Gorgeous game, game-breaking controls and AI.

First off- every British soldier in this game is a master marksman with XRAY vision and the reaction speed of a fighter pilot. Jump from one building to another, you just alerted a guard who was standing below you who takes aim- shoots you in mid air (1.5 seconds airborne from one building to the next) and using his IPHONE notified every single British in Boston to your EXACT location- Every British soldier converges on your location and using their extensive PARKOUR training they all leap from building to building to kill you. All while moving around the base of the building underneath you constantly tracking your location with their XRAY vision.

This coupled with the fact I have 1600 pounds and cannot buy a new outfit so I'm not the ONLY NATIVE IN BOSTON. While every soldier is on the lookout for... a native.… Expand

My Score: 3.0/10 Pros: -Cinematics -Graphics are **** amazing (IF you have a PC with good hardware) Cons: -Combat is too simplistic and not fluid. -Glitches and bugs throughout EVERY aspect of the game -Terrible AI -Boring gameplay and almost entirely automatic Bethesda's Dishonored makes Ubisoft and their team look like fools. Assassin's Creed III is one of the more disappointing games to be released this year. Don't fool yourself by reading the review by IGN, BECAUSE Ubisoft paid for that review. I'm sure over the next couple of weeks I will have to listen to all the simple minded **** who bought the game and are too afraid to admit how stagnant the series has become. The game emphasizes cinematics with a cutscene for every 5 gameplay minutes, which seems to serve as Ubisoft's effort to distract the player from the slow, simple, and glitchy gameplay. Marketing will fool the majority of the tools, hopefully not you, but this game is a failure. If you want to play it then pirate it so you can save your money for bourbon.… Expand

This review contains spoilers. This game is probably best compared to going into a restuarant, purchasing the best steak available and finding that it is burnt on the outside and raw on the inside. My first review composed of a lot of swearing, but I have decided to refine it...
I love Assasins Creed. The story, the characters, the open-world and free-running freedom and the choice to go at your own pace. The series seemed to go from strength-to-strength (with the exception of Revelations), however when I played this game, I couldn't believe at how arrogant the game is. The first 4 hours of the game, you are dictated what to do non-stop. The cut-scenes happen far too often and rather than allowing you to skip conversations during a cut-scene to speed it up, the only options you have are to watching the entire scene - which are usually incredibly drawn out and slow paced - or to skip the scene entirely. I don't like being left in the dark, but Assasins Creed 3 seems to like to test the gamer's patience with the abundantly pedantic amount of cut-scenes. It feels as if every time you are getting momentum, suddenly, a wild lengthy cut-scene appears! Also, ignore every review that addresses amazing new free-running. It's not amazing it's actually disasterous and completely unneccesary. The game has now taken away your choice as to when you want to climb/jump and when you only want to run. Now, when you run, you automatically will climb/jump. This sounds great, except for some reason, the developers decided to slow your character down when jumping/climbing to the point where I'd rather just run away from enemies instead of performing the seamless parkour that was evident in the earlier titles. Most of the time, my character tries to climb or jump onto a nearby barell/box during a chase that I wasn't even aiming towards. Next up, combat. Combat is always fun right? The developers decided to find a way to mess that up too. Your counter-attacks can now be countered as well, which is kind of ridiculous when surrounded by strong enemies who take away your health each time they counter your counter-attack. So there's no way around that but to discourage combat, which nobody wants to do. The leap-back move has been taken out, because the game would rather you time your blocks, even if it means the enemy can counter your blocks which you cannot stop. You can no longer grab enemies. The menu to select weapons has now been taken from a nice, seamless, in-game experience to a full blown menu which covers your whole screen. Which you still need to hold the button in for. Instead of an easy inventory-wheel seen in previous titles, the weapon-select menu shows the weapons in a column view, which is rather annoying and doesn't allow a "snap-select", you now have to scroll through each and every weapon to get to the one you want. Did I mention there are only 4 quick buttons? So we are now forced to use this unpleasant menu more frequently. Horses are completely useless when not being used on roads and trails because although they have no problem jumping up hills, they seem to have a problem jumping down again. It's little, irritating things like this that make me really not care about the game. It's just irritating and not a joy to play. Even the amazing visuals and life in the busy streets of 1700's New York isn't enough to distract the disgustingly obvious flaws. There are no bugs in this game, the entire game is even more flawed and unfinished than Dragon Age 2 ever was. It seems that the developers were so excited about finishing the game, they decided to distribute it before they could discover on how to make it better.

