Assassin’s Creed Review

Assassin’s Creed, developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft, is a game that you will not forget. It is beautiful, fun to play, and always forces you to question what is happening. The game takes place during the Third Crusade in various Middle Eastern locations and you play as the assassin Altair. Assassin’s Creed plays as a stealth type game with quite a bit of open combat interspersed.

Early in the game I was told that there were a certain number of people I needed to kill and it was made quite clear that the majority of the game would follow these assassinations. My initial reaction was a little bit of disappointment. All too often this happens in games where early on you are told what’s you’re going to be doing rest of the game. Even though it might still be enjoyable to play through it, a large amount of the excitement is stripped from the experience because you already know what is going to happen. I immediately knew that the game was structured in a way that as soon as I completed an assassination, that the game would move me on the next target on the list leaving me in a position where I would never be left wondering what would happen next. Fortunately, Assassin’s Creed is all about deception and the game is not as simple as it initially lets on. Instead of simply running down the list of targets, more of the story is slowly revealed over the course of the game leaving you to postulate about what is really happening.

All of this is compounded by the fact that you also play as Desmond at the near present day. So as you progress through Altair’s story and try to figure out more about what is going on, you are also trying to figure things out when you play as Desmond, almost a thousand years later.

The developers did a fantastic job building an immersive world to play the game in. The three major cities that you play in are Damascus, Jerusalem, and Acre. Each city is truly massive in scope and bustles with life. Each city feels real in the way that after spending some time each city you get to know where you are just by what everything looks like. This is an amazing feat considering each city is made up of at least several hundred buildings. Each city also has a architectural feel and mood to enhance its identity.

Playing the game is extremely exciting. Some battles are over as soon as you finish sneaking up on a lone guard and take him down with your hidden blade. Some battles are longer as you must fight larger numbers of enemies in more traditional sword fighting. The different moves available in combat provide an easy learning curve. You can definitely get through the entire game with only mastering a few moves and if you decide to master more it will make combat that much more enjoyable. Combat is also kept fresh through the use of finishing moves. These aren’t necessarily anything you control but rather small scenes where it shows Altair use a more fancy, and interesting, method to deliver the fatal blow to his enemy.

However, there are a few areas of combat that were a little disappointing. Personally I would have enjoyed combat being a little more difficult. Fairly early in the game you learn the counter-attack move which pretty much allows you to face any number of guards for any length of time. You could even just cautiously stand there and just wait to be attacked by the different guards, use your counter-attack move, then wait to be attacked again. The strength of this move made it hard for me to be motivated enough to truly master some of the other moves that you learn. It’s a little disappointing because the other moves are visually impressive and having a bigger toolbox to help mix things up during combat would be a plus. Instead I sometimes found myself feeling lazy when I would get in big fights and just relying on the counter-attack move when I could have been more engaged in either running and trying to hide (it’s part of what assassin’s do) or using my whole arsenal of moves to tear them up.

The biggest negative of Assassin’s Creed must be the repetitiveness. While the cities are varied and combat is mostly exciting, much of the game is still doing the same thing over and over again. When you get a new assignment and go to the new area, there are only a couple different types of investigations you do. None of them are necessarily bad and I quite enjoyed them all the first several times I did them, but by the end of the game you really are kind of left wishing you could do something else. This is especially true when you rescue citizens. It always leaves you in a large fight where by the end of the game you are 100% confident that you will have no problem mopping the floor with the group of guards, yet it still just seemed so inefficient. You are Altair, a master assassin, and yet you are forced to enter traditional sword fighting with large groups of armed guards over and over again. It would have been better had the developers devised a way to save the citizens in a more assassin-like way.

With that being said, overall the game was very enjoyable to play through and there were many moments that were extremely exiciting. During one assassination mission after I had reported my information at the Assassin Bureau, I began racing across the rooftops towards my target. On the way I came upon 4 rooftop guards and luck was on my side as they all faced away from me as I approached so I was able to quickly take them all out from behind and keep moving without skipping a beat. My journey played out like a movie script and I felt like I was truly a skilled assassin. Later on in the game when I was sent to take out Sibrand in Acre I managed to stealthily sneak to the back of the large ship he was on. I climbed up the back of it and was able to pop up when he turned his back, take him out, and climb back over the side of the ship without anyone even noticing I was there. Moments like these stand out because they take more time and thought to plan out. It was always easier to just charge forward and kill everyone in your path, but it is much more rewarding to play the more stealthy route.

Character development has also been given lots of attention. As you play through the game you see major transformations of Altair’s persona. Although there are only a few other characters that you see and interact with during the whole game, you are still exposed to many deep characters. The cutscenes that exist where you talk to your assassination target briefly before they die show an extremely varied cast that all do a fantastic job portraying different personalities.

As with any good story you are always left with the impression that far more has been created than what you have been exposed to. This is especially evident in the game’s ending. While some people have been upset over the apparent lack of a concrete ending, I view it as a plus because I’m sure there will be more to come. Thinking of how enjoyable this game was to play, I am definitely eager for more.

Overall: 8.6

Release Date: November 13, 2007