Assassin’s Creed: Liberation HD is port from the PS Vita to the Xbox 360 and PS3. Earlier this week I tweeted that I was undecided with the game being somewhere between utter crap and almost decent. Now that I’ve completed the game, has my opinion changed?
Actually it is still middle of the road on the fence opinion. Gut reaction is that the game should have been released on the consoles as a full game and ported to the PS Vita. There was more than a sufficient potential story line for a full game but Ubisoft failed to take a risk and release a full Assassin’s Creed game with a female protagonist.
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
The ugly first, the graphics are muddy and are very obviously retextured from a much smaller screen. This is particularly obvious with the sequence involving Connor from Assassin’s Creed III. The game undoubtedly looked much better on a handheld device than it does our large screen television.
Now for the bad and there is a lot of bad to report unfortunately. The story is all over the place and often times makes no sense. There is no backstory on how Aveline came to be an assassin and that isn’t remedied as the game progresses either. Story threads are often poorly written and incomplete. Don’t get me started on the weird, uncomfortable, and awkward relationship with her “business” partner.
Then there is the whole issue with her triple personas. It is an interesting game play idea and it could have worked but it doesn’t unfortunately. It forces Aveline into one of three roles in pre-American Revolution New Orleans: Assassin, lady, or slave.
Time for some brutal honesty, it is incredibly unlikely that given her parentage and complexion Aveline would have been accepted as a lady in New Orleans social circles. It requires a LARGE suspension of reality to believe acceptance of Aveline as a lady. Now for the slave persona, really Ubisoft? Slaves running around New Orleans with weapons visible and not one guard gets suspicious and citizens act like it’s no big deal? Again, requires a huge suspension of belief to play.
Aveline, our heroine, suffers from the same caped crusader problem that Connor suffers from in AC III. Game play is often frustrating and often I wanted to throw my controller across the room. Invisible walls, sticking to stuff for no good reason, jumping when you don’t intend to and incurring notoriety for it, and desynchronizing more often than I ever have an any previous installment in the franchise. The Assassin persona is always restrained because she can never lose twenty-five percent of her notoriety. The male characters do not suffer from this same handicap so why does the only female character Ubisoft created?
Now for the good, Ubisoft gets a lot of credit from me for making a mass market game with a female lead. Yes, it is a highly flawed game but it is one of the few games with a female lead. I’m by no means a raging feminist but it is so damn nice to play a female lead on a character not created by me. There is lot of potential in the Aveline story and I hope the Ubisoft doesn’t relegate her to the dustbin never to be heard from again. The good is mostly potential however. I wish it were otherwise.
Overall, I give the game a two and a half stars. It isn’t so horrible that it is a two star game and it is too much of a mess to warrant middle of the road status.
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