Its been two months since
my last Switch Game review(s) so its time for another one!
Oh, ain't I ambitious, I played another game too, right after that one and I beat it in only three days. If anything, I've been waiting for the site back so I could shit all over Assassin's Creed Liberation (remastered version.)
So yeah, when I played the Assassin's Creed 3 remaster I noted that it came with Rogue, which I was going to set aside and play later. Well, its been a bit and I was between games so its time to go through and finish that purchase off. So a little history for those who can't remember. AC Liberation was a contemporaneous release to 3, set in colonial Louisiana. The big "twist" was that rather than being a PS360 release, it was a Vita game. It was one of a slew of games that took advantage of the power of the Vita (which means Life!) to provide a similar, but lesser, experience to the full console release.
So how does it stack up compared to 3? Well its a smaller, lesser version of it, with both the small town life simulator aspect (the part I liked) stripped out and nothing added to replace it. The city of New Orleans is tiny and lacks notable buildings to climb (much like real life 1770s era New Orleans), the bayou gets it even worse, feeling more like a Banjo Kazooie level than an open world and the third area you go to is practically nothing. The story itself was probably fine but, to be honest, I listened to podcasts during it and at the halfway point, upon realizing that I had no idea why the character was doing what she was doing, I started skipping the cutscenes entirely because at that point fuck it.
The game also lacks visual impressiveness, with at least one set of textures being blatantly mis-aligned to the ones adjoining it. The game also has what I can only assume are a bunch of bugs with character climbing, resulting in your character being unable to climb things that she damn well should and one notable bug that results in you being unable to climb out of water while in a disguise. Speaking of which, I think I got more hard crashes in this game than I have playing any other Switch game, I'm tempted to say that AC:L would eat up 40 percent or more of a pie chart showing all of my hard crashes.
I have a lot of other negative things to say about this clunker too, like how the trading minigame was an unrealistic time sink, and how it wouldn't load as an option half of the times you walked into a store, forcing you to leave and re-enter it. Or how the game did not fundamentally get how to make the game feel like New Orleans, or even what a bayou actually is. Or how loading up your map takes a second and a half too long. Or how you don't even get to assassinate people in the game. Its half escort missions and half tailing missions with only the very basics of occasionally killing a directed person- with those usually being side-content killing generic business leaders or unnamed templars.
Anyways, as a free piece of side content to Assassin's Creed 3 its a good ten or so hours of extra content that I would encourage fans to play but it fails to stand on its own two feet. I've played six Assassin's Creed games over the past decade or so and this is certainly the worst of them.
For its own merits I give it a 0 out of 2.
edit:
Bonus Mini-Review: I purchased Hotline Miami collection and played about five minutes of it. The game looks awful up-scaled to a television, as opposed to a tiny computer screen, and gave me a headache with its flashing lights in the opening cut-scene. Also the default button mapping is fucking weird. Both easily forgivable. Asking you to control your character's direction by having the right stick control a mouse reticule? Unforgivable. 0 out of 2. Unplayable without a keyboard and mouse.
gbatemp.net
