Gameplay
The gameplay of Assassin’s Creed 3 and others in the series is what distinguishes them from everything else out there. It is an open world action-adventure, but it is also very heavily stealth focused. One moment you may be stalking an enemy sticking to the shadows or ease-dropping on a conversation to gather information, and then the next you may find yourself faced by multiple enemies in melee combat, or even facing a firing squad. Both types of gameplay are very suiting and well placed and spaced out throughout so that the game doesn’t get stale. The combat itself is quite fun as there are multiple options. You can approach any situation stealthy or full steam ahead. When approaching it from a stealth aspect, you may take out four or five enemies before they even know that you are there. If you don’t want to seem a coward however and give your foes a fair chance there is always open combat.
For melee combat alone there are swords, tomahawks, hidden blades and bayonets. For ranged you have pistols and muskets, both of which are only single shot and take a while to load, but can be incredibly effective in either picking off a more difficult enemy prior to starting battle, or to defend yourself against an impossible situation during battle. You are able to loot those who you have slain to collect money, ammo, or extra special items like smoke bombs.
In Assassin’s Creed 3 the movement is highly improved from previous versions. Movement is now much more fluid and feels a lot more like free-running. The new movement system makes the game feel more responsive in my eyes and certainly leads to some more exciting chase scenes and battles. The free-running is best demonstrated when tracking down almanac pages. The pages are only on the screen for a short amount of time, and have a predetermined path that you must learn over the course of a few attempts at grabbing it, but once you have perfected the path and are able to snag the pages, you can turn them into Benjamin Franklin for a little bit of extra pocket cash, or quid I suppose. On top of all this there are disguises in Assassin’s Creed 3. You can cloak yourself as one of the British and walk right into their camp and wreak havoc. Keep an eye out for the officers though, as they have the ability to see through your disguise and ruin everything.
One final point, though not really an issue with gameplay is that my save file became corrupt. I don’t know how, but I can only assume it happened when Uplay decided to do an automatic update. Since then I have been keeping a backup of my save and haven’t had the issue again, but there are multiple reports of people’s saves becoming corrupt or even being removed all together with the download of a DLC so be weary and backup your data!