There's just too much wrong with this game. Play it for yourself and see.… Collapse

Initially this game felt very solid to me, it felt like a good addition to the franchise.. that is until I got to the second sequence. This game is absolute trash, a complete waste of money and I couldn't even be bothered to start it again despite paying $50 for it. Even if you get this game for free as a gift or some other form, save yourself the headache and either return it or remove it from your computer.

This shouldn't even be called AC3, they took everything that made it Assassin's Creed out. It's not like the old Splinter Cell games that the first Assassin's Creed was modeled after. The only similarity between the first one and this one is the less than perfect movement. There is a linear path in this game, no creativity at all, the only path you can choose is the order in which you complete the now mandatory Synchronizations. You have to do missions a certain way or you fail, you don't get to try new things unless it's convenient for the game.… Expand

I don't know how many times I have failed a mission because I didn't know what to do and only found out after failing that mission! The lock picking "mini game" simply does not work, check YouTube to see what others are saying about that! Way too many cut scenes! Combat is horribly simple and repetitive! This is a lot like the first Assassins Creed but prettier and easier for the most part, when it works!… Expand

This game ruined everything I used to love in the Assassin's Creed -franchise.
(1) The characters were not exciting.
(2) Story was not exciting.
(3) Assassin's Creed used to be about assassinations, not charging enemies with your sword out. This game encouraged to brawling, many missions even started with enemies attacking you.
(4) Parkour is missing. Lack of heights, building too wide apart. Even the greatly advertised tree jumping is more linear than all CoD -games combined.
(5) Sum of previous 4: The game is just not that fun to play. Once I completed it, I felt no desire to go back and complete all mini missions and try for 100% game completion. Maybe if Ubisoft fixed all the hundreds of bugs, I might feel intrigued again...… Expand

I've never uninstalled any open-world game before without finishing it first. AC3 will be the first. I decided I'd rather watch the ending on YouTube than suffer through the insanity of game design. My monumental disappointment stems from the realization that such an incredible game series has fallen so very far since the first and second games, including their variants. Despite being a "stealth" game, accomplishing objectives with stealth is either impossible or unrewarding. Lockpicking is a hair-pulling affair, the enemy AI is laughable, and travel (despite being reworked in a more advantageous way) is even more of an annoyance. Heaven forbid you run into the rock wall of a cliff above you and need to choose left or right. If you choose wrong, you're running ALL the way back. There's no way to climb up, the trees nearby don't go high enough, and you can't Fast Travel to a closer location to start again because Fast Travel is turned off during a quest. The only thing I love about this game is the music. An incredible score keeps up the exciting tempo. Such a waste, though. God damnit.… Expand

Fail and disappointment f the year :( That's very sad because I'm big fan of AC series and was waiting hardly this part to come out. First, this is NOT AC game at all. Everything good from AC2, ACB and ACR is gone. Controls are totally changed and practically unplayable. For first 30 minutes be sure to make popcorns because there is 30 minutes unskipable boring animated sequences series. Overall, unplayable game which have nothing in common with good old AC games. Everything except nice graphics is bad in this game.… Expand

This game has turned into call of duty and their just churning out new ones each year, wait till this goes on sale for $20 or something, I do not know what I was thinking when I bought this....

First thing to hit you about this game is how badly optimised it is. The opening scene, which is set in a fores, makes your frames per second plummet. All this is but a taste to what is to come. Once you enter the city of Boston, the game becomes unplayable even in the lowest detail setting with frames dropping to as low as 20 fps. This is on a rig that plays Hitman Absolution and BF3 with no issues.

I guess this was expected since it is a Ubisoft game after all. Their console to PC ports are some of the worst in the business.

Gameplay wise, it's standard assassin's creed fare. Jump some buildings, kill some guards and hide in some things. Perhaps the gameplay would've been better without the infuriating performance issues.… Expand

**** console port. Ubisoft delayed the game three weeks behind consoles for what? The optimisation is horrible. There are barely any changable graphical options in single-player. The low FPS being experienced by many is the straw that broke the camels back. And on top of that, Ubisoft forum moderators state that there is no patch 'forthcoming' to fix issues. This is the last Ubisoft product I'll purchase.… Expand

I simply do not understand why people are so enthusiastic about this game. I hate games that take you by the hand and don't offer anything else besides the scripted linear path. The summary of my experience with this game comes to: "Hold E to skip cinematic" and "Follow the yellow dot to finish your goal". Extremely boring... moving on.

