Review: Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed was an interesting play that kept me involved, intrigued, and interested over the course of the 7 months it took me to beat it. (Note, the long play time says nothing about the game, and a lot about my ridiculously busy schedule.)

I loved the gameplay. Running up walls, leapfrogging across scaffolds and flinging knives at sentries was amazingly fun. The story relating to the past (where you play as Altair) was full of mystery, difficulty, and a bit of suspense. Very well crafted overall.

Choice was also a key element of the game. You could pick what order you did the assassinations in (at least, for each group of missions) and which investigations one performs. The latter was particularly nice, particularly since I sucked at the stealth assassination investigations.

Trasitioning from the past to the present felt a bit choppy and sudden. While it is meant to feel this way (just as Desmond would feel being drawn out of the Animas), I felt it could have been handled differently. As it was, it felt bulky.

While the second story of Desmond was just as full of mystery and intrigue as Altair's, I sometimes felt like it was trying to be two stories in one. While this wasn't altogether bad, I did occasionally feel bogged down trying to puzzle through two separate mysteries.

I think a better tether between the stories would have helped me a lot. As it was, the rare amount of play time that I got made me forget when I was due to get pulled from the Animas. While the zone-loading and execution scenes tied you to the Animas itself, I never felt any connection to the present. Some stronger tether between the two to help keep the player conscious of both ends of the story would have been a positive change for me.

The largest problem I had with the game was the script. It was a little cheesy, a little melodramatic. Once, my husband was in the room where I was playing, and he sarcastically quipped off a response to one of the characters that was as predictable and cheesy as he could think of. As if on cue, Altair repeated it word for word.

Assassin's Creed has fallen into the trap that many games seem to fall in to: Having to Tell, instead of Show. In a book, or even a movie, it's easier to convey a lot of back information to a character via cutting over to a different character. But this story focuses on just the one character, so you don't really get a chance to convey information except to have him say it as exposition.

Particularly when Altair was puzzling through the mystery of the Templar secrets, he would feel to just ramble, restating things for emphasis, and ladling exposition of plot and his thoughts onto the player. These were done in awkward feeling dialogues with other members of the Creed.

I think that was what really bothered me. Not only was there a lot of spoken exposition, but it was done chunky, unnatural dialogue, when if it had to be done at all, may have felt less chunky if it came as a voice-over of an internal monologue.

A couple of minor problems that I had were gameplay based. First of all, I know that tearing down a street at a dead run is not the easiest way to blend in. But walking everywhere sometimes felt painfully slow.

Accomplishing side-objectives, such as saving citizens from abuse, could easily become overwhelming if a patrol happened to walk by. While finding creative ways to bypass this problem (or simply killing every enemy in sight) was definitely a welcome challenge to the game, the reward felt too small. I rarely really had need to run through the vigilante groups that would congregate there to escape pursuit. It wasn't long before I gave up saving these innocents.

Another irritant were the designed hindrances. Just as there were vigilantes and hiding places to help you, there were hindrances to your movement as well. These came in the form of beggars and drunks/crazies. However, for me, these quickly went from hindrance to just flat annoying. Yes, beggars tend to be whiny. But hearing a croaking, sing-song voice crying "My family is sick and [i]dying[/i]" every other block really ground on my nerves. And being completely unable to navigate certain areas (always right where I had to go, of course) due to being shoved around by the drunks and crazies was also very frustrating. A few times, I even got irritated enough to just take the hit to my "synchronization" bar and knife them.

But hey, that's just me.

Another annoyance was the requirement to find a designated hiding place to lose pursuers. While that sounds good on paper, where was more than once when I was fleeing pursuit, and the aggro indicator showed that I was out of sight of my pursuers. I would, while out of sight, run over several rooftops, dash around several corners and really should have lost pursuit, regardless of getting into an "approved" hiding place. I understand they wanted the mechanics to be to hide and not just dash around mindlessly, but there comes a point where it's like... really?

The last minor annoyance was that in-game achievements don't exist for the PS3 version. They weren't even patched in later as they were with the XBox. This made things like killing all 60 Templars and gathering the various flags in each zone feel more pointless.

Achievements may not mean much, but yes, they do make me feel more productive about wasting my time on sidequests.

One thing that I felt really stood out with the game was the integration of the HUD with the story. As gamers, we have come to accept things like arbitrary health bars that grow as tasks are accomplished, areas being locked from access, and other such information as part of the game, despite them really being something more intangible.

But, Assassin's Creed's choice  to instead incorporate that HUD into the story was something I enjoyed. Instead of a health bar, you get a "Synchronization Bar". It functions, and serves the same purpose, as a health bar, but instead you are taking the approach that you are losing the path that your ancestor took.

Given that you are looking at events that have already occurred, it helps to make a player's death seem more realistic in that you don't through off the space-time continuum by creating a paradox, you just fell out of synch with your ancestor. This also allowed the player to be penalized for actions like killing innocents without it feeling like a contrivance. ("Wait, if I kill someone, how does that damage me?")

All in all, it just made much of the necessary mechanics feel more innate to the story rather than something outside of the game world.

But, cheesy script and annoying beggars aside, the game was enjoyable from beginning to end. The mysteries were engaging, the gameplay was well executed over all. The assassinations scaled well, requiring greater cunning and planning than previous executions, requiring the player to fine tune their strategy.

A truly fun game, and one that I'll likely play through again.