Assassins' Creed

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Light Speed
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Assassins' Creed

Post by Light Speed »

I don't know how many of you care about this game, but I know at least Popcorn asked for impressions so here they are.

First off the game definitely has some really cool features and does some things really well, however it is more than a little marred by some not so cool things as well. Depending on your tolerance level of the negative the game can be anywhere from boring as sin within about 7 hours or the coolest game you've played all year. I'm somewhere in the middle.

As far as the good goes, the game is absolutely gorgeous, but I don't think I really need to tell anyone that. The three cities are gigantic and bustling with life. They are filled with thousands of npc's that all interact with you as you move through them slowly or knock them down in a sprint. The coolest reaction I got out of them during the game was the first time I got into a sword fight on a roof. I knocked the guy off the roof with the last blow and as I started to walk away the entire crowd of people down below erupted into screams and panic. The cities really feel alive.

The free running system is probably the most fun I had in the game. I was most excited for this game because it looked like a Prince of Persia where you could do his awesome acrobatics anywhere you wanted to in an enormous open world. It more or less delivered in that regard. Anything that sticks out of the wall even the slightest you can grab onto and climb. The system is cool, but a tad bit simplified. Basically the controls are broken down to Y being your head, X and B being your hands and A being your feet. Pressing the right trigger switches between high profile and low profile mode. So if you were walking without the trigger, you'll be jogging with the trigger. If you hold down the trigger and press A you start sprinting and anything you run into that you can climb, jump off of or any of the cool things you saw in trailers you will basically do automatically. However it remains fun because you are usually doing this with guards chasing you and scouting out paths to run up or through can be a blast on the fly, especially if you make it look cool.

The Combat is also quite awesome. You can make it as easy or as complicated as you like, but it is never terribly difficult, especially once you get counterattack back. I loved it because you could model your fighting style based on looks rather than just killing everyone and keeping yourself alive. For instance, you could walk up to a group of guards harassing a civilian and assassinate two, before the rest realize what happened. Then pull out your sword and counterattack the immediate oncoming attack, then just start bombarding the last guy with attacks until you break his guard. Or you could just throw knives at most of them from afar or just walk in with a sword and counterattack them all, which is a sure fire way to survive if you have the timing down. Something I read a week or so ago described it as a deadly ballet, that seems to fit. It gets pretty neat looking when you get your character to effortlessly move from target to target seamlessly killing them all.

That leads nicely into animation. Not only does the game look incredible, but the way Altair moves is pretty incredible. I don't know how many animations they gave him, but transitioning from one to another is almost always flawless. He never looks awkward doing anything, be it climbing a gigantic cathedral or fighting off several people. The horse didn't look as great, but it was still pretty good.

Anyway, now for the negative. The main gameplay consists of nine assassinations. For each one you talk to your master and he tells you what you must do. You go to whichever city you need too, you can warp there after you've been to each one by just running out of Maysyaf, which is nice because they are quite far away even on horse. Once you are there you head to the Assassins' Bureau, talk to the guy there about your target. Then you go to the area's he tells you, climb to a tall building with a bird circling it and synchronize. This goes into a clip where the camera circles the building and you can see all the things around you, afterwards your minimap will be marked with npc's that you could potentially get information from. The way you get information consists of sitting on a bench and eavesdropping on a conversation, listening to a public speaker then following him to a back alley and beating him until he talks, pickpocketing people, and doing small assassination missions for fellow assassins within a time limit. That is it for the most part, once I had a mission where I had to collect like 20 flags in a minute and they just followed an obvious free run path, but all the rest were one of those four. Once you gather enough information, you need at least 3 but you can get up to 6, you go back to the assassins bureau, tell the guy there about your target. He'll approve the kill and you go assassinate him. You can be as careful and sneaky as you want or just run in and try and kill him with all his guards around, either way you get to listen to him talk for awhile then you run away. After that you go back to Maysyaf and repeat. As you can probably tell, after about the third time this gets kind of old, but it doesn't change throughout the entire nine. You can mix it up by wandering around the cities in between missions collecting flags, or saving citizens, maybe killing some of the Templars scattered throughout, but as far as the main game goes there isn't a lot there. It feels like they put so much time and effort into making this gigantic city with the crazy interactive crowd and they ran out of time to make the main game fun. Well, it is fun, it just gets repetitive quite quickly if you don't mix it up.

Also after the last assassination you are forced into fighting wave after wave of like 10 to 15 guys at once. The problem with this is all the praise I gave to the combat system earlier fails when you are fighting this many guys at once. If you try to do anything but counterattack while fighting that many guys you'll probably get hit in the back by another before you finish off the first. This means you basically just stand there blocking and waiting for someone to attack you so that you can counter and kill them all. This takes a fairly long time and after doing it like eight times or whatever you just want the damn game to be over. I think I spent the last hour or two of the game just counterattacking people. I'm not sure who decided that was a good idea.

Overall I'd say it was a really fun game. but it could have been so much more. To make a great game all they would really have to do is add content. Everything they had was great, there just wasn't enough to do in the main quest. Also they should take out the two hours of counterattacking. :) The story, which was all right, nothing special, set the game up for a sequel so hopefully they get it right next time.

I'd say rent it because unless you are a completionist you will have the main game beat in about 20 hours and with extraneous exploring you will probably be done entirely within 30 hours. If you really want to get every flag and kill every Templar you'll probably be at it for another 20 hours, but I can't really see any reason anyone would want to do that.

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Protodude
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Post by Protodude »

Glad to know what to expect later in this game, I just picked it up today and so far it's been a pretty decent experience but I still need to get used to the controls.

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