Liberation tries quite hard and it's an amibitous attempt to recreate a full-fledged Assassin's Creed experience on a handheld, but it falls a bit flat. Part of this is down to its three main world areas being either dull or finicky to explore, and the lack of engaging content outside of the main story doesn't help either. Aveline is an intriguing protagonist as she exists in a powerful liminal space, existing as an Assassin but one who struggles with her mentor, a member of the nouveau riche in a society that wants to ostracize her for her race, and as a free woman when every other black person she meets is enslaved, but the story doesn't make effective use of this and prefers to focus on a tepid iteration of the usual Templars v Assassins conflict.

The PSVita had many games that are now considered underrated gems among those who played them. Most of the major franchises visited the platform to at least put out a spin-off title on the system. Assassin's Creed did something similar with the PSP with AC: Bloodlines and now did it again with Assassin's Creed: Liberation.

Liberation was offically a spin-off title called Assassin's Creed 3: Liberation, but later on the 3 vanished from the title and became it's own thing, getting released on consoles and on PC as well.

Liberation features Aveline, the first playable female assassin in the franchise, who wants to free slaves and run her father's business as well. Balancing between being an assassin and a lady is hard for her, but her father and friends help her to achieve her goal to become a full blown assassin and freedom fighter.

Let me tell you, that the story is awful just as much as the character of Aveline. Aveline is a somewhat "Batman wannabe" character type, who needs to balance between her rich daytime with the awful amount of assassinations in the night or afternoon. It pains me to see the brotherhood portrayed like this as she feels like a parody of some sort. Even the cinematics feature this awful comic book style music making them even worse.

There are at least fresh additions such as new areas, some new tools like the whip and the ability to swim under water (in certain areas). These things are rather dull but at least it is something new. Speaking of new things, the game features a persona system, where Aveline can change her outfit in order to become a lady, an assassin or a slave. These outfits provide benefits such as... lower notoriety? Yeah, they do barely anything, it is just a gimmick. You can sometimes charm certain people with the lady outfit or pick up a box as a slave to sneak around guards but that is it.

Liberation is a competent but dull and awfully written game that even features cameos from AC III, which feels really wrong after playing through that game. This game also crashed like 3 times but thanks to the short length of the whole thing, it did not bother me.

A boring, dull, unimaginative and utterly pointless entry in the franchise, which is playable but you will get nothing out of it.

Bro what the fuck, people are sleeping on this game big time. No naval combat, 3 completely different maps with such different vibes, ACTUALLY DECENT CHARACTERS AND WRITING, detection fixed, climbing puzzles are finally back instead of being "hold freerun", the story doesn't waste your time with filler bullshit (although it does get too fast and abrupt at points due to what I imagine were budget issues?), the disguise system is cute but it's definitely nothing to write home about, this also had SO FEW BUGS COMPARED TO AC3! I'm sorry, this shit was way more enjoyable for me than AC III and I will die on this hill.

I got this as part of the Assassin's Creed III Remasterd package, but somehow feel that this one needs its own entry; Liberation was developed for the Playstation Vita, a handheld console, and as such it is much smaller and more limited than the main titles. Yet, it is also not just a DLC for Assassin's Creed 3, even though they came out the same time, and (as far as I know) use the same engine.

Being it's own game, it gets its own setting: We're in the "French and Indian War", which in Assassins Creed III only gets touched in the Epilogue - were in New Orleans, Louisiana - the south of America - a french colony that gets attacked by the Spanish. Aveline de Grandpré is an african-french nobel born female of a rich trader; who had a child with his slave, Jeanne. The mother disappears and Aveline grows up with her father and his wife Madeleine de L'Isle; and soon gets discovered by a Voodoo priest Agaté who helps here become an Assassin. In this game, Aveline's main objective is finding out what happened to her mother. But she's also caught between the war of the Assassins and Templars, the defense of the city against the Spanish and her second agenda: freeing slaves.

