Lightning Reviews

As stated in my Assassin's Creed II Review, I am no more familiar with the Templars than your average American (or maybe less so). Since playing 2, I did watch a couple History channel specials on them and the Illuminati, so I have a little more background - and armed with this, I began Assassin's Creed, the first entry in the series starring Altaïr and set in the Middle East during the Third Crusade.

When I first started the game, I absolutely hated it.

The game opens with your character, Altaïr, already a Master Assassin, being so over-confident and proud that he disregards the three tenants to being an Assassin (you guessed it - it's called the "Creed").

1. Stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent.
Don't harm or kill an innocent person. Fair enough. Apparently, in the Assassin's Creed series, guards don't count as innocents. They took that job willingly, so fuck their shit up. Who cares if they just need money to feed their family?
2. Hide in plain sight.
Be stealthy and unseen. Because Ubisoft, like Hideo Kojima, hate you. But Ubisoft hates you more, because there is no crouch. Or corner view.
3. Never compromise the Brotherhood.
Hey, your fellow assassins? Those other guys in white robes? Yeah, don't do anything that would end up screwing them over. This should be common sense, unless you're Altaïr.

Altaïr manages to break all three of the tenants in one very important mission - costing his fellow assassin Malik his left arm and the life of his brother, Kadar. Plus, Altaïr manages to be a complete asshole while doing it, which should really be Creed #4, "Don't be a dickbag".

For breaking the rules, Altaïr is ceremoniously "killed" and "reborn", starting over at the bottom of the Assassin ladder as a Novice once again. He must perform tasks at the request of the Assassin leader, an old guy named Al Mualim (who comes close to breaking creed #4 himself several times over the game) and slowly earn back his weapons and rank with each task. Does this sound like a video game premise? I sure hope so!

The plot of the game - working as an assassin to uncover Templar plots to control and force order and peace by way of manipulation and violence - wasn't bad, but it lacked the fullness of the plot from the second game (which is unsurprising). What bothered me the most about the game was the sheer repetition of it all.

For example, Al Mualim gives you a task to assassinate a city leader in Damascus. You travel to Damascus on horse. Once you get there, you have to perform two to three "investigations" out of six possible investigations offered to get enough information on your target. Apparently it's not enough to just kill this guy, you also have to get to know stuff about him before he dies. Okay, whatever. The investigations, however, are alternatively boring and horrible. You get to choose from four different "types" of investigations - Eavesdropping, which just involves sitting on a nearby bench and targeting your target to listen to them spill their secrets to somebody else on the street; Informers, other assassins who want you to do their dirty work for them in exchange for information they've already gathered; Pickpocketing, which involves following somebody with a relevant document through town until you can safely steal like hell from them; and finally, Interrogation, finding somebody who knows too much and beating them up to spill their beans. Then you kill them.

After you get the information, you go to the Assassin's Bureau and speak to the rafique there - a glorified assassin desk worker who gives you the go-ahead to perform the assassination and a feather to take a souvenir (in a mark distinctly reminescent of the TV show Dexter and his slides of blood, you take the feather and smear it with your victim's blood after performing the deed). You go and kill the target, and go back to the Bureau to announce your victory. Then you go back to Al Mualim in your hometown of Masyaf and he awards you with a lecture and a new weapon. Then you gain a level.

You do this three times. Three. Times. for each city. And that's it. That's the entire game.

This in itself doesn't sound too bad - any game can be condensed into something that sounds repetitive even when it's not (Silent Hill 4, for example: you're stuck in your apartment. A hole opens. You go places and someone dies. Then you go back home. You do this five times. THEN YOU GET TO GO THROUGH THE SAME AREAS AGAIN A SECOND TIME! ISN'T THIS GAME FUN!?). Unfortunately, the way this game is presented makes it repetitive and, ultimately, boring.

