There were plenty of people telling me how much they hated Assassin’s Creed – so I had originally waited on buying the game. When I did get it, I wanted to like the game, to find something different that could be admired to counter the claims that I had been hearing. Luckily, I wasn’t completely lost with my experience with Assassin’s Creed. Despite it’s pitfalls, the game was overall a positive and enjoyable experience.
Overview
Assassin’s Creed is a third-person stealth game in which the player assumes the role of Altaïr ibn La-Ahad (Arabic, “The Flying One, Son of None”), a member of the Hashshashin (The Assassin Brotherhood) which is not allied to either the Templars or Saracens during the third crusade. Altaïr’s objective in the game is to assassinate nine historical figures propagating the Crusades in the year 1191.
The primary goal of the game is to carry out the assassinations ordered by the head of the Brotherhood, Al Mualim. To achieve this goal, the player must use stealth and a variety of intelligence gathering tactics to collect information on their target. These tactics include eavesdropping, interrogation, and pick pocketing [...]
Overall Reaction (Possible Spoilers Below)
There are parts of this games that I dislike, but there are parts of this game that really, really impressed me. The game was really well done artistically. While the color scheme was bland from time to time, the textures, buildings, and clothing of the people were very sharp. Secondly, the movement system that this game had single-handedly takes the cake as to while I find myself returning to this game to do some tedious flag-searching. Climbing up buildings, awnings, jumping from rooftop to rooftop, grabbing ahold of a ledge as your falling – it’s all done very, very well. The movement is easy an intuitive, your character looks good while he does it, and even the animations when scaling building’s and whatnot accurately match up with the surroundings Altair is truly climbing. Past the movement system, I enjoyed the story line that was being told. I disliked the ending that purposely left for a sequel (I later found out this is the first installment in a trilogy), and had wished a few more ends were tied up, but I’m already sold for the next game as I want to know what happens next. There are many questions left unanswered – where do we go next? Does Desmond survive? Does Lucy survive? Desmond got some of Altair’s powers at the end of the game, do we get to fully use him as an Assassin in the sequel? While the gameplay did see repetition throughout the game, it was these parts that kept me anchored to my seat, enjoying the in-between gameplay, and looking forward to the “what-happens-next” aspect, both in the story of Desmond and his ancestor.
Weaknesses (What I’d Change)
Cutting the Cut-Scene
After having beaten the game, I’ve gone back to AC to revisit some of the past cities to get the flags, visit the remaining high points, to enjoy the movement of the game again, and to earn some achievements as well. What’s frustrating is that when I go back to play the game for a second time, I have to pick a memory block to play again, and when I do – I have to listen to Al Mualim go through the same self-righteous dialogue with Altair again, and there’s no way for me to skip it. This is a nuisance in every scene where I save a citizen, or assassinate someone, or start or finish a memory block, there’s some scene I have to watch over and over. It’s gotten to the point where I select the memory block, set down the controller, and do something else for a few minutes until “my game is ready to play”. It’s like when people used to make a cup of coffee while their computer dialed in to the server for their internet connection. I would understand if you wanted to force the user to watch the cut-scene through at least once to make sure they receive the entire story as it develops – fine. But it wouldn’t be out of the ordinary to go and allow them to skip it after that one time. Sometimes people just want to jump in your game to play it, so let them!
Writer’s Block
With respects to the unending cutscenes, there are a good three to four canned responses you get from people who you save. This wouldn’t be a problem if you were doing it maybe 10 times in the game, but there are something like 8 citizens you have to save in every district of the three cities, and hear this crap (and again – being forced to listen to it before you can continue) gets annoying, especially when you’re just trying to barrel through it.
Achievements
Sadly, I must have missed one or two conversations with Lucy right at the beginning of the game, and I did not get the “conversationalist” achievement within the game. It turns out however, that if I wanted this achievement (which, being a perfectionist at this mindless crap, I might want it later) I need to replay the ENTIRE GAME to receive this achievement again. That’s a good six hours for something like 20 gamerpoints. While I am completely fine with setting reasonably hard-but-attainable achievements, don’t go and make something like this to force a second play through of your game for a simple achievement like that. At that point, it’s not an achievement anymore – it’s a punishment.
