Assassin's Creed

Back in my university days, Assassin’s Creed was released and I immediately thought, ‘yes that is exactly my bag baby,’ and went out and bought myself a copy. It was okay, I had learned to survive without food by this point and could spare the forty quid to buy a new release.

Of course this was years ago and I’m writing a retrospective review mainly to get up to date with the recently completed Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood.

The very first Assassin’s Creed revisits the Crusades where you take on the role of Altair, an assassin who goes about killing Templars because that’s what he is; an assassin that kills Templars. Although, in actual fact you are Desmond Miles, some dude in the future who has been captured by an evil corporation and forced to relive ancestral memories so that the bad guys can find the Apple of Eden, a powerful device that is owned by Altair’s mentor in the twelfth century. Or something like that.

Basically the whole Desmond thing is just there for framing and the main game is jumping about ancient civilisations as Altair.

The first time I rode into Damascus, I think my jaw dropped. At the time, I was amazed. You ride out on top of a hill that overlooks the entire city and you can explore every inch of what you can see. It was beautiful. Modern day consoles will make this look like shit now, but at the time, it was fantastic. I went about exploring and doing side missions and climbing really tall buildings and actually forgot that the reason I was in the city was to kill someone!

This is where the game fails – with the thing that is in the title – assassinations. Despite being called Assassin’s Creed, you spend very little time actually trying to assassinate people and more time doing mini-missions in preparation to the killing. These mini missions are exactly the same, no matter what city you are in, so it feels very lazy in terms of development. That said, it’s kind of balanced with the amount of work that’s gone into developing the scenery and cities, however I’ve always said that you should never sacrifice Gameplay for looks and it feels like that is exactly what the developers have done.

 Achievements – 1,000 Points – 44 Achievements

When I was playing Assassin’s Creed, I was going through a rough time with my Xbox360. It decided that it didn’t like having games inside it and would destroy anything that entered it – much like that movie, Teeth.

My first copy of Assassin’s Creed became unplayable after my Xbox had chewed it up and spat it out. This caused me to send the Xbox off to be fixed which left me without an Xbox for six weeks. This meant it took me a long time to get to the 1,000 point mark due to these unforeseen circumstances and also the fact that there are several collectible achievements in the game which take forever to do.

In my Toy Story 3 review, I mentioned that there was no way of tracking the collectibles. Assassin’s Creed not only has a way of tracking them, it marks them all on your map. You have to kill 60 Templars and collect, wait for it, 420 flags across the different locations. This was at a time when I thought Grand Theft Auto’s 100 hidden packages was excessive.

I think I spent three nights running around collecting flags and kept having the same conversation with my flatmate. ‘What are doing?’ he would ask. ‘Collecting flags.’ I would say. ‘Still?’ he would retort. ‘Yes,’ I would answer. Once I had collected the last flag, I was overwhelmed with a sense of achievement. My flatmate called it a waste of time.

The only real problem with the achievements was the Conversationalist one. In the future framing environment, something I didn’t think I would have to worry about when going for achievements, you have to have all conversations with a girl called Lucy. These are missable and cannot be revisited. I found this out half way through the game and restarted to save a full second playthrough. But I was still very annoyed about it. It added no extra dimension to the game so why they put an achievement in for it, I have no idea.

Downloadable Content – Not Applicable

Despite the long haul of collecting the flags and repetitiveness of the missions I do have fond memories of playing the game. The scenery is the best part of it and that makes the exploring element much more fun.