A killer review…

If you’ve seen the screen shots then you know that Assassin’s Creed is a third person perspective game where you play a stealthy assassin running about a middle ages Middle Eastern city during the crusades. But that’s where you’re wrong. It takes place in the near future where you play a bar tender that looks like a cross between Adam Sandler and Ben Stiller who’s distant ancestor was an assassin running about a middle ages Middle Eastern city. You’ve been kidnapped by a mysterious corporation and forced by two scientists into sessions with their “animus”. Female fans of Jungian psychology know that their animus is why they’re reading this. In game, however, animus is the name of the machine which reads a user’s genetic memory. The intro explains that memories like instincts are encoded in DNA and thus inheritable. Which falls short for me and I’m sure anyone that’s passed high school biology outside of Dover. My mind sticks on this kind of faulty science jargon explanation rather than rolling with it. I would rather have the animus presented as is with no explanations.

Your kidnappers want to extract a particular memory of your ancestor’s and so need you to use the animus to relive the past events leading up to the memory they want. Like Hamlet’s play within a play this is a game within a game. The meat of which is controlling the ancestor during the animus sessions. The typical game menus are cleverly presented as the animus’s user interface. Between the sessions you control the bartender where you can explore two empty rooms occasionally interacting with something other than your bed.

The plot is conveyed nearly entirely through in game cut scene dialog. Unfortunately the character’s facial expressions come from the bottom of the uncanny valley and the dialog tends to be canned. During the first animus session, you quickly learn that your ancestor was a real arrogant jerk. When a game forces the player into making bad choices I always feel my suspension of disbelief wavering. Though it is muted a bit since here you’re not the arrogant jerk you’re a kidnapped bartender. As punishment for being an arrogant jerk and breaking the creed of being stealthy he must run the errand of assassinating nine men. Through the experience he becomes less jerky.

This is supposed to be a stealth game so there’re two types of behaviors socially acceptable and anti-social. If a guard catches you behaving badly for instance running crazy fast, climbing buildings or stabbing someone then they’ll chase you and attack. When that happens the best course of action is to make a mad break for it trying to break their line of sight then hide in a stack of hay or a roof top garden. It’s a fairly novel system but it has some flaws. The AI isn’t very bright. Sometimes the guards seem to attack for no reason. It can take quite a while to lose them and find a suitable hiding spot. By the time you’ve lost them it can require considerable back tracking, which is frustrating since you can’t save. It automatically saves at checkpoints but there is no way to save whenever you want.

The assassination targets are in the various cities. The first time you visit a city you must find your way there on horseback. The ride is reminiscent of Shadow of the Colossus. The countryside is beautiful and large and open, but there’s no real reason to explore it other than to work on a collect the flags egg hunt. The cities are guarded. Fortunately, after helping some scholars from some thugs you can blend in with them to sneak past the guards. Unfortunately entering every city works the same way. The cities are huge and intricate with crowded streets. Before you can do the hit you have to perform investigations like pick pocketing a letter, or eavesdropping on a conversation. If you get caught in an attempt you have to evade the guards before it resets. You find these missions by climbing up certain tall buildings and using your eagle eyes to locate and put them on your map. This formula repeats for all nine hits. And I mean repeat; there’s very little diversity in the types of investigations. What’s worse is it seems like half the city population consists of annoying beggars that get in your way, crazy guys that push or punch you, and guys shouting the same repetitive dialog over and over again.

Then there’s the assassinations themselves, this is a stealth game with an elaborate social behavior awareness system so you would expect to have to cleverly perform your role as a stealthy assassin to make the kill. But here again the game disappoints. It’s generally set up so you have to be in a crowd in front of the target for a cut scene where they are on a stage with guards around them. You then have to button mash hack and slash at the guards that encircle you. The one time I was able to sneak in, make the kill and sneak out it was thrilling. The other eight times it was canned. And of course you can’t try different techniques because you can’t save. If the guards kill you, you’ll be tossed back into the fight not before it when you may have had a chance to sneak past.

What’s worse is that climactic final chapter throws you into what feels like ten circles of hell guards to dispatch. Nothing is worse than having the feeling of victory buried under repetitive frustration. To all the game designers out there for the love of Zelda, make the difficulty level peak two thirds of the way in. Let the player finish the game with a taste of glorious victory. If that’s not bad enough, plot wise the conclusion is like an art house film, it cuts to credits leaving you mouthing WTF, but not in a good way.

I wanted to really like this game. With a hooded character, sprawling cityscape and stealth game play description I was hoping Assassin’s Creed would be a more deadly version of Thief Deadly Shadows. While they talk up the creed the game play doesn’t live up to it. The plot is unique and daring given it deals with religion and explores how morality becomes ambiguous after multifaceted investigation. But the game fails to create the tension which is essential to making stealth work. It provides huge beautiful intricate spaces to explore but offers little to find. And not being able to save except for check points makes for a frustrating experience. In general, it plays like they blew the budget creating the spaces then pushed it out half baked.

Rating: C-