Assassin's Creed

Old? Sure. But I've been seeing interest generated around the gaming community for the sequel scheduled to debut sometime this year.

I actually bought the game (unfortunately) going off reviews and reccomendations from friends. The cool parts of the game were great, such as being able to run, jump and climb on anything.. basically a cheaper version of Mirror's Edge. But the problem was that the combat was such a fail on every level, it made the game boring and tedious.

I'm the kind of gamer that will play through the same, one-player game several times to get different experiences out of it. But this game was one that I didn't even want to play again because the combat was so ridiculous. So, here's my proposition to fix that:

First of all, the only aspect to combat is waiting for the right time to press the counter button.. and that's all you do. Counter, wait, counter, wait, counter.. and only one guy attacks at a time. How lame can that get? Fist-fighting in GTA IV is more fun, and getting the achievement for that is one of the worst experiences in the game.

So, the system needs a complete overhaul. Start out by changing the way you attack. Instead of holding RT for block, A to swing, X to counter, use the right stick to swing in a particular direction, left is to move, and the camera is fixed in the same position as the first Assassin's Creed game. You can then combo holding RT, RB, LT and LB (on the 360) to perform different actions while flicking your right analog stick in a direction to either block in that direction, swing in that direction, dodge in relevance to that direction or.. something else like do an aggressive swing in that direction. That way during combat you have full control over the battle and it becomes a question of skill and combat recognition instead of just waiting until somebody swings and you and pressing X.

On top of that, more than one guy would attack you at the same time so you'd eventually have swords flying in every direction like in an action movie, and if you were to get yourself in a 5- or 6-on-1 battle you'd probably get your ass kicked. Imagine, a game predicated around sword fighting that actually has good sword fighting!

And by the way, what in the hell is up with the grabbing in the middle of combat? If somebody grabbed me by the shirt in the middle of a sword fight I'd just cut his arm off. That was the stupidest part of combat. Having something like kicking dirt in their face for a stun would make way more sense. In fact, that's what I would map to the remaining bumper/trigger in swordfighting combat.. kick dirt, just for a quick stun.

Lastly, the things you do during the course of the game are pretty boring. You can basically take tasks to assassinate guards (almost impossible considering there's a million people and you have to do it in stealth so nobody knows who did it and so nobody knows the person is dead), grab flags (exciting and very much appropriate for the setting, right?), talk to people, kill guards that are harassing some civilians.. and there's like 100 of each of these tasks throughout the game so it NEVER ends. Improve that, too.

As a matter of fact, Assassin's Creed kind of sucked the more I think about it. The climbing and free-roaming around was kind of fun, but the combat and tasks throughout the game were pretty lame. The story saved a lot of face with this game because it was well-written and felt surreal, even though the story content is really not that remarkable.

Assassin's Creed better not be another stock, unimaginitive game like the first, otherwise it's going to suck more than the first because they actually had the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. Otherwise, I'd say play Prince of Persia and you're going to get the same kind of quality of game. I don't even know why Assassin's Creed was so popular to begin with... must have been a slow point of the year.