I missed the sensation of cold steel  hidden in my sleeve, and that burst of adrenaline I experienced every time I snapped my wrist and watched a blade penetrate the neck of my hapless victim.

With Assassin’s Creed 3, Ubisoft delivers a third installment of their hit series and honestly, it’s about time they moved on to a new assassin. Don’t get me wrong, Ezio was great and still proves to be a fan favorite, regardless if it was because of all the games he was in or if he earned that fanaticism legitimately, but he was fading out way before the outcome of Revelations.

The new assassin’s name is Ratonhnhaké:ton, or just simply Connor because, well, I don’t believe Ubisoft want people running around referring to their new protagonist as “That new guy” or worse: “Rato whatever”.

Connor’s father is English, his mom is Native American, and he possesses, and ultimately learns, all the skills his famous ancestors had including some added tricks of his own to add to the already diverse repertoire of death. While we’re on the subject of new tricks, evidently, neither Ezio nor Altair knew anything about climbing trees because Connor seems to make a big deal out of it. Maybe it’s because there were no trees in the earlier AC games or maybe the animus pulled off a syntax error every time someone tried to define ‘trees’ to it back then, but regardless, Connor is as limber as a three headed monkey and can scale the highest trees in mere seconds.

The game, of course, doesn’t only change protagonists, but also takes place in a whole new time period and continent. Expect to meet a plethora of famous American characters like Benjamin Franklin and George Washington and be ready to assist in the birth of the US of A with all the war drama that the American Revolution entailed. Additionally  Some neo-revolutionaries and political activists will be saddened to know that the game forces you to go through the declaration of independence, so strap yourselves and look away if you must.

Desmond Miles will also make another prominent appearance and will gladly oblige to your commands for him to scale 21st sky scrapers because, you know, that’s what we’ve always wanted to do with him, right? I’m sure he’s as fresh as when we first encountered him more than 6 games and 5 years ago. Quite.

No matter. The real question is: Is the game any good and does it stand tall among its brethren?

Let me answer that right now: Yes it is. But before you close this tab with an unjustified sigh or minimize your browser to get back to your mundane 9 to 5, know that the game may deliver what fans of the series expect, but it does not even try to introduce the series to a new audience, and haters of the series will have more reason to hate on it now. Unconvinced? Read on and find out why.

As with all other AC games, you start off as an inexperienced man for hire with the will to be something more, and armed with the right amounts of passion, destiny and mentors that seem to teach rather than do, you embark on an epic journey that covers your complete timeline from adolescence to your (insert desired adjective) end. There is really no telling how Ubisoft will spin the yarn for future AC games as I believe, with the addition of the childhood, wilderness and naval battle dynamics this time around, everything has been covered. Well, almost everything. They may come back with a potty training mini-game and maybe a Sims/Farmville addition to the mix that mirrors Skyrim’s Hearthfire *shudder* Please, no.

The cities available to you are fun places for you to run around and play catch with yourself in and are infested with hay stacks that still randomly find themselves strewn around distinct locations for you to hide and dive in to. Since we’re on the subject, I believe it’s high time Ubisoft establishes another method for their assassins to quickly get off a tower/high construct/tree they climbed — this whole eagle dive shtick has grown stale and should not find itself in the new game….please?

The addition of the wilderness is definitely a welcome switch and Connor now has an additional playground that his predecessors did not have access to, or comprehended, and being of Native American descent, he is well versed in the ways of Mother Nature. It is a letdown, then, that you don’t get access to this new environment early on and an even bigger let down that you are yanked right back in to an urban environment soon afterwards. You, of course, are allowed access to the wilds at will, but it rarely goes beyond the novelty factor and hunting soon becomes redundant. You see, with the addition of the wilderness comes the ability to hunt and mind you, animals are not hunted the same way humans are and you have a set of tools, besides your weapons, that are specifically designed for hunting animals of all sizes. Every animal you hunt and skin grants you material which you can sell to various shops. This in itself raises issues of its own, but that’s a story for later. Hunting rabbits and deer is fun but what about the bigger game? Well sadly it is not as exciting as it should have been . The bigger the animal, the easier they are to hunt than their smaller counterparts. Where the small game will try to run away from you, forcing you to approach them with a modicum of stealth and tactic, their big brothers will simply charge at you. This could have been grounds for pure terror that Ubisoft absolutely failed in utilizing. Instead of working your way to avoid your predator, or attacking them with skill, you are left with a mediocre QTE that makes killing big game a trifling matter: Press the right buttons and that black bear is as good as dead.

