Assassin's Creed (PS3)

"Ubisoft" takes "Prince of Persia" to the next level and introduces Altaïr, a 12th century assassin who is about to find out what the Creed is all about. Whether it's roaming about Jerusalem's rooftops, or impaling knights and then casually blending in with dozens of passers by, "Assassin's Creed" featured plenty of things to get excited about and was one of the most hotly anticipated games of the season.

The Story

At its core, Assassin's Creed details the exploits of Third Crusade-era assassin Altaïr, fabled to have personally exterminated all of the Knights Templar. Besides showing Altaïr taking on demented overseers and the Templars' rising fear of him, early trailers also featured some blueish graphical "glitches" that piqued the curiosity of gamers and promised quite a twist for the main story.

Yet, despite building it up so much pre-release, Ubisoft decided to blurt the "twist" out right from the start, not only revealing it within the first few minutes of play, but also including it in the game's manual. All the better for me I guess, as I can now talk about it without feeling like I am spoiling anything.

It turns out, this is actually the future and an enigmatic company has developed a machine that allows the user to access his genetic memory. Supposedly, all our memories are engraved on our DNA and passed on to our offspring; this "Animus" is some sort of Virtual Reality device, that can access any of our genetically-stored memories and allow us to replay them as if we were the person that actually lived them.

The catch is, getting a person's mind not to reject the experience and "synchronize" with an ancestor's memory is a tricky business that only gets harder the more bizarre the events depicted turn and the more alien the actions of the protagonist feel. So, when Desmond Miles, Altaïr's direct descendant, is kidnapped by aforementioned enigmatic/sinister company, he can't simply access the precise memory they are after, which apparently involves a fabled relic of utmost reverence that can change the course of history. Altaïr's life started spiralling down that path at one precise point and a certain mission, so Desmond has to start there, get in the medieval hit-man's mindset and work his way forward.

As such, in Assassin's Creed we have two stories unfolding: The one of Altaïr, an exciting action adventure, a crusade against the crusaders, but also a lesson in humility and righteousness. And the one of Desmond, who is no simple bartender himself, but the deeper he delves into things the more he realizes the perilous gravity of his predicament.

I really liked the Templar storyline and the future twist could have been worked into it impressively, but I am afraid that Assassin's Creed doesn't quite pull it off. It comes close, but it ends up gaining about as much as it loses. The Animus plot device, for example, allows for things common in games, like restarting after failing a mission, or on-screen displays, or even blurry graphics and clipping, to have a plausible explanation, which is pretty neat. But the Animus itself, with its debunked science, requires a fair amount of suspension of disbelief, which is what it was looking to diminish in the first place.

But my main nag lies in the denouement. Although there is a passable ending on the Altaïr side of things, the "contemporary" storyline just leaves you hanging. All build-up and no pay-off, there is a limit of good taste to just how much of a cliffhanger an ending can be and Assassin's Creed is so far past it, its memory will be embossed in the series' DNA. So, warned be ye, don't get too excited when sneaking around with Desmond looking for clues, because all you are going to get is even more questions you can never hope to answer without getting "Assassin's Creed 2".

The Presentation

The one inarguably good thing about the Animus, is that it allows for impeccable presentation. Assassin's Creed features nice graphics, great voice-acting and phenomenal animation, so it would have scored pretty high on that department in any case; but taken into the context of a Virtual Reality, the presentation is just brilliant. The little things, like people having identical faces, making pretty much the same conversations, or the dimmer, bluer hue everything has and the boundaries that appear can be "blamed" on either Altaïr's memory or the limits of a machine, so it's easier to maintain the illusion and enjoy the atmosphere Assassin's Creed tries to create.

The only real flaw is Altaïr's voice, which is totally out of place. His American speech would have been somewhat understandable had Altaïr been voiced by the same actor as Desmond, but it's someone completely different so it simply doesn't make any sense at all. It just clumsily clashes with most everyone's faux-Arabic accents.

But this is small potatoes when compared to everything else about the presentation. In what's a rarity for me in video-games, Assassin's Creed presentation is fundamental to my enjoyment, probably because it's a game that has you doing relatively simple things over and over again. I suspect that it is only because scaling a castle's highest tower, standing atop a hawk's nest to take in the city and then swan-diving in a stack of hay looks and feels so awesome, I just can't wait for the next opportunity to see that stunt again.

The booklet also does its part, masquerading as an early version of the Animus' user's manual, complete with the Project Leader's notes on what needs to be changed. A pretty fun effort!

The Gameplay

Assassin's Creed features some, let's say, unconventional gameplay mechanics. In most games there is some short of logical progression and escalation to the things you can do in-character. In Assassin's Creed, after a short while of introductory sequences, you have practically done everything you are going to do until the end credits. You are going to dispatch 9 notorious individuals, each auspiciously situated in a different district in one of the 3 "hostile" cities you can visit, Damascus, Jerusalem and Arce. And you are going to do it in pretty much the same way.

