Vital Stats

Genre: Stealth
Players: 1
Online: None

Developer: Ubisoft
Publisher: Ubisoft
ESRB Rating: M
Release Date: 11/14/07

Platforms

• PC
• 360

There’s a reason you don’t mix exploration gameplay with sandbox gameplay, and Assassin’s Creed is a good test case. You just end up with aimless repetition, even when each task is technically novel. On the other hand, as a game of carefully plotted murder, Assassin’s Creed recaptures something lost since the days of Deus Ex: freedom. Whether or not you’ll enjoy it depends on your willingness to skip half the game.

The Usual Suspects
It’s a mostly unspoken truth that there is a rift between enjoying gameplay and enjoying the gameplay experience. Portal had good gameplay. It started with a clever idea, Valve tested and refined the hell out of it, and that effort made for deep and empowering play. However, you don’t need any of that stuff to have a fun game. Final Fantasy VII delivered a good experience. It took unbalanced, homogenous RPG gameplay and compensated for it with extraordinary production values and skillful storytelling compared to its contemporaries. Neither approach is necessarily more fun, but the latter ages a little less gracefully.

Some deserve death and others deserve life.
Can you give it to them?
Ok fine, how about just death, then?

Assassin’s Creed leans toward providing a fun experience instead of fun gameplay. Players assume the role of Altaïr, cocksure member of a discreet order of assassins. After botching a sensitive job, you guide Altaïr as he seeks to regain his station. Of course, as an assassin, this means killing a whole lot of people.

Killing comes in two primary flavors in Assassin’s creed: assassination and melee. Assassination is actually quite simple: when you ambush an oblivious target with a hidden blade or a throwing knife, they kiss the cobbles and you can be on your way. It’s phenomenally accessible, but relatively shallow. Melee combat is more intricate, featuring combos, counters, and guard breaking, but guards will politely take turns attacking you so it’s not overly demanding. It’s notable that Assassin’s Creed doesn’t punish you with awkward combat for failing at stealth, and the result is smoother pacing for fun than the usual stealth game.

The usual stealth game is hardly a high bar, however, and combat in Assassin’s Creed is pretty pedestrian. The fun instead comes from the presentation. Combat is loaded with flourishes and cinematic tricks to keep it visually interesting. Assassination is accompanied by a particularly satisfying ringing sound as Altaïr drives his blade home.

Places to Go, People to Kill
Actually, arranging murders makes better gameplay than the murders themselves. Assassin’s Creed takes place in a sprawling world that’s ripe for Parkour. Most walls are riddled with handholds, and the city teems with scaffolding, poles, and wooden planks. In fact, if you took an overhead map of any of the game’s three cities and drew an arbitrary line from one end to the other, there’s a pretty good chance you wouldn’t have to deviate from that path to cross the city. Picking your way through viable routes takes fast decisions and a sharp eye, but the controls only require that you hold a button: Altaïr automatically scales, swings, and vaults according to context.

It’s usually prudent, if not required, to clear the streets and rooftops of guards and archers before you commit to a high profile assassination, so there are plenty of opportunities to enjoy the acrobatic exploration. However, even if you prefer to stab straight to the heart of your problems, there are still several scalable structures that give you a great view of the cities. Climbing makes less interesting use of the simple navigation mechanics because it slows the pace of a simple task, but the view usually makes up for the tepid climb.

Sadly, Assassin’s Creed skews farther from exploration and more toward combat as the game proceeds. Especially near the end, the game jumps from brawl to brawl as large groups of hostiles try to bar your way. In addition to focusing on the game’s weaker mechanics, the shift drifts away from the genre core of selective altercation. It makes the end of the game feel like an unnecessary bait and switch.

Video games must be the only medium
that can take MURDER and make it boring.

If you tire of the cycle of killing and running, there is an abundant supply of optional side quests that…consist of running and killing. Side quests sometimes heap on additional limits like timers and mandatory stealth, but they mostly boil down to the same tasks you’re performing during the rest of the game. The minimum required gameplay of Assassin’s creed is already a bit repetitious, but the sidequests are just so much bloat.

Why Are the Pretty Ones So Dumb?
Assassin’s Creed is a strikingly pretty game, in spite of a washed-out color palette. The developers took a great deal of care to assemble historically accurate architecture, and it pays off in a detailed world that feels remarkably whole. When you see the writhing cityscape from the top of a steeple, the mess of homes and stalls are convincingly disorganized, despite their gameplay function.

However the completeness of the city design came at the expense of everything else. Citizen dialog is remarkably sparse, for example. All beggars say exactly the same selection of two or three lines. Religious ranters only know one speech. Sidequest NPCs all thank you with the same pathetic desperation. By the time you’ve finished the game’s first chapter, you’ll have heard most of the incidental dialog. Once you’ve been through the next seven chapters, you’ll be stabbing innocent civilians just to shut them up.

The narrative dialog is more interesting, though there are issues with the presentation. There’s been a games industry push to integrate storytelling into the flow of gameplay for the past several years, but Assassin’s Creed doesn’t so much integrate as confuse storytelling with gameplay. Players can walk and manipulate the camera during exposition that amounts to little more than cut scenes. In fact, the only real impact of this control is to create the false impression that you’re obligated to be present for the unskippable plot.

Dead Stop
Assassin’s Creed is pretty enough to date, but too shallow to marry. A tremendous amount of effort went into making a beautiful and believable array of cities, but apparently the development cycle ended before anyone interesting could be made to live there. This means that exploration and sneaking through the streets is great fun while they’re still novel, but once the infatuation fades, there’s only the uncomplicated and repetitive game. For the duration of a rental, genre fans will certainly enjoy the permissive stealth, and hardcore gamers will enjoy exploring an organic cityscape. The controls are a small enough hurdle to recommend that casual gamers bum around the cities until boredom settles in.

What It Costs: $20

What It’s Worth:
•To The Hardcore: $20 (rent)
•To The Genre Fan: $20 (rent)
•To The Casual: $15 (rent)