There are also "secondary memories" - things you don't have to do in the game, but that help you gain more health and lengthen playtime. Unfortunately, these are the absolute worst parts of the game. Even more unfortunately, I felt the absolute need to do them all, because apparently I hate myself.

One of these secondary quests is to save citizens. Every once in a while you'll stumble across a citizen being bullied by guards in the cities - usually for stealing, it seems, although they always claim they "didn't do anything" - and you have to save them by killing all the guards. Doesn't sound so bad - but the dialogue is always exactly the same. The guards are always yelling the same phrases over and over and over again. Even the citizens you save only have about three things they say between all of them (and there are a LOT). The game isn't picky about who says what, either - more than once, I saved a monk, only to be told he would "go home and tell his sons about my bravery". His sons! He's a fucking monk! He's not telling his sons anything because he doesn't have any sons!

Unfortunately, this repeated dialogue is everywhere in Assassin's Creed. In all cities, town criers scream the exact same thing, making you want to punch them to shut them up. One town crier monologue says "He will march on Jerusalem next! That city is ours, has always been ours!". Unfortunately, the town crier in Jerusalem says this, too. Sigh. This wasn't the only problem with the game, however, although it was the worst. (And it actually made me take the game back to Gamestop only a few hours in before finally breaking down and buying it online for much cheaper - not because I cared about Altaïr and his repetitive bullshit, but because I cared about the secondary background story about Desmond and Abstergo.)

Other (more bigoted) people may have had a problem with playing as an Arabic (possibly Muslim, although I'm more of the opinion that Altaïr doesn't believe in any religion whatsoever) man in the Holy Land punching beggar women and killing a huge amount of European Christian Crusaders, but this never really bothered me - the game made it clear that this wasn't a matter of race, or religion, but rather of affiliation - Assassins versus Templars, not Muslims versus Christians or the Middle East versus Europe.

What did bother me was a disregard for historical accuracy in small cases. When encountering women in the city, if you bump into one and knock her off her course or bring what she's carrying to the ground, she will actually yell at you! In one instance, a woman actually cursed at me - not only is this completely mind-blowing given the misogyny of the area and time period (I have a really really really difficult time believing a woman would yell at a man during the 12th century in the Middle East), but from what very little research I've done, cursing is forbidden for Muslims. So. Yeah. Uh. I don't get why that ever happened.

The most interesting parts of the game (besides Malik, whom I've decided I am in love with) is the modern-day sequences, which, sadly, are few and far between. Altaïr is actually an ancestor of a man named Desmond Miles, living in 2012 and currently being held captive by a Templar company known as Abstergo. Desmond is being forced to use a machine called the Animus which taps into Genetic Memory, allowing him to relive the memories of Altaïr. The Templars want Desmond to find something that was hidden in Altaïr's memories, and despite the fact that, as Desmond, you are confined to four rooms in the Abstergo building, it is infinitely more interesting than the five cities you visit as Altaïr. Most probably won't feel this way, but I certainly did - the modern-day segments lack the repetition and redundancy of the Animus parts, making it much more entertaining to me. I guess I'm weird.

The graphics were nothing to complain about. Things were obviously improved in Assassin's Creed 2, but that's to be expected. Cities all had distinctive looks (especially Acre, which was always so grey and gloomy) and people looked good enough. Altaïr moved well. People moved well. Clothing flowed well. Etc. It was visually stunning in that the cities were vast and buildings were beautiful. The sound was good, but not great. Most of the voice acting was very well done, with the exception of, weirdly enough, the main character - while everyone else in the game had a Middle Eastern accent, Altaïr sounded emotionless, flat, and American, making for a weird playing experience. Eventually, you got used to it, though. The soundtrack was good, but not nearly as beautiful as 2.

All in all, it was just alright. The game doesn't hold a candle to 2, in my opinion, and has zero replay value (although others may feel differently on this one). It was a good set-up to Assassin's Creed 2, although I couldn't help but think that, had I played this one first, I would have never given 2 a chance.

Verdict: C