First you have the preparation & investigation portion, where you hit the town and try to formulate your assassination plan. You scope the district by scaling its highest points, revealing a "memory map" which includes points and incidents of interest. You gather information on your mark's whereabouts and behaviour by completing various missions. Optionally you can also help citizens attacked by rotten guards and this isn't as selfish as it sounds, as the persons you save are quick to return your favour by having their friends keep an eye out for you. Saving a gang member's wife for example, will place some thugs in a part of the city, eager to tackle any guards that might be after you.

The information gathering is basically split up to four mini-games. The simplest is eavesdropping, where you simply and nonchalantly sit on a bench trying to listen in. You can also pickpocket someone you've noticed carrying a letter intended for your mark, proposing a rendez-vous or detailing the garrison's patrol routes at a given point. Things get more physical should you decide to interrogate a teller that seems to know too much for his own good, which of course means that you follow them into a dark alley and beat them up until they talk dirt.

One thing all three of those missions have in common, they sound better in theory than they actually are. Calmly trailing your pickpocket target, waiting for the opportune moment to try the "lift" is pretty cool, but less so once you realize you can get off with quite a lot and not get noticed. Similarly, you can immediately attack the interrogation victim, in the plain sight of guards, and still succeed on your mission. And spicing up the eavesdropping mission a bit, by having to follow your targets around packed streets, trying to make out what they say, would have been a nice touch.

The fourth mini-game utilizes an informant and it is by far the best. You contact a fellow assassin who asks you carry out a task before he shares his insight. "Task type A" is collecting a series of flags within a time-limit, which might be nonsensical, but it is also a very fun way to show off the game's impressive "free-running"mechanics. " Task type B" is a quick assassination mission, where you'll have to stealthy kill a number of specific guards. These, incredibly, are the only missions where the game forces you to actually act like an assassin; as such they might be hard but they are also a blast to complete.

The actual assassination attempt is a pretty quick affair. You make your way to the point you've surmised as the ideal place to attempt the hit, where you'll get a cut-scene showing off how malicious the person you are about to kill is. Then you proceed to the actual kill, with as much tact or brute force as you are willing to put into it and, once successful, get another cut-scene, showing off how righteous the person you just killed is, at least in his mind. Lastly, you make your escape by running really fast and far away.

And that's all you'll do for every one of nine assassinations. If you like the grind, then good, you are going to get more of exactly that. If not, then there's little hope for you in Assassin's Creed. The game does change up a little on the way to the final battle, but it honestly does so in all the wrong ways. It breaks apart any semblance of non-linearity it had up to that point, forces you down set paths and has you doing combat and only combat. You suddenly can't sidestep any encounter by going the less travelled route and aren't even allowed to give your battlers a run for their money, or use your surroundings in any way. You just blindly fight your way to the end.

It's a good thing that I really liked the counter-based combat scheme which looks very impressive when pulled of correctly. Of course, most of the moves except the counters are kinda useless and using different weapons doesn't feel too different, so we have "lack of variation" and "weird game design" here too, but that doesn't stop combat from being pretty rad.

What actually bothered me was just how much killing you had to do to carry the game forward. Good assassins only performed calculated hits and rarely called needless attention to themselves, while Altaïr's exploits might as well have been titled "Barbarian's Rampage". Not that it isn't fun, but it could have certainly been more assassin-like.

In what would have been nice breaks from the main story, you also control Desmond, who, ironically, moves much more artificially than Altaïr, in-between animus sessions. It's your chance to snoop around, looking for anything that might make sense of the situation, but all the neat things you find out just set you up for an even harder fall with the abrupt ending. I dare say it's even clumsier than this here section change.

The Other Version

Assassin's Creed is also available for the X360 and it's a slightly better variation. It has a bit cleaner graphics, those addictive gamerscore Achievements and rumble with the default controller. It also doesn't suffer from any framerate problems right out of the box, while the PS3 version needs a patch to run smoothly. If you don't have your consoles connected to the internet, you should definitely opt for the X360 version.

I went with the PS3 one because I wanted to test out the DualShock 3 and because there just aren't that many decent games available for the machine that looks increasingly like the most expensive ornament I've ever had.

A PC version will also be released, come February 2008, certainly a bit cheaper and speculatively a bit better, or worse, according to your PC's hardware.

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==OVERALL==

Assassin's Creed may well be the definition of a "love it or hate it" game. It only does a few things but it does them gracefully, so you can pretty much get the picture with little more than a glance. If you like what you see, you can look forward to another dozen hours of doing little more than just that. If not, you can happily overlook Assassin's Creed, knowing that it never evolves to anything different.

I personally found the type of "action adventure" offered right up my alley: Exploring the Holy Lands, throwing archers off rooftops, fencing legions, helping the helpless, wrestling the wicked, these are exactly the kind of actions I don't mind repeating! They could have been done better, but they at least look transcendently perfect, so I enjoyed Assassin's Creed and am looking forward to the sequel; even though I just know "Assassin's Creed 2" will try to top the ambiguousness of the ending and controllers will inevitably be flung in all directions.

Precise Score: 8.0/10.0