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Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut Edition

So you want to be an Assassin?

In case you haven't played the game yet on the consoles, a quick recap is in order; You play as Altair, a master assassin in the times of the crusades. The game is set in the Holy Lands, with action spread around several cities around Jerusalem. Your main objective is to perform several assassination missions for the brotherhood, taking out notable people who are "in the way of the peace" in the region.

Trips between cities are done on horseback, and the landscape is dotted by optional objectives.

...thankfully after a couple of rides, you can skip the travel bits and head directly to your target city.

In practice, an assassination mission opens with a trip to the city where your target resides. After contacting local Assassin's Bureau, you are given a task of investigating your target. Before you can eliminate your target, you need to collect the requisite amount of clues about him, his whereabouts and routines. To get the information, you end up doing a number of side jobs - interrogating a notable person in an alley, helping a local assassin to stab some people in exchange for information and so on. Once you have the quota collected, you can either continue completing all the available side missions in the area, or you can return to the Bureau and start the actual assassination mission - sneak or fight your way in, poke the designated target with a a sharp object and get away in one piece.

What sets Assassin's Creed apart from your average scripted action adventure is the play area. Each mission takes place in a vast bustling city that actually looks like you might expect a period city to look like, complete with large crowds each doing his own thing - and the city areas are very large. This technical achievement alone is notable, and paired with the ability to freely run and climb just about everywhere, Assassin's Creed presents definitely something unique.

Cutting people to pieces

In addition to running around, you unavoidably also end up killing people. A perfect assassin would prefer to just silently stab every target, but in practice you end up in sword fights quite often. Too often towards the end of the game, in my opinion. While the combat system is fairly complex, offering a bunch of tricks, such as grabbing and throwing your opponent, the package fails due to the all-powerful counter-attack. You gain this move very early, and for the most of the story melee combat degenerates to a series of very flashy counters. Sure, there is a big cinematic feel to the fighting, but it's just all too easy. To push up the difficulty level, the designers have gone the easy way - add more enemies.

As the story progresses and guards get more and more twitchy, the whole "stealth" aspect of the game gets bumped to the backseat as you wade through piles of guards in straight-up sword fights. Towards the end, things also get more complicated as your all-powerful counter no longer provides 100% success rate - leading to many reloads as you get a bit over your head with the number of enemies. Overall, stealth killing is done very well, while open combat is barely tolerable.

The "Big Plot Twist"

While you play an Assassin in the game, your character is actually the distant descendant of Altair, and you are reliving the memories of your ancestor. In "reality" you are stuck in a machine in some futuristic high-tech laboratory, and you are forced to assist in digging up a secret from the memories of your distant ancestor. Yet, you can't immediately access the relevant memory - instead you have to work your way through the story of Altair to unlock the needed bit.

This sci-fi "twist" caused some initial controversy, but in my opinion the story works, and adds a nice layer of mystery while rationalizing some gameplay elements. It doesn't matter that much if you get killed while reliving the past - the situation can be rewound to an earlier point and you can try again. It's also easy to explain away skipping unimportant parts of the story.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: New features on the PCPage 4: Performance and VisualsPage 5: Conclusions and Scoring

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