Assassins Creed Review
I found the game to be good, but not great. I’ll start off with all the negatives, so as to get them out of the way: repetitive gameplay, a shit-load of bugs, and a not too satisfying narrative (very minor spoilers).Although AC claims to let you explore each city and the lands surrounding them at your leisure, there’s not much to actually explore. The game limits you to the outdoors, with only a handful of indoor locations. Aside from the actual storyline, there is not much else to do except collect some pointless little flags/banners, which isn’t even worth the effort. Each city looks practically the same, with only a change in the theme. The missions Altair is sent on are also identical. It all leads down to either eavesdropping, pick-pocketing, or interrogating, as well as scanning an area to add it to your map. Although great at first, these missions start to get tedious after the third of fourth time.
The boring nature of these missions isn’t helped by the fact that the player (specifically the PlayStation player) constantly encounters a number of bugs which range from flying, to your horse breaking it’s legs, to all people climbing the roofs, to time stopping (as you can see in my latest user movie). It can really piss someone off if they constantly have to restart their system to play the game. However, luckily the game saves like every five minutes, meaning you can restart without worrying about losing data.
Moving onto the story: It’s not that the story is bad, but so much information was leaked during the development process that the “big surprise” that was expected wasn’t much of a surprise at all. I haven’t finished the game, so I can’t even spoil the ending for you if I wanted to; however, I hear the ending is highly unsatisfying. In my opinion, the story could have been crafted better, but with a whole franchise in front of it, it might evolve into something very epic.
Despite the above mentioned minuses, I found the game perplexing. The whole “medieval Spider-Man” climbing mechanic is very exhilarating. Running away from guards is good fun and the “leaps of faith” never get old (though I’m still not convinced a pile of hay would stop all your bones from breaking). The fighting system is done exceptionally well also, but it gets too easy once you get the counter-attack move. Also, the game offers many ways to tackle a situation which is really cool. The only problem with this is that I usually found myself doing things against the current because it would have been to easy otherwise (for example, you can basically go anywhere by disguising oneself as a scholar; where’s the fun in that?).
Verdict:
Assassin’s Creed introduces a variety of new gameplay mechanics that are well designed and fun to play with; however, the mass of glitches and repetitive gameplay holds it back from its full potential. If the developers listen and fix these problems, future releases in the franchise may redefine gaming. Also, with the Animus, other settings, such as World War II or the 1700s, are not out of the question. So all in all I would say a solid 3.5 or rent
