Finally got around to getting this game and it's not nearly as good as I was expecting.
Finding view points (several) -- climb up tall buildings to un-blur sections of the map and reveal locations of the other stuff:
Save citizens (several) -- kill a few guards harassing a citizen to get a group of scholars or other types of guys to help you evade guards
Interrogation quests (1-2) -- beat up a specific person with your fists to learn more about your assassination target
Pickpocket quests (1-2) -- pickpocket the appropriate person for something that helps the assassination (often you supposedly get a map of where guards are supposed to be, but I couldn't find a way to actually see that information)
Eavesdropping quests (1-2) -- find a bench and just listen for info that helps the assassination target (lol lame)
Informer quests (1-2) -- either spend a couple minutes collecting placed flags or stealth-assassinate some dudes so that your assassin buddy will tell you something useful
Assassination (1) -- once you have done enough of the above you can start the assassination mission (these are the best part of the game)
After each assassination you get some more info about the story, but you can pretty much figure out how it's going to go around 1/2 way in.
The free-running controls are pretty good, although sometimes you'll be holding a direction (while scaling a building) that he definately can go but he won't budge.
There's a huge problem with the hidden blade being almost unusable. You can't do regular attacks with it, and there's some problem with him putting it away so that it's almost impossible to counter with it, which is too bad because it's got some nice counter animations. The only good thing about it is if you knock an enemy down you can use it to assassinate them, which is how most of the main assassinations went for me; stealth is not needed in this game whatsoever, because you can kill lots and lots of guards (there's an achievement for killing 25 guards in 1 fight).
The second big annoyance in combat is you can't use throwing knives up close because it'll automatically use the short sword. This may sound like a silly complaint, but without being able to use them up close you don't get a whole lot of opportunity to use them.
Perhaps the biggest problem with combat though is that grabs are broken. While you're grabbing someone you can't get hit. If they counter the grab, you don't get hurt. If they grab you, you don't get hurt. If you're almost dead, you can just spam grabs to not get hurt any more and you'll slowly get healed up while in combat.
The game would have probably been a lot better if combat with more than a couple guards was impossible. Oh, and I also had some trouble with trying to flee combat (took a while to figure out how to do so, and even then the camera is often not facing the right way) so it usually was easier to just kill everyone.
The camera is usually okay, but there's some times in combat where it's behind a pole or migrates to a bush when you counter, and then you can't see anything. There's also a big problem with when you save a citizen the camera and your movement is locked for several seconds, which gives enough time for a patrolling guard to see the bodies, or just annoys you as you don't want to hear one of the ~5 thank-you lines for the 10th time.
There's a lot (hundreds) of flags throughout the game that you can collect to try and get achievements, but there's so many that getting the achievements for them is unrealistic without a map of where they are. There's also templars to kill throughout the game, but finding all of them is also unrealistic.
The Kingdom (the area between cities) is kind of nice that they put it there, but there's not really anything to do there so it's just a painful ride across the countryside until you get to fast-travel.
So I guess to summarize, the game feels more like a good 5-hour game with decent replayability, not the 15 or so hours of forced repetition that it took.