Assassin's Creed
by UBI Soft
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Video Game Reviews of Assassin's Creed
Customer Review: Entertaining Game
Summary: 4 Stars
I got this game a couple of weeks ago and have made it about half way through the storyline. Normally I'm a first person shooter guy and when I've played games like this in the past it's seemed impossible to aim accurately the way the controls are set up. This game eliminated that problem. When you have throwing knives you can select your target simply by pulling the left trigger(Xbox). This makes the controls so much easier and makes the game a lot more fun for me. Climbing is fairly easy too. There are a few difficult climbs that require you to be creative and that adds to the fun. You definitely feel a sense of accomplishment when you get to the top.
Pros:
Great storyline. You'll even hear some names from history that make the story seem more realistic
Great counter move sequences. You really can make some great kills
Great AI dialog. The AI dialog is all in context
Fun additional challenges. After you complete your investigation you can get more info by completing some challenges
Cons:
Repetitive action. Fighting the soldiers gets old. The fighting gets repetitive. I try to stay to the rooptops to avoid it.
Poor respawn points. There are times when you get killed that you respawn right next to the soldiers that are after you and you don't have a chance to deflect the first blow
Overall, this is a great game. I'm having a lot of fun with it.
Customer Review: Repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat, etc...
Summary: 3 Stars
This game has outstanding graphics. The game itself runs smooth most of the time, but there are long delays in loading times and your character's reactions can be extremely annoying in battle and when you run away from your enemies... and believe me, you will be running a lot.
The game is very repetitive too! The landscapes are great, but in each city you do the same mini-games and sub-objectives and it gets old after hours of play.
The fight sequences are cool when you can make a clean strike or block, but when you have multiple enemies, forget it, you're done!
The best things about the game; you get to ride horses across the countryside, use swords, leap off roof tops into haystacks, play the Crusades.
Probably not going to purchase Part 2.
Customer Review: Don't you dare buy this game for PC
Summary: 1 Stars
This game will murder your computer. I've got a damn good system, better than the required though not quite to the recommended and I had to play this game on the lowest settings. Maybe if they had spent a little more time porting it to PC this could have been a smoother game, but honestly, the graphics are the only thing going here. It's hideously ugly on the low settings and it still lags like a mother. The interface is lousy, too, with limited options for customizing graphics and a maddening four screens to go through before you can quit to the desktop (Alt+F4 comes in handy here!). If the graphics had been better I may have made it a few more missions, but I highly doubt I would have finished the game.
The gameplay is lousy and repetitive. You're supposed to be a sneaky assassin, but there's no punishment for getting exposed or killing hundreds of guards. Hundreds. Literally hundreds. It's often easier to just kill all the guards than it is to hide and become anonymous again. The story might be good, but the repetitive "kill some archers for information", pickpocket and "interrogation" missions are dull, dull, dull. I'll admit that I stopped playing after the fifth assassination because it's so infuriating having to go through the same dumb sequences again and again. Your character has been stripped of his rank and is being punished by having to go through these piddling investigations so maybe the idea was to get you to pity the character, I guess. The only person really punished is the player, though, with this boring, buggy game. I'm just glad it only cost me $5 on Steam a couple weekends ago (I still feel ripped off), I pity the fool that bought this game for $50-60.
Customer Review: Great concept, poor variety.
Summary: 3 Stars
A decent game that become very monotonous with repetitious tasks. However, the graphics and smooth animations make it a worthwhile playthrough. Initially the "wow" factor is very high, with beautiful landscapes and amazing animations. However, too much of a good thing is a bad thing, and this game is no different. Fun for a bit, but wearing in the long haul. Worth the playthrough if it's found at a bargin basement price.
Customer Review: Victim of hype but still fun game
Summary: 4 Stars
While I first had the Wii, I didn't get a Playstation 3 or an Xbox 360 (price for former, reliability for latter) till awhile later but once I finally bought one, there was several games on my list as far as "games I want to play but couldn't" and one of them was Assassin's Creed. Seems like everyone else had this on their list to play too because the game sold an insane amount of copies and got a lot of hype and anticipation. Well nowadays the game has gotten such a bad reputation thanks to its repetitive mission structure and maybe too ambitious for its own good but with the sequel coming out in just a month's time, I thought I'd revisit the game and see whether or not the game really is that bad or whether people just overreacted. I'd say personally that everyone overreacted because they expected a masterpiece and they got a good game instead.
