"Nothing is true. Everything is permitted."
Jerusalem. The XII century. Amidst the chaos of the third crusade, a brotherhood of warriors rose to power. Shrouded in secrecy, feared for their ruthlessness, they alone would save the Holy Land... or destroy it. They were the Assassins...
2012. Desmond, an Assassin, is held prisoner by descendants of the Templars in a secret lab. With his help, his captors hope to achieve nothing else than... world domination.
Let's start with the beginning. In the beginning, there was... Adam and Eve. Whoa! No, I won't take you that far back (although I could). Let's stick to our friend Desmond for a while (played by you). Held captive by the "future" Templars, you are forced to "play along". Connected to a device called Animus, you must explore the genetic memories of your ancestors, in the search for a repressed, hidden memory.
There's a whole theory that what we currently call "instincts" could actually be ancestor memories, stored in our genes.
With the outbreak of the L-11 virus, future Earth is confronted with a lot of social problems, war and famine. The "future" Templars decide to take drastic action, with the use of devices called "Pieces of Eden". These sphere-shaped devices create powerful illusions and help anyone who possess them control the population. Water was never turned into wine, the Red Sea was never parted... it was all an illusion.
As I was saying, Desmond is forced to explore the genetic memories of his Assassin ancestor Altaïr, whose mission is to kill nine key Holy Land leaders that make the crusade worse, by suppressing the freedom people have. Altaïr stumbles upon the secret of the orbs, and a map with the location of these "Pieces of Eden". It's exactly this memory that interests the Templars.
There are seven memory blocks available for play in the Animus. That means the game is structured into seven big chapters.
Altaïr is one of the best Assassins the order has, but he is too arrogant and self-confident. We start the game with a mission of crucial importance: the retrieval of an important artifact that the Templars are also after. He fails to assassinate Templar Robert de Sablé, and gets every member of his team killed. Robert lets you live, so that you may tell what happened to Al Mualim, the leader of the Assassins Brotherhood.
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As a consequence of your actions, Robert assaults Masyaf, a small town where the Assassins have their base of operations. Altaïr redeems himself by stopping the invading force, and gains a second chance. But all comes with a price, as he is striped from his weapons and rank, and he has to start low, as a student once again. As you assassinate more and more of the nine targets you are assigned to, you slowly regain your rank and possessions.
But it's not enough to know your next target in order to kill him. You see, as a low rank student, you must also investigate for yourself who your target is, what people think about him, and when the best time and place to strike is.
The Kingdom is the area between the four playable cities: Damascus, Jerusalem, Acre and Masyaf. As a side note, I must say horse riding between those cities is awesome. The best by far from any game I've seen! The horse has three "speeds" and moves so naturally. And of course you can fight while mounted. It's a shame really you won't be using this too much as you progress through the game, because you can teleport (or "fast forward memory") to each city once you reach it by horse.
It's amazing to see that each city is not only historically accurate (architecture, people...), but also that each region has its own color palette. Acre for example is a sea port, so everything is rendered in cool, blue tones. Opposite is Damascus, a desert city, where everything is drawn in warm colors, yellow and red. Even at the end of the game you may notice everything turning a bit black, as the pressure is on and everything is a life and death matter.
High landmarks such as cathedral towers offer a great city overview and are not just there for optional climbing. In order for you to see possible objectives on the minimap, you have to get up there and use Eagle Vision.
Speaking of the minimap, you may also notice a health bar, a weapon bar and a context sensitive help with all the actions you can perform at a certain moment. As you can see the developers made quite an effort to give everything an explanation, the Animus being the one to explain your interface. You may also see certain glitches and chemical reaction links from time to time, either during cinematics or gameplay. If you press any key while a glitch occurs during an interactive cinematic, the camera angle will change and you will be able to see hidden things.
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When you are exposed, break the line of sight by...
HHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
Just having fun :) When you die, and the computer loads your last checkpoint, sometimes the load is done so fast that the Animus voice doesn't finish reading the tips for you. We used to joke that she maybe has a heart attack or something. Ok, enough - back to our regular transmission now.
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More interesting is that Assassins's Creed was initially designed to be played without an interface at all. Visual glitches and audio sounds help you enough throughout gameplay if you pay attention. In fact, after you get acquainted with the game and the controls a bit, I strongly recommend you to disable all of the visual HUD elements from you game menu, for a really unique experience. It may be harder, but it seems a lot more real.
Your control system is pretty innovative, but unfortunately designed for the consoles. Imagine a puppet with one button for the head, another one for the legs, and two more for the left and right arms. Now open your eyes. You see exactly the function keys on any Xbox360 or PS3 controller. Of course, the game supports the Windows version of the Xbox360 controller, including vibration. I am not saying that the keyboard and mouse control is awful, but it will take some time for you to adjust to it.
