Assassin's Creed

Date Acquired: 11.25.2008

Date Completed: 7.6.2010

Thoughts: I initially had trouble getting into this game. My initial impression was the controls were clunky and imprecise. I played through the tutorial and a few minutes of the mission but just didn't get hooked, and moved on quickly. That could have been it for me and Assassin's Creed, but the stellar reviews the sequal received made it clear to me that I would eventually need to revisit the first game. Also I really like Ubisoft's Prince of Persia games, to which I perceived this being of similar ilk. The end result was a game I found to be alternatingly very satisfying and very frustrating.

Pros: There is a lot this game does well. The assassinations are a lot of fun. I enjoyed the simplicity and effectiveness of the throwing knives (they replaced the crossbow that was originally supposed to be in the game and even exists in some early trailers) Finding high perches and climbing to their summits to synchronize your map, and discover new missions was a highlight. It allowed the game to show off it's visual beauty, which even now 3 years later I felt held up very well. The little graphical flourishes were a nice touch, there were a lot of different ways to kill someone in a fight, from cutting his head in 2, to stabbing him in the leg so he drops and then impaling him. But my favorite part was the story. I was engrossed in the events as they transpired. I WANTED to talk to Lucy after every trip in the Animus, to find out more about my mysterious captors and her role in all of this. I needed to know where it was all leading.

Cons: As good as the game is in places, it is a frustrating, buggy mess in others. My initial assessment of the clunkyness of the controls was spot on. Many times fights would not go my way even though I was performing precisely the correct block and counter moves I'd performed so many times before. The game just chose not to register that I had done anything and allowed me to be hacked to pieces. Once the game froze so badly on me after an assasination, I was trapped inside a building's wall and couldn't get out. I had to restart my game and redo the assasination. Water may be the most frustrating thing about the game. I can take on 50 enemies at once, but if I fall in the water, my game is over. And the game makes it VERY easy to fall in the water. One assasination in particular has you traveling to a pier and fight an enemy on a ship. You have to hop along several small platforms and the game won't auto correct when it realizes you were aiming for a peer. It will let you sail 3 inches past it into your death so you can reload and backtrack to that spot and try it again. The most common flaw with the game I've heard cited against it is it's repetitiveness. And there's no arguing this point. The games extremely repetitive. You will be doing the same missions over and over and over again in the game. There is one optional side mission: Save the pesant from harm' and this is always 5 guys attackin a peasant and you always have to fight them off. As far as story missions go, there are stealth assasinations, interogations, pickpockets, and eavesdropping. Oh and once I went to do one of the missions and was asked to go pick up 20 flags he's spread all around that area of the city in 4 minutes. I would have stealth assasinated him if I could but I settled for defying him and doing a different mission. Fortunately, the game doesn't require you to do every mission, you can pick and choose, you only need to do about 3 of the 6 or so available for every assasination target. Good news since they're all the same. You can do your favorite if you want (eavesdropping is the easiest, you just sit on a bench, press y, now go make a sandwich or something, the mission is over) The repetiveness reminded me of some other sandbox games like Spiderman 2 and Crackdown, it's just a fact of life in some games, but it's made tolerable if the bulk of the gameplay is enjoyable, which is the case for Spiderman 2 and Crackdown, and it's the case in Assasin's Creed.

Undecided: The ending. Wow, how do I feel about the ending? Well if I finished the game when this originally came out, the ending definately goes in the cons section. Basically this is because the game, well DOESN'T end. I'm not joking. I got the achievement for completing the game over 30 minutes before I actually stopped playing. I even got another 50 point story achievement after that point. And even at this point it wasn't obvious the game was over. The game never takes you to a 'to be continued' screen, even though it's obvious the story isn't close to being over. The game just leaves you in your little room, free to use the animus to your heart's content, but never again to advance the plot. I had to go online to confirm that I wasn't missing something. The game just.... ended but... didn't end, because I could still be playing right now if I hadn't eventually just turned the power off. The cliff-hanger ending caught me be surprise, I really expected the story to be resolved. Fortunately I already own Assassin's Creed 2, so I immediately put it in, even though I've already s tarted the game and gone a ways through it, I started again from the begining so that this time the plot would make sense. And it made a lot more sense.

Overall: Would I recommend this game to someone else? It might depend on the person, but overall, yes I would. Partially with the expectation that the excellent 2nd game will vindicate the flaws of the original. I am very interested to see how the game improves, as nearly every critic agrees that it does in a big way.