Assassins Creed

Assassins Creed captures very well of what it is to be an elusive assassin during the Crusades, except for the whole assassination part.

You start off as a bartender called Desmond who is kidnapped by an evil corporation.  It turns out that you are a descendent of a notorious assassin from the third crusade and your DNA can 'relive' his exploits.  At the beginning of each mission you are placed on a device called the Animus and then you play as the elusive assassin. Stupid, I know. But this is a game so I will let it slide.

Your ancestor was a very cocky person and in the first mission you stuff up and get stripped of your rank. Of course you have to redeem yourself by assassinating a series of colourful targets throughout the game. Funnily enough the assassinations are the most boring and frustrating part of the game, more on that later.

Like Prince of Persia the game is a third person adventure and you can just about go anywhere within the game.  You can run, walk, jump and climb. They sound like very mundane things but in this game these movements are fully developed. See that church over there? You can climb to the highest steeple. That marker on the other side of the city? You can jump from roof to roof to get there and never have to set foot on the street. The freedom of movement is nothing short of amazing.  The most fun in the game is running from your perusers in a Jason Bourne-like chase as you try to lose line of sight and find a suitable hiding spot. Your character moves naturally as he tip toes across a plank of wood connecting 2 houses, climbs a stone wall with his bare hands or jumps into a haystack from a tall building.

The controls aren't perfect but acceptable for the hours of gymnastics which you are about to complete. However for combat the controls suck.  With a mouse and keyboard setup you hold the right mouse button down (or toggle) to switch from "low profile" (passive actions) to "high profile" (aggressive actions). For example when you move around normally (without holding down the RMB) you are walking, hold down the RMB and you go into a run. Now it starts to get complicated, when you hold space in low profile you shuffle around pretending to pray like a monk. Hold down space in high profile, you do a flat out sprint. This example causes major headaches when you are trying to flee a 7 on 1 sword fight and with the furious clicking and button mashing you start praying when 3 angry guards are trying to disembowel you. The action sequences look awesome and very violent if you are only watching.

Movement throughout the game in relation to guards is bamboozling as well.  When you travel in between cities you can ride a horse, if you make the go any faster than a slow trot guards unsheathe their swords and start pursuing you. I don't know if there were speed limits enforced or guards feared fast moving horses, but it is just stupid. Crazy homeless people attack you but the guards won't lift a finger, however if you fight back they attack you.  Fortunately you can quietly shiv the mofos even though that is frowned upon by the game and costs you "synchronisation".

The game does not have a standard health bar.  Since you are playing the assassin through what is effectively a VR program you have "synchronisation" with your ancestor's DNA.  If you take too much damage and die or break too many rules against the Assassins' creed you get re-synced to the last save point. It works fine in practice although I still think you shouldn't be punished for rectifying the organ donor shortage, sorry, killing homeless people who attack you. I suppose Ubisoft are socialist French wimps who don't want the man to beat down on the working class.

Assassination missions work like this;  You start off at your home base which is a castle with huge markings of your "secret" order's painted around everywhere. You head down to the local village and take a horse to travel to the nearby cities, such as Jurusleam and Damascus. Then you find your order's home office in each city and speak to the brearu chief about your next target. It would be a bit tiresome to do this whole process again and again, but the fast travel option allows you to skip all that if you have been to the location before. Secondly, you must carry out investigations about your next target; which are boring and repetitive. Most of them feel like glorified mini games and they range in difficulty from really easy to meancingly hard. One example is the eavsdrop investigation which means you just have to sit down on a nearby bench and listen to 2 targets talk to eachother and leave. It is insultingly easy, if doing nothing constitues 'easy'. Then you have another type of investigation where you must destroy some shop fronts which forces you to be chased by half the city's guard (thus getting into combat) with a time limit.  Fortunately many investigations are easy, but it feels like a lazy filler for the assassination part of the game.

When the investigations are complete you get to go out and assassinate your primary target. To be blunt; Ubisoft stuffed up the execution.  First you have to sit though a 3 minute dialogue scene before the killing then you have to approach your target and kill them. What makes it so bad is that it feels like a mindless violent attack with no finesse involved, like your some sort of vigilante instead of a highly skilled assassin. There are no ingenious ways to dispatch targets using the environment like the Hitman series. Just get near your target stab him and fight your way through the dozen guards which surround you. Oh yeah. You also have to sit (or get up and get another beer, whatever your favourite activity is) though a dialogue scene right after you "kill" your target and listen to the asshole justify his actions.  It feels like a MGS game with the hamfisted way the story is told.

For the first half hour or so AC is good fun.  However after you start scratching the surface you realise the developers have neglected some aspects of content. The sound is the main offender. It is a real deal breaker to walk around a city to hear the same scholar on different steet corners preach about the same stuff over and over again. Some areas of the map you can hear the same surmon from two different preachers and it kills the immersion. Citizens have limited dialogue too, I have lost count the number of times I was told how brave I was compared to the attack victim's son.

Assassin's Creed is a 1 hour game copy pasted 10 times over.  Which is real unfortunate since the idea is brilliant with great movement throughout the map. Also it is a good port of a console game with graphics and sound options within a game menu, not some shoddy window outside the application itself. In the end, it is all style over substance. Not surprising that the project leader spent more time getting her photo taken than pushing a quality product.