Assassin's Creed

[Jabberwocky]

Review: Assassin's Creed

Yeah I know this game's been out for Xbox 360 for ages. But I just replaced my ancient desktop that would have a hard time running Mrs Pacman, so I've got a long backlog of cool games to catch up on. Assassin's Creed received very high critic ratings, and so I thought I'd give it a go.


The Good:

Visuals:
The game is stunningly beautiful. The cities are very immersive, filled with sprawling buildings and crowds, and have a dusty realism about everything.

Fight Animations:
Watching the fights are like watching choreographed battles from movies like 300 or Troy. The camera work during these scenes is top notch.

Spidey-like Climbing Action:
Bolting across the city, leaping from rooftop to rooftop, grabbing ledges, and swinging from poles and rafters is extremely fun. Huge respect to the programmers, animators, and level designers who made this work so smoothly.

Controls:
There's a slightly unusual control scheme, where they've divided the buttons into body parts: "head", "hand", and "legs". What these buttons do depends on the context of the game; the hand button might be used to pick someone's pocket, grab someone in a fight, or grab a ledge while climbing. This turns out to be a neat and intuitive way of arranging the controls.

Polish:
The game is slick, polished, and practically bug free.


The Bad:

Fight Balance:
As you solve missions, you receive various skill and weapon upgrades. Unfortunately, the most powerful (counter attack) is one of the first one you get, and allows you to easily win any fight. The AI soldiers only attack one at a time (regardless if you're facing a big crowd of them), and by simply counter attacking every strike, you can easily win any battle without getting injured. This makes the rest of the skills useless, other than simply throwing them in for variation because you're bored of your invincible counter attacks. This ruins any real sense of visceral danger for the majority of the game.

Stealth:
There are a fair amount of game mechanics built up around stealth. This was used to great effect in other games such as the Thief series, where you needed to carefully sneak past guards, paying attention to the lighting conditions, the guards' patrol movements and view direction, and leaving evidence of a kill. Getting caught by the guards was scary, and you did everything in your power to avoid it.

In Assassin's Creed, since any enemies can easily be bested in combat (see above), it's really a wasted effort. There's no reason to spend the extra time and caution sneaking past guards or avoiding detection in an illegal act because there are no serious consequences of getting caught.

Laboratory Scenes:
The game has this whole extra layer of story where you're some modern average guy who is hooked up to a freaky brain machine to "sync" with his ancestor, the assassin. Every once in a while, you get booted out of the assassin's world, and taken back to the laboratory. Many hours into the game, there is still zero gameplay associated with the laboratory, other than having to walk (extremely slowly) from the brain machine to your bed to fall asleep once in a while. This all seems like the game's writers were left unchecked or unsupported to create a big chunk of irrelevant cut-scenes.

Cut Scenes:
This is subjective. To be fair, the cut scenes aren't bad. They're high quality, and in general, the voice acting is very good. Except the main character, an assassin named "Altair Ibn La-Ahad", Who talks with a modern day American accent. Which is particularly annoying since everyone else in the game talks with wonderfully flavorful and relatively proper middle-eastern accents.
On top of that, I could explain the plot so far in 1 or 2 sentences, but you must endure countless cut-scenes regurgitating these same plot points over and over again, all of which have very little impact on the gameplay and can easily be ignored (although the game doesn't allow you to skip them). Still, maybe some people will enjoy these. I didn't.

Repetitive Missions:
There isn't a lot of breadth to this game. You'll be doing the same stuff over and over, in various different cities and with various different victims.

Quitting the Game:
Quitting the game is really hard. No, I seriously mean it. It may seem nit-picky, but it's such bizarre UI design I have to call it out. I almost feel like I must be doing something wrong, and would be happy if someone could correct me.

Here are the sequence of steps you need to take to quit the game:
1. hit escape
2. (menu 1) select "Exit memory"
3. (confirm 1) select "Yes"
4. wait for loading screen
5. (menu 2) select "Exit animus"
6. (confirm 2) select "yes"
7. short cut-scene of getting off the animus booth
8. hit escape
9. (menu 3) select "quit game"
10. (confirm 3) select "yes"
11. title screen: press any key to continue
12. (menu 4)select a profile
13. (menu 5)select "exit"
14. (confirm 4) select "yes"

Yes, that's 5 menus, 4 confirm dialogs, and a couple loading screen / cut scenes.

Summary:
The "bad" section is longer than the "good" section, only because I feel they need a bit more explanation. Still, parts of the game are great, and it feels like it could have been great overall, but just missed the mark.

[johnhpus]

Animus is a weird name for them to use, if you're familiar with Jung http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animus

Also, I haven't played this game so I don't have anything to contribute, but this makes me think that I'd like to see more game reviews in the off-topic forum, and using the sort of clear format that you've gone with here. Really it's pretty surprising there hasn't bee more of this.

[syedhs]

Cant you just Alt+F4 the game to quit to desktop, provided of course you did save the game earlier

[nikki]

Cant you just Alt+F4 the game to quit to desktop, provided of course you did save the game earlier

Bah. In TF2, you just press F10 for sleep.

[Evak]

I never did figure out how to exit Assasins Creed properly. In the end I didn't play it that far, was a incredibly nice looking but horrendously dumbed down combat/rpg game with overly repetitive gameplay.

I think it made for a nice tech demo and hope that future games get a bit more depth and substance. Not expecting too much what with it being primarily a console franchise. Would love this kind of game if it was done right though.

[Nauk]

I found this one particularly funny: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... sins-Creed

[xadhoom]

I found this one particularly funny: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/ ... sins-Creed

Very good indeed!

[Jabberwocky]

Yeah zero punctuation is fantastic. Interestingly, he actually trashed Assassin's Creed less than most.