Assassin's Creed Liberation Remastered (PS4) Review

 Assassin's Creed Liberation Remastered (PS4) 2/10

I can't bother myself to put a quote from the game here, so here's a quote from me: "This game is so fucking stupid." I lost track of how many times I said that.

Hello everybody and welcome to one of the worst fucking games I have ever played! AC Liberation was originally made for the PlayStation Vita, then ported to the PS3 as part of the Americas Collection, and then "remastered" for the PS4 alongside Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered. I say "remastered" because the game looks slightly better than the PS3 version but still looks like shit and performs worse. I had played this game before (the PS3 version) many years ago and it was one of my worst gaming experiences ever. When I started working through the AC series, I dreaded the day I would have to start this game. Anyway, let's get on with this shit show.

Our story follows Aveline de Grandpré during the mid 1700's in New Orleans. Her whole mission is to end slavery in the south (you can imagine how well this goes lmao). To do this, she has to end the Templar threat in the area. Leading a secret life from her adopted parents, she and her Assassin brothers Gerald and Ágate will try to do this while trying to keep Aveline's secret life a secret. To help with this, she will don different personas that will outfit her with special ways of dealing with situations.

This story is boring. It tries so hard to be a mainline title but fails miserably. The story is boring, the characters are boring, even the setting is boring. How the fuck do you make a place like New Orleans boring? It's one of the most culturally rich areas on the continent. Anyway, Aveline has to be one of the most boring protagonists I've seen in a while. Sure she gets shit done and tries not to prattle, but her personality sucks. I know I sound like a broken record, but it's true. This whole game is half boring, half infuriating. I'll get to that second half in a little bit.

I highly doubt any of you are going to play this piece of shit, so I'm going to spoil plot points. The game doesn't start to get interesting until you meet Connor, which is near the end of the game. [Sidenote: despite my feelings about Connor, he's still such a badass. Fighting alongside him is easily the highlight of the entire game. End sidenote.] So the entire time, Aveline is looking for "The Company Man", which is the source of the Templar influence in the region. Turns out this man is actually a woman and it's her stepmother to be precise. This reveal was awful and the game tried to make it like Al Mualim's reveal. As the game progresses, Aveline finds a Piece of Eden and she tries to discover its secrets. At the end of the game (true ending), Aveline kills her mother and unlocks the disk's secrets. It has something to do with Eve rebelling against the First Civilization, but idk what this has to do with Aveline besides her own story about ending slavery. I see the connection, but it doesn't work. The main problem with the story is that it can't tell its story in a competent way. Any "meat" to the story feels very shallow, rushed, and uninteresting.

Let's talk about Gerald for a second. This guy is so fucking annoying. He himself I don't really have a problem with, but his dialogue is the issue. He seems to have this speech impediment in which he constantly says ugh, er, erm, like he's trying to figure which word comes next. I know this ties into the French language, but holy shit just get to the fucking point.

There's also Ágate, Aveline's mentor. This guy is dumb as fuck and should not be an Assassin mentor. There's a moment where Aveline spares the life of one of her targets when Ágate specifically says to kill him. Knowing that he's not going to be a problem in the future, Aveline spared him. Ágate gets all up in her face saying "I never should have trusted you" and shit like that. He should've trusted her judgment and praised her for making a judgment call like that. This would've saved us the shitty boss fight with him later on in which he was trying to copy the Al Mualim boss fight from AC 1. Ágate is a horrible mentor and I'm glad he killed himself.

The main villain, The Company Man aka Madeleine was a shitty villain. She was this invisible hand that eluded Aveline and while this is a good concept, Madeleine's execution was trash. She became another basic villain with no charisma. Easily the worst villain in the series so far.

And of course we can't forget Aveline herself. Earlier I said she was boring. She's boring because she doesn't learn anything. Sure she had an arc about her questioning the Brotherhood, but it's not really touched upon. She talks to Connor about it and he basically says "I take things into my own hands". It works for Connor, but Aveline needed some reassurance into the Brotherhood. What Connor said can easily be misinterpreted into leaving the Brotherhood. This concept won't be explored until Rogue. I really wanted to like Aveline but by the end of the game, she gave me nothing of worth, honestly making her whole story not worth it at all, even if we were to connect this to AC Black Flag.

