Chairman Yang
if he talks about books, you better damn well listen
I'm hopelessly behind on my ever-growing gaming backlog, and given how little time I actually spend playing games these days, I probably will be until the end of time. Despite that, I can occasionally appreciate a good palate-cleanser, and don't mind spending some time on a downright bad game. These bad games can have interesting ideas; they can also sometimes serve as useful cautionary tales, and help me better appreciate good design in other games.
The last game I finished was Assassin's Creed Liberation HD on the PC. The game was panned, but I got it cheaply, it was an AC game (a series I love, despite its many flaws, wild inconsistency, and many bad entries), and it had some concepts and ideas that looked interesting on paper. I figured I might genuinely enjoy it, and worst case scenario, it would be one of those horrible palate-cleansing games I described above. Heck, I even sort of enjoyed Assassin's Creed 3, and thought it had some great elements!
After completing it (the whole thing took about 13 hours), the worst case scenario indeed came to pass. ACL is horrible, and was clearly made on a tiny budget by a Ubisoft C-team. How? Let me break it down in more detail than this game really deserves:
* Aveline, the main character, is a half-French, half-African Assassin torn between cultures and loyalties. The setting, 18th-century New Orleans, is rich with opportunity for interesting themes. The game does basically nothing with either of these things. Both the character and setting are completely underdeveloped to an embarrassing degree.
* The story is bad in concept. I'm going to spoil it here:
That one-sentence summary encompasses about 90% of what happens.
* The story is also badly told. It's presented mostly through poorly-voiced cutscenes that are disjointed, expects the player to care (or even know) about characters that are newly introduced or barely mentioned, is riddled with plot holes, and is somehow both cliched and bizarre. Character motivations are non-existent, barely discernable, non-sensical, or super-weak. There's no concept of build-up and payoff; big revelations are outright stated in the in-game codex early on, then shown in late-game cutscenes as surprises.
* The game mechanics are bad, even by Assassin's Creed standards. The game has no challenge except fighting with the janky controls. Lots of mechanics boil down to "go here and press a button". For example, when Aveline is in her formal dress, she can act like a Southern Belle, go up to a guard, and charm the guard. Neat concept, right? Rich with potential gameplay possibilities, right? In practice, you go up to a guard, press the Charm button, and the guard follows you around for a minute. That's it, that's the mechanic. There are no interesting scenarios built around this. There are no emergent gameplay possibilities opened up by this. It's literally used twice in missions where the game explicitly tells you that you have to go up the guard, charm him, walk behind a building, and press a button to kill him. Basically all of the mechanics are like this, even ones that worked and were better-developed back in Assassin's Creed 2.
* The game has a cool-in-theory "Persona" system. Aveline can disguise herself as a genteel lady in a dress, a slave, or a combat-ready Assassin. Supposedly, each of these has gameplay advantages and disadvantages, and can entail different approaches to missions. Actually, the slave and Assassin disguises are virtually identical barring a few minor differences. The lady disguise is different only in that you can Charm (as described above), can't parkour, and can only use a couple of weapons. If the game didn't force you to switch disguises for scripted scenarios, there would be basically no reason to use one over another. The concept is nice, the reality is trash.
* I find most game music pretty good. It's rare that a game has outright bad music that I specifically notice. Even indie games, with their tiny budgets, often have excellent soundtracks. Well, ACL has outright bad music. It's a few super-simplistic tunes that sound like they're on 30-second loops. I think I remember one or two tracks being okay. The rest sound totally amateurish and thrown together under severe time pressure.
* The sidequest design...oh god. Assassin's Creed, as a series, has always had some trouble in this area. ACL is the nadir of the series, by far, and I'm including stuff like the DLC for Assassin's Creed 3 and Revelations in that comparison. It's just the laziest mission design I've ever experienced in an ostensibly mainstream game. There are the infamously bad AC tailing missions stripped of any challenge and that go on far too long. There are missions where you're supposed to go to a location, stab a dude, and then fight about 30 enemies. There are missions where you're supposed to go to a location, stab a dude, then sneak out, but you end up fighting about 30 enemies because the stealth/detection mechanics and enemy layouts are badly designed.
* Collectibles are almost never done well, even in generally good games. ACL has multiple sets of collectibles, most of which offer literally no reward and require no skill to get. They will appear on your radar when you get close to them (and not any other time), and you can pick them up. Other than manually walking across the game maps hoping one pops up on radar, or looking at a wiki, there's no way to deduce their locations.
* The in-game economy and trading systems are broken, boring, and based primarily on waiting for your ships to arrive in a port to unload their goods. There's nothing worth spending money on. You can spend money on ways to make more money, but why bother?
* The graphics are only good by Vita standards. Even HD-ified, the game is the worst-looking of all ACs. This actually isn't a big deal to me, but it might be to most people.
Pretty damning, right? The game's not 100% horrible. There are a few--not bright spots, but less grim spots:
* There are a few Prince of Persia/AC2 Assassin's Tombs-style bits in the Chichen Itza location. They're very bad compared to those games, but they stand out in ACL.
* Some environments are kind of nice-looking, despite the low-tech graphics. Again, Chichen Itza is a relative standout.
* Your journal entries start out as sanitized, censored Templar versions that paint the Assassins in a bad light and hide the bad stuff the Templars did. As you progress, you can unlock the real entries that modify your journal and tell the truth of what happened. Kind of a neat idea, that, as usual for this game, is very undercooked.
