Assassin's Creed is one hell of a game. I don't mean in quality, per se, but in scope. It's huge, geometrically and conceptually. Like one of the better GTA games, you could probably wander around for days without really getting bored. The graphics are amazing, the free-running is unlike anything done in gaming before, and the concept is huge.

I'm just not liking it very much.

I've been taking my time, trying to experience the game as a whole, but I'm just getting sick of it. At this point I just keep playing because I feel that I owe it to myself to beat the damn thing rather than give up on it.

While I largely agree with Shiva's review and 4-star (better than average) rating, I think that if I were to give it a rating based on living up to potential it would definitely be closer to the bottom of the barrel. Typical complaints against video games are about how they could have been better, but my problem with Assassin's Creed is how it should have been better. This game had some of the best designers in the industry, a ridiculous budget, a nearly three-year development schedule, and all the consumer-demand one could ever ask for. Few things manage to live up to their hype, but the final product in this case managed to meet its hype but miss its potential.

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I don't feel like there's really a game here. What we have is a vast mid-Crusades Israel simulator. The more I play, the angrier I get at how this game fails to be a game.

Assassinations are a Joke

The potential is huge. The hashashins (early assassins) of the era are legendary for their skills in killing and invisibility. They used disguises and meticulous planning to slip into areas unnoticed and kill high-profile targets right in public without ever being noticed. A mere insinuation of their presence was enough to terrorize any public figure. An assassination by these dudes was a work of art.

How do assassinations work in Assassin's Creed? You roll up to where the guy will be, are forced to watch some lengthy parcel of "story" through dialog which can't be skipped, work your way up to him, bash him a few times with your sword, get attacked by a thousand guards, deal with them, and then run away and hide in a pile of hay for the five seconds it takes for them to give up searching for you.

This is not without plenty of "investigation," though. Before you can kill your target you have to learn about him and where he'll be by pick-pocketing, evesdropping, and even beating people for information. You find out where he'll be, some potential weaknesses in his security, and why your leader wants him dead, and only then can you dispatch him.

Often times you'll hear people say that they have a map of where your targets' guards are positioned, so you steal that map from him. Awesome, now you have a map of where the guards are so you can plan your approach accordingly, right? Nope. Getting that map serves no purpose whatsoever other than to check off another required piece of "investigation."

As you gather more information about the target, does that make it easier to perform your approach or kill? Does it let you choose different ways of killing him or choose the best time to attack? No. There's really only one time that you can approach him and only one way to kill him.

So the first word in the title of the game could very well be replaced with "Nameless Thug," because there is very little in this game to give weight to the lofty use of the word "assassin."

I suppose what I want is a Hitman game taking place in ancient Persia. These are games that are worthy of naming themelves after professional killers. In Hitman games you actually make choices about how you'll perform your hits, choosing to sneak your way in via disguises, maybe sabotaging some piece of equipment, or just running in guns blazing and hoping one of your endless bullets finds your mark. You can use information uncovered through the game to determine weaknesses in your target's security and plan your approach carefully.

If only Agent 47 knew how much easier it was for his early predecessors. All you need is a sword and a pair of legs.

Why The Hell Am I Saving All of These People?

The only speck of variety within the game besides completing your assassination missions and deftly searching for useless flags is to save civilians who are being attacked.

It works like this: As you're sweeping across rooftops like Batman's ninja cousin, you'll hear someone down on the streets yelling, "Please, help me!" and still other voices yelling, "Thief! I'll have your hand for that!"

OK, then, someone needs help because there's a thief about? Maybe Thief's Garrot has come to visit and we can have a hooded-cloak fashion show. So you track down the disturbance and you find that a person is being surrounded by armed... people, and being pushed around. It looks like a mugging.

So these guys are the thieves, right? No, there's guards all over the place. The person shouting "thief!" was one of the guys hassling this civilian, so you're supposed to be saving a thief now.

Regardless of that, you drop down there and have a go at the attackers. If you're quick you can get a few of them with your hidden dagger before the rest catch on and begin swinging swords. Without question, the nearby guards will see this fight break out and will begin attacking: a) the single person who is already surrounded by attackers or b) the sword-weilding thugs who were just moments ago roughing somebody up while they screamed helplessly?

The guards attack you, of course.

So your once-noble attempt to save a civilian is now a situation where you're fighting off five or six enemies in order to save someone who is apparently a thief. Can you use the game's much-touted "GTF out of there and hide" feature to evade these guys and still consider the civilian "saved"? No.

Alright, so you've just killed six men while this civilian stands around like and idiot. Six men, slain in a public square and afterwords all this person can say is, "Gee, thanks, I don't know why they were attacking me but thanks for risking your life for little-old-me, I'll be sure to tell people about what you did," while having the game's camera locked in the most frustruating way possible during this exchange.

As a reward for doing this, vigilantes who were nearby are now allied to you, so that if you're ever being chased by guards and you run through this area the vigilantes will attack your pursuers and give you an opening to escape.

