Assassin's Creed is an attempt to take on the stealth action genre, much in the mold of Hitman. In Assassin's Creed you play as an assassin (Altair) somewhere in the medieval realm in Jerusalem, and as a seemingly unrelated character in an experimental lab in the US.
Gameplay: 6.0
Unique gameplay concepts - What drives the game, and what is it similar to?
The game's concept is that you're a regular guy being experimented on, and recalling the memories of one of your ancestors via some strange machine. Most of the game you play as the assassin, Altair. Typically you're sent from place to place to gather information on a target and eventually assassinate them.
Assassin's Creed is a pretty open-world game with a lot of exploration required to get anything done. There are quite a bit of side-quests, but few of them are very interesting. These quests are usually to place allies in the area, kill templars (tough enemies), find objects or complete challenge courses.
Assassin's Creed uses a lot of parkour/free-style running, with rare instances of horse-riding to get around the map. While the horse-riding is awkward and pretty uninteresting, the on-foot movement in the game is fluid and it's actually pretty fun to climb and swing around the environment. In fact, it's the most fun part of the game.
Their combat is largely centered around sword fighting, but the combat is just atrocious. There is no fluid fighting, and you're often fighting around 10 or even more people, if you choose to fight. Obviously, it's easier to run away and out-maneuver your enemy, then find somewhere to hide, but inevitably combat is going to surface.
The combat is basically "wait until a guy starts to attack you, then press a button to counter his attack". Over. And over. And over. It's endless. It's boring. If you try to be aggressive and actually have fun, you get wasted and die or are forced to run away to delay your death.
The stealth aspect of the game is also really disappointing. They have a few challenges where you're supposed to stealthily assassinate specific targets, but.. it's impossible. There's way too many guards and finding a guard alone where another guard won't go is impossible. You're given throwing knives to supposedly stealthily assassinate targets, but a majority of the time when you use them, it alerts somebody nearby. To call this a stealth game is an insult to true stealth games. It has the typical alertness and evasion system that a lot of stealth games have, but alerting and evading people is way too easy.
The fact that exploration and goofing off in the game is more fun than completing game-progressing objectives means gameplay is shallow and utterly mediocre.
Presentation: 10.0
Graphical and audio presentation (animation, texturing, overall look & artistic style)
Assassin's Creed really is a beautiful game. Artistically, it's one of the best games on the 360.
Theatrics: 8.0
Story, Dialogue, Cut-Scenes and Artistic Use of Camera
There's two major parts of the story, and a lot of which doesn't make a lot of sense, even though the shell of the story is actually told very well.
The shell of the story is that you are a regular guy who is being held in a high-security lab, and you are being hooked up to a machine that finds memories of your ancestors through your DNA. The assassin you play as, Altair, is your ancestor and you are recalling details about his assassinations.
As the story progresses your character starts to get more suspicious about the organization that is extracting these memories and what kind of ramifications it will have, which are apparently grand.
Ultimately, it's hard to tell what's going on in the big picture and in the memory sequences other than "kill this guy.. ok, now kill this guy". It's supposed to be some mission of purity, but I didn't really grasp the overall story and why it was important to be extracting this information out of this guy. Either they never really said, because they're trying to keep your character in the dark, or they said so and I didn't think it was the real reason, because it didn't seem all that gripping. Eventually, some of the mental abilities start to bleed over from your assassin character to your main character (not anything combat related), insinuating that this is just the start of something crazy and bigger than expected.
Nevertheless, they had really good characters in the game, good voice-acting, and good story-telling.
Controls: 8.0
Ease of Use and Smoothness of Controls
Movement controls, climbing and navigation is all really good. Sword-fighting sucks, lacks any intelligent design, and often feels unresponsive.
Replay Value: 6.5
Total Gameplay Time versus Expected
For being open-world, and how little reward it is doing the narrow bits of side-quests, this game doesn't offer a lot of unique gameplay. The entire game is maybe 15 hours front to back. For a game that is open-world, has seemingly a lot to do, it's just not that appealing and gets boring quickly.
Fun: 7.0
How much fun was the game?
It was an okay game. The story is the game's redeeming quality. If it was a ho-hum story or told in a way that wasn't interesting, there wouldn't be much of a reason to play this game.
