Assassin's Creed -- Falls short of Great Potential
Let's begin by taking the word Assassin. When you hear that word what comes to mind? For me, things like: Stealth, sneaky, lockpicking, breaking into someone's house in the dead of night and slitting their throat, killing off people in covert ways to avoid detection and fulfill a contract.
Now let's take the term Open World. In an open world I would want to be able to go wherever I want without unlocking anything, be able to interact with everyone, be able to go into houses, legally or otherwise, and just generally have a connection to the people and environment beyond the quest chain.
When you combine Open World and Assassin into a henceforth named game such as Assassin's Creed, you would expect most if not all of the things listed above. What we got, however, was nothing of the sort.
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My breakdown of all my disappointments will follow in due suite but I will start off with my short list of positive aspects of the game. Firstly, like everyone else has said, the game is breathtakingly beautiful. The animations of your character and the other people in the game is nothing short of lifelike, but I think the movement of the horses trumps all else. It just makes you take a second and think, "Wow . . ." before you remember what tower you're supposed to be climbing.
The sound is also very good in the game, from the soaring eagle squawks to the din and raucous intermingled in all the cities-even the accents of the people. The one flaw is definitely your character's voice. I don't know if they made you without an accent to correlate to the other storyline or what, but the mood is always ruined when you have to hear yourself speak.
I would also classify the entire game up past the first "Poor District" assassination to be a 9.0, but here is why it ranked so low in my book.
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Firstly, third-person games, especially combat-oriented ones, are known to have control issues and Assassin's Creed is no exception. Aside from some camera angles that get stuck and make it impossible to see what's going on, the game just feels jittery. If you engage someone in a fight on a rooftop oftentimes you end up jumping backward off the building or latching onto an overhang and getting hacked to bits while you're immobile. The targeting system for "Fight mode" is also a little annoying . . . sometimes it's difficult to lock onto the assassination target and instead you get a guard.
Next, I have gripes with the whole game premise packaged under an "Assassin's" title. There is no night/day cycle . . . meaning everything you do is in broad daylight. And how is it being a sneaky-assassin-type person when the guards know you're coming for them and the target before you even draw your sword? Where's the deception, the cunning? Why can't we poison someone's drink or creep into an open window and take a sleeping victim? It isn't "assassination" when you have to run up to a guy on a busy street, deal with about 5 guards and actually fight the guy you're supposed to kill.
For the whole "Open World" aspect all I can say is . . . meh! Parts of the cities are locked until later levels for starters. Then there is this whole huge area in between cities where... wow, some flags are hidden. Big whoop. The only people you can interact with are the ones from quests. You can only pickpocket select targets, speak to select people. And no, knocking off pottery from a woman's head and her programmed response of "Watch where you're going!" is not interaction.
Still on the topic of "Open World" is my most disappointing factor about the game. I've read that people like to sit down on a bench and just watch the people passing by and they feel immersed in the game's world. I, for one, don't. You are completely removed from the game by lack of interaction and also, for lack of a better word, purpose. You have no money or currency, therefore no reason to want to sneak into people's houses and steal things or pickpocket rich merchants on the streets. They programmed the game to be authentic with tons of street vendors but you can't buy anything. You are basically in this very pretty virtual world (and I'm talking world because it is huge) with nothing to do but the preordained quests. Or you could search for a very long time to collect some inane flags.
Just like Just Cause, the developers of the game focused on making the game look so stunning that you feel you should love it and all the hype going along with it but in the end the gameplay barely exists. It's rinse and repeat down to the core. The same quests over and over-save the citizens, listen in on a conversation, pickpocket information from someone, kill that guy. After the first "Poor District" mission you do, you've done every quest-type in the game. It's so sad that so many people worked on this for so long and turned out a very mediocre but good-looking game.
All in all, if you took Thief and Oblivion and put the gameplay from those into this world you would probably have one of the best games of all time; but, in the end, pretty graphics don't make me want to sit there and play this game.
Final score – 6.5
C. Leschinsky
(DigitalWatch)
/hopes to get her money back from Gamestop