Assassin's Creed

Even without an HDTV, the infamous birds-eye panoramas in Assassin's Creed look amazing. Needless to say, the graphics in this game are fantastic. Beautiful textures and animations, with lots of environmental details and wonderful use of imagery and sound.

In the game, you access memories of an ancestral past life. The past life takes place in 1191, during the Third Crusades, and your memories are of Altair, an Assassin. You play as Altair, who is commanded to kill political figures in an overarching conspiracy theory that runs throughout the game.

As a Crusades buff, I'm delighted with the setting. They stuck with Masyaf as an Assassin stronghold and you can visit three other cities: Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus. While I don't know how close to the real thing the maps are, they got the ethnicities right; for example, Jerusalem belongs to Muslims and Acre has a number of French and German guards. It would have been better to assassinate Conrad of Montferrat instead of William, since Conrad supposedly died via an Assassin attack (though in Tyre, which isn't one of the cities in the game), but that's just nit-picky. Overall, they did a good job bringing the period to life and filled the plot with actual events like the seige of Acre and disagreements between Richard and the contested rulers of Outremer (however, it was Richard who ordered the execution of the 3,000 prisoners at Acre, not William...). The inclusion of the Templars and Hospitallers were a nice touch and it was interesting to play a non-Christian in an era usually romanticized by Europeans but demonized by everyone else.

This is one of the better stealth games, with a "low" and "high" profile system. If you keep a low profile, your actions are much less noticeable than aggressive high profile actions. But of course, it also limits your speed and range. People around you act realistically: making comments if you do strange or rude things and alerting guards when you kill someone. If you're careless, you spend a good amount of time running and hiding, so it's a constant, enjoyable struggle between quiet, patient killings and outright bursts of violence. There are also mini-quests to help citizens, who later return the favor. Sneaking up behind someone and slipping a knife into their throat without anyone noticing is pretty damn fun too.

The climbing algorithm is really well done. Instead of a set path, the system figures out if your next movement is plausible given the map and your position, and then transitions you into the appropriate animation seamlessly. The character looks absolutely beautiful and smooth when scaling walls, darting across beams, and leaping rooftops, all in motions that are determined ad hoc.

The art direction is great and the story is actually decent. It's preachy at times, trying a little too hard to make the targets "evil" and the code of the Assassins "good" (for example, not killing innocents). But I like how they didn't go for the obvious Holy Grail or Ark of the Covenant angle, and instead invented their own powerful icon.

Innovative as the game is, it's also immensely repetitive. While the climbing mechanism is awesome, the combat could use more work. Sword and hand-to-hand combos are well animated but very limited, and using the same old moves on the same old enemy patterns gets...well...old. The missions could use more variety, perhaps with different goals and citizen reactions in different cities, or more mini-games aside from capturing flags. Once you complete two or three assassinations, you pretty much have played every scenario the game has to offer. All the missions follow the same steps and the beauty of the world can only hold your attention so long.

I think there are sequels planned, so hopefully they carry over the good elements and add more diverse missions and combat mechanics. That was definitely holding back this installment from true gaming greatness.