Okay, so if you haven’t read my previous post on this game. Go and do that , otherwise this is going to seem extremely negative! I’m going to discuss the less impressive parts of the game now. Which unfortunately is larger than it’s qualities!
Gameplay 4/10
I’m being kind. A Seriously boring game to play if you’re not baffled by the visuals. The game itself is a generic assassination game with a few new features. If you’ve ever played Hitman and loved the variation of kills and missions ,this is not a game for you. The first kill is the same as the last and the middle ones aren’t too different either. In previous games such as Hitman, there have always been multiple ways in which to execute your mission, but Assassin’s creed usually ends up in a “Pirates of the Carribean” sort of melee combat , and with single button combat it is far from exciting. I’m a forgiving guy, i can forgive this. Then you try and stealth. Stealth in this game should have been number one of priorities for Ubisoft. It seems like more of an afterthought.
Let me use an example. A main action of the game is to pickpocket (When i say main action, it gets so repetitive i feel like killing the guy and just taking it off him.) Anyways, i seem to be able to pickpocket a man in the middle of the street and nobody notice, walk away , and then a guard who was behind a building and could have noway seen the crime comes running up to me and attacks me. Baffling.
Also, you can’t seem to walk any quicker than a crippled snail without attracting the guards attention , and don’t even try to get on a horse. Apparently that’s illegal. I could literally go on forever here but I’ll stop before I bore you.
Storyline 4/10
I’m not being pessimistic here. In the interests of keeping this review pretty much “spoiler free”, I can’t say much here, other than what has already been revealed through trailers and previews and so on. The year is 1191 AD; You take the role of Altair, a master assassin. However, in a key mission which takes place at the start of the game, you make several mistakes which break the sacred tenets (a word woefully mispronounced by the voice actors) of the Hashshashin clan to which you belong. As such, you are stripped of your rank and weapons. Al Mualim, the leader of the clan, offers Altair the chance to redeem himself, and to earn the right to again call himself an assassin and gain possession of his weapons once more. To do this he is presented with a list of nine key figures in the Third Crusade, whom he must assassinate to free the Holy Land from their corrupt influence. And so you, as the player, set off to explore the kingdom and three major cities (Acre, Jerusalem and Damascus) as well as Masyaf, the home of the assassins, in order to find and eliminate these targets. As you take down each one, more of the story is revealed and Altair finds himself questioning the justice in his actions.
The story is good in theory, but not told fantastically by any stretch of the imagination. Some of the main twists are very predictable which isn’t really all that interesting, and the ending was (in my personal opinion) really quite awful. The key aspect to the story is the historical accuracy, something which the team at Ubisoft has taken into very careful consideration. The cities and the assassination targets all existed more or less as they appear in the game, in the year 1191 AD (according to what resources we have available anyway) and the targets themselves all disappeared or perished in that same year. But their idea of how people talked , dressed and behaved is very disappointing.
Overall i was quite disappointed. But recently I’ve been feeling like this toward a lot of the next gen games. It’s not a bad attempt at a fairly original game, but it isn’t exactly a genre defining title either. Rent or buy? Rent. No way would I buy this. Unless they decided to make major changes for the PC version I’d stay well clear of it’s hefty price tag. Buy it if you’re really interested in the architecture and visuals or you’re a die hard fan of the Genre. But I think i’ll stick to playing Hitman and stealing my sisters money in my spare time. It’s a 7/10 game that could’ve been 10/10!
-Reemz