Could have been so much more.
Everything about Assassin's Creed looks brilliant. The art style is inspired, the interface is simple, yet effective, the free running concept is well implemented and fun to do, and the fighting mechanism is also fun and engaging. At face value Assassin's Creed is a five star game, and I would love to give it five stars, I would love to love this game.... but I cant. The reason I cant is because of the mission design. The missions represent the core game play of Assassin's creed and I must say most of them are quite lame, to put it mildly. Let's go over the various mission types.
Pick Pocket - In this mission type you have to pick-pocket somebody to get some sort of information. To do this you walk behind him, press and hold the appropriate button to stick out your hand, and then move the stick to position your hand over the person's purse, which is always in the same place. It takes all of two seconds and is very easy to do. This is a core mission type that you have to repeat over and over.
Eavesdrop - Step one : Sit on a bench. Step 2 : Look at the dude you want to eavesdrop on. Step 3: Press a button. That's it. That's all. No more. The game tells you when you're in an eavesdropping area, and its extreemly obvious who you have to target. Now if sitting on a bench and pressing a button is your cup of tea, then this game is for you. This is a core mission type that you have to repeat over and over.
Interrogation - This is a little more advanced than pick-pocketing, but not much. Follow a dude. He'll eventually go around a corner into a more isolated area. At this point you beat him up in a fist fight. He will put up a fight, and you may actually get punched, but fighting without a sword is not so much fun, rather its more of a mindless pushing buttons experience. I never once lost a fight, or failed an interrogation on the first try. This is a core mission type that you have to repeat over and over.
Collecting Flags - Some missions have you collect some flags strewn about the area within a time limit. This is accompanied by some ridiculous back-story about why it's urgent that you run around this area and collect flags. Basically you have to free run over a path the developers prescribed for you. Being that free-running is part of this mission type I actually found it to be quite fun. That being said you only have to do it a few times during the game. Figures that the game type I enjoyed was limited throughout the game, then again if it occurred more often I might have grown sick of it.
Assassinations - The name of the game. These are legitimately fun and do have a sense of tension about them, especially when you can't be seen. You do, however, only have to play the specific missions types where you can't be seen a couple of times during the game. All other times you simply can't be seen killing your target. At first this can be tricky, but once you get the hang of it it gets kind of easy. This also repeatedly occurs during the game, and every boss character must be assassinated.
To locate missions on your map Altair must free run around the city and find towers to climb up. Once on top of the tower Altair looks around and in this moment you see all of the promise of the game. The process of ascension is fun and the payoff is big. The vistas atop the towers are impressive. That's when the honeymoon ends and the trite conventions of the game take over. Instead of having a fun way to descend the tower, instead all you have to do is take a leap of faith of the top and you will fall many stories to conveniently land in a pile of hay. The developers have gone to painstaking lengths to make the game mechanics and actions believable only to drop you ten stories into a small pile of hay. On what planet can anybody fall ten stories into a pile of hay and be alright. Is it really necessary to inject this kind of contrivance into the game?
The most fun I had was with the non-essential side mission of saving pedestrians from bullying patrols. Although this breaks the stealth game play concept, it is lots of fun to take on a handful of guards, and rewarding when the pedestrian thanks you. However, after a while the messages of gratitude start to get recycled. Would it really have been that hard to record 75 different thank you messages? That is only a small grievance.
Equally as fun as the side missions is when you get busted and have to run away from the patrols. This fluidly incorporates the free running mechanic and the fighting mechanic.
The Assassin's Creed team seems to have gone to great lengths to create a living breathing environment, and allow you to interact with that environment at an extraordinary level. It seems that after they finished accomplishing this great feat, they didn't know what to do with it. Its really a shame considering what this game should have been.
That being said there are a lot of awesome aspects to this game, and in my estimation they make up half of the experience. The other half is dull, repetitive, overly simplistic game play. That being said I'm giving this game half of a full score. Hopefully they'll make a sequel to this game and execute the mission structures the right way. There is a lot of potential in this series. In Assassin's Creed though, that potential is failed.
