Small-sized open environments, rather than the giant, anxiety-inducing giant playgrounds that take hundreds of hours to cover, allow for a level of intimacy and recognition all but impossible to imagine for the likes of the most recent entries like Origins, Odysseyor Valhalla. Ten years later, playing through Liberation’s bite-sized missions, designed for quick handheld play sessions, feels like a breath of fresh air for the series.

These are two things the main games – with their increasingly bloated, endless worlds and female optional-at-best central characters, still have not matched to this day. As a benefit of being developed as a smaller-scale side project for Ubisoft teams in Sofia and Milan, it was somehow allowed to stray from the formula already firmly cemented in the mainline games.įor one, the protagonist is a woman – a revelation in itself – and she leads the charge through a concise 8-hour campaign. Released on the ill-fated Playstation Vita in 2012, before being ported to PC in 2014 and rebranded as downloadable content (DLC) for Assassins Creed III, Liberation sits at odds with the franchise as a whole. It’s an Assassins Creed almost lost to time itself: Assassin’s Creed Liberation.

A game that bucked series trends in several ways, weaving a tale that has become more perceptive of the times since, and one that has just as much to say mechanically as it does narratively.

The 30th of October 2022 marked a decade of one of the most interesting Assassin’s Creed games to date.

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