Assassin’s Creed III Game Review

Overall Score  
8.6

The Good

Assassin’s Creed III is very enjoyable overall,
but it’s not consistently brilliant. Not
everything about the game gels together convincingly
and the missions’ unnecessary prescriptiveness
sometimes undermines the sense of freedom that the
rest of the game works so hard to create. But it
achieves so much that you can’t help but respect
it; no other open-world game has ever given us a
setting that’s as impressive to observe or as full
of things to do as this. Connor’s story has its
lulls but it still tells a tale much richer and more
compelling than most other games manage, set in a
fascinating period of history. Assassin’s Creed
III isn’t as huge an improvement upon its
predecessors’ achievements as many players will be
hoping for, but it’s still up there with the best
that the series has achieved.

The Bad

Where the story line missions usually follow a
pattern of gathering information, stalking and
eventually killing a high-profile target (with the
odd naval mission or large-scale battle thrown in
for variety), outside of that you’re free to do
whatever you want: hunt for trinkets, clamber over
the rooftops of New York in search of almanac pages,
or pick fights with the Redcoats on behalf of the
populace. There is a vast amount of content in this
game, from liberating Boston and New York to
building up a homestead on the frontier to sailing
the high seas to just enjoying the outdoors and
hunting wildlife. But perhaps because Assassin’s
Creed III is so huge, it can be pretty inconsistent.
It attempts an astonishing amount, and doesn’t
always succeed.