Assassin’s Creed Liberation HD, an HD remake of Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation for PS Vita, is a very good game - one that could’ve easily been great, had it been able to overcome some of its more severe technical limitations.
Still, you can’t fault Ubisoft Sofia’s and venerable game director Julian Gollop’s ambitions from both a narrative and gameplay standpoint. By eliminating the open-world escapades of the previous Assassin’s Creed titles, Liberation confines itself primarily to New Orleans and brief sojourns into Chichén Itzá and New York, allowing the title to focus primarily on the corrupt memory of Aveline de Grandpré, an unreliable narrator who imbues the franchise with something new and exciting.
Aveline is a young woman of bi-racial French and African descent, not unlike Nilin in Remember Me, who uses her gender, class and race as a means to carry out her duties as a member of the Assassin Brotherhood. While it contains gameplay mechanics that are largely standard for the series, it is Aveline’s triple status as a Lady, Slave and Assassin – roles that can be switched between in-game - which proves to be the real draw of Liberation.
These three personas each possess their own unique strengths and liabilities, and it is this gameplay mechanic that really allows for Liberation to stand out from its predecessor and provide a strong ludo-narrative. The story is engrossing, and your surroundings have as much personality as Aveline herself, and she’s a protagonist we hope to see more of as the series progresses.
The Assassin’s guise is the one that will be most familiar to players of other titles in the Assassin’s Creed series: free-running, stealthy kills, and a large selection of primary weapons such as swords and large axes give this persona an edge in combat and escape. However, Aveline’s notoriety – which dictates how easily an enemy will take notice of her - can never drop to zero.
This means that while Aveline can defend herself ably - and in fact is the only persona capable of chaining kills - she’ll also draw more attention from the guards posted around the city, which makes sense given her appearance. This contrasts heavily with the Ezio trilogy, where guards would completely forget who they were pursuing once the initial chase was over. In fitting with this more realistic approach, the Assassin persona’s notoriety can only be lowered from higher levels by bribing corrupt officials, which means being noticed costs a hefty bounty - a price that Aveline doesn’t have to pay as either the Lady or Slave.
In stark contrast to the Assassin persona, the Lady walks around New Orleans in an elegant dress, reflecting Aveline’s lineage as the daughter of a wealthy French noble conducting business in the Colonies. The Lady can run and fight adequately with her Assassin’s blades, but given her status as a noblewoman she can’t draw on primary or small weapons, and can’t climb buildings or other architecture to escape. This means that if she’s assaulted by guards or thugs, she’s more vulnerable to attack, something which is particularity true at night, where thugs will randomly attempt to rob her - a reflection of the social stratification present in New Orleans after the French and Indian War.
As the Lady, fighting her way out of situations - or performing witnessed assassinations in broad daylight - will cause Aveline’s notoriety to increase, making it more difficult to operate in the open. Her notoriety can only be lowered by killing witnesses - a risky proposition when you’re already being watched, but one that costs a lot less than bribing a corrupt official. Fortunately, the Lady persona is soon outfitted with a parasol which fires poison darts, allowing for stealthier kills that don’t draw much attention. However, the Lady’s main advantage is being able to charm vulnerable soldiers or guards into acting as temporary bodyguards, allowing Aveline to slip past sentry posts that would otherwise arouse suspicion or outright hostility in other roles.
Lastly, Aveline’s Slave persona occupies the middle-ground between the Assassin and Lady persona, and is likely the one to be used the most while free-roaming due to its relative anonymity. While in the guise of the Slave, Aveline’s notoriety will increase more quickly if she’s seen climbing buildings or assassinating enemies, but it’s also the most easily lowered via pulling down wanted posters, a throwback to previous series titles and one that makes sense when a dozen slaves or more occupy every corner of New Orleans.
Taking advantage of this increased anonymity, the Slave is able to blend in with other slaves scattered around the city by carrying boxes or sweeping the streets, actions which help her blend in with her surroundings more efficiently than simply standing next to a few people. At certain times, she can also incite riots among other slaves, an act which creates distractions and can allow her to slip past guards - but will inadvertently cost the lives of her fellow men, if the guards open fire.
