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The year is 1191. The Holy Land is in turmoil, enraptured in a complex battle for religious power between multiple factions. In Assassin's Creed, you are Altair, a Blade in the Crowd, one of an elite faction of assassins whose ultimate goal is to prevent the Knights Templar from overthrowing Jerusalem to reclaim it for Christianity. At least, this is how things might initially appear. In reality, much more sinister things are looming behind the scenes.
In actuality, the year is 2012. You are Desmond Miles, a former assassin and current bartender living out your normal life in peace. When your story begins, you wake up to find that you've been kidnapped by a massive, worldwide corporation known as Abstergo. You come from a long line of assassins dating all the way back to the middle ages, and Abstergo is using you in conjunction with cutting-edge technology to peer into your "DNA memory" (hold your laughter, please), allowing you to fully "relive" the memories of your ancestor, Altair, for reasons as-yet unknown to you.
Story
The plot of Assassin's Creed teeters delicately on the border of brilliance and near parody-level inanity. The very premise, that the coding of ones DNA actually holds the repressed memories of that individual's entire ancestral line, is laughably ridiculous to anyone with even a basic grasp on genetics or neurology. But if we can forgive this absurd notion, the storyline which drives Assassin's Creed can actually be quite interesting at times. The exposition is spent in unequal portions between the "real world" of Desmond Miles in 2012 as he builds a taboo sort of relationship with one of his captors and slowly unravels the reason behind Abstergo's actions, and in the fictionalized history of the Crusades-era Holy Land as Altair receives and carries out his assassination missions.
The main problem with the story of Assassin's Creed isn't that it's bad, per se, but that the game spends a grossly unbalanced amount of time developing the far less interesting historical plotline, while choosing to tell Desmond's much more intriguing story through tiny tidbits of character dialogue mixed with lots of email reading. Really, in 2008, who wants to unravel the complex storyline of a next-gen video game title by reading through lines of onscreen text?
The two plotlines come to a point in the final moments of the game, culminating in the following, in chronological order:
- A "plot twist" following the single most cliché and predictable "plot-twist" formula in the proverbial book
- A final "reveal" that's meant to be epic but ends up feeling ridiculous due to a level of scientific implausibility on-par with or surpassing the game's premise
- A brief, "real-world" ending sequence which makes no sense and provides absolutely zero closure to the part of the story you probably cared a lot more about than the fate of the Holy Land
Throughout the course of the game, I kept celebrating the moments I was given a break to step out of the world of the past and explore the world of the present, continuing the character dialogues where I previously left off, given another chance to explore my claustrophobic environment in search for clues and details on why Desmond had been captured by Abstergo and what was the purpose of all this DNA memory business. But I kept wishing I could do more. That I could use the assassin's blood which ran through my veins to spring into action and escape my captors in a Portal-esque moment, or at least use my cunning and stealth to gain access to more restricted locations and observe the gears moving behind the curtain. But there was none of this.
Your ancestors might have been able to climb daunting surfaces, leap acrobatically between rooftops and dispatch his enemies with cunning and grace, but the most Desmond can ever do is walk around, lay down on two surfaces and "press any button to interact" when prompted to watch a few cutscenes and listen to people talk. This might have been forgivable if there were a profoundly interesting cutscene to watch at the conclusion of Desmond's story, but the problem is that Desmond's story doesn't have a conclusion. He's just left hanging there, in the same environment he sees throughout the entire duration of the game, completely unaware of what's going to happen next, and then the credits roll.
Presentation
Make no mistake about it. This game is absolutely beautiful. From the endlessly normal-mapped surfaces to the stunningly realistic shading and lighting engine to the fluid cloth dynamics to the amazingly natural, organic character animation to that first, breathtaking view of Damascus from a hilltop as Altair approaches the city on horseback, the game takes absolute full advantage of the hardware capabilities available to it. Unfortunately, even the glorious presentation of Desmond and Altair's interweaving stories has its own set of problems.
The lip sync and facial animations are pretty good for video game standards, but they could have been better (I still have yet to see a game which lives up to the quality of Half-Life 2 on this front), and they're made worse by the fact that the numerous cutscenes utilizing only two character models with lots of close-up face shots make use of the same models and textures used for rendering in-game, when there are scores of models onscreen at once which are all viewed from a relative distance. This means that during these key moments when new pieces of the story are revealed, you're left somewhat distracted by the muddy textures and low-poly modeling made much more apparent by having the camera positioned in point-blank range to the characters involved.
And then there is the voice acting. I must give credit where credit is due: The voice acting for the three present-time characters is phenomenal, and the voice of Altair is likewise excellent. But every other character in 1191, which are the characters you'll spend the most time listening to, are acted with a plethora of bad fake accents ranging from middle-eastern to east-Indian to Old English. It's weird enough that all of the characters in ancient Israel speak English. The fact that they all speak this language in a wide range of different, generic, "old-sounding" accents just removes you from the experience that much further. The developers made a wise choice allowing the protagonist, Altair, to speak without an accent. I don't understand why they didn't extend this decision to all the other characters in the Holy Land.
Gameplay
So sure, maybe the story kind of sucks, and maybe the presentation of the sucky story could have been better, but hey, first and foremost this is a video game, so the question of utmost relevance is this: Is it fun to play? My answer is an enthusiastic, "Ehh."
