Heartbreakingly Disappointing
Well, it's finally here. Assassin's Creed 3. If I spent anymore time anticipating this game, I probably would have flunked out of school.
And why shouldn't I have been excited? We have before us 4 extremely above average games that managed to innovate more given their production periods than any other series I know of, and we were promised a BIGGER leap from AC2 to AC3 than from AC1 to AC2 (that's saying a whole lot).
But then we have AC3. I wanted this to be amazing so badly. "Please don't suck" was the subject of all my youtube comments on the Sneak Peak videos because I don't want AC to turn into Need for Speed when it comes to innovation. Review spoiler alert: It did turn into Need for Speed when it comes to innovation.
Okay, less block text, more reviewing
Graphics: 6/10 The multiple-character rendering is an impressive feat, but this game has more graphical bugs than any game should have to deal with.
Sound: 5/10 Nothing good worth mentioning here. They REMOVED the feature of awesome ambient music in the singleplayer. The ONLY time you hear music outside of scripted mission riffs is when completing a viewpoint.
Gameplay: Can't just do a number just yet, gotta break the hate down:
Combat: 8/10 The only improvement AC3 made over any of the previous games.
Missions: 5/10 Boring and/or frustrating. There is one way to play every mission that is correct. The level of handholding is offensively bad here.
Side-Missions: 4/10 Stupidly worse than in previous games. These missions are stale "kill this gaurd" or "pickpocket this guy" or talk to this guy" missions that have no personality. MAJOR GRIPE: It took me until Sequence TEN to notice that there WERE any side missions because:
1. You are never told what viewpoints accomplish
2. No side-mission Icons appear on the screen unless you walk up to them and start them
3. You are never told to press back to look at the missions available
4. You are bombarded by IMMERSION-DESTRUCTIVE prompts 24/7 early on that disenchant you to doing anything but the tepid story. (You have new email? REALLY?)
5. If any of the above are false, it is because I was too bored and frustrated to pay attention to the dude explaining it.
Mechanics: 1/10 All the new ones are awful, and all the old ones we loved were either REMOVED OUTRIGHT, left unexplained, or done WORSE than the previous iterations. Name anything you liked from the previous games and I will tell you how this game screwed it in the eye-socket.
Multiplayer: 1-10/10 I love AC multiplayer, and this is basically a carbon copy of the previous ones. 1/10 because nothing is new here, 10/10 because I love it still. 5/10 then, I guess.
Overall Gameplay is about 4.6/10
What I'm Really trying to say:
Look at Skyrim, a great game hated early on because of bugs. Bugs were fixed and the game is wonderful now. Mass Effect was hated because of it's ending, and fans were given a new set of endings because the rest of the story was so goddamn good; now the game is highly praised. Modern Warfare 3 was expected to be a small improvement over the second, and when people realized that they were expecting too much to be changed in a series that aims to do no such thing, the reviews improved. AC3 is a game with ALL of these severely crippling problems, and NONE of them are salvageable. The game is what it is and I wish it was never made. I never in my wildest dreams anticipated that I would write such things, and I am extremely disappointed. This is my Need for Speed Most Wanted 2012 review on crack. It's so mindbogglingly worse than previous that you have to wonder just what the heck the devs were thinking. If I haven't conveyed it yet, this game which was supposed to leap and bound past its predecessors actually leaps BACKWARDS all the way past AC1.
If you need me, I will be at my Xbox, with AC Brotherhood put in. I will have my eyes closed, tearing up slightly, as I pretend that it is AC3.