Juggling these three different guises offers a truly interesting and unique way to navigate New Orleans, which allows its more contained setting to be more exciting to explore. You can take full advantage of the possibilities when Aveline takes on side missions to battle business rivals, help free slaves, or beat up unruly ship crews. The game stumbles, however, when it locks you into one persona or another during story missions, sometimes severely limiting your ability to complete the task at hand. This happens often during the early, more tutorial-focused missions of the game; but thankfully as you progress, these instances become few and far between.
In terms of the story and narrative arc, Liberation is a bit of a mixed bag. Many of the individual segments - including Aveline’s sojourns to the Bayou outside of new Orleans, the temples of Chichén Itzá, and the snowy tundra of New York with her inevitable team-up with Assassin’s Creed III protagonist Connor, work well; but unfortunately much of the narrative thrust is often difficult to follow, as character relationships and motivations are difficult to keep track of at best, and incomprehensible at worst.
Similarly to Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag, there is very little connection to the present-day narrative of Desmond Miles and the modern war between the Assassins and Templars. Instead, the game casts the player as an unnamed user of one of the newly-dubbed Abstergo Entertainment’s memory-machines, and the “brainwashing” of unreliable narration that this causes manifests in segments where you’re forced to kill the “Citizen E” programs, which show the player snippets of Aveline’s life in a different light - placing her more in line with the Assassins and less in league with the Templars.
While these segments generally do work in terms of narrative, other major connections that are tied to the Assassin’s Creed franchise tend to focus on the nonsensical. From a storytelling point of view, it feels as though the idea for the game was originally conceived as a title outside of the confines of this universe.
That being said, the dialogue and the twisting and turning plot is able to hold your attention for the relatively short amount of time that Liberation will take you to complete. With the campaign clocking in at around 12 to 15 hours depending on your speed and willingness to do side quests, this is a comparatively brief return to Ubisoft’s potted alternate history compared to previous games, but it remains engaging throughout despite occasional instances of frustration.
Additionally, the dialogue and the unpredictability of the plot is well-constructed, although the game’s biggest achievement by far is Aveline’s character. While you play as a female bi-racial protagonist, Aveline is never reduced to stereotype, and always comes off as a well-rounded, likeable, and intelligent character. Given the excellence of her characterization, it’s easy to forgive some of the more nonsensical aspects of the story and the writers deserve to applauded for their efforts.
The HD remake of Liberation allows for tighter controls than the game’s original release on the PS Vita, which managed to fit neatly alongside Assassin’s Creed III. With that comparison in mind, Liberation suffers from similar problems in terms of the way its combat is structured and its general bugginess and glitchiness, problems which could have been mitigated by having it spend a few more months in QA testing and debugging. These technical issues often break your immersion in the world, and hold the game back in terms of its mechanics. It’s difficult to counter when you want to counter, and fights are often completed by running away and causing enemies to open themselves up to attack.
Like the controls, there’s a lot of good and bad in the audio-visual aspects of Liberation. The textures and details of 18th-century New Orleans are impressive to say the least, and there’s plenty to explore in all of the other environments as well - which all feel fully-realized, despite the infrequency with which you visit them. Most of the voice acting and music are of high quality, with particular praise going toward the musical score; the one downside is the Spanish accents heard in the latter half of the game, which are laughably poor.
Despite persistent mechanical and technical problems,, Liberation brings a hugely engaging and interesting gameplay mechanic to the series, one that’s informed by Aveline herself, who ranks as one of the most well-rounded Assassins and certainly the best female character in the entire franchise. With that in mind, Assassins Creed Liberation HD may not be objectively the best Assassin’s Creed game, but it certainly has earned its place among a largely high-quality franchise, and Aveline is able to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Ezio, an accomplishment that isn’t to be sniffed at.
Daniel Horowitz
@horowitzcentral
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