Assassin’s Creed III arrived in 2012 as the fifth major installment in Ubisoft’s long-running series, a direct sequel to Assassin’s Creed Revelations, and it did the one thing the franchise had never risked before: it threw away the Renaissance and started again. Ubisoft Montreal built a game about Colonial America, the French and Indian War, and the American Revolution, and then handed players two protagonists instead of one. It is ambitious, uneven, and frequently brilliant. It earns an 8.1.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
Haytham Kenway Opens the Story
The prologue runs three sequences and puts players behind Haytham Kenway, a British nobleman and high-ranking Templar sent to the colonies to establish his Order’s presence and find an ancient temple built by the First Civilization. He recruits allies. He eliminates a rogue associate. He falls in love with a Mohawk woman named Kaniehti:io.
That structure is the game’s smartest trick. You spend hours learning Haytham’s methods, his voice, his confidence — and then the game reveals what he is. It is a better twist than any of the series’ modern-day conspiracy reveals, because it costs the player something.
Ratonhnhaké:ton, Haytham’s half-Mohawk son, takes over from there. He witnesses his mother’s death during an attack on their village. He grows up under the retired Assassin Achilles Davenport and becomes Connor.
Boston, New York, and the Frontier
The world splits into three main areas: Boston, New York City, and a large wilderness called the Frontier. Roughly a third of the story takes place in the Frontier, which spans forest, cliffs, rivers, Connor’s village, and the settlements of Lexington and Concord. Philadelphia can be visited once. Portions of the Eastern Seaboard and Caribbean Sea open up during naval side missions.
Free running is simplified for more fluid parkour in cities and wilderness — climbing and running on trees, mountains, cliffs. Close combat lets Connor dual-wield and take down multiple opponents at once, and the lock-on mechanic is gone. He carries muskets, swords, pistols, a tomahawk, a bow and arrow, the Rope Dart used to pull foes or hang them from above, and the Assassins’ signature Hidden Blades. Human shields work against firing lines.
Stealth is revamped around natural cover. Tall grass and trees hide Connor. He can blend between any two people. Health recovers automatically, so medicine is gone.
Naval Combat and the Homestead
The naval missions are the genuine surprise. Connor captains a warship, and the game treats it as more than a minigame — the Eastern Seaboard and Caribbean become explorable space. Hunting, a homestead economy system, and seasonal weather that affects gameplay round out the additions.
| Feature | What it adds | How it holds up |
|---|---|---|
| Naval combat | Connor captains a warship across the Eastern Seaboard and Caribbean | The best new idea in the game |
| Hunting and homestead | Animal hunting plus a homestead economy system | Slower, but it builds the Frontier |
| Seasonal weather | Weather that affects gameplay | Ties the world to the calendar |
| Dual protagonists | Haytham for three sequences, Connor for two decades | The strongest narrative choice |
The Desmond Miles framing holds it together. In the modern day, Desmond uses the Animus to relive his ancestors’ memories, searching for a way to protect Earth from a solar flare on December 21, 2012. He finds a key that opens the inner chambers of a precursor temple and sacrifices himself to activate a device that shields the planet.
That ending is the series closing a loop it opened years earlier. It is also the last time the modern-day story carried real weight.
Connor Hunts His Own Father
Connor’s story spans two decades, from his childhood in 1760 to 1783, and drops him into the American Revolution as a participant rather than a spectator. He hunts the Colonial Templars. One of them is his father.
Over those twenty years he eliminates Haytham’s allies, learns that his mother’s death was ordered by George Washington rather than the Templars, and is finally forced to confront and kill Haytham himself. The Washington reveal is the sharper of the two. It refuses the easy version of the Revolution, where the righteous side is simply righteous.
The father-son confrontation is the game’s emotional center, and it works because Haytham was never written as a villain. He was written as a man with a different answer.
What Holds It Back
Assassin’s Creed III wants to be several games at once, and not all of them fit. The Frontier is huge and often empty. The homestead economy is a slow burn that pays off late or not at all. The opening three sequences ask a lot of patience before the game shows you what it is actually about.
The remastered version, released in 2019 for Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch, and in 2021 for Google Stadia, smooths some of the rough edges but does not change the shape of the thing.
What matters is that Ubisoft Montreal took a series built on Italian rooftops and moved it to a frontier, a warship, and a revolution, and had the nerve to make the player complicit in the villain’s story first. The naval combat alone justifies the trip. The Haytham prologue justifies the rest.
It is not the cleanest Assassin’s Creed. It is the one that tried the most, and most of what it tried stuck.
Get the Notebook.
The day's best stories and every fresh verdict, in plain English, in your inbox by seven. One email a day, no more.
