Sitting nearby inconspicuously, I eye my target through the swarming crowd. Seeing an opening, I stand and gently push my way through the passersby. Bearded and jovial, the mark never notices my silent approach from behind. When I’m within striking distance, I extend my arm…and tap gently on his shoulder with my index finger.
“Excuse me, Patrice?” I ask.
I’m not describing an encounter I had playing Assassin’s Creed, undoubtedly Ubisoft’s most paramount multiplatform title for the year, but instead my first encounter with the game itself. It was Day 3 of E3 2006 and for the two previous days, I had been skulking around the Ubisoft compound, attempting to be granted the opportunity to see first-hand what I sensed would become the year’s most talked about game. Private showings were available behind closed doors to only those most esteemed members of the press with reservations booked months in advance.
So naturally, we didn’t stand a chance of getting in. Repeated denials from Ubi’s PR team, those resilient sentinels guarding the entryway, made this very apparent.
Never one to shirk from a challenge however, I watched and waited and schemed, and finally concocted the perfect plan upon spotting Ubisoft Montreal’s Creative Director, Patrice Désilets. I explained to the amiable Montrealer my predicament and how much seeing his game would mean to me.
Overcome with gratitude (or perhaps he just wanted to be rid of me, it’s hard to say), Patrice made the necessary arrangements. Before you could say Al-Hashshashin, we were being ushered into a tiny white room for a spellbinding demonstration. With unparalleled visuals and gameplay that looked both unique and engaging, Assassin’s Creed went on to win our Best of E3 2006 award some weeks later.
We also absconded with a half-dozen t-shirts and posters on our way out the door when no one was looking.
In the year and a half since then, Assassin’s has been shrouded in both secrecy and controversy. Awash in a deluge of issues, from an overblown reaction to a minor glitch that reared its nasty head in the game’s E307 showing, to the gaming population’s love/hate attitude toward Executive Producer Jade Raymond, and most recently, questionable review scores from a number of outlets, gamers and critics alike have lost sight of what matters most: the actual game itself.
Which is truly a shame, because Assassin’s Creed is one of the most ambitious titles we’ve encountered in years. Unfortunately, the grandness of its scope is precisely what’s ultimately responsible for the game’s downfall.
Set in the year 1191 AD during the time of the Third Crusade, the game blends actual historic places, people, and events with ancient myths and modern conspiracy theories, tying it all together with Ubi’s own devised storyline. Central to the game is the infamous Hashishin sect, a secretive cult of Shia Muslim assassins who clashed violently during the Crusades with both the Knights Templar and Sunni Muslims.
After inexplicably disregarding all three of the Assassin’s tenets, Altair, the most gifted of his order and the game’s protagonist, is stripped of his blades and rank and is tasked with carrying out a number of assassinations so as to regain his honor and his master’s trust. The game takes the player from the Assassin’s stronghold at Masyaf to the Seljuk capital of Damascus and from the port-city of Akko (Acre) to Jerusalem, held by Saladin’s forces against the encroaching Crusaders. The player is also given the option to explore on horseback or foot the countryside that lies between the cities.
Trained in the art of free running, or le parkour, as the developers so elegantly put it, Altair must rely on his agility to seek out his targets and escape from his enemies. The game offers no shortage of towers to climb, walls to scale, precipices to leap across, and rooftops to transverse, and Altair moves with ceaseless grace and unmatched fluidity, thanks to the 12,000 motion-captured animations his creators have provided to him. A streamlined, contextual control scheme unique to games of this sort make controlling Altair as he leaps from rooftop to rooftop an immensely enjoyable experience.
The player must carry out a handful of objectives prior to being granted the opportunity to perform an assassination. He can choose to interrogate individuals close to his target by beating them senseless for a while or gain information from informants that can be sought out in each city.
All this culminates into the game’s most important and enjoyable moments of gameplay: the assassinations. After gaining the requisite information on his target, Altair must seek out his victim within the city. When within range, a cut-scene is triggered, with the player given the option to cycle through various camera angles; a subtle touch that provides a bit of interactivity to an otherwise passive cinematic affair.
Each assassination is unique from the one preceding it and the player will often need to wait for just the right moment to strike or chase his fleeing victim down or cut his way through mobs of bodyguards. More importantly, each is more wickedly satisfying than the last.
