Assassin's Creed

Without a doubt, Assassin’s Creed has been one of the most hyped games for the past year. Now that it is finally out, the question on the minds of those who have yet to play it is, “was it worth the wait”? Well, it is a good game with a beautiful presentation, but there still is much to be desired.

If you’ve been hiding under a rock then the odds are you know very little about Assassin’s Creed – otherwise you probably have a general idea of what it is all about. Basically, it is a stealth action game in which you take the role of an assassin called Altair. It is set during the Crusades, so combat consists mainly of sword fighting. You also have the opportunity to quickly and quietly put someone down with a retractable blade that is positioned on your wrist. There is a pretty major twist to the whole story, which I will refrain from saying in case you are unaware at this point. Oddly enough, you find out this major story telling element as soon as you start playing, which seems a bit odd, considering how much better it could have made the game if the designers didn’t reveal the secret to you until you were done playing. Anyhow, the story in Assassin’s Creed is pretty well done, although there are a few questionable elements which may have worked better if they were tackled in different ways and at different times.

One of the nicest feelings you get out of playing Assassin’s Creed is the sheer scope of your mobility. You can climb every building you see, virtually as high as you can see and you can move nearly everywhere you see. One major exception to this otherwise open-movement philosophy is the lack of mobility in water. How assassins are incapable of swimming is absolutely well beyond me! It is a horrible decision that was made because it completely contradicts the essence of free movement. Fortunately, there is very little water in the game, so it is only going to get on your nerves for a brief period of time.

Most of the time, you will want to do your dirty work incognito. There are many ways to act covert, even if this is the feudal ages. You can blend in with scholars by gesturing your hands in the prayer position, sit on a bench, and you can roll in a nice pile of hay. Of course, hay is located all around the game, and it always tends to be conveniently located in places you’ll need it. Instead of taking care of your immediate objectives right of the bat (each of your assassinations), you need to spend a good deal of time – in fact most of the time – gathering information before you strike. If you need a simple metaphor to help you visualize how this game takes place, just think: Tenchu meets the Crusades.

Of course, Assassin’s Creed plays quite a bit differently than Tenchu, and is leaps and bounds ahead in terms of graphics. There’s almost no debate - the most attractive feature of Assassin’s Creed are its breathtaking visuals. This amazing visual monument contains some of the most stunning graphics ever seen on any platform - from highly detailed, and authentic looking settings, to fluid looking cloth animations (for the most part). Altair wears a fluid and nearly life-like outfit that flows with movement, and flags throughout the kingdom ripple in the wind as one would expect in the real world. Enemies even twitch and spasm, as they are lying on the ground before death’s sweet embrace. The world of Assassin’s Creed is painted beautifully with high resolution textures, and nearly everything looks spectacular. Well, that is with the exception of water – once again water is not the high point of Assassin’s Creed, as it is quite dull and stagnant looking. Aside from that, everything is animated superbly, and the tremendous amount of attention to detail is remarkable.

The character models are all sculpted with a strong sense of style and polish, and clearly represent the era and region they derive from. Surprisingly, lip synchronization is also well done, with a few less common exceptions. There are thousands upon thousands of NPCs throughout the kingdom, though realistically, most are only there for show and to make escaping through the streets more of a challenge. Far fewer actually have any real importance in the game, though every person walking the streets enhances the environment, even if they are not as finely detailed as the more significant figures you encounter. Needless to say, it is quite obvious that much more attention has been paid to the design of Altair, than any of the other characters in the game. Those who have roles in the main story also look considerably better than the masses you encounter on the streets, but still are nowhere near as sleek and polished as Altair.

Nonetheless, there are hordes of civilians spread throughout each of the main three cities, Acre, Damascus and Jerusalem, which really gives you a sense of the size and life of such thriving outposts of civilization. It’s a nice change to see so much life in capital cities, since many games tend to throw in a scarce number of citizens and want you to believe the city is a booming metropolis. In Assassin’s Creed, you actually get the sense of the scale of these regions, and just how lively many ancient communities were.