This game does a few things different than other AC games before: The Assassins are not shown as the perfect order; Agaté has his doubts and does mistakes, and Aveline even has to work against him. However, he is no Templar (different to AC). Also it is the first time, we get to play a female Assassin. She got her own unique sword fighting system, which according to rumor was so good that it only afterwards got adapted to AC III. She also introduces the chain kill ability - something that we'd see reappear in games much later. And besides that she also introduces the Berserker dart, which in my humble opinion is one of the best weapons to have. We also get a much more complex trading system that needs you to pay attention. You could not only make bad trades by buying and selling goods at the wrong places - you can even make a loss. Besides the city of New Orleons we also get to play in the Bayou and there's even an "out mission" in Chichén Itzá - an old Maya city that is located on Yucatán - Mexico. This leads to an interesting mix of colonial french life, Bayou Voodoo cult and ancient Maya culture. Plus, there is a little bonus - she also get's an "out mission" in New York where she stumbles upon Connor; a small "fan favour" mission. Aveline is also the very first character that is not connected to Desmond; instead you as the player are the person in the modern-day, playing a game Abstergo invented by utilizing the DNA from Subject 1; the goal of Abstergo is not to find anything new, but actually make the Templars look good and the Assassins bad. But you got a hacked version of the game, which - similar to the glitches in previous games - will show you the changes when you find the data packages those hacker left behind.

However, the feature that is most unique for AC: Liberation and which - unfortunately never got picked up again afterwards - was her stealth and clothing system. Being situated in so many different "cultures" Aveline has a set of three different clothes: Her typical Assassin clothing which gives here the most range of movement and weapons, but also the most attention form guards and people around here.

But being of noble decent, Aveline also learned all the ways of the Lady and even has access to expensive dresses. Wearing those, she wasn't able to move the way she could as Assassin, and also she doesn't have access to nearly all here weapons. But she looses all notoriety, can move around more freely in restricted areas, flirt with guards to get access to areas you couldn't otherwise access, etc.

Last but not least there is the slave persona - dressed up as a slave she is not noticed at all - and when she is, she has easy ways to get out of visibility, by picking up a broom or carrying crates. She can move around "mostly" freely except for when slave guards are around, she has her full range of motion but of course no access to most of her weapons (but more than with the Lady persona - especially the ever so important Assassins Blade).

Not only do all three outfits let here access different areas, and need her to work with different strategies - but also the actions that make here notorious differ - as do the ways to loose notoriety again.

All in all I really enjoyed this part of the game and I am really disappointed, that it has never picked up again until now.

While all of this sounds really great, the main issue I have with this game, is that you'll see it's not a main title. Everything is much smaller, the story much shallower, and the overall game time is also really short; I cannot see any hours logged for the game, but it took me less than a week to complete the game, and that includes finding all the collectable things that are hidden in the maps. This also leads to a smaller range of usage of all the abilities that I mentioned. E.g. while it is cool that you can switch cloths and have different approaches on the missions, it would have been nice to actually have different choices to do a mission - maybe something like: "I need to kill target person": Possibility 1: I access through the slave entrance, work my way through the kitchen, etc. and get different challenges but also opportunities, as opposed to Possibility 2: I work myself in as a guest being the Lady. The reality for the game is this: "Kill target person, but you can only enter as slave". So while there could have been great potential to give you different play-styles and have different experiences and challenges, in reality you only get one way of doing things anyways, so it's rather dull, even though the idea is great and could have had so much potential.

Then again - and that's what makes it so hard for me to take into account: It's not really a main game, it wasn't intended for the main platforms that all other main games are published for, it's a mobile game - similar to all those iOS and Android games. And on that level, I think it might be an incredible game (I cannot judge it on that level though, as I never owned a Vita and have no references to other Vita games).

In the end I think it's a game worth playing - today you'll get it for free with AC III, it's treated as an DLC (which it never was - but if it where, then it is a much better DLC than most of the other DLCs), and it fits perfectly between AC III and Black Flag - so for any other competitionist out there: Give it a try; view it as a DLC and you won't be disappointed.