Assassin's Creed Liberation Review: Good Ideas Squandered on Troubled Play

Assassin's Creed Liberation signifies the first time a portable entry in Ubisoft's history-simulation franchise has managed to go toe-to-toe with its console siblings. For all intents and purposes, Liberation is a faithful (if smaller) rendition of Assassin's Creed. Herein lies its greatest strengths and greatest weaknesses.

Let's focus on the good first. Liberation's game world presents the same sense of openness and scale as its HD counterparts. Set primarily in French New Orleans shortly before the American Revolution, it focuses on a chapter of U.S. history that tends to be overlooked in light of all that was happening in Philadelphia and New York around the same time. It also includes one of the few female protagonists to have appeared in the Assassin's Creed franchise. This brings more to the game than just a feminine sway to the hips; heroine Aveline is not simply a girl skin over Ezio and Altaïr's bodies. The social ramifications of Aveline's gender and social standing -- she's the mixed-race daughter of a wealthy merchant and a former slave -- play an integral role not only in Liberation's story but also its mechanics.

Aveline doesn't enjoy the same freedom to strut about the city as the previous heroes of Assassin's Creed, but she uses her role to her advantage. We've made joking comparisons between Ezio and Batman, but Aveline is the real deal: Wealthy socialite by day, costumed assassin by night, and not afraid to go underground in disguise to snoop. More than a costume, each of Aveline's "personas" comes with its own special abilities and limitations.

As a lady of high society, she wears a corset, bustle, and plunging neckline that prevent her from engaging in wall-climbing shenanigans or any real combat. Dressed as a slave, she can climb and fight, but can only carry small weapons easily concealed about her person and has to avoid drawing attention to herself. And while the assassin guise represents her at her most capable, she's permanently "notorious," so guards will immediately recognize her as a criminal and attack, forcing her to choose her routes through the city with caution.

Yet with each of these drawbacks come boons as well. The slave is essentially anonymous and can blend into the background most easily, slipping past guards by being too unremarkable to notice. The lady persona allows Aveline to go anywhere in society, bribe guards, and charm gentlemen. This last feature is particularly interesting, as it functions not unlike Ezio walking around with courtesans in the ACII trilogy, except inverted. Aveline doesn't stroll around with an entourage of men who coo and giggle at all around them; rather, a single courtier will tag along behind her like a smitten puppy and fight off anyone who troubles her.

And, of course, there are plenty of people who will trouble Aveline, because Liberation employs the same annoying, contrived elements as every other Assassin's title. That means you'll constantly encounter things like the knots of three men who stand around talking and ignoring everyone else in the city, yet who are drawn to Aveline like iron filings to a magnet the instant she walks past. Rather than asking for money or strumming a lute like the beggars of yore, these guys take a more disturbingly aggressive approach by physically assaulting her, grabbing her by the arm and shoving her back and forth. And, as in previous games, it could be a convincing game element -- an unnerving, sexually tinged assault -- if it happened in moderation. The problem is that the exact same trio of thugs appears all over the place and does the exact same thing over and over, and always only to Aveline, revealing the utter artifice of the entire thing and rendering it a tiring nuisance.

Therein lies the problem with Liberation: Despite its fresh new setting and thoughtful application of the social dynamics of the colonial-era South, it's still the same old game that we've played four or five times already. It runs on the series' essentially automated engine in which playing basically consists of pointing yourself in a direction and running while holding down X and R. As usual, this allows you to effortlessly navigate the environment but comes at the expense of making fine controls unreliable at best. Anyone who has played an Assassin's game knows what's up: You'll have missions blown by the game's decision to do the wrong thing at the wrong time. My most mind-boggling Liberation moment came when I attempted to perform a ledge-grapple on the guy standing a foot away from where Aveline was hanging unseen. Even though I had my victim highlighted, the game interpreted my attack on him as a command to perform a plunging assassination on the guy 150 feet below. All those automated moves look cool, but I don't need awesome scripted bullet-time cutscenes as I go about my business; I just want to play, and Liberation's interface hinders that effort at crucial moments.

Like all Assassin's Creed games, Liberation is incredibly fun to play until you actually start participating in the story missions. Simply roaming the city and swamp offers a wonderful exercise in exploration, sight-seeing, and generally goofing around in history's sandbox. But once you jump into a memory, you'll follow a breadcrumb through some of the most rigid yet poorly explained examples of poor game design clichés in the industry. Aveline's first few quests consist of awkward stealth missions, escort missions, and tailing missions. It's almost as though Ubisoft Sophia carefully studied the game tropes that people hate most and said, "Yes, let's do all of those." I half-expected an ice level or auto-scrolling mine cart stage... though come to think of it, the infuriating reprise of Revelations' god-awful runaway carriage scenario midway through the story is the Assassin's equivalent of a mine level. Oh, and there's the mine escape sequence, which is one of the most sloppily executed pieces of video game I've ever had the misfortune to suffer through.

The problem with Liberation is that it's content to dwell on the same old game design ideas that have come to define the franchise in a year where it's up against two top-caliber games about sneaking and assassination. The almost-revolutionary social stealth of the first AC has largely been forgotten, and the assassination missions are basically just a matter of following a marker to the next waypoint for an almost instant win. Compared to the exquisite tension of Dishonored and the genuine freedom to slip invisibly into a crowd of people and chose one of any number of methods for completing a hit in Hitman: Absolution, the Assassin's Creed style feels disappointingly flat and automated. The series has only grown more restrictive and hand-holding over time, rendering its famous creed -- "Nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted" -- an increasingly empty promise.

ability to control an Islamic holy warrior against armies of Catholicism. Despite being set in the plantation-era South, its take on slavery comes off as bizarrely antiseptic. You won't hear a single racial epithet or (outside of an auction in the opening cinematic and a very tiny number of random beatings that Aveline can interrupt in town) even see the wealthy white looking down on their slaves. Slavery definitely exists in the game; the mysterious disappearance of slaves is at the heart of Aveline's quest. But the writers' apparent reluctance to depict the true ugliness of the American slave trade ultimately serves to weaken the heroine's vigilantism. This is the Saturday morning cartoon version of the antebellum South.

The game would also be much better without the stupid Sony-mandated Vita gimmicks, many of which simply don't work. Even with a bug-fixing day-one title update, I had to reset my system several times when the game stopped recognizing rear touch-panel input, leaving me incapable of advancing beyond these distracting sequences. The touch nonsense was a figurative game-stopper in Uncharted: Golden Abyss, but here it's much more literal in nature.

Despite all of this, I love portable gaming, and simply having an authentic take on Assassin's Creed to play on the go helps makes up for the flaws. I can't give Liberation a glowing recommendation, but between its small-screen ambition and thoughtful take on navigating the social waters of its setting as a woman, I see a real glimmer of creativity here. Liberation doesn't live up to its potential, and in many ways it amplifies some of Assassin's Creed's longstanding issues, but how many games let you play a high society spy pretending to be a French-American plantation slave in order to topple a plot by the Templar Knights? And while you're on the bus, no less? For better and for worse, Liberation condenses the true essence of Assassin's Creed -- its strengths and weaknesses alike -- into portable form.