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Assassins Creed is an experience that falls between two stools.
Before I played this, I’d seen a number of clips of the gameplay and it looked absolutely wonderful… and it does, but when the shine on such a game has faded after the first hour, it’s the content that’s lacking.
This game has a well weird start to it that seems more akin to Life on Mars than an action console game.
In fact, the introduction about how you get into the game proper in the first place is really long-winded and got on my nerves. The idea is that your ancestor’s memories are transferred into your brain and you act out like they would. The same kind of thing crops up later on and is so unnecessary – you don’t need to pretend we’re playing a game full of AI and computer-generated imagery… we already are!
The general plot of what you’re meant to be doing centres around Altair, an assassin who has fallen from grace after failing to bump off the Templar Leader and wants to climb back up the ladder. Taking place in 1191 AD, when the Third Crusade was tearing the Holy Land apart and Sinan, the Assassins’ Leader sends you out to execute a number of men involved, most of whom sound like they have a name that looks like an accident in a scrabble bag. So, job done, right? Not quite.
A number of aspects here come about rather like the Hitman series, such as with hiding from the enemy. Do it for a little while and they’ll soon forget you’re about. Of the various missions, listening into others’ conversations and then pickpocketing someone is a fairly tedious exercise, as is blending into the background by mixing with scholars or riding a horse, upsetting the locals and then galloping further away from them so they give up… and repeat.
At times this reminded me of the Sega Dreamcast title Shenmue. That one had great graphics, was overhyped and had characters forcing you to go to bed every so often (to break up the days, that is, not for a bit of the other). similarly, there are long-winded cut scenes that come too often and go on a fair bit.
There were traces of the title Nomad Soul in there too, a game that looked and sounded nice too, but just didn’t play too well and sometimes left you running about in frustration trying to find out what to do next. There is some direction here, but you can end up going for a wonder sometimes.
Assassins Creed looks lovely, with graphics that, if I was to nit-pick, would allow you to spot a slightly too-near draw distance, but perhaps this is so that the visuals can be so lush? All that said, before long you start to notice its shortcomings, such as regular inhabitants of the village saying variations on a theme of “What is that man doing?” as you run about like a looney, including up thee walls, since none of them have yet been introduced to the concept of parkour 🙂
It’s also nice being able to climb up a ladder part of the way, swing round it somehow as someone comes and attacks you, and then swing back again. In fact, the ability to be very agile including to perform a kill and quickly escape will give the next Tomb Raider episode something to aim for. (And on the subject of murdering, although you can try and grab the baddies before doing the deed, most times it’s just easier to button-mash and bump ’em off good and hard).
Other observations and irritations in this title include the ability to help save a citizen by killing the attackers surrounding him, but they’re the same old kind of attackers you’ll always see and once saved he just tells you he’ll make sure others have heard of his tale.
You can collect flags of various denominations throughout the game, but with 100 of each this is much like the same kind of thing in the Grand Theft Auto games: you’ll find them when you find them, and if you have nothing better to do than to track down all 100 of each type… you clearly don’t have a day-job.
Playability is a pain when you’re in a fight and can’t seem to break away from it and run off. Your man just seems to want to stand there and take a beating(!)
In addition, it’s the seemingly arbitrary behaviour of letting you run through scenes and then flicking to a ‘more recent memory’ that really gets on your nerves and you just want to play a normal game but with the same cool graphics and style.
Come on, Ubisoft, you’ve got a wonderful and inventive graphics engine here. Please do something great with it next time.
Assassins Creed is available now on PC, Xbox 360 and PS3
Important info:
- Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
- Publisher: Ubisoft
- Players: Single player campaign
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GRAPHICS SOUND GAMEPLAY ENJOYMENT |
10 10 7 5 |
| OVERALL | 8 |
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.