Games You Might’ve Missed: Assassin’s Creed

After finishing Prince of Persia in 2 days, I checked my email to discover that its predecessor from Ubisoft, Assassin’s Creed, was on its way.  Not one to turn down a good game, I gamely fired it up to find out how good it was, especially compared to its spiritual sequel, Prince of Persia.  I was surprised with what I found.

Assassin’s Creed is a better polished, better designed, and just all around better-made game than Prince of Persia was.  Its controls actually allow you freedom to roam, its story is more interesting, and its open world setup actually works.  I would repeatedly marvel at some facet of Assassin’s Creed and wonder why they didn’t do the smae thing in Prince of Persia.   Hell, even the dual plot mechanic they use works better than PoP’s excuse for a plot.

(For those who don’t feel like reading a wall of text, the end of this article contains a bullet-point “tl;dr” version of this review.)

Assassin’s Creed takes place in two different time periods: 11th Century Holy Land Condensed Edition (Last I checked, Damascus and Jerusalem aren’t a 3 minute horseback ride away from each other) and 21st Century Whitewashed Dick Scientist Building.  You play as Desmond Miles, a man who is capture for nefarious reasons that are mostly explained through intermittent dialogue sequences throughout the game.  Desmond’s ancestor, Altair, is the titular assassin.   Desmond enters a machine called an Animus that displays “genetic memories”, and Desmond is essentially controlling Altair to guide him through memories.

The scientists who captured him are looking for a particular memory that he can’t access right away.  He has to “ease into” the memory they’re trying to look at, as evidenced by their initial attempt to reach it directly where the game throws a shitload of tutorial prompts and fog at you in an attempt to confuse you just as badly as Desmond is.  It’s an interesting “cold open” to the story.  It also provides, through the fact that you’re not supposed to be actually “there” but “piloting the guy”, a gameplay context for why people you can lock onto glow slightly, and why you can skip certain parts (”Fast forwarding memory…”) or die (”Desynchronized from memory. Returning to last synced point.”)  Altair has his own issues with his assassin trade, and his struggles with his thoughts combined with Desmond’s struggle to figure out what the hell is going on provide an interesting dichotomy of story.  When one starts to sag, the other kicks in and keeps you interested.

The same could be said of the overall gameplay.  Altair navigates the cities of Crusades-era Holy Land with everyone’s favorite instant gameplay mechanic, Parkour.  This is a less speedy and more dextrous version of Parkour than what was contained in Prince of Persia.  No wall-running, no cieling crawling, just a lot of climbing and jumping on beams.  The key difference is that you are, unlike PoP, actually in control of what you’re doing.  You don’t just press buttons, you have to actively control where you’re jumping or you’ll fall flat on your face.  The controls are still suitably forgiving, and rarely did I find myself jumping in a direction I didn’t intend to; the controls aren’t that picky.

All of this flexibility to move wouldn’t mean jack without a good playground on which to use them.  The three cities and the kingdom connecting them provide this playground in spades.  The cities especially are amazingly well-designed.  They sound, look, and feel alive, and also feel like actual cities rather than places designed because there needed to be 5 jumping puzzles, 4 climbing puzzles, and a combat area.  Whenever you’re sprinting from guards (more on that later) it never gets old getting into character: “Okay, right turn here, come on, where’s a ladder, fuck it, climbing this building — CRAP there’s a guard there, drop down, oh, a ladder, here’s a safe spot, DAMN they saw me…” and so on.  You learn by doing what you can and can’t jump or climb on, and you create your own visual cues. It feels more dynamic than Prince of Persia’s method of “Put scratches on the wall to clearly identify what you can jump on.”

Altair’s quest eventually boils down to assassinating 9 prominent figures that need to die for one reason or another (and it’s usually not a black and white case of them being psychotic, either).  To get to them, Altair first needs to investigate the area by performing various tasks.  This is the game’s first issue.  There are, essentially, four types cycled throughout the whole game, with 6 investigations possible (but not all required) for each of the 9 assassinations.  While they are fun in and of themselves (especially the “mini-assassination” missions), they get repetitive towards the end of the game.

