Assassin’s Creed has followed the ancestry of Desmond Miles for years, and for the first time we get to follow the memories of an entirely different Assassin living in the Bayou. Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation follows Aveline as she fights templars and tries to find out the truth of her missing mother. Does the Vita game hold up to its console counterpart, or is this another terrible handheld mess?
For any complaints players may have had with bugs in Assassin’s Creed 3, Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation takes it to an entirely different level. Framerate drops are common while climbing, or even running across the stress of New Orleans. Tree climbing is still an option and works similarly too the console counterpart, but there is a noticeable lack of polish in mechanics outside of that. While ACL may feel like an Assassin’s Creed game at its core, the bugs littered across the game will leave players feeling incredibly dumbfounded at times, such as when you assassinate an enemy when they’re clearly beyond the reach of your hidden blades. The animations themselves aren’t the problem, it’s the lack of polish and review that the development team put into ACL. Watching some battles almost feels like you’re watching a bad wrestling match where the wrestlers are all ghost punching and kicking each other: no contact is ever seen and enemies go down. Gun shooting mechanics are essentially identical to AC3, but sound doesn’t seem to be an issue for ACL as your enemies won’t know where a shot came from unless you’re incredibly close. Battle mechanics aren’t as polished as the console version either, as countering is incredibly more difficult not for lack of skill, but for lack of control response. This makes for a frustrating, almost offensive experience when playing key battles and forced to restart again.
Perhaps ACL’s biggest offense though is the horrific motion control and camera integration. Numerous times throughout the game, you’ll need to hold your Vita up to a bright light and tilt the vita in order to read secret messages found in letters. This isn’t the first time a game has done this on the Vita (Uncharted), but it’s not the best either as the game simply doesn’t recognize light properly. After holding up the Vita to the sun, windows, and lamps I literally had to take my Smartphone’s flashlight, hold it behind the vita and turn it every which way I could for about 10 minutes until the game finally recognized the light. Puzzle sequences give a more infuriating experience as, for example, you’ll need to tilt the Vita to beat a standard tilting game, except that ACL doesn’t recognize the tilt function whatsoever. When playing through the first tilt minigame fairly early into the campaign, the controls wouldn’t respond at all. At first, I thought that it had an inverse control scheme as the ball didn’t move in the direction I wanted, but that wasn’t the case, the tilt mechanics are just completely broken. After exiting the game numerous times and shaking my vita around, I finally was able to get past the tilt puzzle… 25 minutes after trying to figure out why my Vita wasn’t recognizing the tilt functionality. Many players willpower will be tested to continue playing after that.
Multiplayer leaves a lot to be desired as instead of the standard AC multiplayer fans have come to enjoy from the console versions, instead you’re essentially coaching assassins to move and attack one city to another. Order any number of assassins to fight a brief animation and level up against virtually any enemy and the match is over in literally under 3 seconds. It essentially feels like the developers took the brotherhood missions from AC3’s single player and just called it multiplayer for ACL, albeit other players can attack or defend the same territories your agents are after.
Campaign wise, Aveline has a fairly interesting story. A biracial child just like Assassin’s Creed 3’s Conner, Aveline lives a very affluent life in New Orleans with her father and step-mother. Aveline will switch between the roles of Lady, Assassin and Slave regularly and investigates the Templar’s evil plots for the south while simultaneously trying to learn more about her mysterious abandonment by her mother. Unfortunately, the story isn’t the strongest of the franchise and suffers problems in numerous areas. For one, we never get to see who’s in the Animus relieving these memories, we just are told that Abstergo released a public version of the Animus for the public to use. This takes away from current day importance that players get when they play on consoles with Desmond and is a real shame. Throughout the console franchise, there was a reason as to why Desmond was relieving the lives of his ancestors, here we’re basically using a nameless looking glass to check out an assassin in the south during the same time period as Connor. Aveline’s slavery storylines could have been focused on more as well instead of just being used as a disguise, but the Liberation aspect focuses more on business owners than slavery. Finally, we never find out why Aveline really became an Assassin to begin with, we’re just given an assassin character in the south and told to go with it. Again, this cheapens the character and story of Aveline that much more.
Assassin’s Creed Liberation had a lot of potential on the Vita, but unfortunately is plagued with bugs and technical fallacies that prevent it from shining in any specific area. As such, Liberation comes off as a rushed product that was never finished or tested enough for release and may not be the Vita console pusher Sony was hoping for.
Assassin’s Creed Liberation gets a D from Geek Citadel.
Recommended Buy Prices:
Like Assassin’s Creed? $25
Everyone else? $15
