Assassin’s Creed – so I was never really interested in this series; to me it was the annual conveyor-belt slop, so I never bothered with it. But some anons here and there said the very first game was alright or at least worth checking out. So I did.
Though ultimately I enjoyed it more than I didn’t, the game very much solidified itself as the first truly “modern game” in my mind. Here you have every possible trope of modern gaming: regenerating health, waypoint marker counting down the steps, overbearing prompts that do all the gameplay, relentless handholding of what to press and what to do and where to go, plain white text on translucent rectangles, an orange-teal palette, and constant auto saves, although the latter ends up being a blessing since the game crashes every 30 minutes. Etc. You can find games with these individual elements that predate Assassin’s Creed, but I do believe this is where they all came together for the first time.
The takeaway, ultimately, is that the game mostly plays itself. As the sort of descendant of the platforming genre, which I am a big fan of, it is definitely a step down. It is still nominally fun to climb around medieval cities, but most of the fun comes from self-imposed challenges like scaling the viewpoints undetected. Yes, it is fun being able to climb anywhere you want, but it gets boring fast since there’s no skill involved and no consequences to anything. Combat is absolutely braindead; after you unlock the counter ability, it basically turns into a QTE to insta-win—very much an afterthought. Once you get the throwing knives, the game does get somewhat more interesting, and you actually have to restock them yourself by stealing more. There’s so much they could have done, but that’s the downside of sandbox games—most of the attention goes into sustaining them, and gameplay is secondary and very simplistic.
About the only thing the game does right is recreating the area of the Fertile Crescent in decent sandbox performance; it’s comfy to ride around. The problem is that there’s nothing to do; there are like 4 mission types copy-pasted over and over in the cities, and there is nothing to search for or to collect, whether within cities or outside. There are these flags you can find, but they are literally useless, just some achievement shit, useful only as autosave spots. And an even bigger problem is that you’re not even allowed to explore around at your leisure since you’re constantly under surveillance by the guards and have to use the blend mode where you walk slower than through molasses. Imagine if in GTA every time you passed by a cop, you had to slow to a walking speed. About the only thing you can do as a challenge is to look for and kill hidden Templars.
It would have been so easy to make it interesting with minimum effort—scatter some chests around, some collectibles, legendary treasures maybe; you’re in a fucking holy land; some currency to sell and buy stuff. Instead, the game basically disincentivizes you from exploring—it implies that you have to ride from one location to the next as quickly as possible, so the entire decently sized sandbox hub world ends up being useless.
There are a few rare moments when you have to infiltrate some place, like a highly guarded fortress, and have to study your surroundings to find a suitable approach and use all that climbing sandbox freedom to your advantage, and then it is quite fun.
Visually, the game does look pretty good, and like I said, it depicts that medieval Near Eastern vibe quite well. Certainly, that is the main draw of the game; as you ride down from a mountain range, an entire biblical city sprawls into view right before your eyes, it is quite breathtaking. And it is pretty impressive that they were able to make it all work as well as it does: seamlessly platforming across multiple surfaces and elevations in decently sized cities that are distinct from one another just about enough. I guess the payoff is that the game crashes like clockwork. On PC this wasn’t an issue as it didn’t actually brick the game, but on consoles you do have to restart almost every 20 minutes; hoo boy.
I don’t remember much about the music, which is telling, but Altair’s voice acting is hilarious.
The story is not that bad for a game like this; they at least tried to do something with it. Figuring out the plot as clues and hints are slowly revealed to you is alright. But the presentation of it is terrible and kinda undermines the experience. All you get are exposition dumps from still-standing models in idle animations. It’s funny though; this series is infamous for its indulgent, glitchy movieslop cutscenes, but here there isn’t a single one. It would in fact have benefitted from a few, given its simple story, but without going overboard like the rest of the franchise.
By about 2/3 of the playtime, it becomes mind-numbingly boring, doing the exact same 4 activities time after time, and the game feels out of content and over by that point. It’s pretty obvious they were more preoccupied with making the eye candy sandbox while the gameplay was secondary because nobody who cares about gameplay would be satisfied with what the game has to offer.
Still, at least it’s not a movie game, and you do get some mileage out of platforming if you’re a fan of the genre like me.