It’s fair to say the launch of Assassin’s Creed: Unity was a complete disaster. From the face-eating glitches and frame rate issues that even four massive patches have failed to fix, to its unoriginal and rote story, nothing about the game people bought seemed to match up with the next-gen masterpiece they were promised at E3 (a distressingly recurrent theme this year). It’s not so surprising that a publisher pushed out an obviously broken game and used review embargoes to protect their bottom line—it’s been done before, and the polishing of turds in time for the holiday shopping season is hardly unique to the video game industry. No, the puzzling thing about The Unity Disaster was the volume of the outcry, which suggests that a large number of people totally got fooled again. Many players still bought the new game based on either the marketing or the franchise name, and were ultimately disappointed. What I can’t understand is why anyone would do that. Not only had Ubisoft pulled the same shuffle before with Watch Dogs, but the Assassin’s Creed brand hasn’t stood for quality games in a while. Did people really think they were going to do any better this time around?

I came to the series completely new earlier this year. Admittedly, I was impressed by Unity’s good showing at E3. Running around as an assassin in revolutionary France is an amazing idea for a video game, and Ubisoft’s Paris of pixels was rendered in gorgeous detail. The series often garnered praise on the Bombcast and from other game critics whose opinions I have come to trust, so I decided to see what Creed was all about. I skipped the first game because it was typically described as an interesting proof of concept, but a lacking game. The setting of the second game, Renaissance Italy, had never interested me. But the American Revolution is one of my favorite historical eras, and a used copy of Assassin’s Creed III was only $9 at GameStop.

Maybe starting with the third installment was a bad idea, but I wouldn’t have done so if all the press for the game hadn’t emphasized that it was an excellent entry point for new players. It is most definitely not, beginning with a massive expositional info-dump full of capitalized common nouns and the life-stories of previous series characters you’ve never met before and won’t see again for the rest of the game. The interludes in the modern-day setting are a real chore to play through, don’t make any narrative sense, and don’t advance the more interesting story going on in the past, which is sadly hamstrung by more lazy writing. You have to play through hours of prologue to set up a twist that ultimately has no impact unless you’ve played the previous games, and since it was already obvious that Haytham Kenway was not the protagonist featured in the trailers, it ultimately felt like a waste of time. While his son, Connor Kenway, was a capable warrior and an honorable man, he was far too dry and dull to spend much time with, let alone the 20+ hours it takes to beat the game. He also Forrest Gumps his way through history in a way reminiscent of the worst “edutainment” cartoons of the 90’s.

Playing the game will test your endurance of disappointment. There’s a ton of stuff to do, but as Kotaku’s Kirk Hamilton pointed out, nothing in the game handles all that well. Traversal is very hit or miss. Connor had a habit of leaping to his death on the cobblestones a foot away from the ubiquitous hay carts. That is, if he didn’t get stuck on a random piece of broken geometry that kept him from climbing high enough to hurt himself. Forget using firearms, because the targeting system is counterintuitive garbage and your one shot will either miss or be non-fatal. Assassinating redcoats from the trees with your tomahawk is fun maybe the first hundred times you do it, but if you ever engage in open combat you’re stuck fumbling with a counter system that might not have seemed so shoddy and without rhythm if Arkham Asylum hadn’t come out three years earlier. There are far too many controls to accomplish very few things, and playing the game often feels like trying to figure out which remote actually turns on the TV—annoying, frustrating, and ultimately unsatisfying when you succeed. Only the naval battles sport solid mechanics, the kind you master the more you play, but they are just a distraction from the many eavesdropping, chasing, and instant-fail stealth missions that populate the main quest. Very little of my gameplay time with Assassin’s Creed III constituted what I would call “fun.”

I had higher hopes for the next game, as it had garnered near-universal acclaim as one of the best in the series. It’s set during the golden age of piracy, another much-beloved time period, and as a result the excellent naval combat becomes a central gameplay mechanic rather than an optional mode. You have most of the Caribbean to sail around in, and plundering ships on your way between the islands is a ridiculous amount of fun. Unfortunately, once you step off the boat, all of the problems from III are still there. Combat is clumsy and locking on to an opponent is never reliable: you might mean to stab the guy in front of you, but when you hit attack Edward just might leap in the opposite direction to slash at another guy on the other side of the room. Even if you kill that guy, the long and elaborate death animations (that don’t even look good) will leave you open to a death by a thousand cuts no matter how hard you mash the block button. While the vibrant and colorful islands you explore in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag are much more interesting places to explore than the repressively drab and brown cities of pre-Revolutionary America, they are full of all the same tedious tasks you wanted to avoid in III and even made up some new ones. Most egregious are the terrible fictional treatments of historical events that made the game before such a disappointment. You actually play through Blackbeard’s final battle, literally one of the most epic last stands of any time period, and the legendary pirate dies in a half-assed choppy cutscene with sound effects dropping out. Blackbeard falls after only being shot twice and stabbed once, which is is so pitifully shy of the truth that the game loses any value as a piece of historical tourism. Seriously, go look it up on Wikipedia and tell that ball wasn’t dropped overboard and plunged to the depths.

Can anyone explain to me the continuing appeal of this series, and why it was given so much faith to waste in the first place? I honestly could not play either one to completion, the first and second times I could not care enough to finish a game I bought. The story, particularly the directionless diversions to the modern day, is not all that interesting or compelling, depending on vague references to a mysterious conspiracy to bait your interest. Also, the gameplay is a shameful mess of glitchy garbage. Nothing in either III or Black Flag controls very well, except for the boats. Removing the most beloved new feature of the last two games seems downright stupid, especially since they failed to find anything substantive to replace it. The consensus of the disappointed players seems to be that even if Unity ran as breathtakingly beautifully as its previews, it was still a half-finished attempt at an Assassin’s Creed game. There is nothing new to do; merely a a bunch of set-dressings in higher resolution (but only sometimes, apparently.) People are calling it a franchise-killer, but the truth is this series has been on life-support for the last two years. Maybe it’s time to pull the plug and say a dignified farewell.