Each of the three cities is broken into three separate districts, rich, poor and middle, although I often found myself having a hard time distinguishing between each. I was a bit surprised to see roughly the same looking people and similar looking buildings throughout all of the districts. Several times I couldn’t help but thinking that the variations between the classes were miniscule at most, as I would expect to see much more of a contrast between the architecture of the rich and poor districts. Sadly, there didn’t seem to be that distinction, and if distinction is there it is so negligible you may not even notice it.

My biggest gripe is that there are so few variations among the NPCs walking the streets. The developers created roughly 10-20 different character models for civilians (for each city) and “copied and pasted” those everywhere, which means when you turn the corner you may run into a guy you just saw seconds ago. Even worse are the more rare occasions in which you can see two characters, which look absolutely identical, conversing with one another! More variety with the appearance of the citizens would have greatly increased the level of realism and allowed for the player to more easily assimilate into this virtual world. It’s a bit hard to take your surroundings seriously when you are seeing the same people everywhere. Though, in all fairness, this has often been a problem with even the most highly regarded games - a sad sight this gamer has hoped developers would have overcome by now.

Fortunately, Assassin’s Creed boasts the most professional motion capturing and choreography ever seen in gaming, which rivals even the best Hollywood has to offer. Every swing of a blade, or punch in the gut is amazingly integrated into the most fluid and realistic movement I have ever seen in a game. And, as you climb atop builds to escape, every reach actually grasps onto a small object or crevice in the structure – a feat very few other games take the time to orchestrate realistically.

While not as much of a feast for the senses, the sounds are not half-bad. The music features a variety of middle-eastern sounds which fit the theme perfectly. As things heat up, the music becomes much more intense letting you know you’re in a battle – in case you didn’t get the clue by the guards hacking away at you for some reason. The sound of swords clashing is awesome, and it even varies so you aren’t hearing the same sound clip over and over for each clash of metal. The voice acting is generally pretty well done, though sometimes only mediocre. It’s a pity that everyone seems to emit an accent except for our protagonist, Altair. A more serious problem with the voice-overs is that you end up hearing the same one-liners repeatedly, which can really begin to get on your nerves. But at least something is present and they don’t just stare you in the face. I found myself often feeling that the game was missing ambience and sounds to create the feeling of being in one of these cities. With so many people and markets everywhere, you rarely hear people talking (for how many there are) and you don’t get the sensation of all the hustle and bustle around you. With so much liveliness surrounding you, it should only be expected that sounds envelope you from all the commotion of busy urban life. Since there is so much to see, you naturally only come to expect to hear just as much.

And much to see their definitely is. The line of sight is incredible, especially when you scale to one of the many view points throughout the Kingdom. When you get to the top of a view point and swan dive downward towards a pile of hay - it’s definitely a sight to see. Some of the views are breathtaking, although there does tend to be occasional slow down and tearing from time to time. Oddly enough, the slow down seems to come at almost random times and not necessarily just because you are up high looking throughout the city. Screen tearing, while also sporadic, occurs almost twice as often as frame rate lag, although neither of these are to the point that they really interfere with game play. The camera can also be a bit of a booger occasionally, and it always seems to cause problems during combat. An object may obstruct your view by being present in the foreground and anything behind it, including you or your enemies, will become hidden. It doesn’t happen very often, but I did find myself cursing at the camera at least a few times.

Combat is incredibly intense and fairly balanced too, I might add. When you start off the game, and your health is at a minimum, you run the risk of being killed almost as much as the chances of you killing. Obviously, once you get a hang of how the combat works, things will start to shape up in your favor. I never would have imagined, but I absolutely love the combat in Assassin’s Creed, because it not only is a well balanced composition of skill, timing and patience, but because of how well orchestrated every swing and blow is. If you are impatient you may not like Assassin’s Creed too much, because this is not a button-smasher. You need to time all your moves out properly and think before you act, otherwise, you are not going to be too happy with the consequence. There is a considerably large emphasis on timing and pace in the battles that you will encounter, and if you can’t keep that it mind and can’t wait for the right times to strike you will be one of the corpses lying on the ground people are freaking out over.