TLDR: ACL is bad.
That's it! My palate is cleansed, and now I'm ready for a good game again. Anyone else play this game? Am I off the mark? What did you think of it?
The last game I finished was Assassin's Creed Liberation HD on the PC. The game was panned, but I got it cheaply, it was an AC game (a series I love, despite its many flaws, wild inconsistency, and many bad entries), and it had some concepts and ideas that looked interesting on paper. I figured I might genuinely enjoy it, and worst case scenario, it would be one of those horrible palate-cleansing games I described above. Heck, I even sort of enjoyed Assassin's Creed 3, and thought it had some great elements!
After completing it (the whole thing took about 13 hours), the worst case scenario indeed came to pass. ACL is horrible, and was clearly made on a tiny budget by a Ubisoft C-team. How? Let me break it down in more detail than this game really deserves:
* Aveline, the main character, is a half-French, half-African Assassin torn between cultures and loyalties. The setting, 18th-century New Orleans, is rich with opportunity for interesting themes. The game does basically nothing with either of these things. Both the character and setting are completely underdeveloped to an embarrassing degree.
* The story is bad in concept. I'm going to spoil it here:
the Templars are pretending to free slaves, but actually, they're shipping them off to Mexico to search Mayan ruins for powerful ancient artifacts.
* The story is also badly told. It's presented mostly through poorly-voiced cutscenes that are disjointed, expects the player to care (or even know) about characters that are newly introduced or barely mentioned, is riddled with plot holes, and is somehow both cliched and bizarre. Character motivations are non-existent, barely discernable, non-sensical, or super-weak. There's no concept of build-up and payoff; big revelations are outright stated in the in-game codex early on, then shown in late-game cutscenes as surprises.
* The game mechanics are bad, even by Assassin's Creed standards. The game has no challenge except fighting with the janky controls. Lots of mechanics boil down to "go here and press a button". For example, when Aveline is in her formal dress, she can act like a Southern Belle, go up to a guard, and charm the guard. Neat concept, right? Rich with potential gameplay possibilities, right? In practice, you go up to a guard, press the Charm button, and the guard follows you around for a minute. That's it, that's the mechanic. There are no interesting scenarios built around this. There are no emergent gameplay possibilities opened up by this. It's literally used twice in missions where the game explicitly tells you that you have to go up the guard, charm him, walk behind a building, and press a button to kill him. Basically all of the mechanics are like this, even ones that worked and were better-developed back in Assassin's Creed 2.
* The game has a cool-in-theory "Persona" system. Aveline can disguise herself as a genteel lady in a dress, a slave, or a combat-ready Assassin. Supposedly, each of these has gameplay advantages and disadvantages, and can entail different approaches to missions. Actually, the slave and Assassin disguises are virtually identical barring a few minor differences. The lady disguise is different only in that you can Charm (as described above), can't parkour, and can only use a couple of weapons. If the game didn't force you to switch disguises for scripted scenarios, there would be basically no reason to use one over another. The concept is nice, the reality is trash.
* I find most game music pretty good. It's rare that a game has outright bad music that I specifically notice. Even indie games, with their tiny budgets, often have excellent soundtracks. Well, ACL has outright bad music. It's a few super-simplistic tunes that sound like they're on 30-second loops. I think I remember one or two tracks being okay. The rest sound totally amateurish and thrown together under severe time pressure.
* The sidequest design...oh god. Assassin's Creed, as a series, has always had some trouble in this area. ACL is the nadir of the series, by far, and I'm including stuff like the DLC for Assassin's Creed 3 and Revelations in that comparison. It's just the laziest mission design I've ever experienced in an ostensibly mainstream game. There are the infamously bad AC tailing missions stripped of any challenge and that go on far too long. There are missions where you're supposed to go to a location, stab a dude, and then fight about 30 enemies. There are missions where you're supposed to go to a location, stab a dude, then sneak out, but you end up fighting about 30 enemies because the stealth/detection mechanics and enemy layouts are badly designed.
* Collectibles are almost never done well, even in generally good games. ACL has multiple sets of collectibles, most of which offer literally no reward and require no skill to get. They will appear on your radar when you get close to them (and not any other time), and you can pick them up. Other than manually walking across the game maps hoping one pops up on radar, or looking at a wiki, there's no way to deduce their locations.
* The in-game economy and trading systems are broken, boring, and based primarily on waiting for your ships to arrive in a port to unload their goods. There's nothing worth spending money on. You can spend money on ways to make more money, but why bother?
* The graphics are only good by Vita standards. Even HD-ified, the game is the worst-looking of all ACs. This actually isn't a big deal to me, but it might be to most people.
Pretty damning, right? The game's not 100% horrible. There are a few--not bright spots, but less grim spots:
* There are a few Prince of Persia/AC2 Assassin's Tombs-style bits in the Chichen Itza location. They're very bad compared to those games, but they stand out in ACL.
* Some environments are kind of nice-looking, despite the low-tech graphics. Again, Chichen Itza is a relative standout.
* Your journal entries start out as sanitized, censored Templar versions that paint the Assassins in a bad light and hide the bad stuff the Templars did. As you progress, you can unlock the real entries that modify your journal and tell the truth of what happened. Kind of a neat idea, that, as usual for this game, is very undercooked.
TLDR: ACL is bad.
That's it! My palate is cleansed, and now I'm ready for a good game again. Anyone else play this game? Am I off the mark? What did you think of it?
