Assassin’s Creed
// November 17th, 2007 // Reviews
There are already many reviews out there which detail how mediocre Assassin’s Creed is, so it seems totally stupid to me that I’d write another one - so instead I’ll write one which airs more on the side of the games graces, than it’s slightly gaping holes. For the younger people out there who come to games like Assassin’s Creed after games such as Splinter Cell, Tomb Raider or Hitman you will never understand the leap that this game represents. As someone who has now breached 30 years old I can remember when Prince of Persia was released on the Commodore 64 - it represented a mammoth step forwards in the way that games behaved and looked. From titles such as Blagger and New Zealand Story, the platform genre suddenly became “grown up” - they stopped using sprites which essentially had three or four states, and they became “fluid” - or at least as fluid as 1983 could handle. For me, seeing and playing Assassin’s Creed is akin to going back to that day, those days, with Prince of Persia. It is a truly emotional experience that takes me back almost 25 years ago. Now, the game itself is amazingly beautiful - the most beautiful game that I’ve ever seen! Unfortunately, the game is a little bit samey - with missions pretty much being the same from one to the next. The story is a little predictable (even with the wierd subplot - you’re not actually an assassin during the crusades it seems…), and the end a little quick to come - but this game was always going to be about the graphics, the way that Altair throws himself around these middle age cities with ease and looks amazing doing so. It’s simple to make him do it too, simple key combinations result in the most complex of manouvres - and to see the quite brilliantly fluid “counter attacks” that Altair can wield out have left me speechless more than once. We need Ubi or someone else to take the visuals and control of Assassin’s Creed and then apply it to a game with a little more life-span, and a bit more complexity - then the platform genre that started it’s evolution so long ago with Prince of Persia will truly have evolved into something special. 7/10
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