I welcome the combat system, because of how finely tuned it was towards practicing timing and rhythm. It’s nice to play a game where you can’t just hopelessly smash down all the buttons hoping to win. I have to admit, when I first played Assassin’s Creed, I was pretty bad, but towards the end of the game I could take on 20 or more guards while taking only a scratch. In other words: practice makes perfect! Unlike other action, and even role playing, games that guide the skill balance based on handicaps (the AI’s attack power, speed, etc), Assassin’s Creed seems to only increase the number of foes you have to deal with, which is a much more welcome direction than pitting you against ridiculously difficult enemies. Unless you are a train wreck when it comes to playing games, your skill should increase as you play, so an increased number of enemies as you progress is not a big deal.

Of course, occasionally, there may be more guards than you can deal with, or you simply may not be up for a fight. Whatever the reason might be; if you need to get away from your pursuers be prepared for an amazing getaway. If you have seen Assassin’s Creed in action, you were probably impressed with how awesome looking and incredibly intense the chase scenes are. You do your best to climb to the highest point you can, while guards are throwing rocks to knock you down. If you do manage to get on top of a structure and loose your followers then you better find a hiding place quickly, because they are sure to follow you up.

One odd, and downright unrealistic, quirk about escaping is that when you do manage to find camouflage, as soon as your status becomes “anonymous” again, any guards that could have been feet away from you seconds ago become completely oblivious to you when they see you seconds later. It’s a bit too easy in that camouflage not only restores your status to being another face in the crowd, but it apparently induces amnesia upon all your recent pursuers. Without the ability to remember who they were even chasing seconds earlier, the AI of the guards could use a bit more work. I also found it amusing to stand next to the top of a ladder and wait for the guards to climb up and I’d slice them down – and of course, since they aren’t the brightest bunch, they will continue to keep re-climbing the ladder until I sliced them all to death.

Generally, the control is not only simple but very efficient, but there are times when it just does something completely different than you had intended. You would think that to scale so many large structures and jump from poles and so forth that a lot of work would be involved in pulling off those feats. That couldn’t be any less true – all you really need to do is hold down the R2 and A buttons and you will be running wherever you go and climbing anything in front of you or jumping over any gaps in your direction. It’s actually a very simple system that still lets you feel like you are controlling the character, but also takes care of most of the dirty precision work. Of course, it’s not perfect, and there are bound to be times which Altair does something different than you intend or expect, but it is never anything major like jumping off somewhere or killing himself. Instead, occasionally he may try climbing up a structure or jumping on something when you just want to sit on a bench or hide under shelter. Assassin’s Creed also contains an auto-lock-on mechanism that will automatically have your aim locked on the closest enemy when you enter combat. It works very well, and is incredibly helpful, but there are occasions in which you don’t want the lock-on enabled at all because you are trying to escape.

There are some fundamental problems with the formula of Assassin’s Creed – primarily which it suffers from a high dose of repetition. You have your assassinations, and then you have to gather information prior to introducing Mr. Steel to Mr. Badguy. The gathering information part is where it all gets bland and overly done as the game goes on. To gather information, you do different things like sit on benches and eavesdrop on people, pickpocket others and perform hits on the side to gather knowledge from a couple brotherhood buddies of Altair. The problem is that for every assassination you make, you need to repeat these same preparatory steps over and over again. And since you spend much more time doing the information gathering than assassinating, this means you are spending more time doing the same thing over and over again as opposed to something new.

No one wants to do the same thing over and over no matter what it is – unless it is pleasurable. And not too many people are going to think it’s that interesting or entertaining to sit on benches listening to people, or walking behind a guy and holding a button - especially when pickpocketing is so overly simplified and without consequence. To pickpocket, you walk behind your victim and hold the A button – that’s it. Very rarely they may turn around and you’re busted, but all that happens then is they might alert the guards and you just have to leave the general area and come back again to give it another try. There is also no penalty for being spotted by anyone else as you are doing it, which feels a bit off for a stealth game. Other forms of information gathering consist of making a hit on some other guards as a favor to a friend, or collecting a certain number of flags – both objectives which are timed. It seems odd that some of these information gathering objectives have 3 or 5 minute limits, as they seem to be nothing more than mini-games and oddly out of place in a stealth game. Once more, if you fail any of these, you can come back and try them again. You don’t have to gather all the information that exists prior to an assignation, but at least half it. No matter what you do to get that information, you are sure to repeat many of the same steps numerous times for each new assassination you get. Sure, it is understandable that a game can have such elements, but the entire formula of a game shouldn’t revolve around them, as is the case here.