Enough about the story. Before I get into gameplay and graphics, I have to talk about the technical issues. I thought AC 3 was bad but this game takes the fucking cake. This game has different technical issues compared to AC 3. At least in AC 3, all the problems were minor/manageable. In Liberation, I suffered through crashes, clipping, and swimming through the air. All of these are much more severe than clothes not rendering or enemy pop ins. When I first started up the game, during the opening cutscene, my game crashed! After I finished the first sequence, my game crashed again! The swimming through the air thing got me stuck in midair and I had to restart the game! I would much rather deal with AC 3’s problems than this bullshit. There's also texture failures, unresponsive controls, difficulty spikes, glitched trophies, and a couple of other things. On a technical level, this game is a fucking mess.

Aesthetically, the game looks boring af. Sure there's that famous New Orleans flare once in a while, but the rest of the city looks bland. The bayou is even worse. Chichen Itza looks decent I guess. And the sound design is awful. The voices for the characters all sound so uninspired (except Ágate. I like his voice). Aveline sounds like she just doesn't want to be there. Gerald is annoying with his French accent and his shitty dialogue.

Music kinda sucks too. The start menu sounds like the VR main theme from Brotherhood and the pause menu sounds like loud, annoying drones that's reminiscent of AC 1 but worse. What original music there was got annoying very fast. The theme for New Orleans was cool at first but it just keeps playing over and over again. The fucking flute for the bayou was really annoying too. The battle theme sounds more like I'm at a ball than an actual fight. The entire soundtrack is ass.

Onto gameplay. With every AC game, you have an open world map to explore, collectables to collect, and optional objectives to complete. Because of how ass this game is, I could not for the life of me push myself to do every collectable and side mission. At first I was playing normally, but as the game's issues continued, I just wanted to be done with the game. The level design for both New Orleans and the bayou are ass, especially the bayou. Like I get that swamps are suppose to be hard to navigate in, but I'm here to have fun, not kill myself. Also, how the fuck do you expect me to find all the collectables when you hide them on the map and only have them pop up when I'm close to them? And with the layout of these two maps, getting to these collectables was much more of a chore than it needed to be. With the past AC games, you can purchase a map to find these things or if you scan an item with your eagle vision, it'll be marked on your map. That's not a thing in Liberation, which sucks. I didn't even bother with the optional objectives in this either, which were also unnecessarily hard.

So in this, they brought back the ledger from AC 3. Why!? I didn't even bother with this either. I used it once and that was for story purposes. It's much easier to loot treasure chests than this damn thing.

So what makes this game so unique compared to all the other games is the persona mechanic. Aveline can take on different identities to suit her needs. She has three different personas: Lady, Slave, and Assassin. With the Lady persona, she will gain notoriety the slowest and can easily roam about New Orleans, but she can not parkour or use swords. She also has a parasol gun, which is cool. With the Slave persona, she can parkour, use a small weapon, roam New Orleans and the bayou, and is given special blending if she works alongside other slaves. She's a good middle ground between Lady and Assassin. With the Assassin persona, you'll always be 25% notoriety no matter what. You can parkour freely and have access to all of your weapons. She also has a special ability called Chain Kill. You can target a set amount of enemies within your striking range and you can kill them instantly. I only used this once because you need to fill a meter to use it.

Another unique thing about the game is CitizenE. If you find this special citizen and kill him, you'll unlock an alternate cutscene. This is to help cement the idea that Abstergo is changing history to fit their agenda. If you find all of these, then you'll unlock the true ending (where you kill Madeleine) instead of the fake ending where you join the Templars. This was actually a very interesting concept and I wouldn't mind something like this being implemented in the future.

Overall this game is fucking garbage. Stay far away from this game. Because this is a side game, you don't need to play it for the greater story of Assassin's Creed. This game only exists to help showcase Abstergo Entertainment and is a prologue to Black Flag's modern day story. There’s a lot of technical issues, the story is trash, gameplay sucks and combat is repetitive, and music sucks. There's no reason for this game to have this many problems considering this game was ported 2 times to major consoles. I hate this fucking game and I'm never touching it again.

Thanks for reading and I'll be seeing you next time.

This is Zorgak, signing off.