Assassin's Creed may be a short and easy experience, But still it's a must play.
The game puts you in the shoes two different people in two different eras. The majority of the game focuses on Altair, an assassin, back in 1191, while you'll also be playing as his great-great-...-great-grandson in the current time. Altough you won't be doing anything except walking, the story involves both of them. Basically, scientists invented a machine that can show your ancestors memories (stored in your DNA!?). I'll explain later why this helps you a lot.
As Altair, your boss assigned you to assassinate certain people. You must find each one, gather intel on them, and then assassinate them. But don't get excited. Nothing in this whole process is a tiny bit hard or tricky.
There are 3 complete cities in the game: Acre, Damascus, and Jerusalem. Not to mention two small towns and the so called Kingdom, which is a big area itself. So you'll be exploring a BIG map And the whole area looks great. All the buildings, walls, the water, the mountains and everything are detailed to their limits. But don't worry about getting lost, Thanks to the machine I mentioned earlier you are actually controlling Altair here in 2007. So you have a GPS and everything you need to stay in the track.
Characters and other stuff look great, too. I'm glad to report this is one of the greatest looking games to date. Also the cities behave good. You see guards pestering helpless people, merchants auctioning, people talking, crazy people running around, beggars are begging for money, some people are giving speeches to a crowd. You'll hear them whether you're among them or above them, hanging on walls and standing on rooftops. When you kill somebody, people gather around and guards will start questioning around. All of these are great, but it'll be a time (and that time comes way too soon) that you realize you heard every dialog and seen every behavior many times before.
The controls are the game's greatest achievement. Whether you're fighting, climbing a building, or walking in a crowded area, everything is so easy to learn and easy and fun to use. Too bad that no fight is really hard and no building is tricky to climb. Nothing changes in the whole game. You'll always be the greatest swordmaster in the whole country and no guard (not even a team of guards) can take you down the whole game. Also it's strange that while at first the guards aren't strong enough to be a challenge for you, the game will make you even stronger after each assassination, equipping you with new weapons and skills.
The assassinations aren't quite what we'd expect when we were waiting for the game. There's not anything "puzzle-ish" to do. All you have to do to investigate your target is to find a location in your GPS. Then either you have to push a button and sit and listen to somebody saying things that just aren't a bit dependent on how you would murder your target, or you'll be given simple missions like pickpocketing (again with a button) or capturing flags (which are located on your map. You can choose your investigation, but nothing will change no matter what you do and how you do it. At the end, you get the OK from your city leader and must assassinate the target. This is pretty much the only thing that changes over time. Every assassination takes place in a different environment and some of them are a little different from each other.
It is a lot of fun exploring the town. There are different kind of flags all over the place and other stuff you have to collect and some side-mission-ish things like killing templars and saving citizens from trouble. All of these will also give you even more advantage to your enemies, which is completely useless.
All of this said, I should also say that this game is a must-play. Not only that you're running away from all the shooters around and getting something new and creative, all these stuff I told you about are great. It's fun to pickpocket people, to sneak up on a guard, to blend in a crowd so guards can't find you, to flee when they do, to see the reaction of people when a murder happens, to climb buildings and ladders, to jump from rooftop-to-rooftop, to scare somebody and make him talk, and to do a bunch of other things. But you'll be doing all these stuff a million times until you finish the game and all of them would seem boring to you. There's no online mode so after you finished it, it's not likely to return to your console ever.
Assassin's Creed is NOT a great game and It isn't what we expected. But it's still a fine, innovative game with a good (Yet incomplete) story and the bright side is that it's the first game in a long franchise so there's much to improve. Also, the first 2 hours or so of the game will be a satisfying experience to anybody. I'd say rent this game when you have time, finish it, and use your money to buy a game with more lasting appeal. Whatever you do, don't miss this game, and don't get excited with it too much.