My Overall Rating: 7.0
Suggested Gaming Experience Level: Medium/Low
What kind of experience playing video games do you need to really appreciate this game?
Gameplay: 6.0
Unique gameplay concepts - What drives the game, and what is it similar to?
The game's concept is that you're a regular guy being experimented on, and recalling the memories of one of your ancestors via some strange machine. Most of the game you play as the assassin, Altair. Typically you're sent from place to place to gather information on a target and eventually assassinate them.
Assassin's Creed is a pretty open-world game with a lot of exploration required to get anything done. There are quite a bit of side-quests, but few of them are very interesting. These quests are usually to place allies in the area, kill templars (tough enemies), find objects or complete challenge courses.
Assassin's Creed uses a lot of parkour/free-style running, with rare instances of horse-riding to get around the map. While the horse-riding is awkward and pretty uninteresting, the on-foot movement in the game is fluid and it's actually pretty fun to climb and swing around the environment. In fact, it's the most fun part of the game.
Their combat is largely centered around sword fighting, but the combat is just atrocious. There is no fluid fighting, and you're often fighting around 10 or even more people, if you choose to fight. Obviously, it's easier to run away and out-maneuver your enemy, then find somewhere to hide, but inevitably combat is going to surface.
The combat is basically "wait until a guy starts to attack you, then press a button to counter his attack". Over. And over. And over. It's endless. It's boring. If you try to be aggressive and actually have fun, you get wasted and die or are forced to run away to delay your death.
The stealth aspect of the game is also really disappointing. They have a few challenges where you're supposed to stealthily assassinate specific targets, but.. it's impossible. There's way too many guards and finding a guard alone where another guard won't go is impossible. You're given throwing knives to supposedly stealthily assassinate targets, but a majority of the time when you use them, it alerts somebody nearby. To call this a stealth game is an insult to true stealth games. It has the typical alertness and evasion system that a lot of stealth games have, but alerting and evading people is way too easy.
The fact that exploration and goofing off in the game is more fun than completing game-progressing objectives means gameplay is shallow and utterly mediocre.
Presentation: 10.0
Graphical and audio presentation (animation, texturing, overall look & artistic style)
Assassin's Creed really is a beautiful game. Artistically, it's one of the best games on the 360.
Theatrics: 8.0
Story, Dialogue, Cut-Scenes and Artistic Use of Camera
There's two major parts of the story, and a lot of which doesn't make a lot of sense, even though the shell of the story is actually told very well.
The shell of the story is that you are a regular guy who is being held in a high-security lab, and you are being hooked up to a machine that finds memories of your ancestors through your DNA. The assassin you play as, Altair, is your ancestor and you are recalling details about his assassinations.
As the story progresses your character starts to get more suspicious about the organization that is extracting these memories and what kind of ramifications it will have, which are apparently grand.
Ultimately, it's hard to tell what's going on in the big picture and in the memory sequences other than "kill this guy.. ok, now kill this guy". It's supposed to be some mission of purity, but I didn't really grasp the overall story and why it was important to be extracting this information out of this guy. Either they never really said, because they're trying to keep your character in the dark, or they said so and I didn't think it was the real reason, because it didn't seem all that gripping. Eventually, some of the mental abilities start to bleed over from your assassin character to your main character (not anything combat related), insinuating that this is just the start of something crazy and bigger than expected.
Nevertheless, they had really good characters in the game, good voice-acting, and good story-telling.
Controls: 8.0
Ease of Use and Smoothness of Controls
Movement controls, climbing and navigation is all really good. Sword-fighting sucks, lacks any intelligent design, and often feels unresponsive.
Replay Value: 6.5
Total Gameplay Time versus Expected
For being open-world, and how little reward it is doing the narrow bits of side-quests, this game doesn't offer a lot of unique gameplay. The entire game is maybe 15 hours front to back. For a game that is open-world, has seemingly a lot to do, it's just not that appealing and gets boring quickly.
Fun: 7.0
How much fun was the game?
It was an okay game. The story is the game's redeeming quality. If it was a ho-hum story or told in a way that wasn't interesting, there wouldn't be much of a reason to play this game.
My Overall Rating: 7.0
Suggested Gaming Experience Level: Medium/Low
What kind of experience playing video games do you need to really appreciate this game?
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