My Favorite Assassin's Creeds
An ordered list of my favorite Assassin's Creed games (that I've played, obviously), with thoughts on each.
List items
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After a year on hiatus Assassin's Creed came back with a release that finally topped the original. This incorporated elements from other big open world games (The Witcher, Far Cry) while retaining the signature Assassin's Creed feel and delivering a compelling story about the origin of the assassins.
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The original Assassin's Creed had a structure that some found tedious, but I personally enjoyed. I liked the process of discovering your target, doing research on him, and finally getting into position before executing the kill. It made the end result incredibly rewarding.
As far as the Desmond plots go, this one was excellent. Later games eventually got into all kind of detail about the Assassin v. Templar war, but this one kept it simple. Desmond is just a guy in a research facility using a sweet new piece of technology. The final cliffhanger, the discovery of the bleeding effect and the drawings on the wall, is up there with my favorite game endings of all time.
My 2007 Game of the Year.
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Brotherhood suffered from some bad pre-release marketing which made the plot seem less significant than it ended up being (on Desmond's side at least). It ditched the multi-city approach from the first two games, which was fine with me, but I didn't love the spread-out city of Rome. Having things less compacted took away the option of cruising over rooftops as your primary means of getting around. It also introduced the ability to recruit assassins, send them off on missions, and call them to your aid, which I ended up loving.
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The first sequel streamlined the mission structure a good bit and put a bigger emphasis on character building. I didn't love the opening missions when controlling Ezio as a kid, but I do appreciate their thoroughness. By the end of the game you have a much stronger sense of who Ezio is than you did Altair in the first.
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Revelations had far more systems and mechanics at play than any other AC game preceding it. It further complicated assassin recruitment and templar den removal, while also adding bomb crafting, a tower defense mini game, and some first person platforming. I'm glad the team creating the game got to experiment, but ultimately I found that there was simply too much going on.
On the other hand, I enjoyed the completion of Altair and Ezio's stories, the hook blade, and the visually appealing city of Constantinople.
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[Full disclosure: I never completed the main story]
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[Full disclosure: I never completed the main story]
Black Flag brought the series surprisingly smoothly into the next generation and was a big surprise after the disappointment of 3. The naval combat and underwater missions provided a nice diversion from the typical patterns.
The story, however, didn't fare as well. I found it very hard to get invested in the characters' motivations. The Abstergo plot also seemed quickly thrown together just to keep that aspect of the series intact.
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While not a completely bad game, AC3 was a massive disappointment to me. It accentuated all of my least favorite parts of the series while doing away with a lot of the things I enjoyed. The building economy, armor, and banks were all removed in favor of a new in depth trading minigame which I found exceptionally dull. The cities were far less vertical than before, meaning that running on rooftops was a rarity. The open ended nature of many previous missions was replaced with more linear levels and set pieces that I simply did not have fun playing. It felt like the developers were trying to make the series "bigger and better" in every way, but it ends up losing what made me love the series in the first place. Too many systems and not enough cohesion between them.
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