My issues with this game are twofold

1)My favorite moments in this series are always climbing up huge crap. I know its just an issue with the setting, but every building is two stories and just not very fun to scale. Pretty sure the biggest thing to climb is a tree. Black flag had a little bit of this problem, but there was always huge ship masts at least!

2)Story kinda sucked, especially the present day stuff. Totally not worth the payoff

Agree with others though, revelations sucked a hard one, which was a huge let down considering that Brotherhood was my favorite of the series

I think you raise a great question OP about the reviews and I really can't even find an answer for you. Even Ryan Davis gave it a good review (4/5) but then only a couple of months later talked about it as if it was a straight up bad game (which at the time I didn't get).

I didn't even think the game made a great first impression. I think a few hours in it seems to be headed somewhere but then it is completely disjointed and a mess.

@clovy: I mean that's kinda what happens, isn't it? There's a lot of games out there that reviewed really well that people, including the original reviewers themselves, looked back on as " bad games " years after the fact.

I think the general buzz about it being a bad Assassins Creed game just shows how useless reviews can be when making a decision about a game. As games have many moving parts, the ones that try to push the boundaries of what can be done can be lauded for trying new things or killed for failing in another area. Ad to that the expectations of a sequel to keep everything the same no matter what the critics tell you.

I loved the ship combat in AC3. A lot of people did as it spawned it's own game in Black Flag. It was so good that games like Rebel Galaxy use a very similar system as the core of the gameplay. I liked the twist at the beginning as it really gets you pumped for the game. The improved animation made it feel less robotic when moving. The setting was interesting, the hunting crafting system was ok and would be made much better in future UBI games like Far Cry 3. I was going to give up on AC after the terrible Revelations. It did nothing new and was a major step back from Brotherhood.

On the downside was the mission design. Enough of the eavesdropping and chase missions. Making Paul Revere a blithering idiot with no sense of direction did not help the story flow. And trying to make Conner a less gritty sounding Batman is not god tier character design. The disconnection between score and the vitriol you hear comes from human nature. It is human nature to harp on the negatives, especially when someone has made up their mind they don't like something. Conner is flat as a character, but they did try in the design of the main guy. He grows up as a native American so it explains his skills a little. The dour attitude would have fit better if the story had less wonky parts that broke immersion before Conner's disposition ever had the chance to.

On the other side of the coin there is AC2. Everyone loves Ezio, so he gets a pass. You start the game as some guy and then, BAM, you're a ninja. There is a huge disconnect with Ezio being portrayed as a lovable ladies man who cracks wise after murdering so many. In AC4, Edward was a pirate so that would make sense. The reviews for AC2 were universally great. One review by Jim Sterling gave it a 4 out of 10 because of horrible controls, graphical hitches, and the same eaves dropping and chase missions that AC3 had. All of that is true but the good far outshines the flaws. So, why does this one get a pass and not AC3? Is it just subjective? Does over saturation play a part? Do we just expect more at the end of a console's life cycle? Maybe it is just a culmination of those things.

I think the Giant Bomb crew and many gamers cannot talk/write about the Assassins Creed series without being hyperbolic.

It may be a side effect of the Ubisoft overlords, or the annual release schedule or whatever - but I literally never hear anything relatable when people talk about these games.

Vinny's opinion of the series is probably the closest to mine.

I actually liked three, but I didn't play it around launch.

Yeah, it was just he fact that the game was offencably boring.

@artisanbreads: It gets the same exaggerated bad rep as Revelations and Unity, neither of which are THE WORST games in the series as many are quick to say. Unity is probably the most broken, by design wise it did a lot of thing really well, it was just performance that held it back. AC3 wasn't all that terrible, but there were enough bad parts to leave a bad taste in your mouth.

I really, really like parts of that game. For me, it was a density issue. There was just too much frivolous side work that didn't really distinguish itself from the interesting or meaningful side work. But aside from just the activities and missions, that game was at the peak of tool density. They give you like thirty different weapons and tools that all function different but do the same job. It was just overwhelming and weirdly paced.

That said, I really liked the beginning of that game. I know people hated that, but it worked the hardest of any of those games to make you give a shit about your stabby guy. I also loved all the homestead missions. I worked really hard to build my crummy house into a small village. That part was well done.

It's mostly that the story is very disconnected and feels jumbled together. After having such strong narratives with Ezio, this game made a humongous world (one that I argue is still incredibly fun to run around in), but as many have pointed out, Conor is boring and there are some missions in here that are downright infuriating or bad. And yeah, Desmond's story was absolutely terrible.

That said, I did like a lot of parts of the game.

Also--after it was patched--I really, really like Unity. It bothers me that at face value, the Bombcrew continue to shit all over that game, though they didn't even play it. Unity's Paris is truly something to behold.

Ugh, so much it did wrong. The pointlessness of the side quests, horrible menu's/UI'S, Connor. When will they bring back the economic system from AC:B? That stuff was seriously addicting, and rewarding. AC:B in general was phenomenal, which was a surprise.

I feel like the biggest problem with AC3 that no one has mentioned was the constant loading. It really screws up the pacing making the story seem even slower than it is.

