I recently got my hands on Assassin’s Creed for my PC and have been playing it quite steadily for the past five days or so. From these five days with it I can see that it’s a game that lives up to the hype—at least enough to not completely disappoint—although it does contain a few noticeable flaws. It’s another case of a game that could have been really really good instead of just being “good” if it hadn’t been rushed through its last stages of development in order to get it on the market, but then again the only studios that don’t do that are Valve, Blizzard, Nintendo and Kojima, and they can’t make every game, can they. But I digress. Onward with Assassin’s Creed!
For starters, the plot of Assassin’s Creed is, well, disputable. While the vast majority of the game is played as Altair, jilted master assassin forced to work his way back up to the top from the very bottom, the player really controls some guy who’s name is easily forgotten who is, for some reason, being held captive by a scientist and his sexy assistant while they probe his genetic memory for some hidden “secret” for their “employers.” Seriously. You talk like random-white-guy and you look like random-white-guy the entire game despite the fact that you’re supposed to be in the Crusades-era Jerusalem area. It’s something that would get on my nerves if it wasn’t part of the scenario design—and to its credit it’s a gold mine for the developers. It provides for an opportunity to teach the player the controls (teaching Desmond how to use the Animus machine), it provides a solution for when the player dies or fails an objective (the memory “destabilizes” and resets), and most importantly for the developers, I assume, it provides endless opportunities for sequels. Since the scenario itself is not limited to a time period because The Animus is a vessel for exploring human genetic memory, the Assassin’s Creed series is permitted to jump to all kinds of different periods of subterfuge and assassination, meaning we can expect anything from cold war counter-counter espionage to the Spanish Inquisition in the series’ future.
As for the gameplay itself, it’s like playing Metal Gear Solid crossed with Prince of Persia; the sneaking around, trying to be as stealthy and inconspicuous as you can is complemented nicely by the tight, well executed action elements like quickly fleeing a scene, acrobatically jumping from rooftop to rooftop and then blending in to your surroundings. It’s genius, and this is really the element of Assassin’s Creed that promises to “revolutionize the Action genre,” as so many have said.
Acrobatics and stealth really aren’t two elements that far apart—there’s more than one way to avoid being caught than just simply hiding—but it’s something that games have been limited in their portrayal of because of the hardware available up to this point. As controllers got bigger and more complicated throughout the 90s, it seemed logical to simply give the player more specific actions to perform. After all, games up until that point always hinged on giving the player set moves to work with—Mario for example—and it worked wonderfully. Up until recently, you simply pressed the button (or combination of buttons) and if the specific animation it triggered worked, it worked, and if it didn’t you went back to the drawing board. Now, however, memory capacity and animation technology has had a chance to catch up, giving developers the freedom to do more “for” the player. Essentially, games have become more intuitive, and complicated actions (like the ones a person would actually do in real life) can be performed easily by the player. These instances are extremely common in Assassin’s Creed and are somewhat of a centerpiece of the game. The control scheme, for example, is very free-form. Instead of simply having an “attack” button, or a “jump” button, buttons are used to activate your legs, arms, weapons, etc. based on your overall behavior and situation. You remember the “Action” button from Ocarina of Time? It’s kind of like that except every button is an action button. Now, I realize this concept isn’t new (like I just said, Zelda was doing it in ’98 ) but it’s done so well in Assassin’s Creed that it warrants credit.
Beyond that there is the way the game requires you to behave realistically in the scenarios it puts forth. Playing like a video game character (bumping into people, starting conversations with randoms on the street, jumping on everything in sight) no longer cuts it here. Doing so will get you odd stares from the crowd and may even set the guards on you. It’s new level of immersion that I’ve been waiting to see in games for a long while. The Metal Gear Solid series was the closest so far (and I’ll admit I haven’t gotten my hand on MGS4 yet so I don’t know for sure), but Assassin’s Creed does the best job I’ve seen yet. The accompanying visuals make the experience even more “real” for the player, and, in a world that seems to want to substitute good graphic for good gameplay more and more, I can confidently say these are warranted.
Of course, when you begin to look at the negatives of the game, you find that the elements that lead to some of the game’s biggest positives also contribute to its biggest negatives. For starters, whenever Altair walks past a piece of the terrain he can interact with unprompted, he does so without hesitation. Now, this is all well and good, until you’re trying to walk past a ladder by moving forward and Altair/Desmond keeps attempting to climb up it because you’ve got your finger on the ‘up’ button. Not to mention that scaling a building, something that should seem monumental to the player, becomes routine three hours in the game. In fact, it’s expected of you to climb one at least every hour or so in order to find new objectives, and holding down the requisite buttons while you simply watch Altair find foothold after improbable foothold becomes, well, dull.
Also, the “keeping a low profile” thing seems to have a few kinks in it. Remember Altair’s auto-hide? Well, some of these instances produce result that should be more …conspicuous… than the game thinks they are. For example, whenever Altair passes by a haystack, he always gleefully hurls himself into it to “hide.” Now, I’m just one man, but, to me, seeing someone walking casually down the street one second and diving into a pile of hay the next would be a little, well, suspicious: “Hey, you see than guy just now?” “Yeah Bill, I did. What the hell, right?” “He just jumped into my pile of hay!” “I know man. Whatcha gonna do though, am I right?” And what’s worse, it actually fools the cops: “Unit two move in, we’ve got him cornered.” “You see where he went?” “Yeah. Turned a corner, no place to—DAMMIT! NOTHING HERE!” “What?” “THERE’S NOTHING HERE! JUST HAY! CURSE YOU, YOU WILY BASTARD, CURSE YOOOOOOOOOOOU!”
What it really comes down to, in the end is repetition: Assassin’s Creed is very repetitive. Besides the changes in assassination targets, you go through essentially the same motions for every kill, and it gets stale. So, in the end, as innovative as it is, Assassin’s Creed is more of stepping stone in action-game design: we’re not quite there yet, but this is a solid glimpse at where we’re going. That said, it’s hard to recommend it fully; it’s not quite worth the $40-50 being asked for it by retailers, but supporting this game will lead to good things in the future. If you’ve got the cash lying around and nothing pressing to play, pick this one up for some good times.
Tags: Assassin's Creed, Invasion, Niblet, PC, Video Game