The left and right mouse buttons are your left and right hands, space is used for your feet, and E for your head. Weapons are keys 1-4, and SHIFT is used to change between high and low profile modes. In high profile mode you are able to move faster, sprint and your assassinations have a cool, high-paced action note to them. You will however draw attention on you, as well as if you climb to strange places or bump into people while running. Use high profile combined with roof climbing, to escape from guards chasing you. Low profile is really more suited for stealth assassinations, and going unnoticed.
The population plays an important role into the game. People wander around, minding their own businesses, and the cities look really alive. There are certain types of individuals: the drunken guy that will pick a fight on you if you bump into him by mistake, the beggars that will not live you alone no matter where you go, etc. These can become quite a problem if you try to lose the guards that are behind you.
Altaïr is a pretty agile climber and a free runner, so outsmarting and outrunning the guards on rooftops should be piece of cake for you... right? RIGHT?
A cool move you can do is the "Leap of faith". Whenever you see birds sitting on a ledge, it means you can jump from high above and dive below to safety, as you will always find a pile of hay there. And to make it a bit easier, you always have the option to jump when you climb a really high vantage point.
Once the surroundings are observed, you will see new missions on your game map, similar to quests in RPG games. You need to perform at least 3 missions in order to unlock the main assassination event. Missions vary and are more or less randomly generated. You may have to beat down a guy and interrogate him, pickpocket a secret message, stealth assassinate some guards, and so on. The "Director's Cut" PC edition contains 4 new mission in addition to the ones already available on the PS3 and Xbox360: archer assassination, rooftop race challenge, merchant stand destruction challenge and escort challenge.
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I keep telling you this and that about assassinations, but I didn't tell you about your weapons arsenal yet; silly me. At the initiation, every Assassin has their ring finger cut off, and replaced with a hidden, stealthy, retractable blade. This is your main low profile weapon, and you can perform a deadly blow against unaware targets with it. The default key is 2.
1 is your short blade, ideal for quick counterstrikes. If your enemy is at range and you have your target locked on him, you can use throw knifes instead. When consumed, you can steal more from specific people.
3 is your long blade, the standard balanced weapon.
4 will switch to your fists. While not so deadly, the guards will not intervene if you are fist fighting.
Combat is really quick and looks very good. Precise hits and spectacular counters lead to instant enemy death. Block all the time if possible.
Altaïr does not have life or hit points. Instead of a life bar, Ubi introduced the "synchronization bar". If you get hurt, or perform things against your Assassin's Creed, synchronization will be lost. If the bar goes to zero, the last checkpoint is loaded. Yes, you cannot save during missions or whenever you like.
The Assassin's Creed states the following:
You can however help yourself a little by collecting certain flags, placed in various places throughout the Kingdom. It is really unfortunate that you gain nothing really by completing a collection set of flags, except an auto game save. There are certain achievements to be gained when all flags are collected on Xbox360 for example.
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You can refill your stock of throwing knives by pick pocketing from...
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHNNNNNNNNGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH!
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Conclusion
Assassin's Creed is one of the greatest games out there that shouldn't be missing from any gamers' collection. It has incredible, breath-taking graphics, amazing animations and combat, as well as excellent music, sounds and atmosphere. There are only a few bad things that could be said about it. One is the obvious fact that it was designed for consoles, and ported to PC.
Although it's a very good port, it's a shame that you will play with black bars all the time because the game doesn't support regular monitors, just widescreens; the flags you will collect don't do anything else but save the game, instead of giving you some sort of achievements; and the keyboard control is a bit odd - but you'll get used to that pretty quick.
Now that I've been playing this game both on console and PC and started and restarted it several times, I find that the most annoying part is the repetitive nature of it. Especially the random missions in-between the main story. Add to that the inability to bypass cinematics, and you get a much lower replayability that expected.
Gameplay: 84
Only some repetitive moments eclipse this otherwise fantastic game, full of combat, exploration and adrenaline-packed stealth assassinations. Oh, and as a personal note, I would have preferred the Sci-Fi side of the game to come towards the end of it, as a "shock" to the user, instead of being introduced from the beginning. Plus, the end was a bit disappointing, sort of "to be continued". I did say Assassin's Creed will be a trilogy, right?!
Graphics: 91
The game looks jaw dropping amazing and I can hardly wait for the next Prince of Persia to use the same engine as Assassin's Creed. Too bad for the horizontal stripes on regular monitors, and lucky you if you can play on a widescreen! Also the camera acts up during combat sometimes.
Multiplayer: N/A
... although Ubi planned some co-op gameplay, it was eventually dropped from the final version.
Sound: 92
Jesper Kyd composed the soundtrack. And the voice acting features Philip Shahbaz and Kristen Bell amongst others. Great job! A little minus for too much repetitions of certain dialogs on random missions.
Hardware: 91
I didn't expect Assassin's Creed to work so well even on a low spec machine. A friend tried it on a 6600 AGP card and it worked! Both DirectX 9 and DrirectX 10 are supported, though there is no visual difference between the two versions - the only difference being speed.
