A good start
*As I'm writing this review I've played AC2, Brotherhood, Revelations*
Loved this game, great premise and interesting gameplay. When I heard 'parkour in the 12th century' it seemed odd, surely there weren't that many big buildings? Is this just a developer capitalising on a current trend? Well yes a bit, but it works well and doesn't seem out of place. The castles and villages lend themselves well to this style of play and it feels natural. The fighting is enjoyable but get's plain and simple. It really needs variety.
Storyline is very good, I wasn't overly sold on the whole meta story that comes in the ending. It felt like it went off on a tangent, there's a sci-fi element throughout the whole story but it doesn't take over and feels to a small degree based in reality. Then the ending just went off the deep end. Stick with it, it get's better in later games. But take out Desmonds story and Altair's story is immense, I loved it and while later games with Ezio are great I really feel Altair could've had his own trilogy.
Graphics and sound are good, could use a fair bit of polish as it looks dated when compared to last games. In fairness, at the time for the launch of the franchise the game is perfectly serviceable and I'm glad the focus was placed on the gameplay.
Now I've mentioned in other reviews my distaste for glitches/bugs, some are acceptable some are just plain wrong and amount to selling a broken product. I wont sugar coat it, this game has bugs they're not game breaking but they are easily spotted and should have been spotted out the door. The thing is I do give open-world games a bit more leeway than 'on-rails' games as I'm aware of the difficulties, plus I'm a bit more forgiving with this game as it's a lot of fun.
This game feels like it wants to be grand in scale, it's wishing it was a triple AAA, big title but you can see it was done on a budget. Things have been cut and it shows. If only this first game were released and someone mentioned the name in 20 years time you probably would recall it fondly as a decent game. When taken as part of the franchise it's much more as it's the bedrock for a whole franchise. Oh and Altair's bad ass.
