It's a curious time to rerelease Assassin's Creed: Liberation. The one time PlayStation Vita exclusive takes the series back to a much simpler and understandably smaller scale than last year's Assassin's Creed 4: Black Flag and runs the risk of turning new fans off from the series. That being said though, Liberation is easily one of the titles to benefit most from the recent HD re-release craze - the game looks (mostly) fantastic and the controls have been given an upgrade. Some of the game's nagging issues go untouched here, but that shouldn't stop fans of the series from checking out a chapter they may have missed.

Originally released as a sort of side-dish to Assassin's Creed 3, Liberation is a unique and often overlooked chapter in Ubisoft's Assassin's franchise. For the first time in the history of the series, you'll play as a female assassin named Aveline de Grandpre during the French and Indian War. Aveline is the child of a wealthy father and a slave mother, and the game brings the class warfare themes you'd expect to the forefront right away, making for a unique and interesting story. Right from the start, Aveline is a likeable character, much more-so than Connor from Assassin's Creed III, and perhaps much more than any character in the series to date.

"There's still enough to satisfying your assassin urges here..."

For the most part, Liberation plays just like you'd expect an Assassin's Creed game to play. Try to blend in, take out targets and pickpocket people for treasure. Because of it's portable roots, this is easily the smallest entry into the Assassin's Creed series and there's not nearly as much to do here as there was in recent games (no, you can't hunt whales here ala Black Flag). There's still enough to satisfying your assassin urges here, as the Spanish controlled New Orleans makes for a great digital playground, even if it's not as well thought out as the world's of previous games. There are major plot holes and changes that go unaddressed here, but hey - at least Ubisoft kept the modern day crap to a minimum here.

That's all not to say that there's nothing new here in Liberation. The development team took a chance on several new ideas that although they do ad to the formula, they never quite feel fully explored. Chief among the changes is the ability to switch between costumes to better blend into the crowd. Slave rags will help you fit into the slums of town, while a fancy dress will allow you to go by (mostly) unnoticed. It's a cool change, and adds to the realism of the game (as if that's what we're going for in an Assassin's Creed game) but it ends up being cumbersome and much more trouble than it's worth since you'll have to backtrack to storage lockers and trunks just to switch and more often than not you're just going to chose the costume that makes stabbing people easier...which is all of them.

"...the world here is much more believable on the big screen."

One of the big worries going into the re-release of Liberation as how the actual graphics transition was going to be handled, and luckily it's one of the better HD transfers. When games are re-released, companies have a habit of just making them larger, and reducing some of the detail but with Liberation, the team has focused on more of the details and the game is just beautiful compared to it's portable counterpart. It may not be as detailed as Assassin's Creed 3 or Black Flag, but the world here is much more believable on the big screen. The world still feels small, but there wasn't much the developers could have done about that.

Assassin's Creed: Liberation is a game limited only by its own ambitions and while the HD remake goes miles ahead of what the portable version could do, it still feels just as rushed and cramped. There are some great ideas here, but unfortunately they often go unexplored or feel like they're never developed nearly as much as they could. Fans of the series should jump on this chance to play a chapter that they more than likely missed, but fair warning - it's going to feel very limited, especially coming after Black Flag.