Difficulty:

Easy

Time Spent:

20 to 40 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"All flash, no substance"

There are many classic games built from the ground up for handhelds. There are at least an equal number of sloppy attempts to cram a home console experience onto a smaller which feel unsatisfying and half-baked. Assassin's Creed III: Liberations unfortunately falls squarely into the latter category.

For what it's worth, it does look beautiful for any system. The Vita can't match the graphical capacities of an Xbox 360 or PS3 but the developers do a great job of making its OLED screen shine w/ beautifully realistic depictions of New Orleans and its surrounding bayous. The music too has a wonderfully well-composed and cinematic quality that sets the mood perfectly. Ultimately though, this polish on the surface is undermined by problems in basically every other area.

You play as Aveline, a woman who is apparently of a complexion that allows her to fit in equally well as slave and a lady of New Orleans high society. She is a member of the Assassin's Brotherhood and her goal is to free slaves or fight the Brotherhood's enemies, the Templars... or something. The plot is overall quite convoluted and lengthy while still glossing over seemingly important details such as what exactly Aveline is supposed to be trying to accomplish. Additionally, the overarching plot-line to the Assassin's Creed series is thrown in haphazardly in such a way that will likely be bewildering to those new to the series.

Similarly, gameplay feels half-completed. Liberations has nice and tight control except for a few points where touch screen and motion controls are forced on the gamer for no real good reason. There is also an element of depth added by the three personae Aveline can adopt--slave, lady and assassin--but these are mostly forced on you at a particular point rather than allowing for multiple ways to complete each mission. In either the slave or the assassin persona, Aveline can run, jump and climb up walls in order to complete her missions. Doing so is almost too easy as it basically requires you to simply hold down the right shoulder button and automatically prevents you from falling off rooftops and the like for the most part. I suppose on one level this simulates the ease w/ which a trained assassin might accomplish these tasks. On another level, it seems like a game in which much of the gameplay revolves around jumping across rooftops should have a button reserved for jumping rather than just having the protagonist jump automatically when it is needed.

Beyond even these problems and despite a launch day patch, Liberations has quite a few bugs. In addition to being able to get stuck in the scenery or to walk or swim through walls and mountains, unable to return to the proper play area, which only requires only the game to be stopped and restarded, there is a save-corrupting bug that causes players to have to restart the whole story from the beginning. These problems will hopefully be fixed in later patches but the whole mess is indicative of a lack of attention to detail which damns Assassin's Creed III: Liberations to feeling like "only" a handheld version of the home console series. It is good for impressing your friends w/ the graphics on your shiny new Vita but ultimately no fun to play and lacking a coherent plot w/ real depth. Whether you want a full Assassin's Creed experience or just a great game to play on the go, this simply does not deliver on any level.