Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation – when looks can kill

Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation features our first female protagonist, Adeline, and is shaping up to be quite a thorough adventure, exclusive to PS Vita. It has been revealed that the game will offer players three ways to play through each mission.

Aveline is the daughter of a French merchant and an African servant, and uses her beauty, money, and deadly skills to her advantage.

Assassins Creed III: Liberation is set in new Orleans during 1771. The Spanish have taken control of the city from the French, and elsewhere in North America, the Revolutionary War is raging.

This places it in the same time frame as its big brother game, Assassins Creed 3. The stories of the two games will cross over one another, but the developers would not reveal details.

The game is pitched as an Abstergo product, which means there is no current-day protagonist storyline. All the action takes place in New Orleans.

The game is built on the same AnvilNext engine as its console and PC counterparts, and the visuals reflect this, and the computing power under the hood of the PS Vita.

Watching a Gamescon 2012 demonstration on a large television from a moderate distance, one had to look twice to realize that this wasn’t a game powered by a current-generation console.

We were treated to a demo of the stealth action in Liberation, and shown that Aveline has three disguises, and three different ways to approach gameplay.

Aveline can put on two disguises in the game. One sees her as a wealthy, seductive aristocratic woman, who uses her money and charms to beguile guards and make her way into restricted areas.

In this guise, Aveline wields a parasol which shoots poison darts. She cannot run fast or climb, and engaging in open-combat will leave her vulnerable as she isn’t wearing armor. To her advantage, she can charm a guard into following her, providing both an armed escort, and a level of legitimacy to her movements in restricted areas, as other soldiers will regard her with less suspicion.

On the other end of the spectrum, Aveline can disguise herself as a lowly servant – a class of citizen that goes by unnoticed in poverty stricken New Orleans. She can carry crates right through guard posts, who assume she is making a delivery. She can also blend with other workers while tracking a target and plotting a kill. In this guise, Aveline can run and climb, but is still vulnerable in combat.

In both disguises, Aveline is still deadly, as she retains her hidden blade. Stealth and cunning are the demands of approaching a mission in these disguises.

Finally, there is the traditional assassin getup, complete with hidden blades and other classic gadgets, such as smoke bombs. Aveline comes wielding a whip which can help her in traversal sections and combat.

In this guise, soldiers will become suspicious of Aveline, and will quickly become aggressive towards her.

The familiar Assassins Creed combat style returns, but making use of the Vita touch screen, Kills can be chained together by selecting targets on screen. This initiates a stylish kill animation.

This makes for three different ways to approach the missions in Liberation.

The developers indicated that the main story will take around 15 hours to complete for an Assassins veteran, and about 20 for a new player.

The missions have been designed to offer the kind of short-fix that mobile gamers require, but it is also open-ended in the Assassins Creed tradition, so one can get lost in exploration if desired.

It is not clear if there will be a multiplayer element as the developers remained tight-lipped on the subject. They did say that there will be a multiplayer Assassins Creed title for Vita, but could not reveal details at this time.

Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation will launch on 30 October 2012.

Check out more of MyGaming’s Gamescom 2012 coverage to find out what’s been going down at this year’s show.