The game has the look and feel of your typical GTA-esque sandbox experience, but in reality the gameplay is actually quite formulaic. You start in Masyaf to receive a target from your master, and then you proceed out of the assassin fortress, jump on your horse, and ride to the city where the assassination must take place. Early in the game you're forced to use a large, open-ended area called "The Kingdom" to transition from city to city, and this is one of the bigger annoyances in the game. There's nothing interesting to do in the Kingdom unless you're really hellbent on achieving 100% game completion by collecting all the flags and climbing all the viewpoints, the mapping is absurdly confusing to the point that you'll make a lot of wrong turns en route to your destination and be forced to turn around and backtrack quite a bit, and all of this is made more annoying by the fact that the entire area is patrolled by guards who very much want to kill you for galloping too quickly. For the most part you can just ignore them and ride past, but then you'll be plagued by the incessant beeping of the visibility indicator which is absolutely determined to get you to jump into a haystack for a few second to regain anonymity long after you've outrun all your pursuers. Fortunately, after the first couple missions you're given the option of bypassing the Kingdom entirely and warping directly to your destination city, which most players will likely take full advantage of.
Once you reach the destination city, you must find and climb pre-established "viewpoints" which mark points of interest on your map in the immediate vicinity of the viewpoint in question. These points of interest include lots of civilians in need of rescuing from tyrannical guards, which will reward you in the form of small groups of people which can provide some help to you later on, and a limited number of canned "investigation" scenarios which you must complete in order to research your target before striking.
Eavesdropping scenarios have you sit on a bench and listen to the conversation of two people speaking about something revealing to the nature of your target. Pickpocketing scenarios have you listen to a brief conversation and then sneak up behind a particular person and snatch a revealing document from him. Interrogations have you beat the crap out of someone until they're sufficiently roughed up to spill the beans, and informant scenarios have you help carry out stealth missions for a fellow assassin, who will repay you by passing along some of the information he has gathered.
This could have been an interesting gameplay mechanic, but in practice they wind up being more irritating fluff than anything. The eavesdropping and interrogations are easy to the point of absurdity. The pickpocketing targets are so paranoid-suspicious that you'll spend a lot of time laughing the first time you see them look over their shoulder and stop dead in their tracks to exhaustively survey their surroundings literally every second or two as they're walking. The informant assassination missions have the most potential, but they all carry the ridiculous requirement that you cannot become exposed, ever, while carrying out these missions or else it's an automatic fail. You'll soon realize that the best way to carry these out is to climb to a rooftop sufficiently high enough that you're in a state of perpetual anonymity and use throwing knives to dispatch your targets. Yes, as long as you're on a rooftop and there aren't guards patrolling the roofs, you can hurl sharp objects at the ground, jump up and down and dance like a monkey and you will never be seen, ever, because the people of ancient Israel have an apparent disdain for ever looking up.
Once you've completed a set number of investigations, you can proceed to the local assassin's bureau and speak with the official there to obtain permission to carry out your mission. Then it's off to the location of the kill, where you'll watch a pretty long cutscene introducing the target before using whatever means you'd like to take him out. Once he's down, you watch another cutscene where you and your dying target are removed from your environment and have a philosophical conversation detailing why the target was such a terrible person and why you needed to kill him. Then you're returned to your surroundings post-kill, and holy damn do a lot of people now want to kill you.
In an ideal world, the most efficient and theme-appropriate way to proceed from this point would be to use Altair's cat-like acrobatic skills to escape the scene and elude his pursuers. But here is where yet another glaring problem reveals itself: The navigational controls suck. A lot. Mainly because there aren't any. You hold two buttons at once to enter into super-duper freerunning mode and then use the left analog stick to navigate. On paper, it would seem that this would make things simpler and therefore more intuitive to the player, not needing to make complex series of button presses to quickly navigate the nooks and crannies and rooftops. But in practice, navigating a complex three dimensional environment using just a single analog stick doesn't work so good. There are many, many, countless, endlessly frustrating instances where you'll see your escape route, envision Altair accomplish the stunningly beautiful feat of taking said escape route, point your single analog stick in the necessary direction and watch in helpless desperation as your onscreen character does the exact opposite. Like dive to the ground into the middle of a group of guards. Or dive elegantly into a haystack on the ground instead of hopping elegantly to the next rooftop. Or, when actually aiming for one of those haystacks, leap instead to the ground – and your death – three feet from said haystack. Then you finally get back to the assassin's bureau, tell the associate of your success, and the whole mangled, tortuous, wretched, repetitive and uninteresting cycle begins again with another mission, another target, another city, more boring investigations, another mediocre assassination and another mind-numbingly frustrating escape attempt.
The one aspect of the gameplay design which was almost done right is the combat, but even this, which at times can be quite fun, suffers from overly simplified controls which can sometimes lead to frustrating results. The fundamentals of combat control involve pressing X/Square to attack and RT/R2 to enter a defensive stance which automatically parries, but in reality, most battles will consist of performing a limited number of special moves in reaction to the limited number of special moves your foes employ against you. While holding RT, you can press X to perform a "counter" when your opponent attacks you, which results in a beautiful motion-captured animation which often results in the instant death of your attacker. Still holding RT, you can press B to perform a different counter if an opponent attempts to grab you. Still holding RT, when opponents break your defense by swiping your sword out from its parry position, you can press A to instead dodge the oncoming attack and avoid taking damage. There's also a two-button "combo" move you can perform to carry out a spectacular offensive special move which is usually an instant kill, but the timing on this combo move is so difficult to nail down that it's far more worth your while to just perpetually hold down the Right Trigger and perform the reaction moves ad nauseum.
Conclusion
Assassin's Creed is a beautiful disaster of a game. The visuals are almost universally breathtaking, but awkward voice acting, repetitive gameplay and really, really broken controls muddle the whole experience. Add to this the fact that the conclusion to the mostly-interesting storyline is catastrophically disappointing and you have a game that's really not worth much more than a rental, unless you're really, really, really into pretty graphics.
Score: 2 out of 5
