Assassin’s Creed Review
Assassin’s Creed puts you in the shoes of an assassin during the time and place of the crusades. Throughout the games you’ll be assassinating targets given by your clan’s (aka Assassin’s Guild) master. Your targets are located in three impressively detailed, living, breathing cities (Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem). This could’ve been a must have game on the PS3 (and by extension Xbox360), however one can’t help but feel that this was a rushed product. Bad story, repetitive gameplay elements, repetitive voices in the cities and abysmal AI killed this game.
As mentioned above, you play as Altaïr, a member of a group of assassins that do indeed exist during the 11th and 13th centuries. In fact, this group, known as the Hashshashin is the earliest known assassins in written history. Apparently, the nine men that Altaïr is charged to remove did indeed died or disappeared around the time this game takes place.
Each of the three cities has been detailedly rendered from top to bottom. Minute details can be found in all nooks and cranny. The size of each city is also staggering, it is absolutely huge (although exploration is limited in the early parts of the game) and transition from a district to another district is seemless (i.e. no loading times).
The developers has also crafted bustling bazaars and market squares, detailed towers reaching to the skies and also quiet, shady corners and streets to make each cities believable. To further add to the immersion, the streets are populated with with tons of believable citizens. From jar-bearing woman to merchants, and beggar women to drunks, every conceivable caste of society is included.
However, the gameworld is not without flaws. The A.I. for the guards on top of roofs are as dumb as bricks. If you are spotted on the roofs, they will either draw their swords or aim their bows at you warning you that you do not belong up there for bout twenty seconds before they engage you. This gives you plenty of time to hurl a dagger and send them to their doom. Alternatively, you could drop and hang on the ledge and the guard will think that you mysteriously disappear and as they turn around, you could just climb back up and stab him in his back. The guards are also deaf. You could run along the roof jump and stab a guard and another guard (nor your target) nearby wouldn’t hear a thing.
Also, the cities are completely devoid of children. Streets in those days are usually filled with groups of street urchin causing all sorts of troubles. Also, the general populace is only limited to a few sentences. Barely an hour into the game, you’ll get so sick of it that you are tempted to break your creed and kill that annoying innocent arsehole. Ubisoft stated that their multiplatform games are identical as they do not want any one version to stand out over the other. I guess that may be the reason for the limited amount of audio speech (PS3′s Bluray disc can hold much more data than its counterparts).
The controls for Assassin’s Creed is quite intuitive. Each face button represents a part of the body. For the PS3 version, triangle represents head, square and circle are hands and ‘X’ represents the legs. Each face button is context sensitive. For example if you wanna look around in first person mode, you press triangle. If you want to run, you hold R1 to enter high profile mode and holding on ‘X’ will make Altaïr run.
Running along rooftops, jumping from roof to roof, running up walls to climb up even higher and continuing leaping from roof to roof is absolutely fun. Ubisoft was wise in not making this a platforming game like Prince of Persia. To scale buildings, you only need to move your left analogue stick and Altaïr will attempt to grab onto something in that direction. You must think like any rock-climber. Every piece of art that looks grab-able or sturdy enough to be a foothold can be used to climb. This is one of the more enjoyable and rewarding part of Assassin’s Creed.
You will need to utilise this mechanic to scale towers marked by eagles (known as view points) to spot items of interests such as pickpocket targets or citizens in distress. By successfully completing an eavesdropping, pick-pocketing and informer missions, you will gain additional information which could help you in your assassination of the main target (most of which are pretty useless). Saving innocent citizens being harrassed by guards will net you some allies in the form of scholars and vigilantes. Scholars are moving hidden spots which you can blend in to escape your pursuers and vigilantes are like road blocks that grab onto pursuing guards to slow them down.
However, this is where Assassin’s Creed slips into mediocrity. Imagine doing all these mini-games about 7-11 times per assassination for a grand total of nine assassinations, you will be bored to tears. I plowed on in the hopes that the story is worth the grind. Be that as it may, the main assassinations are pretty well-done for the most part and are actually enjoyable when compared to the boring grind. Almost every assassinations can be done steathily or by force. In addition, each assassinations can be done in a number of ways.
Once you enter the area where your target is supposed to be, you will enter in a long cutscene with story elements and you will enter into a stalking phase. After you stab your target, you will be greeted with another cutscene with story elements. After this cutscene, the city alarm would be raise and the hunter becomes the hunted. You will need to dodge all guards and reach the Assassin’s Bureau undetected. You will definitely be engaged in combat during the chase. Altaïr is more than capable to hold his own.
The combat system is simple and logical. Its kinda like a rhythm game where you tap a button in response to an attack. For example, holding the R1 button and tapping the square button when your enemy starts to make a lunge at you, Altaïr will engage in a cinematic and brutal counter-move. By learning their rhythms you could practically dominate with impressive killing animations. The flow of the combat is extremely fluid and when you are chaining counters after counters and occasionally switching to offensive mode, you will feel like you are watching a over-the-top action movie rather than playing the game.
In my first hour of playing Assassin’s Creed, I was very impressed with the whole package and thought that this is game of the year material. However, as hours passed by, the pacing of the game slows down with uninteresting repetitive minigames. It doesn’t helped with the fact that the story is uninteresting and an ending that screams sequel. When the credits rolled, I thought:” What?! thats it?”. The ending is not really an ending at all. IT would have been great if the huge twist in the first five minutes of the game were revealed at the end. I’m not going to say anything about the first five minutes though some reviews may have already spoiled it.
Overall, this is a graphically impressive game with slick fluid animations and open ended game world where you can technically kill anyone in your sight or go anywhere you want. Controls are very intuitive and satisfying. However, the weak slow paced story and repetitive gameplay is what keeps this game from being a must-have title.
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