Death by Button Mashing
The fighting system in this game wasn’t the best – I constantly found myself mashing the attack button when I was hacking away at my enemies, and simply mashing the counter combo when they were attacking me. Sure, I love the quick cut-in’s that show you obliterating your opponent in numerously grotesque ways, but there was generally little payoff, since there didn’t seem to be a combo tier that brought better animations with different moves. Washed down, it seemed like, attack, counter, and break grab were really the only pieces of the fighting system I was coming across.
All day, everyday
While the game does some neat lighting that one would expect from a cloud blotting out the sun, never once did any of these levels take place at night. In Twilight Princess, this even added to the style of the game, which would allow and disallow certain access depending on the time of day (if I remember correctly). This would have been an excellent addition to the game, as it could have added another level of stealth, or challenges, or feature sets to the game. And what else better to be a skilled, stealthy assassin, other than to be moving with the veil of darkness as well?
Do you just want to call it exercise?
Altair had to go on a three mile run every time he got his instructions from Al Mualim. Couldn’t there have been a back door? At least in a game like Shadow of the Colossus you ended/started right at the exit of the castle, and your horse was right there. In this one, you needed to take a good two minutes just to get to your horse before you could ride out. I will take a second though, to applaud the developers for allowing you to select where you wanted to go after you had ridden to it once. I’m not sure I would have had the patience to take the ride from Masyaf to Damascus every time I wanted to go there.
Listen, Steal, and Punch
This problem was the biggest “kick to the nuts” that this game had to deal with, and is the majority of the complaints that I’ve heard about Assassin’s Creed. In a nutshell, Ubisoft Montreal created a beautiful game, an awesome movement system, with varied landscapes and (fairly) different environments, and then they have you go from place to place to listen to people, steal from others, and beat information out of the rest of the people you need to interrogate. That’s it. It singlehandedly flattens out the game experience for the majority, and if I didn’t like the movement system so much, I would have put the game down at a much sooner date. That’s not to say that was the only choice they had in order of variability with their game. As I mentioned before, adding nighttime events could have easily added to the tasks Altair needed to conquer. With the phrase, “there’s more than one way to skin a cat”, there are plenty of ways to kill people, yet the game only focused on you stabbing your opponents. What happened to poison, or crushing an enemy, or drowning him, or setting him on fire? Without going further to cause any sort of alarm on my own mental stability, there are plenty of more ways an assassin could have gone about doing his job, and many more dimensions that could have been added to the interrogation procedures, as well as the actual assassinations themselves. All the while this could be achieved without so much as adding one puzzle to the game.
Alternate Movement?
When I had exited Animus, it seemed like I had suddenly become handicapped in my movement. The feeling of movement presented to me outside of Animus seemed slow, dingy, restrictive, and not fun. While I understand the “chamber” in which Desmond Miles inhabits is more of a means to an end of getting him into Animus, and thus the game – but there is a stark contrast between the two feelings of interaction between being inside of Animus and out, too much of one at that.
Continuity
I’m nitpicking from this point, but there were a few issues that I had with the game itself that didn’t add up, and brought me out of the experience to remind me that I was indeed playing a game. First – when you go to sleep on the left side of the bed, you wake up on the right. I don’t know how hard it would have been for the animators at this point, but why not have Desmond wake up in three or four different positions, and switch it up? We all toss in our sleep, and we generally sleep in a few different positions, so imitate that. It’s a small change, but it’d add a nice touch to the effect. Also – when I fall asleep on the left side of the bed, have me wake up on that side.
Story Holes
This somewhat plays into the last issue I had, but there were a few things that just didn’t add up. When Desmond was in his bedroom, the point of view would be coming from security cameras, insinuating that Desmond was being watched at all times. Yet there was never any mention of someone noticing him finding the key code, or leaving his room, or accessing the computers. And there was never any story to back it up that Lucy was altering the videos, or changing the logs to cover his tracks. Another thing – as soon as you went in your room, the Doc and Lucy would go Houdini and disappear from the room. At least show a glass window in Desmond’s room, showing them leave after he enters his room. Doing this, and forcing Desmond to only leave his room after the coast was clear would have added to the feeling of sneakiness that you got from leaving your room after you entered it. Granted this would contradict my complaints about adding gameplay, but this could be done quick enough that wouldn’t effect overall gameplay time to a point where I’d complain about it.
If you had to choose, I would say at least play the game, it takes about 6-9 hours on a first run-through, depending how many tasks you achieve whilst playing it. However, the game did see a recent price drop to around $30, and stores are selling it used slightly cheaper than that.