Wait a minute... if there were about five vigilantes there the whole time, and they're so impressed by my saving of that civilian, why didn't they just save the civilian themselves or at least help me out when it was apparent that I was trying to help? What kind of vigilantes just stand around while someone's being attacked?

The first time I did this, heard the idiot say that she'll "tell people about what I did," I thought I had discovered a truly amazing feature of the game. As I continued to save people, my reputation would grow and grow among the townspeople until I become a kind of hero, and where as I walk the streets people know to leave me alone and if I'm being chased people will all try to help me. Maybe I could even become so well known that guards would start to fear me and if a single guard came across me he'd get scared and run away.

No, nothing like that. When the guys you save state that people will hear about your heroics, they're just being gigantic liars. The only point of saving someone is so that the worthless vigilantes standing five feet away will become my BFFs.

Two People I Want to Stab In The Face:

1. Crazy People: After you reach a certain early point in the game, a variable switches regarding crowd population where suddenly about one-in-ten people on the street will be a skinny, shirtless, crazy person who moans, giggles, and shuffles with arms crooked in a somewhat offensive representation of what's basically autism.
   
   When these guys see you, they giggle and shove you. They practically seek you out and push you, hard. Until you unlock the ability to regain balance, they will actually knock you over. Even if you're running at full speed past them, their advanced autism-brains allow them to lock onto you and time his deft shove so precisely that it'll meet your stride and still screw you up. He's just a crazy person, though, what are you gonna do?
   
   Well, they don't seem to shove anybody else. They just shove me, and usually they'll shove me right into a guard who will take that as a cue to start killing me. I take that personally, so I want to take revenge by stabbing the life out of these mindless fools. I can't do that, though, they're just crazy people.
   
   The only function of these people in the game is to piss the player off. That's all they're for. They're not "added challenge" and they aren't "atmospheric immersion," they're just a giant middle finger up the tailpipe straight from Ubisoft to you.
   
   
2. Poor People: "No please, you don't understand! I am poor and my family is sick, I just need a few coins. Please, sir, some money!"
   
   On the streets there are a bunch of these whining poor women who will run up to you and stand in front of you, blocking your path, decrying their unfortunate eco-social situation. Like the crazy people, they only seem to do this to you and they seem to lock onto you from a distance and latch on for all eternity. I've had three of them on me at the same time. Three poor ladies, all with the same voice and the same lines, running in front of me and asking for money. If you try to push past them, they just catch up and continue asking for money. The game doesn't have any kind of money or inventory system, so you can't give them money. The only thing you can do is soldier on and try to get past them.
   
   You definitely can't stab them in the face.
   
   Again, they serve no purpose other than to annoy and frustrate you.
   

The Usual (Only) Suspect

One of the most-tauted features of this game is the whole "social stealth" element, where you have to blend in so the guards don't unilaterally decide to kill you.

This is a gigantic failure.

It's a good idea and there are times when it works, those times just aren't when you need them to. Guards seem to be unusually suspicious of you, to the point where if one is watching you and you bump into somebody or walk funny they will go from "suspicious mode" to "kill, kill, kill mode."

There's no logic to it. There's even been times when I've just been minding my business and a guard notices me and yells, "Assassin!" and initiates another "GTF out of there and hide" sequence. How the hell does he know I'm an assassin? Do I have a guilty face? Isn't the point of my outfit to blend in? If someone can look at me and instantly know that I'm an assassin, maybe the outfit isn't working.

This has nothing to do with any kind of reputation, however. Instead, it's apparent that in order to add difficulty to the game, the designers simply increase a value that determines how "suspicious" a guard will be as you progress through your nine required assassinations.

What I don't understand is that the very first time I was allowed to ride a horse, I was targeted for death because I had the audacity to ride the horse at a full gallop out in the open wilderness. The game wants you to slow down to a speed that in horse terms would be basically running on neutral on a slight decline when you're within a guard's sight. Even a casual trot will garner unwanted attention. I'm outside! Why can't I ride my damn horse?

And it's not even my horse, it's just some horse I found. Why are there so many free horses standing around? Why couldn't they have there be one horse that's just Altair's? Maybe there could be a feature to whistle for him to come find you when you need a horsie.

For lack of that, they just have plenty of ready-trained horses waiting around whenever you'd need them. It's like those services in larger cities where you can pay a monthly fee and have access to a whole fleet of rental cars parked at airports and train stations and other convenient locations, except they're horses.

If I'm just walking casually though the center of a city, I shouldn't be on anybody's radar. I shouldn't have to walk at a turtle's pace to keep from avoiding suspicion. I understand making people get curious when you're crawling over the side of a building like Spider-Man's ninja nephew, but just walking fast shouldn't unsheathe the swords.

There's a Plot Here. Try to Find it!

Somewhere beneath the surface of this game there has to exist some kind of plot, story, or narrative, I just can't find it. I can grasp along the edges of it as people often start talking and only shut up on the following Tuesday, but for the life of me I can't figure out what's going on.