After dealing a death blow to a primary assassination target, Altair and his dying victim are transported to a cloudy netherworld for a brief heart-to-heart in cut-scene form. As our protagonist holds his bloodied prey in his arms, the target will make confessions that serve to progress the storyline and leave the player questioning his own motives. The moral ambiguity the game hopes to illicit however just never feels…ambiguous enough.
A slave trader, weapons dealer, corrupt official, and deranged torturer are but a few of the game’s nine primary assassination targets. Although the only thing these men seem to share in common at first are their individual obsessions to profit in terms of both wealth and power from the Crusades, the player slowly begins to piece together a much deeper and darker bond that links them all.
The biggest criticism of Assassin’s Creed that’s been voiced by others is the repetitive nature of its gameplay. While one can argue that all games are comprised of performing a small number of tasks repeatedly, it does seem to be particularly noticeable in Assassin’s more so than other action titles.
A great diversity of tasks, like interrogations, robberies, and intimidations more evenly distributed throughout would have been beneficial. Also, instead of giving the player six different goals to choose from, a more clearly defined linear progression of objectives leading up to each assassination would have been an improvement.
Paradoxically, Ubisoft has created an incredibly open-ended world that is a joy to explore, but could have benefited from more focused and linear objective-based gameplay to avoid some monotony due to repetitiveness.
Altair is foremost a death-dealer, and his principle weapon is his saber. Fight sequences have a flair for the cinematic: the camera changes angles to highlight the most gratuitous blood splatters during Altair’s positively brutal finishing moves. His swordfighting style is that of a brawler and the player will gain additional moves like grabs, lunges, and dodges over the course of play. Thankfully, swordfighting never descends into button mashing or esoteric ‘Simon-Says’ combos. Instead, it’s all about using timing to your advantage as you parry, dodge, and slice your way through the guards.
A short blade can also be wielded, but its effectiveness is much less than that of the sword. For ranged attacks, throwing knives are an option, but I never once felt the desire to use them.
The game’s signature weapon is a retractable blade that slides out from within Altair’s left sleeve and produces a satisfyingly visceral metallic thump as it slides into the heads or abdomens of enemies. The hidden blade is perfect for stealth assassinations, when the target can be approached covertly from above or behind or through a crowd. A frontal attack, however, will be met with a dramatic parry and result in Altair being thrown to the ground.
As a master equestrian, Altair can steal any horse he happens upon (and there are many grazing throughout the Kingdom) and gallop valiantly from city to city. While on horseback, Altair can walk, trot, gallop, and jump over obstacles and plow through phalanxes of patrolling soldiers, in addition to drawing his sword for mounted attacks which, while aren’t particularly effective, are a blast to attempt regardless.
The game dynamics of Assassin’s Creed are reliant almost entirely on the game’s environment. Thankfully, this is where the team’s talent really shines through. Each city is awash in its individual hue: Acre is blue, Damascus a shade of green, and Jerusalem a warm yellow, all serving to create a somewhat surreal, dreamlike quality to the surrounding world. Each has a unique style and flair, from the layout of its streets to the types and conditions of its buildings to the garb of its inhabitants and guards.
The cities themselves could have benefited from greater interactivity. Climbing to the highest peaks in each doesn’t ever lose its appeal, but there’s little else to keep you occupied. Aside from the incalculable number of structures to climb and transverse, Altair can leap and dive through merchant stands in a most dramatic manner or throw guards off of roofs or into fragile scaffolds that will collapse around them. Other than that, each city seems more like a brilliantly conceived Hollywood movie set and not an actual living, breathing metropolis.
The player gains control over Altair first in an ‘indoor’ environment (it’s actually a cave, but regardless). Only one of Altair’s nine assassinations is completed inside. Aside from that, the only time he’ll find himself with a roof over his head is at the Assassin’s fort in Masyaf or the Assassin’s bureaus in each city, where he goes to obtain missions and intelligence. While we’re not asking for the option to enter every single building, how about a mission or two that lets us break into a fort or palace, explore its interior a bit, and assassinate the target inhabiting it?