As you make your way from one objective to the next, you walk through cities that feel alive and vibrant.  Shops have merchants hawking their wares, a lot of random chatter that feels natural, and crowds of people you can walk through.  One of the more interesting features is that Altair and other people will attempt to twist their bodies slightly to not run into people, as one would in real life.  It’s the kind of detail that you don’t typically care about in a game, but when it’s done right as in this one, it adds to the realism immensely.  If you decide to be an asshole and run (knocking people over in the process), you can be sure the guards will be on your ass in no time.

Guard chases, as it were, are the most exhilarating part of the game.  One invariably follows each assassination, but also just about any time you screw up, especially later on when they’re suspicious of you.  It never gets old, as I mentioned above, searching for ways to duck away from the guards and find a “safe point” to lose them with.  Once you escape the line of sight of the guards chasing you, all you have to do is enter a hay bale, a roof garden, or sit on a bench between two other people to lose the guards.  It’s funny in a Scooby Doo kind of way to watch the guards run past where you are, but it breaks the realism a bit when you jump out of the hiding spot not half a second after you’re declared safe and 8 guards who were just 5 seconds ago chasing you intending to kill you walk past as if nothing happened.  It’s the mark of a well-imagined world, though, that instances like that feel artificial rather than part and parcel of the game world.

This game isn’t perfect by any stretch.  The realistic streets contain realistically ANNOYING beggars (who you can’t walk through when they stand in front of you, and you can’t kill because civilian kills cause you to lose health) and psychotics/drunks who shove you around, including into guards who then chase you.  Both of them are engineered to the point of annoyance perfection, and they show up far too often in the later areas of the game.  Just like Grand Theft Auto, there’s a bunch of annoyingly placed collectibles that seem designed to sell player’s guides.  The open world structure works better than in Prince of Persia owing to the more frequent feeling of “I just accomplished something”, but the repetitiveness of the tasks leading up to those points gets old fast.

The things Assassin’s Creed shares in common with 2008’s PoP run the board from good to bad, as well.  The Assassin’s Creed engine is an accomplishment, to be sure.  In PoP it was used to render enormous draw distances and vibrant colors, and in this game it’s used less for artistry and more to power the realism.  Climbing to a high point and looking over an entire city at once, and being able to see people milling about below you, is quite awesome.  Sadly, though, both games’ endings crap all over themselves.  Assassin’s Creed spends almost the entire game focusing on stealth, but ends the game with an hour-long combat-required chapter.  By the time you reach this point you’re conditioned to avoid combat just on the basis that it’s typically slower than the stealthy way, so to be forced to fight at the end of the game just feels half-assed.  The outside-the-Animus portion of the story relies on an incredibly cryptic, confusing, and abrupt ending, and hides most of the explanation for what happened in a computer terminal that, in all honesty, is next to impossible to get into without knowing what to do and when.  It’s a blatant sequel setup, and it pissed me off royally last night when I hit it.

Don’t let those grips discourage you from getting this game, though.  The story may have ended badly, but still left me interested to see what happened next, the gameplay felt original without being obtuse, and the game looks, sounds, and plays incredibly well.  Considering this game’s age, it shouldn’t be hard to find it for cheap.  It’s definitely worth it.

tl;dr Version:

Good:

• Story being told through two time periods is (with the exception of the ending) executed well and remains interesting throughout.
• City design is fantastic, giving you tons of freedom without being obvious about it
• Stealth mechanics work well, and “Oops I screwed up” run away moments are awesome every time
• Combat isn’t broken or overpowered, both of which are common in stealth games
• Jumping and freerunning controls are “sticky” enough to keep you from messing up too much, while still requiring you to pay attention
• Dialogue (with the exception of the totally disinterested VA of Altair) adds a lot of flavor

Bad:

• Story takes a two time period crap on itself at the end with a blatant sequel setup
• The tasks you perform before assassinations get old long before the end of the game
• No game needs 400 collectible flags scattered across a world this huge
• The kingdom between cities is skippable after you do it three times, but still feels underutilized