Surprisingly Good

Sure, Assassin's Creed on the PC is a port from the consoles - some design decisions and UI elements are unavoidably "non-PC style", but otherwise Ubisoft is to be commended for a solid conversion. The underlying game itself still suffers from some fundamental gameplay issues. The game just gets repetitive towards the end, with most of the difficulty coming from the ridiculous odds you constantly end up fighting against. The whole idea of a stealthy assassin going about doing his dirty deeds unnoticed gets thrown overboard in the later parts, and the open melee combat, while visually nice, just isn't very compelling.

In a way, Assassin's Creed on the consoles was a flawed gem, and the PC version, while being technologically a very competent and fairly polished conversion, is just as mixed bag - great, yet deeply flawed in the gameplay department. The engine is very impressive, and technologically the game surpasses the contemporary competition, yet it fails to really grip you with enough unique gameplay content to keep the interest going. The storyline partially saves the day, giving some incentive to keep slogging onwards, but in the end Assassin's Creed is only "good", not "great".

Maybe the sequel will add some compelling gameplay to the solid technology developed so far...

Summary of YouGamers Hardware Testing

The publisher of this game state the following specifications for their minimum and recommended requirements:

Component	Publisher's Minimum	Publisher's Recommended
Processor	Intel Pentium D 2.6 GHz / AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+	Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz / AMD Athlon64 X2 4400+
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Graphics Card	256MB DirectX 9.0c card with Shader Model 3.0 support	256MB DirectX 10.0 card
Graphics Card Example	ATI Radeon X1600 series / NVIDIA GeForce 6800 series	ATI Radeon HD2x00 series / NVIDIA GeForce 8x00 series
Free Disk Space	8 GB	8 GB
Net Link	n/a	n/a

To learn more about how YouGamers performs its hardware testing, click here. Through our extensive gameplay and hardware testing across the full spectrum of PC configurations, YouGamers suggests that one should use the following guidelines for an appropriate minimum and recommended setup:

Component	YouGamers Minimum	YouGamers Recommended
Processor	AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E4500	AMD Athlon 64 X2 5800+ / Intel Core 2 Duo E6700
Memory	1024 MB	2048 MB
Graphics Card	ATI Radeon HD2600 256MB / NVIDIA GeForce 8600 GS 256MB	ATI Radeon HD 3870 512MB / NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB
Free Disk Space	8 GB	8 GB
Net Link	n/a	n/a

Scores

To learn more about our scoring methodology, please click here.

Gameplay	79	Excellent gameplay areas with beliveable crowds and varying landscapes. Yet even with the new side missions, things get repetitive a bit too quickly, and the combat could've used some extra work.
Graphics	92	Exceptionally pretty with impressive character animation and very atmospheric lighting. Easily looks better than the console versions, assuming your system is up to running at maximum settings.
Audio	90	Professionally done audio with excellent music and effects. Voiceovers are bit uneven, but still better than in most games these days.
Technology	94	Very advanced graphics engine, yet it runs fine on surprisingly poor hardware. Also includes proper DX10 support without gutting the performance and runs remarkably smooth on a high end system even at maximum settings.

OVERALL

Great PC conversion of a somewhat flawed game. It just feels that the actual gameplay elements got sidelined while developing all the technology used to realize the the impressive cities, the crowds and the great character animation. Still, definitely worth getting if you have missed the console versions, have a modern PC and want something shiny to play.

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