updated within a week to factor in the game's multiplayer, which is hard to judge pre-release, and harder still when Hurricane Sandy is screwing with the Internet.)

My Two Favorite Things

Advertisement

My Two Least-Favorite Things

Advertisement

Made-to-Order-Back-of-Box-Quotes

Advertisement

Publishers from big video game companies are not known for subtlety or complexity of theme, and games set in America or tied to America's great military victories tend to wave the flag without pause. The marketing always suggested that ACIII's igniting of the Revolution would be a game of interactive jingoism; its developers always said it was not. The developers were the ones being accurate.

Fortunately, the game is refreshingly skeptical about the values fueling the Revolution while not knee-jerk anti-American, either. The characters acknowledge the hypocrisy of freedom-loving Founding Fathers owning slaves just as they celebrate their resistance to non-democratic tyranny. Connor is no mere change of skin tone for the series' protagonists; he is a man whose people will not win in the new America, and the game presents that painful truth not as a side element or history-textbook-footnote but as one of the main currents that pushes ACIII's story along.

Advertisement

This new game's developers earn the player's trust and respect repeatedly throughout the game, not just because of the story they're choosing to tell but because of how smartly and carefully they have re-thought most of Assassin's Creed's side content. They vowed to avoid repeating many of the gameplay loops of previous Assassin's Creed games and, for the most part, they did. You may still have to climb to the tops of buildings (or massive trees!) to survey the land and fill out a mini-map, and you may still be able to pull wanted posters from walls to reduce the heat level that compels guards to chase you. But in so many ways, the old systems of Assassin's Creeds have been chucked for better ones.

Advertisement

(One thing that hasn't changed: the incredible writing in the game's database. Seriously. Read all of the lore that is unlocked as you play. It is as insightful as it is hilarious, most of it written in the voice of the put-upon modern-day British agent who is helping Desmond stay alive during the adventures in the Animus.)

What's striking about Assassin's Creed III is both how many elements it has and how well-made most of them are. Ubisoft puts an army of developers on their AC games and it seems that these armies have tried to out-do each other, with so many parts of the game that could be side-projects rivaling the game's main quest in level of quality.

All that said, it is equally striking how precariously Assassin's Creed creaks under the weight of its developers' intent. I played the game on the PlayStation 3 and don't know if it's the six-year-old hardware to blame or the game's programming, but AC III is a game that will birth many a glitch memes. Even a day one patch has not cleansed the sprawling open world from the occasional malfunction. I had no crash bugs. And the one mission-ruiner I experienced early on-it involved a guard being artificially un-intelligent-has been patched out.

Advertisement

This game is, however, simply a great producer of screw-ups. Most don't affect gameplay. They just look or sound silly. In the 20 hours I played, I saw one guard standing, waist-deep, inside a wooden cart, as if it was built around him; I heard the sounds of combat during a single enemy encounter play in a very, very wrong way (see/hear the video above) and I got a cannonball to stall in mid-air because it was fired right as a cutscene began. In one underground maze I entered a room that had malfunctioning textures that displayed beams of wood as flashing, static-y rainbows. Across 20 hours, those were nearly all the glitches I found, so they were not enough to ruin the game-not close to it-but more than plenty to merit a warning.

Unfortunately, our Kirk Hamilton, who has been playing the Xbox 360 version, says he's seeing more frequent glitches: nothing game-ruining for him, but clumsy transitions in and out of scenes, music cutting off when it shouldn't, civilians vanishing into thin air, and the occasional AI screw-up. Combine this with the fact that the game's enemies do betray some standard video game stupidity (the soldiers in one corner of a huge fort stay at their post while I'm loudly murdering their captain and buddies at the other end), and you wind up with a game that feels like it would benefit from a couple more patches and a more powerful machine.

Advertisement

The glitches didn't affect gameplay and were infrequent. They are, however, prevalent enough that when, say, you're in the frontier and can't find the treasure trinket that your map and a buzzing audio cue indicate should be right in front of you, first you think that maybe the trinket is in a tree. Then you wonder if maybe it just didn't load in the scene because of a glitch.

Whatever it is that compels you to climb a tree in Assassin's Creed, you are in for a good time as you get up there. Everything else I've written here is secondary to the feeling of smoothly running up the trunk of one tree and then skipping from branch to branch through the forest with a grace usually reserved for ballerinas or gazelles. Given that neither ballerinas nor gazelles do their thing in the canopy of an 18th century forest, advantage: Connor. Advantage: Assassin's Creed III.

Advertisement

The title Assassin's Creed III is a lie insofar as this is the fifth console Assassin's Creed game. Ubisoft put the number on there to sell the game better and to sell the idea of radical change. The number is earned. The game is not just set in a radically different place at a very different time; the sense of reinvention permeates from the game's core.

ACIII packs surprises big and small, veers away from habits of the older games, and looks a hell of a lot better than them, too, thanks to a new graphics engine. All things considered, it winds up perhaps not as refined as Assassin's Creed Brotherhood, but far more satisfying and well-crafted than the rough draft of Assassin's Creed 1. Connor may not have Ezio's flair, but he has a game that rivals the quality of the Italian's trilogy. Cautious consumers might want to wait for the inevitable subsequent patches, but those who don't mind a few cosmetic bugs should have no fear. This is a great game.

Advertisement

P.S. The game has multiplayer too, with a story and some design twists of its own. Having only played a few missions of it, I'll reserve any critical assessment for now. I will update this review within the next week with a fuller take on that aspect of the game. For those looking for just some basic details, Brotherhood and Revelations' multiplayer is back, pitting players against each other in challenges to find and kill each other, as everyone hides in crowds full of computer-controlled civilians. There is still a lot of Modern Warfare-style leveling-up and ability-unlocking, but now there are also co-op multiplayer assassination matches and not one but two narratives that are unlocked as you play-one about the series' evil company Abstergo, which ostensibly made this multiplayer part of ACIII, the other also about the company but told by some hackers who, in a cheeky move by Ubisoft, also serve as the justification for letting players pay real money to unlock upgrades and items that could otherwise be obtained through continued play.