Assassin's Creed III

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

Assassin's Creed's greatest strength has always been its focus and commitment to history in a way that only the video game medium can provide: gorgeous, immersive renditions of historic cities and landscapes, with stories drawn from history--albeit a vaguely alternate universe history. AC at its best is the anti-Call of Duty. Unfortunately, AC's best runs right alongside its worst.

From the beginning, Ubisoft felt the need to give its alternate history lesson some context. This context came in the form of the charisma-less Desmond Miles and the hunt to save humanity from the evil Templars. Also from the 2012 apocalypse, though the Mayans don't appear to be involved (admittedly, I zoned out more than once during the exposition). These cutaways from the historical action have always been a brief nuisance. But in ACIII they cease to be brief, forcing the player to spend more and more time with Desmond and his Assassin comrades in their makeshift cave base. The only plus to this focus is that Desmond ends up dead.

All this time in the present day helps to fog the dullness of main character Conner, another charisma-less lead around whom things happen (the AC franchise seems to have spent all its likable protagonists; we were spoiled by Ezio Auditore). After some initial stop-start fun playing as Haytham Kenway, we transfer into Conner, Kenway's illegitimate half-Native American son. From there we run around the wilderness hunting animals and learning our way around ACIII's various collectibles (seriously, so many collectibles). Conner later becomes an Assassin, but the allegiance seems little more than a hobby for Conner. And he's slightly more interested in secret society-ing than he is in the American Revolution, which is another thing that happens here and there in a herky-jerky plot that never gains a solid foothold anywhere. The game seems almost aware of the fact that no one mission-type is especially fun and so offers seemingly dozens of different of mission types and mini-games in an attempt to distract players from the creeping monotony. Naval battles, for example, start out tedious, but become genuinely fun with a little practice. Unfortunately, when an aspect of a video game starts tedious, it's not usually a sign of a job well done.

The parkour remains the same as ever, if a little more fluid than past games, though this is broken up by environments that aren't as flush with easily traversed rooftops. This is not to mention the intense attention the player can draw from redcoat guards, who are T-1000-like in their persistence when they get a smell of Conner. When free-running is your second-biggest draw, it doesn't seem a great idea to actively make that harder to do.

It's some small consolation that the main game missions and grinding missions alike take place in some gorgeous environments. 18th Century cities, the open seas, the wilderness areas: all beautiful and fun to explore. I can almost forgive Ubisoft for making the "frontier" stage so large: it can't have been easy to stop painting that canvas.  In the midst of the hunting and stalking in beautiful scenery, I was reminded of Red Dead Redemption, which is good because I love RDR and bad because ACIII is not RDR.

The game features a few additional triumphs. Among others: never giving into the America Fuck Yeah approach that would've been so easy. And neither was ACIII a full indictment of the occasional hypocrisy of early American leaders, which must've been tempting. The game instead opts for a neither totally good nor totally evil that might strike some as CNN-esque false equivalence, but sits reasonably well with my understanding of the period.

ACIII continues to do a few AC-type things well, though it's several less than previous games managed. It is, overall, a dull ride with a few, not as frustrating, high points scattered throughout. With Desmond gone, the franchise may finally be ready to move on to its full potential of historical Assassin-ing in immersive environments that other games never offer: ancient Babylon, feudal Japan, early 20th Century Russia. The possibilities should be endless. Ubisoft has the tools and the care, they just need to throw caution to the wind again.

Grade: C-