I started playing the Assassin's Creed games at the request of my girlfriend, who loves the series. I'm usually a fan of third-person action and stealth games, so I thought why not. I played her copy on the Xbox 360. The fact that the series is now so expansive and popular hopefully means that the series takes an upswing from now on, because while there are elements of a really good game here, those elements are hindered by a lot of flaws that made it really difficult to get into this game (the first 2-3 times I tried, I got maybe an hour or two in before losing interest).
Story: The story is definitely one of the stronger points of the game. Even though it's not super layered or complex, it was entertaining enough to keep me engaged. It's a simple arc of Altair, an assassin in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade, losing his honour and rank in his brotherhood, and having to earn back the trust of his leader, Al Mualim, by committing 9 assassinations at his behest. But as he does so, Altair learns things from his victims, and begins to lose faith in Al Mualim. The whole thing is framed by the story of Desmond Miles, a descendent of Altair, who has been kidnapped by a corporation and put into a machine called the Animus, to access "Genetic Memories" of Altair's story. The first couple of times I tried to get into the game, I found the frame narrative to be kind of unnecessary, a break in the immersion of the gameplay, when there was so little to be done in the levels played as Desmond. However, this time, I found them a bit more palatable, and providing a simple but decent second story in the game.
Graphics: As I said, I set up my girlfriend's old Xbox 360 to play this game, and for reasons unknown to me, the console was preset to run at a dismal 480p, worse quality than pretty much any video game in recent memory. The console was projecting a fullscreen 4:3 resolution onto my widescreen TV, whereas the game was actually in widescreen within those parameters, leaving massive black bars around every side of the screen and only using maybe half of the available screen space. I asked her about this and how to fix it (I've only used Playstation in the past) and she didn't know. So I started up the game, and stomached the terrible resolution for most of the game, until about 3/4 of the way into the game, when I figured there was no way that an Xbox 360 ever survived the gaming market if it only ran at 480p, so I went and messed around with some settings until I got it to fill the whole screen. Call me an idiot for taking so long to figure it out, but let me tell you, the change in graphic quality was instantaneous and astounding. It was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. At this new resolution, the game was much more on par with other games of the time, and while it still doesn't hold up brilliantly today, it's definitely passable. Environmental design is very detailed (although less awe-inspiring than games like Uncharted 1, which came out around the same time), characters look decent, but everything takes place in-game, and there are no pre-rendered or cinematic cutscenes - just the ability to take multiple angles on a scene when prompted.
Gameplay: This is where things really start to go downhill. This game just... isn't very fun to play. The free-running, for which the series is really famous, was surely something groundbreaking in 2007, but would often just slow down or completely stop from time to time, usually as soon as I needed to get somewhere fast. For some ridiculous reason, Altair, highly-trained assassin with a brilliant athletic physique and a prowess for scaling buildings, turns into a fumbling idiot when confronted with water. It is so stupid to me that falling into water will instantly kill Altair. And it wouldn't even be that much of an issue if the parkour system had better targeting. Too many times I tried to jump from one post to another, miss completely even though I was aiming properly, land in some dreaded water and have to start my mission again. In addition to the better parts of gameplay being much less polished than I had hoped they might be, the actual gameplay cycle gets really repetitive after 2-3 of the 9 assassinations. It just kind of kills the fun. Games are supposed to be fun. Even just making my way through the open world eventually got boring or frustrating, or being harassed non-stop by beggars in the street would constantly get in the way of a mission. Even rescuing the terrorized citizens of each primary location (which functions as a side mission throughout the game) boils down to the same combat encounter with the same copy-pasted bad guys, to always result in one of four dialogue options - which isn't nearly enough, considering that there are probably over 50 iterations of this mission in the game. Sword combat definitely feels like it's from 2007, with a very basic system of attacks, parries (which are clunky at the best of times), blocks etc,. And even the final boss fight does nothing to deepen or improve upon this. The only thing that really kept me going was wanting to see how the story ended, and gave me no desire to go back for any of the side content.
