Assassin's Creed 3 - The Tyranny of King Washington Review

Despite the DLC giving me a very bad first impression with it bugging out on me multiple times during the first mission, I slowly started to warm up to the Tyranny of King Washington the more I played. I wouldn't call it "good" by any means but it does do enough differently from the base game to warrant me writing a review on it which I can't say for the AC4 Aveline DLC and Freedom Cry.

The Switch version that comes with AC3 Remastered isn't very good from a stablity standpoint on top of the questionable practice of the player needing to download it off the Nintendo Eshop instead of just coming with it the moment you finished downloading the base install. It's very glitchy and it crashed on me twice all though this DLC seems to run pretty poorly in general no matter what the platform.

What this DLC ultimately is cashing off the whole wacky and over the top content that Red Dead Undead Nightmare did. It's very much "follow the leader". Other examples include Infamous Festival of Blood and Far Cry Blood Dragon. However the fact that the DLC is separated into 3 episodes each ending on a cliffhanger where the story is wrapped up in the 3rd episode almost gives me shareware 90s first person shooter vibes like Doom 1993, Duke 3D and Blood.

As a whole, it inherits all the problems with the base game but there are some good things that standout about it.

First of all being George Washington. He's one of the better villains in the series in that he does a good job at being destable like killing Connor's mother and his friend or how he gets in Connor's way throughout the DLC and slowly starts to get more desperate the more the player foils his plans. He's also over the top and flamboyant which makes me want to see him fail that much more. He's one of the series' more memorable villains despite this not even being a mainline game.

Other positives is that you can now fast travel to mission start points since in the base games, one of the dull aspects about it was running to the next mission start point due to how much vast and empty land there is. Now just fast travel and you get to the point faster. This isn't a solution I would like but this is a DLC, you can't change the game fundamentally.

The powers are also pretty interesting, well mainly just the Wolf ability since and I'm not kidding here, this is the closest the series pre Unity ever had to a dedicated crouch button, it drains Connor's health but the fact that there is a reliable way to be sneaky at all is worth some praise, it makes the tailing and no detection missions more tolerable since now stealth doesn't borderline feel like a game of luck. Running from hidespot to hidespot as Connor's health regens while not amazing does make it feel like stealth in an AC game can somewhat be reliable, all though the dogs are annoying but they aren't as prominent as the Episode 1 of the DLC wants you to believe since only appear 2 or 3 times afterwards.

The rest of the abilties are nothing to write home about one is a teleport which helps during the chase sequences and it's nice that the game makes you use this in order to actually succeed in them and they help during some of the climbing sections particular the ending platforming guanlet.

Bear ability mostly just makes fighting large enemy waves much easier and it gets a little too easy to spam since Connor's health regens so fast but considering the amount of enemy fighting you will do and how combat isn't great, I'm kind of glad it's here.

Other than that, a big issue with Tyranny of King Washington is that here are guards everywhere and it's easy for you to get alerted and since you need to not be chased by guards to complete objectives or start missions, getting chased or getting the suspicion meter up was pretty annoying since I just want to finish the objective. I want to use fast travel but I might get alerted by enemies, this is at it's worst during Boston and New York, I'm not even sure there were any wanted posters for me to tear down to have the guards ignore me.

Overall, outside of the unstable nature of the game and the weird changes to the wanted system, I do think this the best DLC Assassin's Creed has ever done even if it's not saying much. Out of all the AC DLC, this one feels like there is enough different from the main game to warrant playing it.