Assassin’s Creed
Published on: 16th May, 2009
Assassin's Creed |
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We’re just going to come right out and say it: Assassin’s Creed is fantastic. More to the point, it’s beautifully realized, richly detailed and carried by a story with twists that rival the surprises of BioShock. It’s also endlessly fun, giving players complete freedom to tear ass across the rooftops and streets of its medieval cities as they track down their targets and try to avoid attracting attention while doing so.
Cherry-picking elements from games like Prince of Persia, Gun, Crackdown and Hitman, Assassin’s Creed offers up a huge, freely explorable game world consisting of three crowded, historically accurate cities – Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem – as well as the Assassin-controlled fortress village of Masyaf. All of these are connected by The Kingdom, a vast expanse of secret-filled wilderness that can be explored on horseback.
The meat of the game revolves around slipping undetected into each of the cities in turn, fully exploring one of its three districts while investigating a single assassination target, and then pulling off a risky, high-profile hit in public before cheesing it to safety and reporting back to Masyaf. Along the way, you’ll pick pockets, save citizens from armed bullies, sprint recklessly up walls and across debris-strewn rooftops and play lots and lots of cat-and-mouse games with the cities’ guards.
Publisher Ubisoft has been extremely cagey about the game’s long-rumored sci-fi trappings, but because they’re revealed so quickly, it’s not really a spoiler to say what we’re about to say (although if you really don’t want to spoil the game’s first five minutes, go ahead and skip to the next page): Assassin’s Creed actually follows two storylines. First, there’s white-robed Altair, an arrogant young Assassin cultist who lives in the Kingdom of Jerusalem circa 1191, during the Third Crusade. Soon after the game begins, Altair botches a vital mission deep underneath Solomon’s Temple; disgraced, he’s given a chance to restore his honor by assassinating nine key Muslim and Crusader political figures, thereby restoring some peace to the region.
Then there’s Desmond Miles, Altair’s near-future descendant, who’s kidnapped by a shadowy corporation and strapped into a machine that can unlock the ancestral memories stored in his DNA. His segments – which bookend each chapter of Altair’s story – play a little like a point-and-click adventure and are confined to the lab where he’s imprisoned. Why this layer of sci-fi weirdness even exists isn’t clear at first, but it never feels tacked on, and the things you’ll learn here will gradually cast an unsettling new light on Altair’s story.
Each of the game’s nine central missions breaks down in a similar way: when Altair enters the district where your target lives, his knowledge of the area will be a complete blank – the map is fogged over, and there are no visible objectives. To unfog your map and reveal points of interest, you’ll need to seek out and scale an assortment of “View Points,” dizzyingly tall structures that range from relatively small watchtowers and minarets to gigantic, realistically detailed castles, cathedrals and lighthouses. Climbing to the top of one reveals the locations of the others in the area, as well as opening up access to a couple of side missions. The best part is that, when you’re finished climbing, you can get down quickly via a vertigo-inducing swan dive into a conveniently placed haystack (which will automatically break Altair’s fall from any height, anywhere).
Key to getting up there in the first place is the game’s free running feature, which takes a little getting used to but is incredibly fun once you do. Rather than worrying about jumping over obstacles manually, you can just hold down two buttons while running and you’ll automatically parkour over anything in your way, whether it’s a crate, a wall or a series of tightropes. It feels a little like cheating, until you realize that it enables you to effortlessly get around in a hurry, which is especially useful when a bunch of guards are hot on your tail and you don’t want to deal with any complex jumping puzzles.
The side missions you discover by climbing view points, meanwhile, are what you need to pursue in between entering a district and actually killing your target, and they break down into a few simple tasks: eavesdropping on conversations; pickpocketing sensitive documents; interrogating some preaching demagogue by following them into an alley and beating them senseless; doing a favor for an informant (which always either involves stealth-killing soldiers or collecting flags in some inane rooftop race); or saving some citizen who’s being pushed around by a small group of guards.
That last one is the most repetitive by far, as it always involves breaking up the fight and then getting into one yourself, although the rewards it offers – releasing a group of monks to hide among or vigilantes to waylay your pursuers – make it completely optional. In fact, unless you’re a completist, most of the side missions can be ignored altogether; you’ll only really need to accomplish two or three of them before you’ll have enough intel to go after your intended victim.
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