By now, most of you game enthusiasts would’ve seen the trickle of promos for Assassin’s Creed III. You’d also know why it bears the number ‘three’, despite being the fifth game in the series. Just for the uninitiated, here’s a quick refresher — the first game was set in the middle of the Crusades. Except that it wasn’t. The actual game was set in modern times, with the protagonist Desmond reliving the memories of his ancestor Altair during his life amidst the Third Crusade, using a Matrix-style jack-in machine called the Animus.
Twists follow, confusion ensues, and it turns out that the organisation that has employed Desmond is a modern day incarnation of the Knight’s Templar, and they apparently have nefarious plans for the information that Desmond is collecting during his trips down memory lane.
So in Assassin’s Creed II, Desmond is broken out of his facility by the Templars’ age-old adversaries, the titular Assassins and taken to their hideout. Turns out they too have a state-of-the-art Animus lying around, and he gets to go for a fresh set of memory trails, this time inhabiting the memories of Ezio, another of Desmond’s ancestors based in Renaissance-era Italy.
Ezio’s tale is a stirring epic of hubris, tragedy and redemption through killing a whole lot of bad dudes, so I guess they felt they needed a trilogy to do it justice. Consequently, Brotherhood follows his journey to Rome, and Revelations rounds it up with his sojourns in Constantinople, while letting you relive more of Altair’s missions.
And that’s why Assassin’s Creed III technically has four games that precede it. But what of the game itself? It looks like memory clock’s been wound forward a couple of centuries again. This time, the ancestor that Desmond will be examining is a half-Native American, half-British man named Connor. I could mention his native name, but then I’d hit this article’s word limit trying to explain how to pronounce it.
As you were probably expecting, the game’s set during interesting times — the American Revolution, to be precise. With so many factions jostling for a foothold in the new world, it’s a safe bet that there are going to be plenty of opportunities for an assassin to ply his trade. So far, we know that they’re going to feature the cities of New York and Boston, as well as an expansive wilderness called the Frontier, where Connor gets to climb trees and hunt animals. Since those heartless people over at Rockstar haven’t bothered to make a PC version of Red Dead Redemption, this will have to satisfy my rusticating gaming needs.
But there are still many questions that need answering. Will Connor be using his cool tomahawk exclusively against the British? Or does his Native American heritage give him cause to go after the French and the Yankees as well? Was George Washington a templar? Did the KKK base their uniform on Connor’s outfit? And most importantly, what’s happened to Lucy! I guess we’ll have to wait till October to find out. Or if you’re a PC gamer, somewhat later.