Now on to the problem I have with skinning animals and selling their hides, and it has nothing to do with PETA (if they ask, the furs are synthetic). The issue is more of a general one and deals with the actual economy of it. At the start of the game, getting money is a struggle and you will be poor more often than not, not that it really matters since all you can buy are properties which generate more money for you. So, make money, buy houses, make more money, open casino. That last one was racially insensitive, and I apologize, because you actually can not buy casinos,  but can you believe that Connor never says ‘Hao’ during the whole game? I’m sorry, I don’t know what’s gotten in to me. Moving on.

All this property buying is fine and dandy, but after buying every single real estate, which is extremely easy once you get the ball rolling at the start, what do you do with all the money being generated? Well you could spend it on a boat. “I get a boat?!” Why of course you get a boat! “Sweet, what do I do with it?” Well, You open new trade routes…which generate more money. “Oh, I see”. In the end, you will end up with more gold than you’d ever need and it will prove to be virtually useless. All the money you have is used to make more of it, which is used to just make even more. I wish they’d at least let you swim in a vault full of your gold coins…anything to justify all that money coming in!

At any case, you probably won’t be spending your time killing animals or building a commercial empire in the first place, because, well, you are an assassin and your job is to assassinate, and with pointy metal objects if you please. The combat, which is hopefully something you will be doing a lot of throughout the game, is exactly what you remember it to be with a few additional quirks. The game still uses a system of parry and counters which makes the combat dynamic and impressive to look at as you gracefully whirl around, blocking, thrashing, and turning the enemies’ weapons against them. Spicing up the scuffles, some enemies are harder to kill than others, requiring that you break their defense first before you can apply damage to them. That, or you could pull off an Indiana Jones and just shoot them in the face. Incidentally  Firearms are overpowered. See that soldier who is an expert at parrying parries and is a blast to spar against? Shoot him in his at face. Problem solved. Thankfully, there are major drawbacks to using firearms. The reload time is abysmally slow and if you are struck while you are reloading, you have to reload from scratch. Also, trying to manually aim is rage inducing. Whatever your choice of combat is, once you master it, you will feel nigh-invincible, until you press a button at the wrong time, since the enemy is stubborn in its belief that forming an organized conga line to attack you is a better idea than just swarming you with raw numbers.

Yes, things indeed haven’t changed, the AI is still completely idiotic. This is really frustrating when you have friendly NPC following you that refuses to act with logic and insists on getting stuck on walls, roofs, or just standing in plain view when you are hiding behind a wall alerting the guards that were looking for you. I would tell them to just sit somewhere safe and move on with the mission without them, but the game will automatically make you fail the mission if you move too far away from them. Rage inducing, really. The ability for NPC’s to get stuck on walls is not proper to only them, you also have this useless super power. I was to kill a patrolling guard, he was however busy being inside a tree. It gets better, I was somehow able to assassinate the target, but doing so had me leap at him, hereby getting me stuck in the tree instead. The game does have a mass of bugs and pathfinding issues, but often than not they won’t break the game, it’s just a bit disheartening to see them in the third opus of such a franchise. These were issues present since the first game and their presence up to this point is a bit frustrating.

Have no fear it is still a good game as I said, you will obviously get your money’s worth. Portraying Connor is a blast and the new maps are a joy to travel. The story has become a complete cluster-fuck at this point but honestly after all this time it is bound to let down some people (I’m looking at you ME3 ending). The story does lack the charisma that it had in the previous games, where Altair and Ezio felt like they were active and were the ones making the decisions, Connor feels more passive, he is someone that is told most often than not what the plan is and here’s what he can do to help. By buying Assassin’s Creed 3 you will enjoy a game that offers an armory of toys to be used in colonial America, it’s a shame you need to play through half the game to get them. As a side note, the game hosts a small encyclopedia that is a blast to go through. I highly advises to access it whenever you unlock new information about a historical figure or location, it is hilarious to read.