Story: It's 1191 and there's a conflict going on between Crusader and Saracen forces with 9 men in particular really being the key major players concerning the turmoil to the lands. Al Mualim, leader of the Assassin's Guild, entrusts arrogant and recently demoted member Altair to kill the 9 men and help the conflict and bring some kind of resolve. But the real reason why Altair is doing anything at all will be revealed and it turns out it has nothing to do with the problems in the Holy Land. The story got criticized for being a bit too ambitious concerning its plot twist, it's unfinished-feeling ending and for some people, the lack of coherence since there's no subtitle option to get into the larger plots concerning the intended targets but it's an interesting story, just I guess not properly told.
Graphics: One thing you can never fault - well, least not frequently - is Ubisoft's lack of graphical prowess and Assassin's Creed is the kind of game that not only has a really beautiful and unique look and aesthetic but the horsepower behind the engine as well with incredible draw distances, crowd animations not only in groups but on individuals and especially Altair's parkour animations, Assassin's Creed is certainly a beautiful game which unfortunately gets marred when some screen tearing pops up but it's minimal. But doing the Leap of Faith where you drop practically 10 stories down to a bundle of hay in one camera move is quite impressive.
Sound/Music: The music isn't necessarily buy-worthy but it's a likable soundtrack with some of-the-times type pieces but for the most part it's all the crowd din as you hear the rustle and bustle of the city and it's all incredibly realistic and really puts you in that place. However, the voice acting is incredibly spotty with the intended targets doing admirable jobs with their roles yet Altair is one monotonous and unlikable bugger who really needs a kick in the ass (and who sounds strangely American for a Middle-Eastern character) and the repeated lines will drive you crazy. That one beggar woman who constantly cries out "just a coin, sir I'm sick, I havent any money" will most likely have you wanting to put her out of her misery more than once, in addition to the lines civilians say when you rescue them. How many times have I heard that the whole city will hear of my sacrifice? 50 times too many.
Gameplay: The city has been described as an open-world game which basically means "do whatever you want" but in a way, Assassin's Creed doesn't fit the mold. Whereas a lot of these kind of games offer you plenty of variety of things to do (Grand Theft Auto series) or a massive map to explore (Fallout 3), Assassin's Creed gives you huge areas to explore, just not as much stuff to actually do in them. When you come across the 3 key cities, Acre, Jerusalem and Damascus, it's predominantly the same thing in each city: view points to help fill out the map, saving citizens from brutish guards, eavesdropping missions where you sit on a bench and listen in, pickpocketing people's pockets (yay, alliteration) or roughing up someone for information. There is a tad bit of repetition but it isn't so bad but people might not and didn't like how same-y it got. The other gameplay extender is flag collecting and if you're one of those types that hates finding stuff for achievements than Assassin's Creed will drive you batty because there's 100 flags to collect and not just in one city either and unlike say Infamous which had a similar thing but gave you a radar to locate them, some flags are so well-hidden you practically need a map and cross them off.
A large part of the game is parkour where Altair climbs up down and around buildings to get to where he's going and it's one of the more funner elements of the game since not only does it look so realistic and easy to use (though too many platforming games have me pressing Jump to climb higher that I keep jumping OFF buildings whereas this game just requires you to hold the Up button) but it for some reason actually feels that fun. But should you run into guards on your voyages is where combat comes in and this is where it gets a bit dodgy since you get to counter attack, grab them and throw them away, sometimes straight off cliffs and high roofs too, but face multiple ones at the same time but the AI has a habit of just standing there and sometimes they even pose, as if they don't want to attack you so much as mock. In addition, it's way too easy to actually start a fight and more than once you'll be riding on your horse and people will assume you're up to no good and chase after you and bizarrely they actually don't stop so you can ride 2 football field lengths away and eventually they'll be right behind you slicing your horse's feet and it's like "go away already". City guard AI is worse since sometimes they don't even see you assassinate a guy right near them and yet you can be on a ledge above the street and be like "assassin!" and you'd be like "what did I do, haven't killed anyone for....3 minutes" but it's way too inconsistent.
One of the low points of the game though is strangely part of what's actually not set in the Holy Land but rather the future. While I don't want to spoil the entire story and its concept despite others having done so, the segments where you're not controlling Altair are so linear and really just walk around, chat to chick that you wonder why this wasn't just cutscene. Is this a fun game? It strangely is when your brain isn't thinking about what wasn't included, why one was etc so it's not an outright bad game and maybe not deserving of the huge amount of hype people put onto the game since that kind of influenced what we were expecting but I did find it fun, just maybe not flawless.