Overall, this game was a mildly entertaining story, decent 2007 graphics, and some impressive environmental design, marred by awfully boring gameplay loops, frustrating creative decisions, and clunky mechanics. I hope the rest of the series has more to offer.
Story: The story is definitely one of the stronger points of the game. Even though it's not super layered or complex, it was entertaining enough to keep me engaged. It's a simple arc of Altair, an assassin in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade, losing his honour and rank in his brotherhood, and having to earn back the trust of his leader, Al Mualim, by committing 9 assassinations at his behest. But as he does so, Altair learns things from his victims, and begins to lose faith in Al Mualim. The whole thing is framed by the story of Desmond Miles, a descendent of Altair, who has been kidnapped by a corporation and put into a machine called the Animus, to access "Genetic Memories" of Altair's story. The first couple of times I tried to get into the game, I found the frame narrative to be kind of unnecessary, a break in the immersion of the gameplay, when there was so little to be done in the levels played as Desmond. However, this time, I found them a bit more palatable, and providing a simple but decent second story in the game.
Graphics: As I said, I set up my girlfriend's old Xbox 360 to play this game, and for reasons unknown to me, the console was preset to run at a dismal 480p, worse quality than pretty much any video game in recent memory. The console was projecting a fullscreen 4:3 resolution onto my widescreen TV, whereas the game was actually in widescreen within those parameters, leaving massive black bars around every side of the screen and only using maybe half of the available screen space. I asked her about this and how to fix it (I've only used Playstation in the past) and she didn't know. So I started up the game, and stomached the terrible resolution for most of the game, until about 3/4 of the way into the game, when I figured there was no way that an Xbox 360 ever survived the gaming market if it only ran at 480p, so I went and messed around with some settings until I got it to fill the whole screen. Call me an idiot for taking so long to figure it out, but let me tell you, the change in graphic quality was instantaneous and astounding. It was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders. At this new resolution, the game was much more on par with other games of the time, and while it still doesn't hold up brilliantly today, it's definitely passable. Environmental design is very detailed (although less awe-inspiring than games like Uncharted 1, which came out around the same time), characters look decent, but everything takes place in-game, and there are no pre-rendered or cinematic cutscenes - just the ability to take multiple angles on a scene when prompted.
Gameplay: This is where things really start to go downhill. This game just... isn't very fun to play. The free-running, for which the series is really famous, was surely something groundbreaking in 2007, but would often just slow down or completely stop from time to time, usually as soon as I needed to get somewhere fast. For some ridiculous reason, Altair, highly-trained assassin with a brilliant athletic physique and a prowess for scaling buildings, turns into a fumbling idiot when confronted with water. It is so stupid to me that falling into water will instantly kill Altair. And it wouldn't even be that much of an issue if the parkour system had better targeting. Too many times I tried to jump from one post to another, miss completely even though I was aiming properly, land in some dreaded water and have to start my mission again. In addition to the better parts of gameplay being much less polished than I had hoped they might be, the actual gameplay cycle gets really repetitive after 2-3 of the 9 assassinations. It just kind of kills the fun. Games are supposed to be fun. Even just making my way through the open world eventually got boring or frustrating, or being harassed non-stop by beggars in the street would constantly get in the way of a mission. Even rescuing the terrorized citizens of each primary location (which functions as a side mission throughout the game) boils down to the same combat encounter with the same copy-pasted bad guys, to always result in one of four dialogue options - which isn't nearly enough, considering that there are probably over 50 iterations of this mission in the game. Sword combat definitely feels like it's from 2007, with a very basic system of attacks, parries (which are clunky at the best of times), blocks etc,. And even the final boss fight does nothing to deepen or improve upon this. The only thing that really kept me going was wanting to see how the story ended, and gave me no desire to go back for any of the side content.
Overall, this game was a mildly entertaining story, decent 2007 graphics, and some impressive environmental design, marred by awfully boring gameplay loops, frustrating creative decisions, and clunky mechanics. I hope the rest of the series has more to offer.