Review: Assassin’s Creed 1

 

The Gameplay

Ok so where to start? How about the controls.. well on the PC version anyway, the controls felt extremely smooth and intuitive. There were a couple times when I would watch my character do something unexpected such as dive off the side of a building that I was scaling but it was so rare it's hardly worth mentioning as a negative. 

The combat system in Assassin's Creed is really really well done. It starts off quite simple. You'll learn how to block, counter attacks, dodge etc and as Altair regains rank, he'll learn more advanced moves such as disarming your opponent. The only downside to this style of combat, other than the break of realism (who forgets how to block really?), is that it became too easy to become a one man army. I'm not kidding, even early on in the game, Altair could take on an Army of super soldiers without even breaking a sweat.  

I swear, after a few fights, I was literally invincible to even an army of bad guys, I felt like Neo from the Matrix, no one was going to take me down. Sure it was a nice feeling becoming that powerful, but on the downside, it made the game a little too easy for my liking. 

I would say one of my biggest complaints with the gameplay in Assassin's Creed is it's repetitiveness. For instance, to unlock areas on the mini-map in the city, you'll have to climb up to a viewpoint and hit the use key which will then activate a short 360 degree camera pan around your character with epic music to boot. In theory, this sounds great until you realize that you'll need to do it literally hundreds of times and it becomes a massive chore.

Sadly on the surface, Assassin's Creed seems like a gigantic world full of life, but once you get into it'll you'll quickly realize that it's a game that has been flushed out quickly.. full of tedious tasks like collecting a billion feathers for little to no reward, saving unimportant citizens from muggings, and what seems like a copy/paste rush job to fill out content in the game.

Notice how in every city the Assassin's Guild looks exactly the same? *COUGH* Copy/Paste. *COUGH*

Assassin's Creed suffers from the developer spending too much time on the graphics and too little time creating actual content for players to play. A lot of the content really feels rushed and repeated.

It's obvious that many of the side missions serve absolutely no purpose other than to simply extend the game, that wouldn't be a problem if they were actually fun.. and maybe they are the first time, but after you realize the missions are exactly the same but with different npcs (ex: saving citizens from muggings) you'll be underwhelmed. 

I understand how the developers might have thought that it would be great to add content to the game, but doing the same missions over and over sucks, and only the harshest of achievement whores would actually go through and finish them all.

The main assassination missions aren't quite as bad, but in order to do them you'll again have to do a 3-4 cookie cutter quests that you've done over and over... enough about that..

Onto the camera.. Well, the third person camera view never seemed to obstruct my vision or interfere with me while I was in combat, which is definitely a good thing; too many third person games have horrible camera views which can cause a lot of problems during hectic gameplay, let's leave gameplay on a somewhat positive note and head onto where Assassin's Creed really shines.. The Visuals.