I was actually looking forward to Assassin’s Creed because it had so much potential. An open world game in a Medieval setting where you play an assassin? Count me in! In actuality it is a bland open world with repetitive missions and poor combat controls where the main character is anything but an assassin. Count me out!

I figured that this game would be akin to the Hitman series in that you use stealth to assassinate your targets subtly and without arousing suspicion. Nope. After the first major target, this is all but impossible. Once you enter the area where your target is you enter a cinematic mode with scripted events that most of the time have you fight a wave of enemies. The option of stealth is never even given to you. This game needs the word “assassin” stricken from the title because you are anything but an assassin in this game. You’re constantly initiating fights with large groups of enemies and spreading pandemonium.

What bewilders me most about this game is the guard’s eagerness to attack you for doing something trivial. There’s an alert icon on your screen that is yellow when you are being looked at by a guard and red when they’re REALLY looking at you. So say you’re being watched and a drunken leper pushes you (they’re everywhere in this game). This sets off every guard in the area to attack you. Or how about walking, yes, you will be attacked for walking in this game. To get by guards undetected you need to hold down a button which slows you down considerably, a mind numbingly slow crawl. I was constantly being attacked for this reason. I like to run around the city because I don’t have the time to play a game where you walk everywhere and apparently in the holy land running is forbidden because they’ll be all over your ass if you go too fast. I especially love it when they start attacking you for running to fast and start screaming “assassin!” I didn’t know that only assassins ran during the Crusades.

What makes completely no sense is that even though you’ll get attacked for running you can walk right up to someone in a crowd and shiv them without any guards noticing, even if they’re nearby. And then when they go to inspect the body as long as you’re holding down the snail button they won’t know it was you. Okay, a guy wearing a white robe (that stands out amazingly in a crowd by the way) just walked up to your guard friend Earl, grabbed his mouth from behind so he couldn’t scream, put something in his back and walked away and you’re not going to notice this as long as the guy in the white robe slowly walks away? Come on!

The main storyline of the game has you go after nine main targets that are divided across three different cities, Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre, which are then divided into three sections each, putting one target in each area. This is where I see the game lost a lot of potential. Instead of having three cities which are considerably smaller than their real life equivalents and separated by boring horseback segments, why didn’t they set the game in one very large city such as Jerusalem? I didn’t even bother to learn the layout of any of the cities because they were each so dull and uninspired that I felt no attachment to my surroundings. I would have loved to be able to explore one city that was designed very well than a few which are half assed. I look back at game worlds such as Vice City because I have fond memories in specific unique sections of that city. I don’t recall a single part of Assassin’s Creed’s game world which I’ll remember at all.

Before you can get to your major targets in each city section you have to do a number of the same “investigation” missions throughout the city which are:

• Eavesdrop: Sit on a bench near some NPCs and watch their scripted conversation. Fun!
• Pickpocket: While standing watch a scripted conversation between two NPCs and then walk up behind one of them afterwards and hit the B button. Radical!
• Interrogate: Watch an NPC give a scripted speech to an audience of people and then punch him afterwards to get him to talk to you, after which the NPC always gets shived in the gut. Far out!
• Informer: Either collect flags on rooftops or assassinate a few guards that are walking around the area. Wowie zowie!

Each city has these same monotonous missions in addition to a “Save the Civilian” side-mission where you must kill a group of guards harassing a civilian. This initiates a boring drawn out fight which often draws in nearby guards and only puts nails in the coffin that this isn’t an assassin game at all. What I hate most about these side-missions is that they offer no actual reward. All you get is a group of civilians which pops up in that area of the city which will cling to enemies if you’re being chased. The game doesn’t even have any sort of inventory or reward system. There’s no motivation to do anything optional in this game because it doesn’t get you anything. The only reason I did all the “Save the Civilian” side missions was because I wanted the achievements.

The fighting system is boring and made me grow to hate getting into conflicts with enemies. it’s just a matter of learning the rhythm of when you need to hit the attack button and no actual skill is involved, so if you can hit a button at the right time you can be a pro-fighter in this game. It’s more like you’re watching a cinematic of a guy fighting a bunch of guards with a quick time event system built into it, except it never flashes a button to hit. I will admit the finishing moves are extremely bad ass, such as Altair bitch slapping an enemy so hard he spins around and then driving a sword through his stomach. My main problem with these finishing movies is, however, that they are rather tame. I could’ve used some severed limbs and gore. Is that so much to ask?

As far as the content of the story goes it’s actually pretty good. I enjoyed hearing what the main targets had to say while they died, although I could care less what the NPCs say during your investigation missions because it’s mundane, and enjoyed the character development between Altair and the other members of his order and how he grows as a person through his experiences. It’s strange that the one part of the game that people claim to hate, the ending, I really have no problems with. I had heard prior to playing the game that the ending is left completely open and shamelessly plugs a sequel. So all throughout the last few minutes of the game I kept thinking, “I bet it ends right here, that’s why everyone is pissed.” That never happened, I had complete closure with the story of this game. Sure, the ending has the option for a sequel but it’s not as if they ended the game mid-sentence.

As far as the achievements for this game go, make sure you read an achievement guide prior to playing the game, because some of them will require you to replay the game to get them if you miss them. I missed a few but there’s no way in hell I’m playing through this again to get them. The achievements range from incredibly easy which you can get throughout the course of playing to the outrageous such as collecting flags that are distributed throughout the game world. Oh, and these flags aren’t marked on your map, you need to find them yourself, or struggle with using a map online. I didn’t do any of the flag achievements, except for one in the starting city, and didn’t do a few other achievements, and still got over 800 gamer points and I’m just fine with that.

If you’re interested in this game despite what I’ve said, and also want to support this blog, you can buy it from Amazon through us.