A good game that shows a lot of promise for future installments.
From the beginning of the game to the end there is this incredibly cinematic feel. There's no arguing that it's one of the best looking games to date. Each city and area is huge and amazingly detailed. When you climb up on the rooftops and whatnot you can see the whole city, the visibility is incredible with the amount that is going on.
Being as this game comes from the Prince of Persia guys and Altair resembles the Prince in so many ways, there are no doubt going to be comparisons, so let's start with one now. Alike the Prince, Altair is incredibly acrobatic. However, where playing the Prince caused you to worry about finding where to go next and then making the jump, Altair does a lot of decision making for you. To climb a building you simple hold up and let him work his way, whereas the prince required you to make each jump yourself.
Now, this gives it that incredibly cinematic feel I mentioned because it's more like an interactive movie than a game when doing a lot of things. However, it also gives it that Zelda feel where you are running and just cross your fingers hoping he'll make the jump at the right time. Most of the time he does....but not all the time. When he makes these wrong jumps or gets stuck in the middle of a climb while you're being chased it is ten times more frustrating than when you screw up yourself because you essentially have no control over it.
These things make a much bigger negative impact on your gaming experience because you feel so helpless during those times and they can often cost you you're life. Since the creators decided to go with such a system it would have been nice to see it perfected a bit more. Lets look positive some more though.
The environments really are fantastic. They are huge and there is a lot going on. There is an overworld similar to that of Shadow of the Colossus (yet much more populated) and then 4 major cities. You will always start in one city and then travel to one of the other three for your assassinations. However, before each assassination there are several missions for you to partake in at each town. These are pretty much the saem for each assassination which is a bit of a letdown, but honestly I never really got bored with them.
Some of them are real simple and basically made to give you hints at how to perform the assassination where others require you to do some flag collecting or perform some extra assassinations. The flag collecting done in the missions is fairly simple, however there are also a ton of flags spread throughout each city you can collect which are similar to performing collection tasks in boring platformers and hardly seem worth the effort. I'm not sure if they decided that putting 100 flags in a city would cause players to put in extra hours with their game or they just did it because they got bored and couldn't think of any good ideas, but collecting them is a total waste of time.
After you do the first 2 or 3 cities you'll get in a rythmn of what to do at each city. Go in, circle around the city saving citizens (a.k.a. fighting certain guards), scaling the view points, doing the extra missions, completing the main assassination. If there was a little more to do in each city it would have definitely been a plus, but I think for the first in the series (hopefully there will be more) it is a very strong title.
The story is decently interesting, but the end is ridiculously bad. It's not even a cliffhanger as much as it is just the end of the game. Literally, it just stops for no reason, but the gameplay is really the strong point. It's also decently buggy, which hurts it, but at the same time with so much going on in the game I can overlook the bugs more than I could in a 6 hour straight linear game.
If you haven't checked this game out yet, I would definitely do so. It's really cool and has a lot to offer. There is plenty of room for improvement, but I'm quite satisfied with what they gave so far. I can't wait to see what they do next utilizing this engine.