Reviews | Xbox 360
Assassin's Creed
By Andy Kavanagh / February 10, 2008
This review was originally published on deKay's Lofi Gaming.
In Assassin's Creed you play as Desmond, a bartender in the year 2012 who's been kidnapped by a pharmaceutical company and forced to undergo experiments in a machine called the Animus. The reason isn't apparent at first, but the experiment involves Desmond regressing to the life of one of his ancestors, an assassin in the Holy Land during the time of the Crusades, and reliving the events of the time from his point of view.
These events being the assassinations of powerful figures in Jerusalem and surrounding cities. Altaïr (pronounced variously as "alt-air", "al-tie-ear", "alt-ear" and "all-te-er" depending on who is addressing you), Desmond's ancestor, starts the game as a high ranking assassin. Interestingly, Ubisoft claim that all his victims really did exist, and died (or at least disappeared) around the time the game is set. Due to a major cock-up on the first mission you get to play, Altaïr is disgraced, stripped of everything, and must again rise the ranks.
Most of the game is spent in the Animus as Altaïr and each chapter is of the same structure: get your bearings in a city (by climbing high points and having a scout around), perform an investigation on your target (by eavesdropping on people, pickpocketing, beating information out of underlings and performing tasks for other assassins), and finally dispatch him. You don't need to carry out all possible investigations, although doing so is slightly beneficial. There are also plenty of other optional missions, mostly involving saving citizens from bullies. These do provide you with allies who will help you out during a chase, however.
And be chased you will. You have a suspicion-o-meter which tells you if guards are watching you, and how suspicious of you they are. Do something wrong (like baring your blade in front of them), and they'll hunt you down, so it pays to be stealthy. The most epic chases usually start after a main target has been dispatched. Run, break your pursuer's line of sight, then hide until they move on. Make it back to Assassin HQ without being re-spotted and you "win". It's these chases that make the most use of the game's raison d'être -- the free running.
You can run up walls, hop across fences, jump from pillar to pillar, climb, swing and leap from building to building, all just by holding down two buttons. Chases through streets, diving through merchant stalls and barrelling between bystanders quickly become chases across rooftops, looking for a hiding place and avoiding archers. It's exciting stuff! Until the game thinks you want to run up a wall three millimetres to the right of a ladder, rather than the ladder itself. Or until it forgets how to let you climb to the next hand-hold, even though it's right there in front of you. Or, instead of nimbly hopping from one beam to the next, it decides you actually want to jump past it and drop to the street below. Again.
In many ways, the game plays like a 12th century version of Crackdown, combined with the setting and moves of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. It has the leaping around, picking off henchmen and tracking down and killing gang lords of the former, with swordplay and acrobatics from the latter. There are other similarities too: the flag collection mirrors Crackdown's orb collection, for example. None of this is a bad thing, of course, as both those games were excellent.
It is unfortunate then that Assassin's Creed suffers from some silly flaws. As well as the aforementioned free running "quirks", the usually fantastic graphics suffer from some tearing and texture draw-in. Nothing game-ruining by any means, but it's a shame. The camera angle is more frequently an issue, especially when in cramped streets. Most annoyingly, it is pretty much fixed for a few moments right after you complete a task (usually when it's showing you the thugs you'd summoned from helping someone), frustratingly delaying the quick escape you should be making before the guards arrive. The successful execution of some of the fighting moves also seems to be a little random, especially in the timing of parry-and-attack moves. Another niggle is the horse riding through the kingdom between cities. It is mostly pointless, unless you're after all the flags or really need to milk the game. These scenes merely delay progression to the next section. Thankfully, once you've visited a city, you can skip straight to it the next time.
The biggest issue is with the needless repetition. There are too few mission types, and each pickpocketing is the same as the last one. Each help-the-citizen scene the same as the last. Even climbing all the towers is much the same; more variety in types of tower, and perhaps puzzles on how to scale them, would have helped here. Thankfully, the "boss takedowns" are sufficiently different from each other so you don't feel too much déjà vu there.
Some have complained about the shortness of the game, but with around a dozen hours of main story to work through I believe it compares well with the majority of action games around now. Another criticism from many is the jarring match of Desmond and Altaïr's eras, but I felt it added a lot to the game, and set up a rather compelling story. It was interesting to see how the acts in the past affected the future, drip-feeding you with information and ultimately revealing how Desmond ended up in the lab. You're left at the end really hoping for a sequel, so let's hope if one materialises they'll fix some of the problems -- problems that take just a little bit too much sheen away from the game.