Mysteriously enough, the tens of thousands of random, non-essential citizens and guards who inhabit the three cities and countryside, all utter the same dozen or so lines of dialogue. And while the voice-acting present throughout the game is incredibly believable, thanks in part to extremely convincing accents and near-perfect pacing, a lack of variety severely breaks the illusion.
While crowd interactivity was a much touted feature early on, Assassin’s Creed doesn’t take advantage of its throngs of citizens nearly enough. There are guards tormenting citizens scattered throughout each city’s streets. Liberate the hapless victims by eliminating the soldiers and they will become your personal vigilantes, blocking or tripping any guards who may be chasing after you. Conversely, if you attack a citizen, others may rush to his support or alert guards.
You can blend in with the crowd to remain unnoticed or tackle them to the ground to create roadblocks for pursuing guards, but I spent most of the game on the rooftops high-above the streets, only choosing to walk among the people when I needed to locate or complete a mission objective.
Stunning real-time dynamic lighting coupled with incredibly complex and realistic textures and an unfathomably high polygon count, not to mention a draw distance unlike any we’ve ever seen before, all make the world of Assassin’s Creed simply jaw-dropping. It is immediately apparent that the team spent an extravagant amount of time tweaking every last detail of the visuals, from the landscapes, buildings, and character models, right down to the game’s HUD and menus.
Noticeably absent are day/night cycles and each individual city and countryside village has its own constant, static weather condition. Jerusalem is bathed in sunlight, Acre is overcast, and Damascus is a bit hazy. We would have loved to have been able to stare down upon a moonlit city, thousands of torch lights flickering below, plotting a stealthy nighttime assassination. But alas, this was never a possibility.
One of the biggest recommendations we can make when playing is to turn off the HUD completely. Not only does this instantly make the game more cinematic by providing an unobstructed view of the world around you, but more enjoyable from a gameplay perspective, as well. Rather than relying on your on-screen map to display the various objective locations, the player must take the time to familiarize himself with the city, spend the time to scout out hiding spots and points of interest, and rely on the game’s multitude of auditory and visual clues to carry out his objectives and make a quick getaway, if necessary. It makes the Assassin’s only marginally more difficult, but ultimately a great deal more satisfying.
For Achievement lovers, there are hundreds of small flags hidden on rooftops and in alleyways throughout the Kingdom that need to be retrieved. There’s also an Achievement waiting for those who take the time to hunt down and eliminate the thirty Templars posted throughout the cities and the countryside. These acts serve no actual gameplay or storyline enhancements, but are an enjoyable diversion for those with their Gamerscore constantly in mind or those looking to squeeze every last bit of gameplay out of Assassin’s. Complete the bare minimum assignments and it’s a ten hour game, but spend the time working on these additional objectives and you’re looking at well over thirty hours of playtime.
There are a few technical abnormalities present in Assassin’s Creed, including characters and buildings that ‘pop-in’ unexpectedly, invisible walls, split-second freezes and a slightly problematic camera during fights, but for a game of this scope, they are few and far between and never significantly detract from the game.
With regards to story arc, the game stands well on its own. But keeping in mind that it is the first title in an Ubisoft franchise that will contain at least two more games, the ending to Assassin’s Creed understandably provides more questions than answers.
It’s hard not to notice the parallelism the game provides to real-world current events: a secretive, Muslim faction attempting to drive a foreign aggressor from its lands through acts of terror. But rather than embracing the ethical and political debate that Assassin’s could have sparked, Ubi timidly distances itself from any potential controversy, even going so far as to display a disclaimer on-screen that the game is ‘a work of fiction created by a team of many beliefs.’
To its credit, Ubisoft Montreal has attempted to create a truly unique kind of gaming experience and should be applauded for doing so. But Assassin’s reach ultimately exceeds its grasp. It feels as if the team spent three and a half years constructing the most visually captivating game universe in the history of the industry and then spent the last six months on the actual ‘game’ portion of it. What could have been the year’s most provocative and unique title invariably trips over itself and collides headfirst into a wall.
By delivering on its key promise of allowing the player to engage in enjoyable assassination missions within an incredibly beautiful, open-ended world, Ubisoft Montreal didn’t turn the game I became enamored with at last year’s E3 into a disappointment.
But that doesn’t mean I’m not left feeling disappointed.
Primotech Rating: 
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