Assassin’s Creed is a series that flew under my radar for a long time. There was no reason for it other than time. I bought the first two games on Steam and they sat in my backlog for years unplayed. However, after making a recommitment to start digging into some AAA IPs that I’d been sleeping on and hadn’t played a single entry in, Assassin’s Creed became a priority. Even though I knew that the original Assassin’s Creed is considered one of the lowest-rated games in the series, I wanted to start at the beginning.
Things got off to a rough start. Real rough to the point that I almost quit on the game. My main issue was that I didn’t understand how the exploration works. You’re expected to explore and find hundreds of flags they’ve strewn throughout the game, but at the same time, some of the areas have a lot of hostile enemy guards. There are places to hide, but having so many guards about made it difficult to explore. If I needed to get through an area with lots of guards about, it seemed my only choice was to ride through on my horse as fast as I could.
Some of this came from a misunderstanding on my part of what kind of game Assassin’s Creed is. I went in expecting it to be more of a stealth game, but that’s not how it’s designed. While there are times you need to run and hide, Assassin’s Creed’s gameplay is much more of the action-adventure type. You’re not expected to hide from enemy guards any time they come after you. You can fight them if you choose. It’s not like Thief or Metal Gear Solid where you’re not supposed to be seen or noticed. The guards are bullies and will draw their swords and come after you at the slightest provocation. You can choose to run and give them a good chase, or you can fight your way out. As a result, I thought I was doing something wrong any time I had guards harassing me for any reason, and I quickly grew frustrated to the point that I wanted to quit. In fact, I did quit for awhile. I put the game down for two years and vowed to move on to other games in the series.
What brought me back was the historical angle of the game being set in the Middle East during the Crusades. It really resonated with me. I’m not a history expert by any stretch, but it has a feeling of historical authenticity that I hadn’t experienced in a game before. So even though I had vowed to move on to Assassin’s Creed 2, after giving it some thought, I decided to give the first game another go, but this time to play it more like an action-adventure game rather than a stealth game. I’m glad I did because, in spite of some obvious technical and gameplay flaws, I found myself enjoying it quite a bit.
Assassin’s Creed isn’t a bad game, it’s just repetitive. If you don’t like the first hour of the game, you’re not going to like the rest of it because the gameplay doesn’t evolve. Your character, Altair, will acquire new abilities, but it doesn’t radically change how the game is played. The gameplay that’s there isn’t bad, but it doesn’t play like a game that was fully conceptualized and fleshed out as well as it could’ve been.
The two pillars of the gameplay are climbing towers and sword combat. The combat starts off being repetitive and clunky, but evolves into a system that becomes quite elegant and fun to use. Altair gets more sword moves as the game progresses and it gradually improves the combat. He starts off only being able to hack away at his enemies, but he eventually gets the ability to grab, counter, dodge, and even break holds when his enemies try to grab and throw him. It became one of my favorite parts of the game. He can also use throwing knives.
Fighting and killing a lot of guards in Assassin’s Creed is unavoidable. The main reason being, like I mentioned before, the guards are bullies. They bully citizens, they make comments to Altair as he’s walking around minding his own business, and they look for reasons to pick fights with him in general. In all of the cities he visits, you even have crazy drunks walking around the city who will shove him around if he gets too close to them. Sometimes they’ll shove him into a guard who happens to be walking by, and then the fight’s on. Apparently the guards are okay with crazy people shoving random people around, but if Altair happens to get shoved into them, instead of going after the crazy guy that shoved him, they try to kill Altair. Fine then, let’s fight. Crazy hobos caused enough fights to the point that whenever I saw one in my way, I would automatically punch them and send them running before they had a chance to start anything between Altair and the guards. Although that sometimes had its downside as well, as some of the citizens thought Altair was trying to punch them and would try to engage him in fisticuffs.
The other pillar of the gameplay is tower-climbing. There are dozens of high-points to climb in the city and countryside that will give Altair the lay of the land. After that, you’ll know on your map where to go to gather information or liberate any innocent citizens from bullying guards. This may sound boring, but it ended up being one of my favorite parts of the game. The main reason being, after Altair gets to the top, you get a panoramic shot of the city or countryside – and then he can take a massive swan-dive into a pile of hay that always happens to be conveniently placed next to the tower for you to jump into. I never got tired of it. In fact, Altair’s movement in the game, whether he was climbing, running away from guards, or just walking around, has a fluidity and realism to it that played a large part in why I kept playing in spite of the repetitive gameplay. He looks and moves like you would imagine an assassin would. His ability to jump, climb, and balance on just about anything is very reminiscent of Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia trilogy and very much plays like an evolution of those games.
The side-missions and minigames don’t add much to the gameplay, but they’re a fun diversion from the repetitiveness of Altair’s primary missions. If he completes a minigame or side-mission, he’ll get a piece of information that’s supposed to help him take out his main assassination target. Some of the info is helpful, some of it isn’t. What would’ve been really helpful is if the game logged the info he’s given so you can access it later on. Instead, you just have to remember it. It doesn’t matter that much as the actual assassinations he carries out at the end of each mission are somewhat scripted and don’t require too much strategy.
Getting back to the flags I mentioned earlier, they serve no purpose other than to collect them. You’re not rewarded or acknowledged in any way for doing so. As far as I could tell, they’re doodads the developers threw out there to make the player feel like they’re doing something when they’re not climbing towers or dealing with hostile guards, which is a clear indication that this game was rushed and they didn’t have enough gameplay ideas to completely fill it out. It’s very similar to how I felt collecting the golden quills in Yooka-Laylee after I bought all the moves. I kept collecting them thinking there might be some payoff at the end – but nope.
Assassin’s Creed’s story is a little disjointed in how its told. To summarize, the game takes place in the Middle Ages during the Crusades, but are just memories of someone who lived long ago being experienced by someone who’s hooked up to a sophisticated computer run by a company who’s looking for information from this someone who they believe is an assassin of some sort. Does that make sense? No? That’s because, like the rest of the game, it was rushed and not thought out as well as it could’ve been. You have interludes from the main gameplay where you’re walking around an office in a modern-day skyscraper in some nameless city with a cranky doctor and young female assistant. In the game itself, the story is much more straightforward, but the office interludes aren’t explained very well and don’t add much to the gameplay.
Assassin’s Creed is still a pretty game, but the PC version has some very noticeable pop-in, especially in the countryside. I did everything I knew to do to mitigate it, but to no avail. My PC far exceeds the recommended specs for the game, so running it at 1080p/60FPS with no pop-in shouldn’t have been a problem. At times, pop-in in the cities was so bad, I almost ran into citizens who would appear right in front of me. I would get significant framerate dips at time as well. Other than those issues, the game looked and performed well.
The original Assassin’s Creed a good enough to play through if you’re interested in the origins of the series, but it needs more meat on the bone of its gameplay and less repetition. That being said, in spite of my very rough beginning, I found it compelling enough to play all the way through to the end. The story and combat improved a lot and has me excited to dive into the rest of the series, especially Assassin’s Creed 2, which I’ve heard nothing but glowing things about. Overall, I’m glad I stuck with it and I’d be interested to see the series return to the Crusades at some point in the future.
The Gamer's Standard 