Assassin's Creed (Xbox 360)

Assassins Creed was realised on November 14th 2007 near the beginning of the 7th generation console launch and I considered it to be the revolutionary game which attracted the attention to these console as before Assassins Creed, there were only mediocre games and PS2 ported games which honestly didn’t show off the type of he potential these consoles display today. Until Assassins Creed we have never seen a game of such scale allowing you to have ...
...assassination, not forgetting Assassin Creed was displaying the best graphics at the time as well.

===Story===
Story starts with a man called Desmond Miles, who has been kidnapped by a very wealthy company called Abstergo Industries, they ‘force’ him to use a machine called the Animus which reads the ‘genetic memory’ of Desmond who he is told is a descendent of an Assassin who lived during the Third Crusade in 1191AD called Altair ... more

Assassins Creed was realised on November 14th 2007 near the beginning of the 7th generation console launch and I considered it to be the revolutionary game which attracted the attention to these console as before Assassins Creed, there were only mediocre games and PS2 ported games which honestly didn’t show off the type of he potential these consoles display today. Until Assassins Creed we have never seen a game of such scale allowing you to have an open world to scale building, free run and manoeuvre assassination, not forgetting Assassin Creed was displaying the best graphics at the time as well.

Story

Story starts with a man called Desmond Miles, who has been kidnapped by a very wealthy company called Abstergo Industries, they ‘force’ him to use a machine called the Animus which reads the ‘genetic memory’ of Desmond who he is told is a descendent of an Assassin who lived during the Third Crusade in 1191AD called Altair (Altaïr ibn La-Ahad to be exact) who is part of the Assassins Creed who are a skilled set of Assassins working against the Templars.

At the start of the game you see Altair will fellow Assassins attempt to retrieve a sacred treasure from Solomon’s Temple, but is interrupted by the Templar Knights and during this Altair breaks the 3 important rules of the Assassins Creed and on return to his master and leader of the Assassins Creed, Al Mualim, he is demoted from his high rank, but is given the chance to rise up once again by assassinating 9 key figures and by doing so help stop the Holy War and bring peace. During these missions Altair learns that the people he is killing believe strongly in what they are doing and he being to ask questions about these people and changes his attitude which resulted in him being demoted and gains a new outlook on his actions.

Gameplay

The game has 2 different characters and therefore a massive variation in gameplay, you initially play as Desmond the descendant of Altair whose part although consistent throughout the game, is short and uneventful only involving him walking to the Animus and hearing the speech from the Doctor and Lucy. There are some achievement involved during Desmond’s parts such as talking to Lucy and getting an Access pen from the Doctor (discussed in Achievement section), but essentially, you only play as Desmond to get into the Animus. All the features about gameplay will be about Altair who is the key character and you spend 90% of the time playing.

Character

As I’ve mentioned, you play as an Assassin called Altair, the key and most exciting thing about Altair is that he is not only a trained Assassin but is Free Running expert giving you the ability to climb building, jump from/to building as well as do some impressive assassinations using you variety of weapons and blend in with the crowd. You view Altair from a 3rd person view (from behind) and you never tend to see his face as it is covered by his hood throughout the whole game.

Weapons/Fighting

You start off with a Sword and the basic fighting skills at the start of the game your abilities in combat are limited, only able to attack and defend. As you progress and every time you complete a killing and finish a Memory Block, you return to the Al Mualim where he gives you a briefing and debriefing as well as giving you a higher rank, with which comes a new weapon (for the first few ranks) and typically a new move as well as an extra 1 or 2 bars on your Health. Eventually you have 2 full bars of health and 5 different weapons; Sword, Hidden Blade, Knife, Throwing Knife and Fists. The amount of Throwing Knifes you have is also depending on your rank and by the end you can hold up to 15 knifes.

Altair being the skilled fighter that he is, he typically find himself fighting from around 3 to 20 guards at one time so some choreographed moves come in handy in these situations, like I’ve said he upgrades his fighting style as you progress but throughout you will learn to Counter Attack, Side Step among a few others. Basically the fighting is pretty intense, however is very repetitive, you essentially perform the same moves and the enemies are highly predictable so after a few mission you end up predicting when the guards attack so the enemy AI (Artificial Intelligence) is pretty weak.

Free Running

One of the key features this game offer is an open world environment in which you can free run and scale building basically an 1191’s version of Parkour. Altair can scale pretty much any building in the city as long as it has something to grab onto. By holding the High Profile button (Right Trigger) and ‘A’ you can sprint and climb, essentially simply directing Altair and quickly getting across the town by jumping building from building. This is a unique concept Assassin Creed presents and this is something which makes this game very fun.

Hiding/Blending In

Being an Assassin is the art of not being seen; hence Altair has a few tricks up his sleeve (not to mention a hidden blade) to escape guards and stay concealed. When you attract some unwanted guard attention, you have an alert which ranges from White (normal) to Yellow (Alert but can’t see you) to Red (Can see you and chasing you), when you get out of sight for a good amount of time it all calms down.

