Assassin's Creed

Assassin’s Creed is game from Ubisoft Montreal, which seems to blend together elements from Thief, Hitman and free roaming titles such as Grand theft Auto. It then sticks you in a timeline during the crusades and gives you some incredible gymnastic abilities and allows you to run, jump and stab your way around the holy land with the aim of assassinating a list of targets given to you by your master.

You play as Altair, a master assassin who, at the beginning of the game beaks some important tenets by killing an innocent man, and generally screwing the pooch when trying to retrieve some treasure. This leaves you with a problem, as when you return to the Brotherhood, a small village where all your assassin buddies chill out, you are in big trouble, and this costs you all your ranks and a lot of your equipment. In order to reclaim your title you must then undergo a challenge from your master, who basically tells you to murder nine targets and these are your missions for the rest of the game. However there is another story at play here. Everything that takes place while you control Altair is all just a memory that you are forced to re-enact by some scientists who have kidnapped your real character, a bar-tender named Desmond. I know, it all sounds a bit stupid but as the game progresses so does the story and it does actually become quite engaging, the most fun however is to be had while holding the reigns of your highly skilled assassin.

The assassinations all play out in pretty much the same way, you go to one of the games three cities, Acre, Jerusalem or Damascus and head to the assassins bureau in that area. That is where you are told the areas to start investigating, and is ultimately where you go to start and finish your current missions. Before each assassination can be performed however, you need to complete three out of six investigations, these range from pick pocketing, eavesdropping, informer escorts and more. The PC version also got 2 extra investigations although some of these can feel a bit scripted at times and the game’s real strength is how the world around you is so unscripted.

Ubisoft have done a fantastic job with creating this living, breathing world around you, the three cities themselves are huge, however they are also incredibly dense and this provides an enormous amount of possibilities. Around the cities you will find yourself pushing your way through crowds of civilians, losing the attention of pushy beggars and avoiding the troubles of rowdy drunks. Of course, killing civilians is deeply frowned upon and doing so too much will effectively “de-synchronise” you from the system and load your latest checkpoint. I often found myself struggling to keep to this rule as beggars pushed me and pleaded with me for some money. As you roam the city streets you will also come across civilians in need, being pushed around and bullied by guards, it is then up to you as to whether you should save them or not, if you do however, you will be given a reward either in the form of vigilantes, who will grab any guards chasing you through that area, or scholars, who will let you blend with them and allow you to bypass guard posts and other hotspots for enemy activity, as sort of a moving hiding spot.

The combat in the game is also fairly satisfying, although the PC control scheme can sometimes bog you down with too many combinations, the game does however support controllers so if you have one, I would assume that would provide a more streamlined experience. The best thing about the sword combat is the counter finishing moves. These are basically “fatalities” in that they will finish off your target in the most gruesome, and awesome ways. The satisfaction of carrying out a combination of these cannot be described, and will literally have you laughing out loud in places as you brutally dispatch a whole group of guards in a few quick swings of your blade. Of course, you aren’t only limited to a sword, you have a hidden blade that you can use to stealthily take down someone in a crowd, or run and jump someone from behind to leap on their back and shove it through the back of the necks. You are also given throwing knives which provide a one hit kill and are useful for dispatching enemy bowmen on roof tops.

By far the game’s main game play feature though is the free running. As mentioned before you have some pretty insane gymnastic abilities and you can simply climb all over anything as long as there is something to hold on to. This is also important as you often find yourself running from guards and in order to lose them you must first break the line of sight and then vanish into a hiding spot, such as a pile of hay, or a roof garden. You will usually end up jumping from rooftop to rooftop in these chases and they can get really exciting, however later in the game it can simply become a nuisance as the guards will get too suspicious for you to really do anything other than walk really slowly, and as soon as you do make an “anti-social” move, such as jogging, you will often find yourself with guards wanting to slice you limb from limb.

This free running aspect easily becomes the game’s biggest downfall. It relies too much on this aspect of game play and it just becomes repetitive to the point where all you want to do is either put the game down, or just stop and kill everyone chasing you, which can take a while and can lead to your death. If only there were something to break up this sequence of events that repeat themselves over and over, the game would become much more replay-able. As it is though, I don’t think I will find myself going back to it for quite a while now that I have completed it and this took me a little over fourteen hours.

Of course, it helps that the game is supported by some pretty impressive tech. I’m running the game on a machine that is a year and a half old, granted, I have an 8800GTS 320MB stuck in it, but if you have anything along these lines the game will run and look brilliant. The fact that the cities are so huge demands quite a lot of the engine and as you climb up to high viewpoints it amazingly retains a steady frame rate (and this is at 1680x1050 with all settings to max). It runs so much better than I had expected and it also looks amazing. The entire free-running aspect of the game depends on building geometry as Altair will only climb up walls if there are things to grab on to, therefore all the buildings and structures have so much detail in them and the textures looks great, especially with the HDR lighting. What looks great also sounds great, I sometimes came across a few sound glitches where it would skip and jump and sword contact sounds often messed up a little, but as you move around the cities, all of which are fairly unique, you can really appreciate the bustling sounds of the crowds chatting, speakers shouting out, and the wind blowing down the streets. The game’s visuals and sounds are nothing short of impressive.

To sum it up, Assassin’s Creed is a great game, it provides us with something new and exciting and I really enjoyed it, however the formula gets pretty dull, pretty quickly and unless Ubisoft manages to break things up a little for the next one, I don’t really see it going too far. I would go as far as to suggest that you either play this at a friend’s house, or rent it first to see what you think as maybe just playing the first few hours of the game will give you everything you need.