While this is the best looking Assassin's Creed so far, everything else is the worst and disappointing. The story missions are dull and uninspiring. The game also feels disorganized, there are side-missions that are already on the map when I haven't even meet the character associated with it. I found myself doing things I don't even know what for because I haven't been briefed. And most of the side-missions doesn't even bother to give you a reason. Just targets popping out in mini-map. 3 years to develop this? More like 3 years spent on the graphic engine and 3 weeks of rushing overworked coders on the actual game.… Expand

This game is awful... I seriously want to write a long review but even then thinking about all of the bad just enrages me. Story was so predictable that I got to the part where you first get to sail your boat and gave up. That's it. I was done. I knew exactly what was going to happen. Wasn't worth my time playing if I knew the story already. What awful story telling Combat is boring more counter fun. Graphics are no big improvement but the visuals are great. The characters I don't even remember... seriously who was in this game? Never touched multiplayer as this game disgusted me to no end. It was... just... awful. There is no more Assassinating in Assassin's Creed too... I noticed as I watched my friend Livestream it he just tomahawked all his victims... there was no stealthy approach or anything... 2/10 because of visual... love of God gaming industry you're just failing.… Expand

After good AC1, much better AC2 and best AC: Brotherhood, we have here revelations and AC3. Sadly it seems that Revelations and AC3 were made with different dev team that made AC1-2. AC3 is probably the worst. Dumbed down to it knees, fight mechanic, free runing... everything. No options for player, everything is scripted. You cannot control when and where to jump. Just press ASDW and everything is done for you. Occasionally (or more often) you just press E and another script will do everything for you. Cut scenes on every move, "press E" on every corner.. Overall for completing the game you just need 5 buttons- ASDW and E. I was looking forward to this game, but it seems that i will skip this release and will just look at the end cutscene on youtube and im done.... Im very sad that developers slapdash last two releases and ruined my whole AC enthusiasm :(… Expand

they ruined ac series with this abomination. Cities are boring, street after street looks the same. amount of guards on the streets/ roofs( ??) is ridiculous . Even in the middle of forest there are 9 men patrols walking in circle guarding snow. No idea why they made soo many of them, since you can kill them without slightest problems. Fighting never been so easy, still its ridiculous how many times you have to stab opponent to actually kill him. Main character is just some random dude, not even close to being so charismatic as Ezio. Missions are uninteresting, most of people I'm helping out i would rather leave to death. This game is much worse then Revelations and thats kinda a achievement.… Expand

I had high hopes for this game and was really looking forward to it after AC2 and the add-ons. Unfortunately, it does not live up to any of the hype as the storyline is completely haphazard and does not explain itself. To add to that the game play is nowhere near as good as AC2 and the scenes and sequences are cut short without explaining the story well enough. I am 40% of the way through the story and I'm still not sure about how a lot of things came to happen. It doesn't explain itself like AC2 did. The story doesn't flow, it's all over the place. And could someone tell me how an old black man (not being racist here, just factual), could own a mansion in America at that time? He would have been a slave, not a home owner and even if he was freed I'm sure the population at that time would have driven him out of the area.
There is a problem with riding horse along wilderness tracks. The horse keeps getting stuck by running into invisible walls. They also get stuck if you try to cross a river at the wrong place. They can't be backed up or turned around so you have to dismount and call the horse out.

Apart from the terrible story line, I'd like to know why Desmond has transformed into a silver back Gorilla? It was bad enough that he completely changed for a good looking Italian guy into an uglier older guy in Revelations but he now looks like something from several thousand years ago. Why couldn't the character models from AC2 be used in AC3? Have the characters suddenly been mutated by radiation or something?

On the whole, the graphics are acceptable but there are too many errors in game play. The sound effects are pretty good but a lot of the time they are misplaced in relation to the character/object and are too loud/soft in many instances.