Sadly, Assassin’s Creed feels to be all about repetition. Even all of the achievements are awarded for performing a certain task or skill so many times. There are things you can do on the side of the main quest’s assassinations, but these too consist of pure repetition. There are many flags spread throughout the game in each of the areas, and if you go hunting for them you will be rewarded with achievements. Throughout each district of each of the three cities, there are citizens in distress, being harassed by guards. Saving all of them for each city also will earn you achievements. Saving each citizen is done by taking down the surrounding guards and then talking to them – once you have done it a single time doing it again will be simply since nothing changes. Even more disappointingly, the dialog they say is incredibly repetitive and you will hear the same few lines countless times if you go on these freeing “missions”. Personally, I feet that Assassin’s Creed would benefit with the addition of some real side-missions with unique objectives. Everything you do in the main quest is already repetitive, and then everything you can do on the side is repetitive, so there should have at least be some missions to break the monotony by sending you on more original missions. It isn’t by any means a complete bore to play, but occasionally you may get the feeling of your routine being somewhat tiresome.

Presentation wise, there is also a bit to be desired. It does not look as if they developers took much time or effort in porting Assassin’s Creed to the Xbox 360. The tearing and frame rate problems appear to be completely random and come at sporadic times, which is a good indication that it isn’t necessarily the result of over-processing. While it is true that a huge percentage of Xbox 360 games suffer from screen-tearing, there are also a large number of huge games with awesome graphics that get away with just as much without suffering from these problems. Sadly, I also encountered collision-detection bugs on two separate occasions, which resulted in me having to restart the game. Once I had got stuck inside a tree somehow and could not move. The other time was towards the end of the game when the area accessible to you gradually moves as you defeat soldiers. Somehow, I got stuck inside a no-access area and Altair was running into a wall and I could not regain control of him. It seems as though either the developers didn’t scrutinize the performance of the game well enough, or problems were created out of the port. Whatever the case, I encountered two fatal bugs while playing, so I can only hope you will be luckier than I. But aside from these two flukes and the occasional issue with tearing and frame rates, the game runs quite well - especially considering how much is on-screen at a single time. Assassin’s creed will never come screeching to halt and completely dip in frame rate as the occasional lag you will encounter is relatively minor.

Even if much of the game play can feel repetitive, it still feels enjoyable to climb up buildings and throw beggars around. Combat is also a blast, and if you are one of those collector types, then you will end up spending a long time trying to find all the hidden flags. Sometimes you just feel like picking something up and messing around in it for a while – Assassin’s Creed is perfect for that. Even with the problems that it has, it is one of the most beautiful looking games ever, and I honestly was quite addicted to playing it for a good few days. Yes, there is a lot that could be improved upon, but very few games are perfect as they are. If you have a general idea about what you are getting into when you play a game like this, then I am quite confident that you will not be disappointed.




Overall Score: 8

Gameplay: (8) A good story, with some questionable story telling decisions. Climb almost anywhere and go almost anywhere - just don't forget H20 is instant death (assassin's can't swim). Enjoyable combat and a wonder to watch. Too bad it's formula is based around repetition. Unmatched motion capturing & choreography!

Graphics: (9) Quite possibly the nicest looking game in many ways. If it weren't for dips in the frame-rate and tearing, it would be close to perfection.

Sound: (8) Some great sound affects mixed with good music and voice overs. It's a pity so many lines are recycled as often as they are and that ambience feels lacking overall.

Lasting Appeal: (7) Repetition. It's always a blast to scale the cities, but the formula begins to feel repetitive after you are on your second hit. A variety of side missions would be greatly welcomed.