Assassin’s Creed Franchise, Part 2 – Liberation HD

Continuing my epic playthrough of the Assassin’s Creed franchise in my Steam backlog, so that I can be ready to … not buy Valhalla at launch and wait for a Steam sale some time in the future, like I do with every iteration of Assassin’s Creed. These blog posts are largely here to archive and expand on all the tweets I wrote.

(To be perfectly honest, this specific blog post is mainly here to test whether or not Tweetdeck is going to show an image on the automated tweet that Jetpack is going to create for this post. But that’s a whole different story.)

Last time, I replayed the games I’d already played. All of the remaining games are new to me.

Assassin’s Creed: Liberation HD (2012), May 26

Liberation HD was originally a PS VITA launch title in 2012, ported to the PC in 2014. I wasn’t expecting that much given it wasn’t really a tent-pole product, but I’m glad I played it because there have been many references to Aveline and her story later in the series. This was the first time that “Abstergo Entertainment” became the new focus of the modern-day story.

I started Assassin’s Creed Liberation. It’s okay. Mostly just running from cut scene to cut scene and listening to a lot of French [and/or Creole] accents, followed by button mashing.

Done with Liberation. It was okay. Inconsistent storytelling. Very little made sense. Sort of like a video game adaptation from a movie. Just kind of thrown together from bits of the IP. Overall, glad I only paid a couple bucks for it.

Liberation is a very short game. The “open world” aspects can be entirely skipped. Aveline is a great character, and there could have been a lot of meaningful story material here, but the subject matter was treated very superficially.

Memorable additions to the franchise: Blowdart Pipe, Abstergo Entertainment.

The “persona” concept in Liberation, where you change into different “disguises” to focus on different gameplay specializations, was an interesting idea but I don’t think it added very much.