Assassin's Creed III

The third numbered game in the series is actually the fifth in the franchise after the super-extended Assassin’s Creed II which followed the career of Ezio the Italian Legend until he is a withered old man swinging around Constantinople on a metal hook.

After the close of Ezio’s story, we are whisked away to a completely unrelated character in the American revolution. I have no idea what the link is between Ezio and Haytham Kenway, but there must be one there as they are all supposedly ancestors of Desmond Miles. They did the same thing with Altair in the first Assassin’s Creed and I would like to see these connections explained at some point!

As for Assassin’s Creed III this is the first instalment where we play as two different characters in Haytham Kenway and his son, Rat’atokene... Connor. Haytham comes from England to America with some kind of key to look for some kind of door and accidentally fathers Connor with a native Indian. The result is; Connor, a half-native American who can speak perfect modern American – complete with the accent – and also in a perfect Native American tongue.

In the modern day as Desmond, we are exploring the memories of Connor to find Haytham’s key that can open a door to save the world from a solar flair. Apparently no one cares about the framing of the story but I thought it was really interesting as to why they bothered to come up with a bizarre backing story in an attempt to make delving into ancestor memories have meaning.

Anyway, the main element the story (within the story) is that Connor is born, becomes a self-righteous prick and goes on a mission to destroy the Templers because he has Daddy issues. His other notable traits are his ability to dictate to the likes of George Washington on how to run a revolution, commanding a sailing ship with no prior experience and leadership and raising a community who love him by allowing people to settle on land that isn’t his and speaking in a monotone which shows no interest in their lives.

As you have probably guessed, I didn’t really care for Connor. I found him to be boring and up his own arse.

Visually however, the game is stunning. You can explore pretty much as far as you can see. The only problem is once you do, you have to come all the way back again. There are very few fast travel points when you are outside of the major cities which means that you have to navigate on foot which was quite time consuming. Oh wait, no they do give you a horse but with all the forests and cliffs littering the landscape, they may as well have given me a hippo with three legs for all the extra efficiency it gave to my travelling ability.

In addition to the main storyline and the obligatory collectibles that almost define Assassin’s Creed, they now have naval missions where you can captain a ship and sail around blowing stuff up. It added an extra element to the gameplay which was quite enjoyable and actually done quite well for the most part.

Achievements – 1,350 Points – 64 Achievements

This was quite the haul of achievements boasting no less than 4 pieces of downloadable content. But more on that later. The majority of the achievements can be gained through playing the main story but there a certain amount for killing dudes in certain ways, including the new cool feature of being able to hang them from a tree.

There were two achievements that really pissed me off. Number one; having to observe all the lazy twats on the homestead not doing any work. This was very unforgiving as a lot of the time they would just be pissing around or doing the same thing they were doing the day before. You have to record all of the fucktards doing three different activities. It would appear that the woodcutters, who are the first to join your homestead, don’t cut down any trees and just smoke pipes, go fishing or play bowls. The achievement was ridiculously tedious and only worth ten points.

Number two; getting 100% on all missions and the only reason I’ve listed this as twatish is because of one naval mission. In order to get 100% sync on this mission you have sink all three ships by firing on their weak points. In order to get the weak points to appear, you have to ram the ships at about two miles per hour or shot them in a very specific place, both of which had inconsistent results. The ships would either sink straight away or the weak would not appear after seven shots in the same place... and the ship would then sink anyway. I think I spent more time on this one mission that all of the other naval missions put together, however this was the only part of the naval missions that could have done with a little more development.

Multiplayer

I’m not a fan of multiplayer achievements and for those of you that can view my gaming history, you can see that I didn’t even bother trying to get the multiplayer achievements on the previous two Assassin’s Creed games.

However, I saw this one through and here’s why. There are two reasons why I don’t like multiplayer achievements. The first one is do with EA and the exact reason why you won’t see a review of FIFA 08 on here. EA decided to close their servers which means it is now impossible to get the online achievements in that game.

The second one is they are a pain in the ass to get if you don’t play the game within its first year of release because everyone stops playing it.

I was very grateful to the online community for sticking with Assassin’s Creed III. This meant I didn’t need to go looking for a boosting session to earn the achievements. Also, the people still playing the game, bar one or two exceptions, still haven’t figured out the best way to play Wolfpack mode which I thought was really funny.

Including the DLC there are only nine online achievements and none of them require a great deal of fucking about. You only have to get to level twenty and there are even a few you can do solo.

Downloadable Content

There are two aspects to the game’s downloadable content. There are four of them; one online and three offline.

The online DLC has clearly only been downloaded by achievement hunters. Could I find a multiplayer game on the additional Wolfpack maps? No. Did I try at every conceivable time of day for a week? Yes. Is that really sad? Yes – I have absolutely no life.

Luckily, I managed to get the achievement which related to the additional maps by myself so no need for too much swearing.

The other three DLCs are totally fucking insane. I don’t understand why there are three separate DLCs for the same fucktarded alternate universe that is The Tyranny of King Washington other than as a major money spinner for Ubisoft. You play in the same three environments from the main game with some extra abilities that make the game easier and the whole episode has no bearing on the main storyline whatsoever. I won’t spoil it for those who haven’t played it yet but at the end I had one question on my mind – ‘What the fuck just happened?!’ and not in a good way.

So, to sum up the multiplayer was probably the best bit about the game. The main story was really slow and incredibly frustrating at times. The lack of fast travel points made me stop playing more often than not.

In terms of achievements it is very doable and still accessible and I did get a sense of achievement at the end even if it was related to my ability to stick at the game even though it continuously tried to shit all over itself. Next stop, Assassin’s Creed IV! That will probably be sometime in July.