- One of the favourites in escaping trouble is to jump in some hay and wait for the alert level to go down, oddly enough there seems to be a hay cart or pile on every corner of any city.

- You can also blend in the crowd by either sitting on a bench for a few second or go in sync with some scholars (since you resemble them) and wait.

- When you just want to be ignored with no alert for instance when about to pickpocket someone or when walking past a lot of guards with a red eye alert (guards suspicious).

- But essentially to not attract attention just act natural by simply walking and climbing ladder rather than sprinting down the roads and jumping on buildings.

Civilians

The towns in Assassins Creed are full of different people as it is an open world platform which makes this game quite realistic. The civilians vary and there are a good majority of people around all doing their own thing. To make it realistic to the time, there are Beggars/Harassers who go up to you and beg for money basically getting in your way.

A good realism is that you can pick a fight with someone using your fists and guards don’t get involved so when you are stealing from a thief (irony) to replenish your throwing knife supply, they can catch you and you simply fist fight and not get into a massive fight with a bunch of guards in the process.

Missions

The whole story of the game is centred around Altair killing the 9 key figures who you take out one by one throughout the game, however if it was solemnly killing those figures I would not have spent a good week’s worth of afternoons trying to complete this game. Before you get to your target you first have to complete some investigations around the city which you gain information about where your target is and what the best way to kill them is. You only have to complete 2 investigations out of the 6 to unlock the Memory Block and hence go and kill the target, but to get the most out of the game its best to complete all investigations.

Eavesdropping
This has to be the easiest investigation to complete, essentially all you do is find your target and sit on a bench close to them, select the target and eavesdrop on their conversation and that is one investigation complete.

Pick pocketing

Basically an expansion on Eavesdropping, you listen to your targets little conversation and when they have finished you pick pocket one of the targets for their information which is usually a letter or a key.

Interrogation

You find a person who is preaching to the crowd about your main target doing something or being the best and when they leave the podium you fist fight them until they give you the information you want, then you kill them.

Helping Fellow Assassins

In some cities you’ll find other assassins who want you to either collect a number of flags in a time limit or kill a specific amount of targeted guards or Templers in a time limit after which they give you some information about your target.
You have to go through these missions very time you are set to kill a target and it takes a good hour for me to get all the investigations done.

Open World Missions

Before actually getting down to the investigations you have the optional but often necessary task of synchronising with the town to map out where all your investigations are. This involves climbing up to a high point like a church tower or a high building and synchronising and this is done a couple of times in each city.
An optional task in each city is to save civilians being harassed by guards and there are typically 6 civilians per city (each city section) and you basically kill the harassing guards. It is a good idea to do this as it’s worth 20 achievement points at the end of the game for each city of civilians you save.

Flags Collection

Another optional task is to collect flags, each city has a 100 flags hidden, and you get a good few achievement points if you collect them all. But I find that there is a ridiculous amount of flags and there are about 7 sets of flags you need to find overall, but does good for some additional achievement points if you’re bored and fancy looking up a guide.

Graphics

This game was realised early on in the Xbox360’s and PS3 life cycle so the graphics potential has not been exploited fully yet as it is in today’s games. However compared to PS2 and Xbox standards, his game looks quite nice and reasonability vibrant, I saw no problems in the graphics.

Replay Value

After spending a good week trying to complete this game and doing so by completing every investigation and saving every civilian, I feel that it is very fun to play, although very repetitive, I couldn’t play it again because once you’ve killed the first few targets, you’ve reached the games peak and experienced pretty much all that it offers, after completing the story I wouldn’t attempt at playing it again. In fact since Assassins Creed 2 has come out, it is time better spent playing the new version.

Achievements (Xbox360)

This game is fairly generous with achievement points, after finishing each Memory Block (killing 1 of the 9 targets) you are awarded with 20 to 25 points so basically half of the points come from completing the story. There are goals like killing 50 guards with your hidden blade and kill 50 guards with throwing knifes which are easy to complete, but also things which require consistence through the game such as the ‘Go through every dialogue with Lucy’ and not forgetting the 7 sets of flags.

Overall there are 44 achievements and 1000 achievements points to gain from this game.

Overall Thoughts

I would like to say I really enjoyed this game from start to finish, however that would render false as I really wanted to stop playing the game when I was on Memory Block 4 and I was essentially going back and forth doing the investigations, killing the targets and doing the same once again, and the most annoying part was that you don’t get an achievement for going through every investigation (of what I’m aware) which is a massive nuisance. But once you’ve gone through the repetitive boring stages of this game and get to the end, this is the point in which the story gets quite exciting and the missions get a little mixed up, although the ending was slighting predictable and tad unrealistic, it is a fairly good ending and I enjoyed playing through it.

I do recommend getting this game, especially now that you can get it reasonably cheap in most shops and online, and it’s a good idea to play before getting into Assassins Creed 2.
 

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