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Assassin’s Creed Review (360)

Age rating:

16+ (PEGI)

What is it?

A 12th Century Grand Theft Auto, but with horses and parkour

Is it fun?

Yes.

Is it worth the money? £39.99

Yes.

Why?

Just for the sheer enjoyment of being totally submersed in a beautifully realised game world. This really is a game that you can play for hours and hours without really noticing. It’s quite easy to spend an entire day leaping around the rooftops, collecting flags (for gamer points on the 360) and killing guards. The whole thing is so much fun. Your character, Altaïr, has a wonderful array of moves at his disposal which allow you to climb and leap over pretty much anything. This is the main attraction of the game and provides many, many hours of climbing fun. Also as Altaïr gains more skills you really feel him develop into an incredibly lethal assassin. This coupled with a simple control method (with quite a bit of help from the game) results in some spectacular looking kills and moves.

However, it seems the effort of creating this beautiful environment has resulted in Ubisoft skimping on the game play. It all seems so fantastic at the start. You initially travel to a lovely looking city (by horse) and complete some or all of the following tasks:

  • Climb all the viewpoints
  • Save the citizens
  • Eavesdrop on a conversation or two
  • Pickpocket someone
  • Collect a set number of flags within a time limit
  • Kill 3-5 targets within a time limit
  • Kill your main assassination target

And that’s it. Repeat about 11 times (4 cities x 3 main targets to assassinate) and then some battles at the end. Surprisingly, I didn’t find the crushing repetitiveness of the game play annoying at all. In fact, it was all quite relaxing. You don’t have to think about what to do next, you just know what to do. This means you can sit back, enjoy the scenery and get on with the killing. Oh, apart from the unbelievably annoying voice artists they hired for the beggar women. Grrr, after you’ve heard them beg for the 10,000th time it really does grate.

Also you can’t skip any of the dialogue in the game, and believe me there is A LOT OF DIALOGUE. It’s so bad that I used the talky-talky bits as bathroom/food/phone a mate breaks. What’s worse is that everyone’s an asshole. They are all thoroughly unpleasant people, even your character. I didn’t feel the slightest bit of empathy, or desire to help him in anyway.

Another gripe, is the totally unnecessary scenes set in the present day. You see, you are actually playing a game in a game. Not only is this silly and pointless, but you can’t do anything other than walk around 1 room and sleep in your bed. Why? I fail to see what this adds to the game other than to annoying you even more. Oh, yeah, everyone’s an asshole in the present day too.

And finally, it’s a next-gen game without a single quick time event (QTE). Oh, the joy!

In summary: A good game (even with its many flaws) that could have been an amazing game had the developers spent more time on the game play.

Screenshots:


Assassins Creed - Always climbing Assassins Creed - Nice horse


Assassin’s Creed is available now on Xbox 360, PS3 and PC in March 08 with Assassins Creed – Altaïr’s Chronicles coming to the DS in Feb 08.

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