The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation

Context

Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation is unlike any of the previous entries in the AC series. This installment was originally released on hand-held devices only, and as one may expect, is a somewhat slimmed down version of the full Assassin's Creed experience. Later on, however, the game was "remastered" for release on main consoles, with upgrades to the graphics and game engine to fit the more powerful hardware.

Of course, "upgrade" is in the context of the graphics being simpler in the first place, so relative to the other regular installments, the graphics and gameplay remain simpler even with the upgrades.

I only ever played the main consoles releases first time around, so I was interested to see what kind of experience Liberation would bring.

The Setting

The setting of Liberation is also somewhat of a departure to the rest of the series. The link of the main protagonist, Aveline de Grandpré, to the modern day is only by story, there is no actual gameplay in the modern day in this game. Also, we are not really made privy to what relationship Aveline has with being relived in the Animus. Who is she the ancestor of? We don't know.

That being said, the game is no lesser for the modern day element being absent. In fact, the slimming down of the some of the usual Assassin's Creed tropes ends up make the game better for its simplicity.

Aveline is the daughter of her ex-slave mother, Jeanne, and her mother's benefactor, the French merchant Philippe de Grandpré, who freed Jeanne. Aveline's mother went missing when Aveline was still quite young, so she continues to live with Philippe, and Phillipe's now-wife Madeleine de L'Isle, who acts as a kind step mother to Aveline.

Considering her childhood trauma and her membership of the Assassin Order, Aveline ends up being an amazingly well adjusted young woman.

The main location of the game is a very simple rendition of New Orleans. As this is an originally hand-held game, the compexity and size of the city are much reduced from previous installments, but this is not a particularly bad thing.

The other main setting is the Bayou, which is a swamp like area. The limited size here is thankful, because traversing around the bayou, with its canoes, alligators and over-dense vegetation is somewhat of a pain in the arse, kept in check by the fact that actually one end of the map to the other is not that far.

The bayou area: Swimming, canoeing, treetops, alligators, impassable vegetation...

The Gameplay

With Conner in AC3, we were led to believe that due to Connor's mixed heritage, he was equally as accepted by his tribe as well as the Colonists. With Aveline we go a significant step further in being led to believe that she can pass either as a slave or as a noblewoman, which leads to the main new feature in the gameplay, the "persona" mechanic.

Aveline has 3 basic guises that she can operate under:

• Dressed as an assassin. Aveline can use her full repertoire of weapons and parkour up buildings, but attracts suspicion on sight with any guard.
• Dressed as a slave. Aveline can wander around largely ignored and even infiltrate some guarded areas by blending in with the other slaves. Aveline can parkour up buildings but attracts suspicion if she is seen doing so. As a slave, Aveline can use some weapons, but not the full assassin repertoire.
  
• Dressed as a noblewoman. Aveline can wander around without suspicion and use her beauty and elegance to charm some men and guards into doing her bidding. Initially she is weaponless, but after a while is given a dart gun disguised as an umbrella, which is actually somewhat of an overpowered device. Dressed like this, Aveline cannot parkour and can't even run, limited to a fast walk only.

Aveline's three personas: The lady, the assassin and the slave

It's an interesting idea, but one that proposes as many problems as new interesting features it brings. In the end, the impact of the personas somewhat blends into the background, as the game contrives to make any persona change extremely convenient, which somewhat reduces the impact of playing as one persona over another in any mission. Most of the time you'll either start in the correct persona already, or will saunter along to a conveniently located changing station before you proceed any further. There are only a very small number of times that you'll want to change gears and switch personas mid-mission.

In keeping with the rest of the game, missions tends to be very straightforward and short, and somewhat easy. For me, this presents a welcome change of pace in the series and is mostly quite enjoyable. However, one of the very last missions in the game gets piled up with the worst of the complications and mechanics we see in AC3. I don't know why game developers think they need to spice things up right at the end of the game with changes like this, it's quite annoying when you go through 95% of the game doing the same thing and then for the last missions have to forget how you've been playing the game previously.

However, the worst thing in Liberation is the collectibles. Luckily, the "moving collectible" like the almanac pages in AC3 is gone. To replace it, we now have collectibles that only show up if you are in the right persona. They won't show up on the map or be visible in the game, although sometimes you do get a message on the screen hinting that there is something around here if you switch to the right persona.

To make it worse, even when you are in the right persona, collectibles don't show up on the map until you are close to them, and they don't all persist when you move out of the area. To put the icing on the cake, there are no trackers for how many of each collectible type you have, of what is remaining, making it an absolute chore to keep track of them unless you are manually maintaining your own list.

The parkour mechanics in Liberation are not too bad, probably due to the simplification of the terrain. The main annoyances are the slave persona running up walls when you don't want her too, thereby increasing her notoriety and making guards taken an interest in you. The main issue is that there is a much increased sensitivity in identifying parkour targets, and Aveline will often jump to the point next to where you wanted her to go. Make sure you don't aim just to the side of the plank sticking out of the side of the building, because Aveline will happily jump there, miss the plank and sail through the air.

There is just one checkpoint race in the game, and thank god for that because it's completely moronic with the sensitivity of the parkour. It must have taken me close to 50 attempts to complete that checkpoint race, tweaking and tailoring the course I take to maximise the chance Aveline will actually jump where I want her to.

The checkpoint mission: A nightmare thanks to the oversensitive parkour

Lastly, there is no fast travel in the game to speak of. Actually, it does have points at the edges of maps it calls fast travel, but you have to actually go there, and all it does it take you to another map, so it's not actually fast travel at all.

Summary

Despite the issues, the simplicity of the game is what makes Liberation a fairly enjoyable romp. It's not overly difficult apart from one or two ridiculous missions and the relative lack of complexity makes this a much more laid-back game to play.

There are links to other Assassin's Creed characters in Liberation. At one point Aveline turns to Connor for assistance and, bizarelly, Assassin's Creed 4 has a short self-contained DLC that has you controlling Aveline again on a mission for Connor (even though nothing else in AC4 has anything directly involving anything to do with AC3, apart from the story continuity).

Therefore, playing Liberation does fill-in some minor pieces of the Assassin's Creed history, and the game itself is largely good simple fun. If you end up not playing Liberation as you go through the series, you won't miss out on any key pieces of the overriding story. Aveline's story is quite self-contained and, although she does have some involvement with precursor relics, it doesn't relate to any storyline in any other game.

But I'd still recommend playing Liberation because it is a generally unique and laid-back experience.

Review Score

There is some difficulty in assigning a score to Liberation, which is down to the roots of the game as original for hand-held consoles. It's clear that Liberation is essentially a cut down version of a "normal" Assassin's Creed game, everything is simplified including the plot, the game mechanics, the size of the maps. Therefore, if you want to try and be fair to score the game in relation to the other "main" installments, you might want to knock a point off for the simplicity.

However, I don't believe that is really fair, because Liberation is an enjoyable experience. Therefore, I will score the game in context of the fact that it is a simpler version of an Assasin's Creed game and therefore I'd expect a player to either buy it for maybe half the price of a regular entry in the series, or actually Liberation is a freeby if you buy the remastered version of AC3. Therefore, against these considerations, I give Liberation the same score as AC3, 3 points, even though that doesn't mean you are getting the same depth of experience.