BURSTING AT THE SEAMS
What is Assassin’s Creed III? If nothing else, it is ambitious.
Let me try to summarize it. It is the fifth entry in the Assassin’s Creed franchise, an ongoing saga about an ancient conflict between “freedom” (the Assassins) and “order” (the Templars). This chapter tells a revenge story largely through the perspective of a Native American protagonist in the mid-to-late 18th century. It also tackles the genocide of Native Americans, colonial power struggles, the British–French conflict, and the American Revolution — all filtered through encounters with famous historical figures.
On top of that, the gameplay is a third-person stealth game, an open-world parkour platformer, a survival sim, a melee brawler, a walking simulator, and a naval combat game — all crammed into one enormous package.
And all of this is still framed by the overarching sci-fi meta-narrative about Desmond Miles, whose storyline finally reaches its conclusion here. Desmond and his companions unravel a global conspiracy while decoding cryptic warnings left behind by an ancient civilization foretelling an imminent apocalypse. Absurd as it sounds, the game treats every bit of it with solemn seriousness.
Do you see the problem?
I tried to keep that summary short, and it’s already exhausting. If this were a book pitch, an editor would have intervened halfway through and said: “Stop. Pick a lane.” But Ubisoft publishes its own games, so no one was there to tell them what an unwieldy mess they were creating.
Assassin’s Creed III doesn’t know when to shut up. It wants to be everything at once, gives none of its ideas time to breathe, and ends up saying nothing at all. Even after half of its twelve long sequences, the game is still introducing major mechanics through endless tutorials. Every system feels bolted on, stitched together into a Frankenstein’s monster of video game design.
Much has changed since the previous entry. I’m still nominally an assassin—eventually I’m given a list of targets—but I never feel like one. Instead, I feel like a passive participant in an interactive museum exhibit about the birth of the United States. I follow quest markers, obey on-screen prompts, and stay strictly within the invisible boundaries of heavily scripted set pieces — or risk “desynchronization” and failure. If Ubisoft wants to make linear games, they should have the courage to actually do so.
Many missions revolve around tailing and clue-hunting, and they are consistently tedious. The auto-assisted controls sabotage stealth at every opportunity, frequently exposing my position and failing the mission outright. In a game about freedom and independence, set in a vast open world, I shouldn’t feel so relentlessly monitored by an invisible, unreliable hand.
What little agency I do have feels arbitrarily restricted. Halfway through the game I attempt to upgrade my gear, only to discover that most items are locked behind story progression, hidden chests, or even the Ubisoft online store. Crafting requires recruiting artisans and engaging with a clumsy hunting system: locating animal habitats, placing snares, waiting, killing, skinning. Apparently, the revolution can wait — I need a marginally better tomahawk. The irony is that I completed the entire game using the weapons handed to me for free.
At this point I started wondering if the lack of agency was intentional. Perhaps Assassin’s Creed III is making a statement about freedom being an illusion. Earlier entries flirted with this idea, albeit clumsily. But this is not a subtle franchise. If that were the point, the game would have explained it at length in a codex entry or an overwrought monologue — which it doesn’t.
The plot itself is dense with twists, historical figures, revelations, and counter-revelations, making it difficult to discuss without spoiling it. It is stiff, overly serious, and weighed down by exposition, though some voice performances are genuinely strong. The characters, however, are poorly written, with unclear motivations and abrupt shifts in allegiance. Ironically, the story is the best part of the game — without actually being good.
Witnessing historical events like the Boston Massacre or the signing of the Declaration of Independence is mildly interesting, even as Ubisoft awkwardly shoehorns them into the revenge narrative. The political intrigue is at least morally ambiguous, and I appreciate the attempt to portray all factions as shades of grey. Unfortunately, appreciation is about as far as it goes.
From there on, the game collapses under its own weight. Constant back-and-forth across the map and across timelines destroys any sense of geography or momentum. The American cities are underdeveloped and ill-suited for parkour, lacking landmarks or flow. Tree-climbing in the wilderness is a neat idea, but poorly implemented, and the forests themselves feel like empty playgrounds in search of something to do. In fact, none of the parkour works particularly well. Frankly, very little does.
The mission design is abysmal. Objectives are often unclear, failure conditions arbitrary, and player freedom severely constrained. Deviate even slightly from the intended path and the game punishes you with an instant desynchronization and restart.
Combat is hardly better. Endless parries and counters allow me to fight indefinitely, making direct combat far easier than stealth — in a game supposedly about assassination. Controls frequently fail to respond, and the camera has a habit of positioning itself behind obstacles, obscuring the action entirely. Difficulty through incompetence is not difficulty worth having.
Despite its remastered status, the game is riddled with technical issues: NPCs walking backwards, characters spawning into cutscenes, AI malfunctions, random desynchronizations, enemies materializing out of thin air. In one session, I was “killed” for shooting a deer during free exploration.
In the final chase, I actually caught my target — only to discover the game had disabled the assassination prompt because I wasn’t supposed to catch him yet. A cutscene further down the road took precedence over player input.
And despite the relentless tutorials, countless systems remain underexplained. Trading, crafting, side quests, collectibles, naval missions, assassin management — all buried in labyrinthine menus and barely integrated into the story. I sampled most of them and abandoned all of them. None felt necessary, meaningful, or fun.
It feels like Ubisoft grew pretentious with Assassin’s Creed III, inflating its assassination fantasy into a grand, hollow statement about “freedom.” A statement so vague it means nothing. Life can be about anything: love, survival, power, peace, exploration — you don’t need this game to tell you that.
Playing Assassin’s Creed III feels like playing with my hands tied behind my back. Even as a history lesson it fails; I’ve never dozed off reading codex entries before, but this game managed it. Who knew the American Revolution could be so dull?
There’s no denying it: life is richer outside your video games, no matter how much content you try to cram into them. Assassin’s Creed III is bloated to the point of collapse, and the remaster only makes its flaws more visible. Polishing these visuals feels like saying: “Yes, the gameplay is broken — and now you can see exactly how ugly it looks.”
I could keep going — the pop-up spam, the terrible horse controls, the dull protagonist — but it’s pointless. Pick any random spot on the map and I can list ten problems on the way there. I never expected the franchise to sink this low.
Assassin’s Creed III is its weakest entry by a landslide. With several games still ahead of me, I can only hope it remains that way.
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