This game is a big let down after the brilliant AC2 and unfortunately, there are too many things to "patch out." I don't know what Ubi soft were thinking with this version but they have definitely lost direction in game development between AC2 and AC3. Very disappointed.… Expand

This game should not have been made. The amount of bugs that exist as well as the bland storyline do not create an atmosphere that is worth seeing or playing. For players who have never played any of the previous games it will leave an empty feeling in your stomach for even attempting such a project. Another reason to never try this game is the fact that anything advertised such as the massive battles that took place during the Revolutionary War do not exist in the game. The player will only see 2 or 3 of the main battles and they mainly have you going from side to side avoiding fire or telling colonial soldiers to shoot at incoming targets. There is only one assassination during a battle, and for the most part it is the same rinse and repeat style that exist throughout the entire game. As far as graphics are concerned the game is beautiful compared to its console brethren. However, graphics alone does not make a good game. The sad part about the entire thing is the story. It makes players want to see what happens next but about half way through there is a feeling of a job. The game becomes tedious and not worth seeing after sequence 9 which is a huge shame.… Expand

This game is not bad, but I'm already tired of the same cities in the game. Graphics of the game is even worse than in the second part. I think that this game is ported from the PS Vita.

Good: Pretty good story line, not a common scenario that you would see in other games. Graphics are good. Cities look realistic, definitely captures the feel of the era. Weapons are pretty cool. Fast travel has been added in more places than just the tunnels. The money systems have been revised, it takes a little more effort to make cash now. Haytham is a very well done character and really good voice acting. The naval battles are awesome, easily the most enjoyable part of the game for me.

Bad: Very linear, yet jumpy story. There isn't a lot of creativity involved in what you do. Combat is great if you love cinematic kill shots, not so much if you enjoy honing your skills to get better. It's basically block when the warning thing pops up and mash the mouse button. It's often hard to pick up dropped weapons while in combat. There are some higher level AI that you fight that seem to just headbutt you and reverse your blocks making you just want to shoot them to end the hand to hand combat. Crafting seems very scattered and doesn't make much sense, why am I crafting barrels again? You will probably get stuck in the crafting menu until they get it patched. Lock picking... wtf. Doesn't make any sense at all. Your horse will likely get stuck inside of things frequently, but no big deal you can just call another. Better make sure you setup your shortcut key to the horse whistle though because your equipped weapons change by themselves. You may try to call a horse and wind up shooting a patrolling redcoat in the face. You can't just blindly jump from a viewpoint because it doesn't automatically line you up with the soft haystack at the bottom, this becomes annoying when you do the tree viewpoints and can't see the ground. Remember all those amazing underground puzzles in the past AC's? Yeah, none of that here. The main character isn't very likable. He's kind of an arrogant dick head to everyone. Achilles's story doesn't really end with a bang. Seems like they just ran out of time and forgot about that part. The story outside of the Animus is just out of control. It's not immersive and mostly leaves you with more questions than answers. The thing that frustrated me the most I'd say was the movement. The cities are designed to look more realistic, but unfortunately that means that rooftops are harder to traverse. Everything is very spread out, and it's hard to stay in the air for very long. The climbing seems to have been dumbed down a bit, when you want to climb it works nicely. If you're just trying to run away on the ground you will probably end up trying to climb the food cart or tree that's vaguely close to you, causing you to be surrounded. Graphics look nice, but aren't quite optimized. I have a decent rig, but there are lots of stutters especially when entering the big cities. At the end of the game, I'm very disappointed. I'd consider this the worst game in the series. So much potential, but not properly utilized.… Expand

biggest disappointment in 2012 is definitive AC3, at least for people which played the full AC line, The. player controls are a full downgrade from ACB / ACR to AC3, the whole story lacks of transitions, sometimes you jump into somewhere where you dont have the slightest clue what happened before, AC3 is more or less a 60 $ Cut scene video clips, lots of hours of gameplay is watching the video clips, so that you might, or might not get the story, lots of things make no sense after all. However one of the really bad things i figured is that its literally a bug release, i am sure they wanted to role out before xmas thou, however the stockingpiling menu f.e. is totally broken, some buttons dont work and you cant quit, there, CTD the game and restart doesnt help cause you jump to the broken menue right away, i finally found some forum posts on how to fix it, but still unbelivable to me how they can release so many bugs in a quite expensive retail version. the 85 metascore is unfort. a total fake, i guess they are forced to put it so that they dont loose ubi as advertiser, still sad to see, that games which are really bad, are recommend here!… Expand

If you are a PC gamer avoid this consolitus like the plague. Ported straight over to the PC without ANY adustments made for a mouse/keyboard setup [The indisputably superior controls over that neanderthal thumb wiggling device]

To the Assassin Creed 3 moron dev who said "PC gamers should use a controller when playing our game." You know where you can stick your console thumb wiggling device?

