Assassin's Creed

A truly next-gen game should also be truly immersive. Many have tried to be fulfilling in this aspect, to legitimatize the "experience." Some succeed, some fail, and some make it happen. Assassin's Creed offers up in this department.

Altair is the resident badass within the Assassins Guild. He is the James Bond in the era of the Third Crusade, 1191 AD. Women want him and men want to be him. Well, the women wanting him part is not really part of the story but hell why wouldn't women want him? He can scale buildings with cat-like agility and take out multiple city guards at once with his ample weaponry; throwing knives, short and long swords, and most especially, his retractable wrist dagger. Give him a list of targets, and he will take them out.

Reconnaissance is part of his profession as well. To get to the targets, you will have to use Altair's powers of persuasion (i.e. beat the crap out of specific targets) to gain information about your quarry. You will also run into other assassins who will assist Altair with further information, provided you assist them first with either murders or timed-acrobatic-flag-collection-drills. As the game progresses, you will have to get more and more information before you are able to access your assassination memory.

Assassination memory? As it happens, this game is not solely based in times long-past. Your actual character is Altair's distant relative. A haughty corporation wants these memories of Altair's and will extract it through a memory machine in a lab. Your character is a lab rat forced to relive Altair's life through memories passed through the family genome!

So the story here is intriguing and drives the game, but the execution is pretty sad. Needless to say, I did not spoil anything because Ubisoft does it themselves five minutes into the game. Shame on you! The crazy twist should have been at the end of the game, not the damn beginning, Ubisoft! But on the flip side, the use of memory-based gameplay (forcing them to spoil the story twist early on) allows the player, as Altair, an excuse to re-do missions, die, and otherwise not progress or go places in very large cities when they are not yet supposed to. You basically fill in memory gaps by performing interrogations, picking pockets, and other feats of the skilled assassin to access the part of the memory where the primary assassination takes place.

That is not to say everything is ordained, however. The gameplay is still fairly open-ended and allows for some sight-seeing (climb towers as vantage points); some good deeds (save citizens from mean old city guards); some additional murders (anyone can be killed, but killing guards and Templar knights in different ways gets you some achievements on the 360 version); and even some collecting of hidden and scattered flags.

Getting down to the nitty-gritty, the gameplay, graphics and atmosphere are what you would expect for a next-gen game. It is these elements that create true immersion and depth. The cities are expansive, exquisitely detailed, and in all probability, historically accurate, though I am pretty sure Acre and Jerusalem were not within a five minute horse ride away from each other. But at least there is some additional fun to be had between these famous cities of yore, which serves for some meager gameplay separation. In fact, the only major downfall to Assassin’s Creed is the lack of some real gameplay breakup. Though there are some alternate objects with the flag collecting and killing of Templar, there are no alternate mission styles or game types, like maybe some knife throwing contests or a king-of-the-hill death match against a thousand guards, for example.

Many have heard how revolutionary the control in Assassin's Creed is supposed to be. The face buttons of the controller utilize a certain part of the body. One button is for legs, another for left hand, another for the head, etc. It is the puppeteer scheme. But what it comes down to is a very basic control on top of a seemingly complicated concept. It is not hard to make Altair perform his feats nor does it feel very groundbreaking. It just works and works well. Battles and acrobatics are exciting and not overwhelmed with too much thought of which button does what in a pinch. Ubisoft did well to keep it fairly simple and effective.

Okay, I lied. There are a couple other qualms I have with Assassin's Creed. One is the lack of stylish and/or varied assassinations. There’s no bag of cool tricks up Altair’s sleeves. At most he can leap far for a loud assassination (not stealth) or sneak up and drive his dagger in the back of a guard… really dumb guards who forget about you if you simply break their line of sight and hide, much like in Tenchu.

While Ubisoft paid a lot of attention to detail with character design and emotion, landscape, interaction, and movement, they seemed to have left out some attention to fun factor. When you kill a primary target, there is a cut-scene where the gravity of the kill can be felt and some story line transferred, but there is no fun in random slayings. No neat flip-over-and-stab tricks or flying dagger strikes. Killing enemies becomes a chore or fun only for the Xbox Live Achievement points.

The other issue with this game is the lack of some quality sound. The voice acting is nothing to write home about; in fact the amount of repeating phrases coming from the citizens is enough to make you want to choke yourself... or murder them in cold blood.

Ah, but I digress. Let there be no mistake, Assassin's Creed is a goldmine of next-gen goodness. The magnificence and magnitude of the world of the first assassins is worth the repetitiveness and small lack in flair. There is certainly a lot of ground work laid for an awesome sequel if nothing else.