Assassin's Creed

The Short


Pros
- Interesting mix of lots of genres, but particularly parkour, open world, and stealth
- Graphics look great, and locals of the middle east are architecturally gorgeous
- Animations for climbing and fighting look extremely fluid. Very well done.
- Voice acting is good throughout
- Music is good
- Playing as Altiar just feels cool, with the hand blade and the assassinations and all that jazz

Cons
- Excruciatingly repetitive
- Stealth elements are poorly executed and the open world feels stilted
- When you mess up a sneaky assassination, you might as well start over. Almost impossible to get a "redo" by hiding out for a while
- Ways you can hide are contrived and make guards look like morons
- On the flip side, if you knock one beggar over near the end, expect 100 overpowered guards to hunt you until you die
- Swordplay/combat is weak; you'll essentially just counter everything to death
- Graphics for faces/animations for faces are awful
- Again, repetition with the mundane tasks kills this game

It's time to be a badass. 

The Long

Assassin's Creed and I have a jaded relationship. It's more one-sided, actually. I really, really want to love it. It's made by the crew that did Prince of Persia, after all, and it looks fantastic and the idea of playing in a middle-ages middle east during the Crusades (an untapped era of time for games) is just awesome. But for everything I give, Assassin's Creed won't give back. It lead to me playing the first sequence and then putting the game down for nine months (pissing off my friend I was borrowing it from) until finally giving in and finishing it. Unfortunately, beating the game didn't make me feel any better about it; if anything it made it worse.

Assassin's Creed is a game that has lots of great ideas but ruins them with some of the worst design choices I've ever seen. Remember my Saints Row: The Third review, where I said that game does everything in its power to streamline its elements so that the game is just a pure, fun experience? Take that, do the opposite, and you have Assassin's Creed. 

One of the many engrossing side missions: sitting and pointing the camera at someone as they talk. 

Assassin's Creed threw everybody off because it wasn't what it initially sells itself as. You actually aren't Altiar, you are his whatever generation later grandson Desmond. Desmond has been captured by some future super-scientist group and forced to sit in a big tanning bed called the Animus which lets him relive his memories because they are like coded into his DNA or something...I dunno, it's total bullcrap but I'm willing to believe it for a few neck-stabs. 

So you are Altiar, an assassin during the crusades, and those douchbag Knights Templar are getting all up in your business. After a lengthy opening sequence you are sent off to a city to find dudes and then kill said dudes, and the story gets...weird at the end with like the Apple of Eden being a mind controlling device or something? I dunno, everything that isn't stabbing dudes in the neck or related to the immediate story is kind of contrived and extremely underdeveloped, so you'd be best to just ignore it. Because it gets super pretentious in Assassin's Creed 2, so save it for that! 

Climbing is really fun and the graphics on the buildings looks fantastic

Assassin's Creed wants to be a lot of things. It wants to be a parkour game like Prince of Persia. It wants to be a stealth assassination game like Thief or a weird variation of Metal Gear Solid. It wants to be a sandbox game like Grand Theft Auto, and it wants to be a swordfighting game like...a game with swords in it. It also wants to have side missions where you spy on people or bribe people or pickpocket people (I enjoyed pickpocketing for whatever weird reason) and have you climb up really high things and then swan dive off into hay and come out undamaged.

All these things are good things, and set to a middle eastern backdrop this game has potential to be just awesome. Unfortunately, it doesn't do any of these things well, and that's only the start of Assassin's Creed's problems.

They can't find me now!

The core element of Assassin's Creed is simple: kill dudes. Specifically, kill one particular dude who is a massive jerk and you need to put down for...plot reasons. So you are briefed back at Assassin HQ (which is what it should have been called), then grab a horse and ride the long distance to whatever city you need to be to. See, that's the open world part. Different cities and stuff. 

Once you get to the city you are given another open world...thingy. You have to climb to the top of tall towers to reveal the map, which is actually a pretty cool mechanic because the climbing is really fun. It can be a pain to figure out what you can and can't climb up, but unlike Crackdown where you'll mash A to try and find out of one window ledge is a handhold while another is not, Altiar just figures it out himself and shimmies up just about everything. It's fast and looks awesome, and it a natural extension of the Prince of Persia formula, though it simplifies things a bit. 

I can see my house from up here!

Now that you have your map updated, your new job is to research your target before killing him. Researching is required, and this is where the game starts to show it's running out of ideas already. The activities you have are limited and not particularly enthralling. You can pickpocket, sit down and listen, interrogate a guy by beating him up, and a few others. Once you've gotten your information you can go assassinate your guy (which is the best part in the game), flee from the guards after killing him, and call it good.

Repeat this, over and over, seven times. There's Assassin's Creed. 

You did so much right, Assassin's Creed. Why do you fail on the fundamentals?

There's a few other bits, like setting up strongholds or safehouses in cities (which is just doing more side missions that I mentioned above) and earning new weapon upgrades, but as a whole this is the game. It ups the number of crappy side jobs (from the incredibly small pool) you have to do for each assassination, and the guards become more and more aggressive further along. No joke: I was stuck on the second to last assassination for an extremely long time because so much as breathing loudly sent twenty guards in my direction. It was frustrating and annoying and was just straight up not fun.

This might have been remedied if the combat was better, but unfortunately it falls flat here as well. 

Good thing the chase music is good, because you're gonna hear it a lot. 

Swordfighting isn't fun. There's just no rhyme or reason to it until you learn the counter move, then you murder everything with one quick tap. Stealth kills are great (sneak up on person and press a single button and you'll kill them silently) but you don't really feel as an agile, empowered warrior like you did in the later Prince of Persia games. It's like he forgets all his agility when he fights, which is too bad because you should be able to do some totally crazy stuff with his acrobatics. 

You'll do a lot of swordfighting on your way to doing another pointless side task you've done a dozen time. The initial rush of a kill, thrill of a climb, and gasp at the beauty of the cities is quickly whisked away to repetition, frustration, and boredom. I didn't think a game about being a badass assassin would get boring, but congrats Ubisoft: you pulled it off. The last several hours of this game were some of the worst I've ever played, and the only reason I finished it was because I felt it was a waste of my time investment if I didn't seal the deal. I was also hoping the ending would make the game worth it. It didn't. 

It's too bad the game is tedious, because the climbing is just so cool. 

I could try and blame it on aging, but it isn't that. Despite being an old game, Assassin's Creed LOOKS really good and the climbing has been basically unchanged through its multiple sequels. It's that its fundamental core is boring and poorly designed. And no matter how good a game looks, if it is a massive, tedious bore to play it's a bad game. Sorry, Assassin's Creed. It isn't me, it's you.

Plus the horses are pretty much useless since they attract guards like ants to a picnic. 

If you really are intent about this game, I will say that the first several assassinations are really fun. The game is still somewhat fresh, the ideas not grinded down yet, and you feel like a totally cool assassin guy. But after that the tedium sets in really fast, to the point where you'll be like me and not want to endure it any more, even to finish the game. 

The sequels did it a bit better (though I don't think the series hit its stride until Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood), but as it stands this game is pretty much a failed experiment. If you are looking to get into this series, you can start up the second game without missing much in terms of plot. Hey, that's what wikipedia is for anyway.

Two out of five stars. 

No matter how many dudes you let me stab, Altiar, your game will still suck.