Years from now, marketers will likely still study the phenomenon that drove Assassin\'s Creed to the success that it has achieved. Don\'t get me wrong, here - it\'s not a horrible game by any stretch of the imagination, but the game\'s quality certainly doesn\'t map to the number of copies that it\'s sold. Indeed, while Creed certainly shows off some fantastic, even groundbreaking elements, it ultimately fails to rise above the ranks of the standard genre-interest action-adventure game.
Assassin\'s Creed tells the story of Altaïr - a member of the 12th century Assassins\' Guild in the Holy Lands of the Middle East during the Third Crusade. Not before long, though, you find out that you\'re only playing through the "genetic memories" of the game\'s actual protagonist, who is himself a runaway member of the modern evolution of the Guild. The game\'s plot details the events surrounding Altaïr\'s fall from grace and subsequent redemption within the group and a modern day corporation\'s attempts to recover an ancient artifact, complete with mysterious motives and a shadowy worldwide conspiracy. If this all sounds a little complicated, you\'re not far off base. The plotting in this game is convoluted, over-complicated, and ultimately more concerned with establishing mysteries than answering questions. I won\'t spoil the experience for anybody that hasn\'t played through yet, but suffice it to say that I wasn\'t satisfied in any way with the story by the time I had reached the end. On a superficial level the plot might satisfy the average gamer, but probing too deeply or exposing the tale to outside logic renders the experience fairly shallow.
Graphically, Assassin\'s Creed meets and surpasses the bar set by other games of the current generation. The characters and items in the environment are all rendered with an impressive amount of detail, and the sweeping pans the game occasionally treats the player to reveal a thoughtful large-scale city design with an amazing draw distance. Of course, the game would be a lot more fun to look at if this impressive engine had more to show us than sand and poverty. While the architectural utilitarianism and the pervasive presence of the underclass might be consistent with the historical period and locale that the game tries to depict, in practice I found myself longing for the more interesting buildings and landscapes of the wealthier districts that I only got to experience on rare occasion. Climbing up the side of a humongous cathedral is fun - jumping around on top of burned out husks of tenements is a bit less so.
The sound in the game passes by mostly without note or exception. The music, where noticeable at all, is mostly understated, but serves to accent the play experience well enough. The game features voice acting mostly on par with the average video game, though Altaïr\'s voice is particularly incongruous with the environment (his culture-neutral basso is wildly out of place among the somewhat stereotypical Middle Eastern accents given to the majority of the game\'s supporting cast), though the dialog loops that you\'re frequently subjected to while scaling buildings and lurking in the shadows can get a little short and repetitive.
The largest problems for Assassin\'s Creed, as well as its largest successes, lie in its gameplay. Eschewing a standard control setup, the game instead maps the face buttons to the head (Y), hands (X and B), and feet (A), with one of the shoulder triggers allowing the player to transition between high and low profile modes. At first blush, the controls are incredibly awkward, and certainly take some getting used to, particularly in combat, but once you get used to the unique approach they become comfortable and familiar enough to enjoy. Even still, the approach is not entirely without its problems. Specifically, the Y button is almost entirely wasted on a "vision" command that could just as easily be mapped to a right-stick click, and the constant need to hold down a trigger button to run around (or parry in combat) seems awkward. Of much greater concern is the camera, which I have become convinced utterly hates me and wants me to die a slow, horrible death. Specifically, operating a camera while holding down one or more buttons and attempting to react appropriately to the many and varied events that can occur during combat is difficult enough. But every other time you perform one of the effective (and quite essential) counters or unblockable maneuvers, the camera cuts away to a view of the action specifically designed to highlight the carnage, after which it proceeds to zoom back out to standard perspective. The only hitch in this process is the fact that this zoom out frequently ends up hiding your camera behind a tree, or obstructing it with a building, or (in one notable instance) pushing it around a corner from your character. Any way you slice it, the camera management is some pretty bad meatloaf, and one of the biggest irritants in the game.
The broader gameplay in Assassin\'s Creed vacillates wildly from intensely interesting activities (clandestine assassinations) to monumentally boring busy work (picking pockets and - I kid you not - racing around flag courses), with the latter really outweighing the former in many respects. Honestly, it feels like the designers felt some kind of pressure to pad out what they had of the game and just tossed in a bunch of ridiculous and unnecessary (not to mention boring and repetitive) "investigation" episodes. Fortunately, an impatient player can avoid a significant number of these side adventures, but it\'s hard to conceive of a potential player that\'s not going to be bored with this game at least some of the time that he\'s playing it. It doesn\'t help matters that the interstitial "present day" episodes concerning Altaïr\'s distant descendent Desmond are uniformly boring, consisting mostly of your clomping around a small laboratory, patiently looking for things with which you can interact. Of course, the only way to tell you can interact with something is laboriously strolling up to it and waiting to see if a prompt appears on your screen. Even the combat in the game (which you would expect to be exciting and intense) is frequently broken, with unblockable combinations and instant-kill counters being the rule rather than the exception.
With all of the shortcomings and every bit of slapdash production taken into consideration, Assassin\'s Creed still managed to hold my interest (barely) from start to finish. Really, this game is the very definition of average. It will appeal to hardcore fans of the Prince of Persia games, and probably some Tomb Raider and Metal Gear fans as well, but it\'s nowhere near as well-executed as any of those franchises. Creed is, above all, a game that will hold strong appeal to a small, significant minority of gamers, while the rest of us could safely ignore it, were it not for the monstrous hype machine (partially game journalism\'s own creation) that drove the game directly into our collective consciousness. The great elements of the game (the basic control engine, for instance) leave me extremely optimistic for the inevitable sequel, but I have a hard time recommending Assassin\'s Creed to a player that might not otherwise be interested in the genre.
"Assassin's Creed (X360)" is on sale November 13, 2007 and is rated M. Action.