I liked the atmosphere of AC3 a lot, and appreciated the setting being different. Colonial America is not a world that you get to explore very much in games, so that was an enjoyable space to spend time in.

I also really enjoyed the ship combat, in fact it was easily my favourite part of the game. Again, it was a new experience, essentially a new type of game-within-a-game. I don't look back on it fondly though. It had potential but it was ruined by a lack of coherence. That's the number 1 problem that permeates through everything in the game.

• The long opening 'tutorial', while frustrating and irritating from a gameplay standpoint, is quite strong narratively. You have a simple-to-grasp set up, get to spend time with the characters and form some understanding of the world and your place in it. It is all quite neatly done, and a gentle start to what could be an interesting arc ... until the part where you become a full fledged assassin and start running errands for the founding fathers and that arc falls off a cliff.

• The game's plot basically becomes a colonial theme park ride with Connor along as an errand boy. They even make constant references to it from that point on, and its not just annoying for Connor, its annoying to play. The whole thing culminates in that horrendous Paul Revere ride, which might be the most garbage section of any videogame I have ever played. Everything you do is annoying. There is no freedom to how you complete your tasks, everything is very set and any notion of you being able to plan assassinations is thrown out of the window. Instead you are commanding troops to fire from river banks until some arbitrary mark is reached, because you are told to. The insistence that you must be shoehorned in to every major event of the founding of America becomes a parody of itself.

• The game's setting doesn't help, as people have mentioned the barren landscape removes a lot of variety from how you can approach things. One mission where you have to murder a commander in the middle of a camp stands out in my memory as a good example: it's a set of tents on a flat piece of ground atop a hill. There is one edge of the camp sided by some woodland, with one absurdly long tree branch sticking out over the middle of the camp... handily right above where the commander is standing. Even though it seems like an open ended design, the geometry forces you down the only viable path. A lot of the missions are just irritating in their requirements, including the awful awful awful chase of Grant Lee through collapsing buildings, where if you take a wrong turn on a blind fork you fail the mission. Things seem open ended but are very tightly scripted, even though the rest of the game is a flat expanse of free roaming. You rarely get a mission that is actually enjoyable to approach in the way you want.

• The addition of the "optional objectives" as a permanent checklist on the HUD, which includes outrageous tasks that not only spoil the upcoming content of a mission but almost threaten you to complete missions in a certain way, is maybe the thing I hated most about the game. For instance, you have to escape from a fort, but the HUD tells you to "Defeat 3 captains with your fists", so you have to not only get into fights with groups of guards now, but also go about those fights in a very particular way in order to achieve your objective. This sort of thing removes any sense of freedom from how you go about the mission because as soon as you 'fail' one of these objectives you get a big red X next to it and it feels like a failure, meaning if you then go on to complete the mission it's not satisfying at all. The optional objectives are also completely arbitrary, which only adds to how annoying they are.

• The rest of the open world stuff is nonsense, meaningless systems and collectibles that don't exist for any reasonable purpose, and to no end. The combat is also a real low point, simplistic but tedious with a good dash of frustration thrown in too. It also continues the horrible Assassins Creed tradition of encouraging you to free roam along rooftops and so on, but then also placing guards and obstacles in your path constantly to make that process no fun at all.

I think that people saw a three on it and expected something as good as 2 was. I'm currently playing it and I understand the hate it gets. It starts off super boring with a character that's totally bland(what ever Conners father name is) then gives you control of the main character and you have to slog through a hours upon hours of ttutorual missions. I'm about ten hours and I'm still playing some of the introductory missions. Just my two cents

I think a huge problem with ACIII is that they start you off with a very charming character in Haytham and they also have that wonderful twist where you discover that you are playing a Templar early on. Both of those things, the interesting character and the twist, make a very engaging early portion of the game. Then you switch to playing Connor and go into a very long tutorial portion. It's weird pacing and I think it kind of throws off the player. I didn't play the game, but I watched my husband play through it from beginning to end. I honestly think Haytham is one of the most interesting characters in the AC franchise, not just ACIII, so being introduced to him and then having him taken away for another character who is, arguably, less intriguing, is kind of a misstep.

Also, the game, I believe, doesn't pay off on that father/son dynamic in a satisfying way. With how the story progresses, and how Haytham is introduced to the characters, I was under the impression that he was against killing innocents and would be swayed to side with Connor. That he didn't was perfectly reasonable, but I feel like there was a big reveal that his associates did horrible things and he was just like "eh, whatever." It was weird. As an observer, I thought that the story would play out a bit differently based on certain story beats, and it just seemed to fizzle.

I think the fact that AC developers brought back Haytham as a character in Rogue (and he had some great moments, BTW) just shows that he was a good character and deserved a bit better where ACIII was concerned.

Those were my biggest issues with the game. Pacing was really off and the story didn't pay off well, both in the past and in the present. I think it was a good game, and it had some great characters and story beats, but it could have been fixed by better pacing and some tweaks to the overall plot, imho.

Personally, I didn't like the noise beavers made when you skinned them, so I stopped.