Assume the role of an assassin during the crusades in this impressively detailed stealth action game.
Assassin's creed is a game that allows you to play as an assassin during the times of the crusades, where you have to assassinate nine leaders in three main cities: Damascus, Jerusalem and Acre. The connection between the nine different assassination targets will eventually start to show and the more you move on in the story the more you become attached to it. But there is more to this story that you might think, you see the real main character is a modern day guy named Desmond Miles, who's been kidnapped by a bunch of scientists forcing him to go through a process of recovering lost genetic memory of his ancestors by means of a machine called the Animus. The scientists are trying to find out about Desmond's ancestors for some reason which will be revealed to you at the end of the game. The end however is not that satisfying and does not give the story a fulfilling closure. But still it's a very engaging story as you go through it.
The most amazing thing about this game is the deep attention to detail which shows clearly in the way everything looks and moves. The three main cities are highly detailed and beautiful to look at. Each city has high buildings you can scale called view points, climbing these will reveal the marvelous view of the city and make you appreciate all the hard work the programmers had been doing, for every building you see-small or huge- can be reached and the city itself is full of population, people going around the market each one attending to his own business, you'll notice normal people, beggars, merchants guards, women carrying jars above their heads and the retarded individuals who will push you around if you get too close to them. Trust me when I say that the level of detail is very high. And not just the graphics, the way the main character Altair moves and interacts with everything around him is unbelievably realistic, for example when he climbs building he just jumps and grabs every thing that looks like it can be touched whether it be a small crack in the wall or a stone or a piece of wood, absolutely anything, he'll grab it and climb his way to the top. Another amazing detail is the way Altair walks around the city among the people, for there is a social acceptance system that he must act with accordance to, for example simple walking among the crowd while gently pushing people won't cause you any trouble but pushing them around violently will start making the nearby guards to get suspicious, and the people will panic and so on.
The game does let you just go and kill someone although that's basically what the missions of the game revolve around, you see the missions go basically like this: you are asked to go to a city to assassinate a specific target, you go around town eavesdropping on people, pickpocket some who carry some important items, and beating the information out from some others. When you gather enough information about your target, you can go to his location and take him out and then report to your master to receive your next mission.
Naturally as an assassin Altair is forced to carry out his missions as discretely as possible, he has a hidden blade he can use as soon as he closes in on his target, he can also blend with his environments easily like hiding in a hay stack, sitting on a bench between other people, or walk between a bunch of scholars which will be available as you rescue a citizen from a gang of guards for he or she will be so grateful they'll call their friends like vigilantes to stop any guards following you and scholars you can blend with -as mentioned before- in order to enter guarded areas. Altair isn't lacking in the resourcefulness department either, if he gets caught he can run to reach a hiding spot or blend with the environment until the guards awareness level- shown by an alarm system- is cooled down again and you are free to walk the streets again. Even if he gets cornered by guards and has to fight his way out he can use his sword to fight using a number of offensive and defensive moves like counter attacks and evasive moves, these abilities will become available as soon the more you progress in the game for at the beginning levels you'll be bashing buttons for the lack of these abilities but later on you'll be using your new acquired abilities in order to survive the later more difficult levels, for at the final stages you'll be forced to fight your way through a considerable number of enemies in order to move on. Rest assured that it's all fun and exciting.
The audio is also another point where the programmers put some effort to, the voices of the different NPC's give out a realistic tone and every character gives it's rightful amount of realism to it, you'll see it as characters will sometimes speak Arabic and sometimes English, and sometimes something else, the crusaders themselves have different European accents and tones, the only weak point is strangely Altair himself, he always speaks in the same tone. And although as I mentioned before although the performance of the different characters in the game is good, it can get a bit repetitive. But considering all the brilliant work done in this game you'll forgive these minor issues.
There are a lot of side missions that add a lot of length to an already long adventure, you can chose not to get into all of them specially the flag optional game were you have to basically collect a number of flags scattered all around the cities and areas in the game, which can be a really tiresome task but as mentioned before, it's optional.
Assassin's Creed is a really special game, you're gonna want to talk about it to your friends and it's gonna be remembered for a long time, the careful attention to detail in the departments of graphics, animation and audio is impressively amazing. It's a shame that the ending isn't very satisfying but it makes us wanna see how the coming sequels are going to be like. The future for next generation gaming is truly beginning to shine indeed. I'm gonna be anticipating the coming sequel for sure, just like many gamers who try this game will.