Look Out, Here Comes The Medieval Spiderman!
You start off in the guild's headquarters, and a run down through a small village leads you to a horse where you then ride off to the Kingdom, where then you have to ride to one of the three cities. Now, you don't get to tackle all 9 at once. Some missions you'll only be tasked against one, sometimes two, and certain times 3. And riding through the Kingdom can get a bit tedious, so thankfully after a certain point of the game you can "fast travel" from the city to your master at the guild headquarters, and then back to a city.
One of the game's main gimmicks is the ability to Free Run. By holding down the right trigger and A, you character runs and whenever he approaches the edge of a roof, he will automatically jump. So you never have to worry about timing a jump just right with a button press, all you have to do is steer him in the right direction and make sure you don't choose a distance that ends up being too far.
Like I said, Altair is like the medieval Spider-Man, in that he can scale buildings and towers to great heights. If it looks like you can grab onto it and climb it, you probably can. And some of the views from high up can be quite breathtaking thanks to a great graphics engine.
But you just can't go to town and go straight for your main target. Instead, you have to see the local guild headquarters in each city, and then go off searching for investigations. You find investigations and side quests by climbing to high View Points, and then at the top, you press Y and Altair will look and listen for things to do.
Unfortunately, these investigations is where the game kind of falters a little bit, in that, there's not a lot of variety. You'll have pick pocketing, where you follow close behind a target and hold down B and hope that the person doesn't turn around and see you sticking your hand down their pocket.
There's Interrogations, where you follow a target until they get into a secluded area and beat them up with your fists to make them talk and give up info.
Then there are the Informers, who offer two variations. Either you'll go on a flag hunting timed race, which to me didn't make much sense and didn't fit into the overall game. But they also offer mini-assassination quests. They'll give you a target or a set of targets and you have to silently assassinate them without getting noticed by the guards.
There's also a bit of a side quest to follow. Often times you'll find citizens in the need of a hero, and so you can attack the group troubling them and if you take them out, the citizen will either reward you with a group of scholars, which allow you to cloak and will often times get you past guards into a area you need to reach. Or they will give you vigilantes, which, if being chased by guards, you can run to the vigilantes and they will hold the guards up for you, which allows you to make an escape.
Of course, it's also good to go to every View Point on the map. Not only does it reveal more missions, but for every 15 side quests (view points and saving citizens) completed, your health will get augmented by another bar. So it really pays off to complete them.
To me, where the game really shines is in it's combat. This game has got some of the most brutal moves I've ever seen in a video game. But don't read that as body exploding gore. By performing counter attacks with one of your weapons, most of the time Altair will perform a finishing move, such as stabbing them through the stomach, stabbing your foe in the face and then punching them to the ground, stabbing them in the foot and then upper cutting their face with the short blade. There are all kinds of nice and very well animated moves that never got old in the slightest by the end of the game.
Your weapons include a sword, a short blade, your hidden assassins blade, and throwing knives. With the sword and the short blade, your able to hold down the right trigger in a fight to block, unless they did a special strong attack that breaks your block, and with the assassins blade you can't block enemy attacks, but if you get your counterattacking down right, you will always kill them.
And counterattacking is pretty much how I fought every fight. You simply hold down the right trigger to go in the blocking stance, and then when your enemy begins their attack animations, you tap X to counterattack. Most of the time you'll get a gruesome finishing move, but other times Altair will just knock them to the ground. Unless using the Assassins blade, in which case Altair will always kill them in a counterattack.
The main targets themselves are pretty easy, which most of the time you end up in big group fights, where it's you verses a dozen guards. I never really had much trouble getting to and defeating the 9 targets, and if I did, it was just because so many guards overwhelmed me. So don't go in expecting big extravagant boss battles.
And the last part of the game is pretty much fight after fight. It's like running a gauntlet, where you have to take down one group of guards after another, until finally you reach the end boss, who really didn't pose much a challenge himself.
Another complaint, which you may have heard of by now, is how stupid the enemy A.I. is. Apparently guards back then weren't too smart and didn't know how to use their eyes. You see, when running from guards and you break their point of view, you have several different ways you can hide from the guards until they give up their search.
One way is to hide right in the middle of a group of white-cloaked scholars. But you would think the guards would see the guy in the middle with the sword on his back and by his side and maybe, just maybe realize that he's not a regular scholar.
Another way is, while running across rooftops, you will come across these large boxes that have curtains on each side. Altair will jump in the curtain-cloaked box, but again, you would think the guards would have enough sense to look in probably the most obvious of all places.
And maybe the dumbest of all, you can sit down on a bench between two people and you will somehow be magically "hidden" from the guards. Those guards must be saying to themselves, "Hey, see that guy sitting on the bench there? He totally looks like the guy we were just chasing." And then the other guard must have went, "But the guy we were just chasing was standing and moving fast. That guy there is sitting down and totally still. Couldn't possibly be him."
You can also hide in large piles of hay, which is all find and dandy. But again, one might think that the guards would go kicking and throwing some of the hay out of place just to make sure no one is hiding in it.
Depending on your personal point of view, the ending will either be good or bad. It ends on a cliffhanger, defiantly setting up for a sequel. I can just say that I hope we don't have to wait 2 to 3 years for the sequel to come out. If we're lucky, by this time next year we'll have part 2 in our bloody hidden bladed hands.
The sound work is great too, with excellent voice acting. The sound of blades clashing and clanging all sound realistic, citizens on the streets respond to your actions when attacking guards or climbing buildings. The music was good, but nothing all that great and you probably won't pay much attention to it.
All in all, Assassins Creed is a great game with great graphics and really fun, if sometimes tedious, fighting. The ability to climb almost any wall and run from guards jumping and leaping from rooftop to rooftop is always a thrill. But every gem will have its scratches, and for this game I'd have to say it's the repetitive nature of the missions and the stupidity of the guards. You're basically doing the same thing over and over again until the last part of the game. The story will keep you interested all the way through though.
On a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the most god-awful piece of software to ever disgrace God's green earth, and 10 being just as fun as kicking cute wittle bunnies in the face.
Graphics – 9.5
Sound – 9
Story – 8
Gameplay – 9
Replayability - 7
Overall score – 9
(not an average, batman)