The Assassin’s Creed franchise has had its fair share of ups and downs, but even when stumbling, each franchise entry is able to hold its ground to create a new and interesting experience. Liberation and its HD port fail to entertain as well as its big brothers in the 12 hour campaign.
For PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC (via Digital Download on all platforms)
Review Score: 2/5
This installment is based in New Orleans around the year 1770 and features the first female protagonist for the Assassin’s Creed franchise, Aveline de Grandpre. Aveline has an interesting background that deals with slavery and mixed cultural parents. Unfortunately, in a rushed storytelling experience, the depth of the character is quickly lost; a side effect from designing a portable game.
The gameplay is very much the same to previous iterations keeping movement and combat largely the same, but adds a new mechanic that allows Aveline to don new costumes that alter her abilities. A slave costume allows her to carry boxes and move around undetected; however, other costumes take away weapons and limit movements, diminishing their overall usefulness.
The game is also littered with bugs from its original PS Vita release.
Guards and enemies get stuck and confused in the map, combat movement lags at various points, movement detection is unpredictable as some guard will spot the top of your hat and others can’t see you in plain sight.
“Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD” bears the promise of high definition that disappoints. HD here means better lighting effects and that’s about it. Textures look like they belong to the very early PlayStation 3 games and on a bigger screen, pixilation and blurring are very noticeable.
Liberation HD should have stayed on the PS Vita, as it doesn’t offer anything particularly new to the lore of Assassin’s Creed. Bugs and stretched graphics take players out of the experience and what could have been a great story exploring social status, race and sex, is left on the back burner.
I’m sure this would have been a good title on a portable console, but playing it on a home console left me disappointed and wanting more, giving “Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD” a score of 2 out of 5.