The big "secret story element" that was supposed to be a big secret is stupid. Of all the things to keep secret in the history of man, this has got to be the stupidest. Keeping the second chapter of Metal Gear Solid 2 a secret made some sense, because it was a large plot twist, but this is just pointless. Not to mention, I figured it out from the second gameplay video from X06.

The bulk of the exposition comes from the leader of the Assassins as he and Altair practice an exercise where they each try to see who can say the most words without actually saying anything. He tells me to kill someone whose name I never remember but is supposed to be important, I go do my three "investigations" and find out some worthless information about him, I'll find that guy and he'll talk for about ten minutes, then kill I him, then after I kill him he just keeps on talking, then I go back to the leader who does a boatload of talking, but nothing is ever said.

It's like reading a novel where the narrative is in English but all the dialog is in Latin. There's something about the Templar and conspiracies, two great tastes that taste great together, but it all falls flat. Rather than telling an intriguing story about the Crusades and the Assassins (hell, how many young people today even know what the Crusades are?), they've decided to use one of the most significant and intriguing periods of history as a backdrop for a Dan Brown novel.

I'm a large proponent of video games as a storytelling device. This game is a storytelling black hole.

There's a Flag on the Field. No, Wait, There's A Thousand Of Them

So you've killed all nine targets, saved all of the worthless thief-civilians, and climbed every tall surface with a piece of wood sticking out of it, but are you done?

Yes.

But if you have no social life and are a slave to your Xbox Live gamerscore, you can spend the next eternity collecting all of the flags scattered around the game's 5 areas.

I hate collecting as a forced component of gameplay (played a Mario game lately?), but using collecting as a shoehorned extension of replay value just annoys me. Spider-Man 2, another free-roaming game I liked more for the engine than for the game, had collecting in the form of skyscraper tokens that were only located at the tallest buildings, so collecting them at least required some skill. The flags in Assassin's Creed are just strewn all over the place, so they only require that you play the game long enough for the skin of your hands to fuse with your game controller so you can blindly stumble upon all of them.

I'm sure kids on the playground are all showing off their mad skills by broadcasting how many flags they've found, but I'd prefer it if the game managed to find some kind of gameplay diversity besides performing the same five tasks over and over.

MISC

Why does Altair have to take a nap before and after every assassination? Is it just so morons don't ask their friends amidst a chuckle, "Hey, when does this guy sleep?"

Why does Altair, an acrobat with incredible dexterity who can fall from a building and catch himself just by his fingers, die instantly upon touching a body of water deeper than the soles of his shoes? I would prefer invisible walls as a means of boundary-containment to magical insta-death water.

Why does the game constantly take over my camera? I need it to see, but whenever something happens they don't just cut away from me to show it, they grab ahold of the camera and force it from my grasp. This is infuriating. The game also likes to limit my movement for the sake of drama. When you first enter an area where your assassination target is, the game locks you into walking, not because you need to, but just to make you angry. All these things do is interrupt the experience and remind you that you're sitting in a chair playing a video game.

A lot of people are complaining about the combat, but I don't have too many problems with it. Actual sword-to-sword combat is very complicated and isn't rarely handled in games in favor of systems where you swing a weapon wildly and people die. For that, it's nice to see a system where swords often fall upon other swords pulled off in a mainstream game. The combat isn't fun at all, but the game seems to want you to avoid it anyway. Except for all those times where they force you into it. Then it just sucks.

The voice acting in the game is mostly good except for two problems. First, the poor women who I mentioned early in reference to the desired stabbing of their faces, when you walk away from them they say, "No you don't understand..." but you never said anything so they should be saying, "No, you don't understand..." The second small problem I have with the voice acting is that the voice work of Altair, the main character of the game, is absolutely horrible. They got an ethnically-appropriate actor for the role, but no matter what he says, it always sounds like a white college-age guy talking to an ex-girlfriend on the phone.

Conclusion

Reviews for this game have been along the lines of "Assassin's Creed: Great Game, or Greatest Game?" but I have to say that I find the game to be a huge letdown.

On one hand, the graphics, ambient sound design, and free-running are all spectacular beyond anything we've ever seen.

On the other hand, the actual "game" part of the game is annoying, derivative, repetitive tripe and it often seems as if the designers have an actual grudge against the player.

Balancing out those two things is difficult. It's not difficult to recommend such a pretty game, but pretty easy to trash on it as well. As a matter of economics I would recommend people don't buy it unless they can appreciate the technical achievements of it. The game is getting largely favorable reviews, though, but I suspect that we reviewers might have been swayed by the beautiful visuals at first and hadn't had enough time to digest the rough bits.

People loved Perfect Dark Zero right after release, remember? Then it had some time to settle and we realized it was pretty damn bad. I think that after a while, maybe a few months, people will start to realize that, though very beautiful, Assassin's Creed is a stinker.

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