Assasin's Creed has truly become portable, but loses some charm.
When I heard Assasin's Creed was being made for the psp, I thought it would be just like the horrible DS and cell phone versions. Even after seeing videos I believed it would still be too linear. Thankfully when I started it up I realized it was a sandbox world and you could climb up buildings just as easily and beatifully as in the console version. To keep the framerate smooth the amount of people on screen is lowered, and the story uses the excuse that they're all scared of the templars and staying inside to explain this. The fighting is still just as good as the console though, with easy to execute timed combos, sneak attacks with the hidden dagger and guard counters. Unfortunately you can't attack from off of buildings for jump kills. You still can hide as a scholar by praying or hide in hay/rooftop gardens to avoid suspision, just like in the last game. Unfornutaly most of the two cities you can play in recycle the same backrounds, and have little variety. Also the models for humans are extremely recycled, and though it all looks good there's too much repetition in them. Another problem is the amount of easily noticable texture pop-in. In both the cut scenes and gameplay texture pop-in is noticable everywhere. Another of the last few problems is the amount of stuff you can do. There were always side quests and missions you could do in the original, this hasn't changed but there are only one or two per mission, and they're easily accomplished. The game hasn't improved much, if at all since the original and seems to only bring the experience to the psp. The game took me about 5-7 hours to beat, including sidequests and random mayem. The last problem is that unfortunatly there are only four types of missions, Assassinate one person(noticed and unnoticed), kill a bunch of guards/pirates, send a message to somewhere in the city, or interrogate some one. There is plenty of room for improvement with a bit more tie to create new textures, maybe more civilian models, and the city could have light object pop in as you travel through, to allow a city with no gates. After all the load times are only a few seconds long. Maybe this was pushed aside to put more time on Assassain's Creed 2 but more work could definitly be put in on this. It's still awesome to climb up buildings jump between rooftops and silently assassinate a guard, but with the short length huge amount of recycling and repitition, and other problems it's questionable if it's worth the price. If you want to buy the Assassain's Creed experience for a handheld then this is perfect for you, but if you're expecting more you might want to wait for the next one.