8. For A Stealth Game, The Stealth Sure Is Jank
And here, maybe my biggest problem with Assassin's Creed III: The stealth. The Assassin's Creed games are, ostensibly, stealth games. One of their oldest gameplay pillars involves your character blending into the crowd, striking, then vanishing into thin air.
And yet it never feels that way. Stealth in Assassin's Creed III is broken, plain and simple. This is best evidenced by an early mission in which you must sneak into an enemy encampment and steal intel without being spotted. If you're spotted, the mission ends, and you must restart it from the beginning. I failed this mission a good 20 times before finally succeeding, and I'd imagine I'm not the only one.
Here are the problems as I see them:
The camera positioning makes it difficult to see where everyone is, and despite the addition of an inconsistent corner-sticking ability, you mostly can't "stick" to cover and make yourself unseen
There's no "stealth" button, not even a crouch button, which means that you can't tell the game that you'd like your character to be stealthy. That means you'll frequently just stand right up while moving through the underbrush, immediately tipping off every nearby enemy to your location. It's maddening
Enemies don't appear to have a realistic line-of-sight, and can often see you from the strangest, most turned-around locations. I find myself playing more against the yellow arrows that have popped up at the side of my screen than against enemies I actually had any notion of when I started sneaking
Crowd-sneaking feels inconsistent to the point that I never even attempt it. The stealth feedback is just fundamentally flawed. I never attempt to sneak using a crowd, because it's almost impossible not to get spotted
Assassin's Creed III has also done away with the hireable helpers that made crowd-stealth more workable in past games. You can no longer hire courtesans and thieves to help you get past guards, giving you far less control over your work at street-level
Sneaking in the woods is almost impossible, as well. Everything is so spread out that there are rarely good "stealth pathways" between you and your target, and there's no good way to quickly traverse open areas without being spotted. Far more often, you'll have to kill everyone who spots you before proceeding. I wanted to be a ghost in the underbrush, and instead I'm a thug with a tomahawk
I've been playing a lot of stealth games recently. From Dishonored to Mark of the Ninja to Hitman: Absolution, which I'll be reviewing next week. All of those games, with varying degrees of success, have built-in systems that dovetail with the level design to make sneaking empowering, interesting, difficult, and fun. By contrast, Assassin's Creed feels like it has a stealth game's punishments without any of its necessary tools. It feels so clumsy. Connor is a constantly-spotted rube, a guy standing on a rooftop being yelled at by a guard.
