Just celebrated my 23rd birthday, and among other presents that I've been enjoying for the past few days, one of the real highlights has been getting my hands on some newer PC game titles.
Among those titles has been Assassin's Creed, and the reason why I've chosen this game in particular to review, is because I've discovered that I do in fact have a few issues with it.
To give you a bit of background, you play Altair, an member of an order of assassins who target political bad-guys in the name of the "greater good". It's the time of the third crusade, 1191 to be precise, and you're in Palestine. The game centres around your initial failure to uphold the Assassin's Creed, a sort of code of honour. You are now forced to regain your honour and the respect of your peers, by taking out nine assassination targets. With each assassination, you are restored a rank and regain lost abilities and weapons. Because you have been demoted, you are now no longer pointed directly to your target, but instead must go hunting around the city, be it Jerusalem, Acre, or Damascus, finding quests and completing them, before you are allowed to carry out the assassination.
This is the first of many, many HUGE gameplay mistakes Ubisoft Montreal made in the production of this game. You are required to complete three out of a possible 6 tasks before you are allowed to assassinate your target. There are nine targets. That means that in order to complete the game you must complete 27 tasks. Many of these are extremely clunky, some are impossible to complete due to poor design, and others are just so repetitive because you have to keep going back to redo them due to constant failure.
Which brings me to another downfall. The clunky controls of this game. By god if I haven't already had enough of third person cameras that don't work properly and a character who seems to have a mind of his own about where he's going, Assassin's Creed had to come along and prove that in fact, no, I have not had enough, apparently I need even more!
At the top left hand corner of the screen on the HUD you'll find a little eye that tells you how your social status. White means you're unseen. Yellow means the guards are suspicious. Red means they see you and you're wanted. Now I've got a major issue with this purely because it goes straight from neutral to fifth gear without anything inbetween - it's either you're unseen or you're a suspect. Whatever happened to just being anonymous? The game claims that you're anonymous in the yellow state, but how can you be if the guards are constantly suspicious of you? Are they suspicious of everyone? This annoying little feature makes it incredibly difficult to do anything with any realistic degree of stealth, because the moment you so much as bump into someone the guards are chasing you out of town. This doesn't happen early on by the way, it's actually much easier early on in the game. This high-alert status when you're supposedly "anonymous" is something that happens later on, once the grind has begun to set in and you're beginning to tire of the repititive and totally superfluous quests that you're sent on.
What's really annoying is that they've obviously recognised that travelling around everywhere on horseback is a real grind, so they've allowed you to "fast forward" past that, which leaves you wondering how they could miss the fact that these quests ALSO need a fast forward button?
The next huge failure is simply how easy everything is. There is no skill involved with this game at all, which sucks all the fun out of it. Altair bungles around like a big oaf in broad daylight, there's no stealth whatsoever. Unlike splinter cell where you were totally in control over how noisy you were, how visible you were, etc. AC is totally devoid of it. You can either hide or "blend", the latter simply involving finding the nearest group of monks and joining in with them, as if all groups of four monks would naturally have a fifth monk who happens to be armed to the teeth and wearing a completely different outfit. Instead of requiring any amount of skill or input, the game has this infuriating and patronising way of "doing it for you". Sword fighting is done for you, you just sit there clicking in the correct order like some twisted version of dance dance revolution. Jumping from rooftop to rooftop is done for you, you just hold buttons down and change direction. Climbing is done for you, you just choose a path that allows him to continue climbing. There is some minor puzzle solving with regards to scaling buildings, which is briefly entertaining, as well as some small amount of finesse and timing required in some of the quests, but for the most part it's decidedly dumbed down. There is no real element of skill that goes into any part of the game - I could forgive one thing or another if it made a certain major area of the game possible - for instance the automatic wall climbing and free running would be understandable if the game revolved mainly around puzzles or something.
Quite what this game was hoping to achieve is beyond me, because they same to have removed or tamed most of the ideas and concepts they threw at it. I've given it up for now, I actually got so bored of the tedious quests in acre that I just plain walked out the city gate and went to Damascus. And now after the game has crashed to desktop, I've just left it. Even once you've completed the quests you're only given more long winded cutscenes, unnecessary dialogue, and poorly executed climaxes that go along with the assassination. There is no satisfaction in completing an area because it is only followed by more of the same tedious crap.
I actually cannot be fucked to load up the game again, because of the countless loading screens that you encounter. Because of that stupid fucking *spoiler alert* Animus machine, you get no less than 5 loading screens before you get to your game. One for the main program to start, another for the main menu, another for the animus section of the game, another while the animus is loading it's in-game menu, and one final one while it loads the actual savegame.
Despite all it's negatives, this game actually has an amazing atmosphere, the graphics are beautiful and the concept (save for the animus part) is fantastic. The design, and the recreation of the ancient cities of the holy land is amazing. There are some really fun elements to the game, some neat design ideas, and some really innovative features that show a lot of potential. The totally explorable environment is brilliant, and would be even better if you could enter buildings. The quests would be much better if they had more depth and were not just boiled down to such menial tasks and didn't feel like "cut and paste" clones from previous missions.
Actually if I'm honest I CAN see the direction they were trying to go with this game, I just think it's a shame that they failed to reach that mark. I think there were some ideas in this game that were intended to be bigger but got cut out at the last minute. For instance, it's obvious to me that the beautiful rendering of the riding around on horseback was something that had a lot of thought and effort put into it - you're taught how to fight on horseback and even blend in on horseback. But after the first few missions you don't even see another horse for the whole rest of the game, in fact you just fast forward past them. Early on in the game, if the horse decides it likes you, it will follow you around after you've dismounted it! Why bother with these elements if later on they're not even encountered? The whole thing just feels unfinished, perhaps even rushed, which would not surprise me.
But still, I'm glad I've played this game, despite all the bad things I have to say about it. It was a unique experience and I'll probably keep going back to it, so that I can eventually finish it. Personally, if I'd been in charge of development on this game I would've taken it more along the lines of Diablo II meets Splinter Cell meets Thief, and I would've left out the Animus as a useless, even disruptive and interrupting story element. I recommend that you all try this game at least once. Even if it's on a console or a friend's computer. It IS fun, it IS immersive, slightly addictive, and an inspiring concept. It does, bizarrely, make you want to go out and buy a sword, make a costume, and go stalking around rooftops!
So, in summary, I'll give this game 6 out of 10. It's a rushed, unfinished, dumbed down, no-skill-required hack and slash "adventure" with a monotonous and tedious quest system, that provides little or no satisfaction whatsoever. Despite how incredible and open the free-to-roam environments are, the gameplay manages to be so linear and gets samey after a while. The AI is pretty poor and the recycled game elements get very annoying quite quickly.
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