User Review : Assassin's Creed

Assassins Creed, so much hype, but can it live up to it?

Assassins Creed, it was touted as a game that could revolutionise the open-world/sandbox game genre.

With the promise of wonderfully historically accurate cities sprawling with buildings and homes, the ability to pretty much do anything, climb any building/house/brigde, interact with any character in the whole city, everyone was salivating at the thought of a game in which "Anything was possible!"

So what did we end up with?

Well we seem to end up with a game that was either made unfinished, rushed or with room for sequels to come.

While many will know that there will definetly be sequels after the word of them coming before Assassins was even released, and now after great sales we are assured of one, two or even three more games to come.

With that being said we will need to be hopeful of a fair amount of improvement after the first.

First off let me set the scene for you, we start off in the not too distance future in which you play the decedent of the legendary Assassin Altair, the "Big Twist That Will Decide The Future Of The Series" that was touted is a mere storyline formality to make sure this game doesn't get stuck in a repetitive style for the next two or three movies, the so-so sci-fi twist is that future technology has allowed us to lie down in something that looks a bit like a tanning bed called the Animus and let us relive the memories of our ancestors, while it is a cool concept and has also never been done before, it is still a little so-so in terms of what a "Huge Twist" could be.

Now as we sit in the Animus(Memory Bed) we are sent back to the year 1191 AD(The Third Crusade) and have to relive certain memories from Altair's memory, now as being a memory this does allow for certain parts of the game to conveniently fit into place, like not being able to access certain areas of a city "Because it isn't apart of that memory", sometimes this can be a bit annoying as there might be a bad guy on the other side of this "Invisible Wall" that is blocking you from going into certain parts of the city.

What happens as soon as you get plonked into the world of Altair is that you are set on a mission to off a guy and end up going for the kill too early, you get caught, but let go, and then stripped of your Assassin Powers as you have broken the "Assassins Creed"(That of which is explained in full after this moment), you are still kept within this brethren though but are forced to fight your way back to the brilliant Assassin that you once were.

Basically what Assassins Creed does right, they do very, very well, but what they do wrong, ruins the game to the extent that the Downs well outweigh the Ups.

While the game is fantastic looking with 3 brilliantly made cities each with brilliant lighting, shadows and also very historically accurate, and the fun of the Parkour(Free Running)element is perfectly done and hella fun to use and get around the city with, not to mention sneaking up to your enemies by creeping around the skirts of a building and blind sighting them for the easy kill.

As said earlier the elements though that make this game good are severely outweighed by what makes it bad.

Each mission you have to complete you must first scout out, to find as much information about your target and why he needs to be taken out, your options are few and far between, you can choose to do a few of these before going to kill your subject, or all of these thus completing your full memory block, problem is if you do choose to complete all of these then it will get boring after about the third time you do it, as there are Interrogation - There will be a man shouting out his beliefs on a stage, once he is finished you then follow him to an alley and beat him up until he tells you his secrets, another task is the Eavesdrop - This is where you sit on a bench and listen in to a conversation between two very loud talking citizens telling each other secrets, unfortunately for the player you will need to do this everytime you play a mission.

Now there aren't only your main missions to kill one big guy you also have little side missions to complete which compromise of a few things like Saving Citizens - A person is getting picked on by authorities, you need to come and save the person and take out the authorities, there are also many high buildings you must climb to complete another part of the side mission, there are also races to catch a certain amount of flags in a set time, once again these are the only side missions and after doing them 10 times in one little part of the city you will get pretty bored once you realise that there are about 50-60 of them in each full city.

Basically this game really felt like they were probably relying on the first to get money and then have the "Oh the sequels will be better" excuse for the next couple of games.

Problem is they should not be counting on "A good sequel", the first game can make or break franchises, they are very, very lucky that they managed a great marketing campaign and hyped it up to the extreme extent, this would have been around about in the Top 10 in terms of games sold for 2007, and if not for the stunningly brilliant visuals I have no doubt this would have been torn apart by reviewers.

While I definetly do think Assassins Creed 2 and 3 will or at least should get better from here I cannot see this happening if the developers finished Assassins Creed and went "We have a perfect game", because in my opinion that is what every creator should say before sending out a game, or at least say "We have a perfect game for our genre", there is simply no way I would believe them saying they thought the missions were full, versatile and never got repetitive, because it is simply not true, they have made about 5-6 things to do in 1 mission and that is all that you can do for each mission right until the end of the game!