Assassin’s Creed III: Liberation review (PS Vita)

Assassins Creed: Liberation is an exciting prospect, as it brings a wide set of impressive features, graphics and gameplay elements from the Assassin’s Creed franchise to the game-starved Playstation Vita.

In Liberation you play as Aveline de Grandpré, a half French, half African-American female assassin who received her freedom at birth because of the influence of her rich father. After the disappearance of her mother, Aveline was trained to become an assassin by a runaway slave called Agate. The back story of Aveline is not fully explained and is mostly surrounded in mist, and most of the details can only be found from her bio entry found in-game.

Aveline is the first woman protagonist in the Assassin Creed franchise, and brings some new and interesting game mechanics to the table. Aveline has three different disguises or personas that she can use in every mission.

The slave persona, where Aveline disguises herself as a peasant slave, is weak in combat, but is less noticeable and can blend in with other workers very easily. The lady persona is even weaker in combat, can’t jump, climb or sprint, but has the advantage by having the abilities to bribe or charm other people. The assassin persona is the strongest in combat but will always have a yellow notoriety, making you suspicious to any guard you get close to.

In the beginning of Liberation, you will be forced to play with certain personas to finish quests. This can be extremely tedious especially when you need to run across the map, disguised in the “ever-so-quick” lady persona. There is however a bright side, as later in the game you have more freedom to choose what persona you would rather play with.

The controls of Liberation are the same as all the previous Assassin’s Creed titles and have been one of the things I truly appreciated while playing on the Vita. Free-running through the city is an ease and pure joy with the thumb sticks.

For combat, a new feature was added called chain-killing. When a chain-kill is activated, the game is paused for a brief duration to allow the player to tag all the enemies by touching them on the screen. Once all the enemies are tagged, a kill sequence is initiated where Aveline kills all the targets in a flurry of fluid motions. The kill-chain stood out quite a bit and was fun to use, if just to see how Aveline moved from enemy to enemy, creating a “symphony of death.”

There are however some gameplay elements that hinder the game through the use of the Vita’s unique input system. To pickpocket, you need to swipe your finger across the back of the Vita’s touch pad, and this becomes extremely distracting especially when you need to focus on a moving target while trying to swipe the correct position on the Vita. When receiving letters, you need to swipe the back and front panel simultaneously over the envelope to open them, and when in a canoe you need to swipe the back panel repeatedly for Aveline to paddle. These little features feel more like a hindrance to the flow of the game, and could have been avoided by giving alternative controls to do the same actions.

Liberation makes use of the same engine used in all the other Assassins Creed franchises, and it shows. The level of detail of the city, the characters and enemies are something to be admired. Even when a building would suddenly pop in the background, it was something that never bothered me, as it never took away from the surroundings and level of detail of the city.

One thing that stood out above all was the level design and how well it all fitted together. When running across the rooftops of New Orleans, jumping from tree to tree in the swamps or forests of Mexico, the levels never felt like there was anything out of place or missing. Entering new areas in a level never caused any issues, and only barely did the frame rate stutter when a lot of action happened on screen.

Running through the levels while chased by enemies did however cause some unfortunate issues. Sometimes enemies would get stuck on objects, and will stay stuck on the objects until you run away and return at a later stage. This has also happened a few times with Aveline, but usually the issue is fixed once you change the direction you were running in.

Voice acting in Liberation was well done, with minor issues where the lip-syncing fell apart at places.

Multiplayer of Liberation is probably the most disappointing aspect of the game. Instead of the usual multiplayer found with the Assassins Creed franchise, you now you have to play a world domination game, which involves taking and defending nodes from hostile players. Even though you play with other players, it is not really that exciting and one will soon loses interest in the lacklustre game mode.

Even though Liberation has a few issues with bugs and has a slow start, Liberation is a fun game with a likable protagonist. Ubisoft was not afraid to try out new things, by introducing new elements to the Assassin’s Creed franchise and it paid off. Liberation was a fun game that comes highly recommended for anyone that has a Playstation Vita.