
(Liberation, too, looks good with a new coat of paint, but I didn't find the effect isn't as dramatic. The frontier isn't nearly as breathtaking as the one Rockstar crafted for Red Dead Redemption 2, but it's almost on par with Ubisoft’s two most recent Far Cry games. The forests in the spring and summer are teeming with plant life, and the snow in the winter sparkles like its real-life counterpart. Outside the cities, the wilderness, too, has a new life about it. Wooden buildings, too, look magnificently lifelike thanks to grain and wear like you would expect to see on a stained, Colonial-style home.

Windows, while not actually transparent as they should be, have a frosted look that reflects the light and absolutely nails the imperfect window glass of the period. Wooden shingles on the roofs of houses and other landmarks in the cities look like they were individually hewn from cedar and the bricks making up much of the city look fantastic. The brick buildings and cobblestone streets of Boston are absolutely amazing in their new fidelity. “Everything that’s not alive in Assassin's Creed 3 now looks incredibly realistic (except for corpses, I suppose, which occasionally rag doll hilariously). It’s a nice touch by Ubisoft that everyone who bought the season pass for the excellent Assassin's Creed Odyssey gets AC3 Remastered for free. So while I'm glad to say Assassin's Creed 3 Remastered does do a great job bringing the appearance of this 18th-century world and its characters of this 2012 game up to 2019 standards, there's a lot of creakiness to it that even the gameplay tweaks it makes can’t entirely smooth out.The whole package includes all the DLC (including the Tyranny of King George trilogy about an evil George Washington), as well as Assassin’s Creed 3: Liberation HD (originally for the Vita) and extra behind-the-scenes content. Since then, our expectations for the series have been changed yet again by the RPG-influenced Assassin’s Creed Origins and Odyssey, which revamped combat control in a way that’s hard to go back from.

It was quickly overshadowed in 2013 by the follow-up, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, which remains one of my all-time favorites – but that’s in part because of how well AC4 built upon the naval combat concepts introduced by its Colonial predecessor.

A lot has happened to the Assassin’s Creed series in the seven years since Assassin's Creed 3 first came out.
