Assassin’s Creed

So Assassin’s Creed 2 is listed as coming soon at my local game store. I guess we should be pretty excited. I, for one, look forward to playing the game but probably not for the reasons most people are. Now there are some people left in the world who didn’t get around to playing the first Assassin’s Creed and I happen to know some of them are having a go at this highly rated adventure so they can get the sequel and not be out of the loop. So for this, but mostly for the hell of it, let’s take a look back at Assassin’s Creed, or Ass’s Creed as I like to call it.

The game was released by Ubisoft back in 2007 to a lot of eagerly awaiting gamers. The trailer looked excellent, it was a novel idea for a game and was making use of all the pretty next generation graphics consoles had to offer. Gamers were excited when it came out and continue to rave about what a great lot of fun it was. The game has sold well enough to qualify for a sequel and some reviewers have given it a ten out of ten rating. So the game must be good, right? Wrong. That means the game is awful? Well, no it isn’t. It’s certainly playable. But it’s still a bad game.

Quick and spoiler free: The game has you playing an Assassin in the 12th century Holy Land, amidst the Third Crusade. The protagonist, Altair, is an experienced and talented assassin but not a very obedient or well behaved assassin. Because he does the unthinkable and kills someone, he is stripped of his rank, weapons and sent back to level one which makes him also somehow inept at combat. In order to regain everything he lost, he must be a good little boy and go kill nine prominent people who are supposedly bringing war to the Holy Land.

That means you’ve got nine sand-box style levels in which to go and kill your target. Now the first couple of levels are good. The game has you running around as you please in one of three different cities jumping over roof tops, moving through crowds, fighting guards and collecting flags. You get to climb up walls, stab people secretly and leave the baffled guards looking for you and even engage in a little swash buckling. The game makes you feel about as awesome as you can get.

When you finally decide to stop exploring and get on with the story you’ll find that before you actually kill your target you have to do side missions to learn clues about where your target is and get helpful tips on the best way to take him out. However there is only about four different kinds of side missions you can do and most of them tell you crap you won’t ever use anyway. If you really want to complete the game 100% you’re going to need to do these four side quests only ten thousand times each for the afore mentioned no reward. Once you get to level three it stops feeling awesome. By level five, I’d given up bothering with a lot of the tasteless, repetitive side missions and stuck to the central three that I had to do.

That’s the biggest problem this game faces. There are nine levels that might as well all be one level. You’ve got nine targets but three cities which means you’re not only going to be doing the same thing but you’re going to be doing it in the same places. I found it was usually more entertaining to not do anything story or quest related and just kill guards but before long you’ve got the dodgy sword fighting part of the game mastered and even that’s no fun any more.

The sword fighting isn’t the only dodgy thing about this game. The controls are painful unintuitive and if you’re ever doing precisions (jumping from narrow platform to narrow platform, for those not up on the parkour lingo) you will end up falling to the ground or, even worse, into the water which means you die. Yes, Altair apparently can’t swim. Just one more painful problem this game throws at you.

Worse still is the complete and utter failure to immerse the player. Not once do I feel like I am Altair or even an Assassin in the ancient Holy Land (not least of all because of how little assassining there is going on). Part of this failure is the AI who are the stupidest people to ever exist. One of the side missions you can do requires you to rescue an NPC getting bullied by the guards. If you don’t then you go running off into the crowd like one of those Batman wannabes in Dark Knight but stay and watch the NPC they will run over to the corpse of the guard and say “How terrible! Who could have done this?”

So you’re probably wondering why I’m looking forward to the sequel? Well it’s not because this was such a fantastic game and it’s not because they’ve had a chance to really screw things up and now they can recreate the experience with extra awesome. No. The reason is all to do with the game’s biggest flaw and the thing that made me hate it the most. It’s all to do with the plot of this game.

You see the game is very straight forward and dull right from the beginning. The game play makes you feel awesome but the story is uninteresting. Then there’s a big turn around and the game play has become repetitive but the plot actually shows up. The only reason I kept playing the game is so I could see how it ends. Then it committed that most hideous of crimes and didn’t even have the decency to end. There’s not even a conclusion like Ass’s Creed was just one small chapter. The game literally comes to a sudden end without resolving a single thing. Then it actually has the nerve to go and hint and more aspects of the plot.

So I’ll be renting or borrowing Ass’s Creed 2 and suffer through it in some desperate hope to know what happens. The story is actually interesting when you finally get to it so that wins some points for the game. However if you haven’t played the game and are thinking of doing so or even morbidly curious, give it a miss. Go buy inFamous or Cooking Mama.

Assassin’s Creed gets 2/5. The story is interesting enough to make me keep playing when I’d lost all other interest and I actually had fun with the first few levels of the game. Overall, though, it just doesn’t cut it. A good idea gone to waste. There’s also a complete lack of trophies in this game which makes doing all the missions and collecting some five hundred hidden flags completely and utterly pointless.