Assassin's Creed III: Liberation (2012) was originally a PlayStation Vita game. A year and a half later it was re-released on more powerful platforms as a beautified version, titled Assassin's Creed Liberation HD. And then, years later the game was included in Assassin's Creed III Remastered likewise as a Remastered version. I have a feeling the HD and Remastered versions are identical apart from online features having been removed from the latter.
A competent, easier-to-grasp spin-off
Because of the platform AC Liberation was on originally, I had very tempered expectations when going in. I knew the game was going to be simpler and have a smaller scale than the mainline games. Probably thanks to that, Liberation met my expectations, and even surpassed them in some ways.
AC Liberation takes place almost concurrently with AC3, and there's even one mission with a Connor cameo. Liberation's primary location is Spanish-occupied New Orleans in Louisiana. You play as Aveline de Grandpré who is the first woman protagonist in the series, I believe. Her father is a wealthy French merchant while her currently missing mother is a freed African slave.
There is a slight disconnection, ludonarrative dissonance, between the gameplay and the story. At one point, Philippe de Grandpré gives Aveline a page from her mother's diary. You can find the rest as collectibles around the maps. They don't appear to be diegetic, however --- or Aveline doesn't read them -- because they reveal a twist that Aveline doesn't see coming. Makes her look kind of dumb and naïve.
Some novel features
Aveline's dual heritage is reflected in gameplay: she can dress as three different personas who each have access to slightly different means for assassin business. Aveline's public-facing persona is the Lady who can't do parkour in her dress and is limited in her carried weaponry. Instead she can charm and bribe, and eventually gets a parasol gun that allows her to take out targets in public completely incognito.
Finally, the Assassin persona has access to all the usual tools of the trade. The downside of being in the persona while in the city is that she always has one level of notoriety, which means guards will notice her even outside restricted areas. She's free to run on roofs without accruing notoriety though.
I quite enjoyed the persona mechanic. In a full-sized AC game, having to change the persona at dressing chambers might get annoying but for this smaller scale title the feature stayed novel enough.
It shows that the game was designed to be played in shorter sessions on a handheld device. Missions aren't long and goals are simple. 100% sync takes far less effort than in the mainline games. Liberation tried to serve some curve balls with "take no damage" sync conditions at the end but I still remembered how to manage those from AC Revelations: smoke bombs.
Enemies don't have AC3's full set of archetypes, though, so you don't have to be as careful with which counterattack combo you use. I found it odd that there is a special, time-pausing chain kill ability when the game also has the same chain kill mechanic as AC3. Outside the tutorial, I never found a need to pause the game like that.
The few new things include a whip. The whip can be used in combat as well as parkour, at select few spots to swing across a gap. I wish the city map had more of such spots. It would've been nice to have it allow some shorter parkour routes, for instance.
There's no modern day sections in AC Liberation. Instead you're a consumer enjoying an "Abstergo Entertainment" product. The memories have been altered a bit, to hide the actual events involving Templars. By killing few special NPCs throughout the game, you can unlock the true ending. It doesn't really affect the storyline of the Assassin's Creed franchise, though -- it is indeed a spin-off, rather than a mainline title. But the similar in-universe style continued more involved in the following game, Assassin's Creed IV Black Flag, in whose present time you're an Abstergo employee.
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