Save your money and buy dishonored on the PC instead of this dumb downed console game that is nowhere NEAR as good as the previous assassin creed games, Dishonored actually showed love for the PC control setup.… Expand

Honestly, I could almost copy my Far Cry 3 review over here since this game suffers from the same issues. AC3 as well is a prime example of mass produced casual garbage. It also suffers from a complete lack of creativity and vision, not to mention the same dreadful casualisation that aims to take all challenge out of the game and make everything so simple that even a monkey who fell as baby from a tree and badly hit it's head could do it. Why I'm giving it a higher rating than Far Cry 3 (Rating 1)? It's because the world is a little more immersive and you at least don't see blinking weapon and ammunition vendor machines in this game.… Expand

It's only **** port of the console game [ps3/xbox360] , poor graphic options, poor keyboard controls, no aspect ratio 4.3 for resolution. Its good game on console's but **** game on PC.

Great story and setting, very well told, but it contains quite a lot of bugs, and the controls can drive you really crazy at times, which is especially annoying in long missions, where you die at the end and are then placed at the start of the mission. Most missions do have checkpoints though, so it's only a few (really annoying) missions who suffer that problem.

Ok so, good stuff first. The singleplayer - awesome. I'm only on mission 3 and already drawn in - story, characters, graphics, music are top-notch. Combat controls will take a little getting used to, but not like it matters - just mash all the buttons, you'll win. Faces are butt-ugly though, not sure what happened there. I hear they pulled a mass effect with the ending, but I'll cross that bridge when I get to it.
No, the reason this gets a 0 is the multiplayer. Now, mechanics-wise, it's way better. Having kill and stun on the same button is fantastic. Everyone having a ranged ability is also great, I'm seeing much less roofing. Recycled kill animations are pretty lame, as is smoke bomb still being in the game, but whatever.
That is, when I can play at all. In Brotherhood, matchmaking was **** terrible, but hey, it was their first experience with that kind of multiplayer, excusable. Plus, they fixed it in Revelations and it was actually pretty efficient. Now it got worse over time, but I put that down to a dwindling player base. Here though, it's back, full retard. I got into a few games initially, which, by the way, had more lag than I've ever experienced in any video game ever, then the matchmaking just failed. Next day, tried for TWO HOURS without finding a single game, gave up, came back a third day, an hour later, still no luck. Now I've gotten into games, so it's not that there aren't enough people, it's just that it's not even trying! It'll say something like "trying to connect to session (1/7)" or (1/21) or whatever. After 3 tries, it puts me in my own session and never puts anyone else in there. If you leave and try again, it puts you in your own session right away. Do that a few times and it will say Ubisoft's servers are unavailable. Sometimes it'll just go to a blank screen (i.e. the background only, no text, music still going) and you have to alt-f4.
God damn Ubisoft. I know you don't give a **** about the pc community, but you don't have to make it **** WORSE THAN IT ALREADY WAS!… Expand

What a complete waste of time. I actually could't play this game for more than two hours at a time, fearing my heart would give in from my frustration:-) Every aspect of this game i worse than even AC1. Let aside the battles at sea whitch was new and great. The buttons, the story, gameplay, grafics, caracters, conversations, cutcenes, I could go on and on, they all suck! Do not buy this game, and spare yourselves from a lot of pain. Alex Hutchinson name is now burned in to my brain, and i will forever shun from anything he puts his name on… Expand

Terrible. After 3 hours I can't stand to play anymore, and from the very beginning I realized this was a game to be dismissed. I've played all the others in the series, but the pacing and mission design is absolutely painful to go through. I consider myself patient, but after nothing but cutscenes and missions that say "hide in a bush, or spring up to this thing and press E" only to enjoy another 10 minutes of cutscenes is very frustrating. And also, after completing tediously boring sections of a mission that include mind-numbingly mundane eavesdropping, some bum spots you a half second before you kill him, and BAM you are a failure and must restart the entire mission.

Boston is bland and uninspiring. Freerunning has become something of the past, the building design doesnt support fluent running and movement. This game is basically about pressing the E button when prompted.

And WTF is with the stupid lockpicking? Broken as hell. Extremely disappointed with this game, I have no desire to continue playing only after 3 short hours of gameplay (chalk it up to about 8 hours playtime due to boring cutscenes and dumb mission design failures.)… Expand