Arkham World: The Tyranny of King Washington

The Tyranny of King Washington is an overpriced DLC in three installments for Assassin's Creed III (the American Revolution one.) It is amusing to play and the production values are high, but as alternate history it leaves much to be desired.

The Assassin's Creed series has always had an uncomfortable relationship with history. On the plus side of the ledger, there are so very few games that even attempt to give a ground-level, personal view of a historical period (the market in history is generally combat sims, which either give you a General's view, or let you ogle warplanes or tanks but never engage with actual people).

The Assassin's Creed series doesn't even go after the low-hanging fruit, having games set in Alexandria during the reign of the Ptolemy's or New Orleans during the French-Indian War. And their Age of Piracy game spent as much time on land and deep in politics as it did on the High Seas.

On the negative side; well, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag took the piss on itself by setting part of the game in a game company who are writing twisted, dumbed-down, player-friendly versions of the real events they witnessed through the techno-magic of the Animus. Liberation (a full-length, fully independent spin-off of the AC III core game) took it a step further by revealing that the game play experience is being sculpted as propaganda by the, well, the fictional secret rulers of the game universe. Ouroboros, take a bow.

Well, alternate history is the historian's playground. Historical fiction can be hard work. Alternate history, good alternate history, is harder. You really have to understand the period before you can work changes on it.

More, alternate history is really about how history has unfolded in a unique way. A story set in 1930's New York can be a love story, a detective story, whatever. A story set in an alternate New Amsterdam is going to be about why it is different and what those differences mean.

The Tyranny of King Washington does not deliver.

The first thing the game delivers, in fact, is another disappointment. In this history, Ratonhnhaké:ton did not leave his native village, train as an Assassin and take on the name Connor. Most of the first installment takes place in the frontier and involves multiple Mohawk characters. But what do we learn and experience that is new? Damn all. Ratonhnhaké:ton goes on a stereotyped Spirit Journey and gets magical animal powers. This is about as anthropological as the latest New Age book from a Plastic Shaman.

Even for the trite and the stereotyped, the game is not in any way designed to let you interact with the Mohawk people or explore the village. Trapping, tracking and hunting skills are still there, left over from the main game, but there is no reason to employ them. The game comes so close; the landscape is a surreal ruin of supernaturally deep snow, destroyed towns, dead bodies, and prowling wolves, and there is an option to feed starving locals. Which you could have hunted for some of the game which is, oddly and remarkably, still hopping about without a care in the world, except that there is insufficient benefit from it and you can get all the food you like just by ambushing soldiers and rifling their pockets.

And of course there is no exploration of what it means for George Washington to gain super powers and go mad. You meet Franklin and Jefferson and Adams, but they have no insight, no discussion; there is none of the frank conversation you had with any of these men in the main game. There aren't even interesting choices being made; Benedict Arnold, like so many, is simply and rudely brainwashed to follow Washington. There's no calculation, no lesser evil, no nuance. Just mechanics.

In a strange way it reminds me of Mass Effect III. This was after the excellent lead writer had left the company, and this may be why with the coming of the Reapers all the interesting human stories stopped. George Washington's army, like the Reapers, have plowed through everything as an unstoppable force leaving little but ruins and a small cadre of desperate survivors who can spare no thought for anything other than where to get gunpowder.

With no history to give, and no interesting side stories, and no interesting people to watch for more than a dramatic cut-scene, all that is left is the usual meat of running around from quest arrow to quest arrow killing whatever you encounter, and sometimes being forced by the script to play with some annoying special mechanic for a while instead of continuing to do the game play the game has been training and rewarding you with until then.

Ratonhnhaké:ton goes on a spirit journey three times. Each time he meets a different spirit animal and each time gets a different super power. The bear is the least unbalancing but also the most annoying in that it allows you to do a ground-pound attack like a small bomb. And the game then throws up endless doors and fences at you to force you to use your Bear Powers on instead of just climbing over them the way you normally would.

It is very Batman: Arkham style. Tomb Raider did this, too, which each new weapon you got causing extra-special doors to spawn in your path that oh-so-conveniently required that exact device to overcome. The Batman series did it well and made it satisfying. Tomb Raider less so. In Tyranny, it is merely annoying. Fortunately, there isn't much of it.

On the other hand, the Eagle allows you to, well, fly. Which means all the climbing and jumping might as well go away, since it is easier to just fly across the city. You fly so very well it is trivial to lose pursuit, making the entire Notoriety mechanic a waste of time. You can kill a squad of soldiers in broad daylight, take the money off their bodies, fly to safety, then swoop down to drop a hefty bribe in the hands of a town crier who makes the entire populace stop paying attention to the six foot tall Native American wearing face paint and the skin of a wolf who keeps turning into a bird and flying around.

And then there's Wolf power, which you get early in the first installment. Call up ghost wolf assassins, that's bad enough. But it also lets you do another thing which wolves are well known for; turn invisible. The only thing that keeps this from breaking the game completely is your health bar depletes quickly while the Cloaking Device is enabled.

The only good thing that can be said is that after playing the main game through you probably have your fill of free-running and wall climbing and those ultra-annoying stealth tailing sessions. But these new mechanics are so incredibly overpowered they don't become a new tool; they become all you do. And they aren't as interesting. The levels are largely imported from the previous game and aren't designed around the new mechanics.

Take assaulting a fort. Used to be you'd have to either laboriously sneak in through the gate, or fight your way through from a sally port. Now you just fly over the wall. Boom, done.

The only thing that keeps you from basically being a Marvel superhero at this point is that the game only allows one Special to be mapped to a key at a time. And me, I found back in the main game that the Rope Dart is the only special weapon or device I ever need. The heck with laying bait or whistling up a horse or even firing a flintlock. Rope darts stun every enemy, even the highest-ranking mooks that otherwise can't be attacked even with a counter-chain, and they drag the enemy to you where you can deliver a coup de grace. 

It is only the annoyance of fussing around with switching Specials that keeps you from swooping over a wall, dropping down with a Drop Bear to kill half the lot, then going Ghost Doggie to snipe the remainder. The game was, basically, so dirt easy at that point I pretty much went with just one Special and stayed within the limitations. Also, the Eagle Assassination is, if anything, even cooler than the Jump Assassination.

So all said, it is an amusing addendum to the existing game. But not worth the money it costs, not even at Steam Sale prices.