Released: 2007-11-17

Genre: Third Person Action Adventure

Platform:

Reviewed By: Joe Johnson

Killing Me Softly

Assassin’s Creed isn’t really a videogame, you know. I mean, in the really literal sense I suppose it is, but as far as actually playing the damn thing, it really just handles things nicely on its own.

When you look at the box art for the game, or watch one of the demonstration videos, you see a rooftop guard screaming as a guy in a white cloak jumps onto his back and drives a blade into his neck. Everybody wants to do that. I wanted to do that yesterday, when a driver honked at me and caused me to drop my keys in the mud. I wanted to sprint wildly after him, spring from rooftop to rooftop behind landing on his hood and ending his life with cold steel. You’ve felt the same thing, don’t deny it.

Assassin’s Creed doesn’t really let you do this. It happens in the game all the time, sure, but you never really have much to do with the actual killing. A guard stands on a rooftop high above you, just waiting for a good stabbing. You, the agile killer Altair, press up on your controller and hold a button. Suddenly, the nimble Prince of Persia knockoff is scaling the building, darting between handholds, dancing up the side without a damn bit of feedback from you. When you finally reach the top, you hit another button and wham, you get a six second clip of the kill. Much like pushing PLAY on your VCR, you totally just witnessed that murder. Too bad you weren’t really involved.

There’s really nothing to Assassin’s Creed. Sure, it’s a visual masterpiece full of buzz words like “immersive world” and “historical accuracy,” but it also blows its load in the first hour and shows you every pathetic thing it has to offer, dripping awkwardly down your skirt as you contemplate a cuddle. Except Assassin’s Creed doesn’t want to cuddle, it wants to fool around for another 12 hours even though you’re already covered in splooge.

But let’s step away from this nasty metaphor and take in the sights. Assassin’s Creed really is beautiful. It encourages you to wander around the world simply by being a world that looks worthy of exploring. Temples, castles, mosques, cathedrals and houses can be scaled from top to bottom. People congregate in crowded marketplaces. Town criers scream propaganda on the front steps of important buildings. Guards patrol every corner. It really does feel like a living, breathing world that reacts to your very actions. Punch a beggar in the face and people will shout at you. Stab a guard in the face and everyone panics. Leap off a giant building into a bale of hay and, well, nobody notices, but you get the idea.

Players take on the role of a disgraced assassin that is given the important task of killing nine crucial targets corrupting the Holy Land during the Third Crusade. To complete his quest, he travels across the Kingdom to the cities of Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus, which are really quite impressive to see for the first time. You really start to get the impression that all this freedom of movement talk was for real and that you can honestly go wherever you damn well want.

Except, you can’t. As you sprint down the dark alleyways of Damascus and peer across rooftops in Jerusalem—only ever pressing a single button at a time because the game just loves to do everything for you—you keep hitting these blue barriers. Much like Grand Theft Auto 3, the world only opens up for you completely after you’ve completed a certain number of missions, forcing you to stay out of clearly accessible districts by sticking a clear, sparkly wall in your face. I wonder if that was a big problem in the Third Century, since it’s historically accurate.

And, on that subject, all of the science fiction shenanigans are really just a clever way for Ubisoft Montreal to explain away any anachronisms in the title. Oh, Jade Raymond may have told you otherwise, but a scientist in the game actually says, “Everyone speaks English in the Holy Land because the computer is just interpreting it that way. Any errors you see that don’t make sense are just a bug in the program.” That’s damn clever. This little trap door ensures that people can’t scream that it’s not factually accurate, because really, you’re just playing a simulation of historical events that didn’t really happen but that’s ok because this is just a videogame, remember?

Being a videogame, there are probably a lot of cool moves you can do that don’t happen in real life, right? Like the head stabbing analogy earlier, we don’t play games to recreate our reality, but to escape it, so, let’s have with the flashy murders! If the city guard sees you screwing about, they are liable to pounce on you for no reason at all. When you can’t be bothered to run and hide in a bale of hay or on a park bench—of all places—you can engage in some brutal close quarters holding of the trigger button.

See, blocking is hard. You and I, we’ve both had a long day and we can’t be bothered to block every sword thrust aimed at our gonads, so, Ubisoft Montreal accommodates by allowing you to hold a button and watch things happen. When an attack is coming, you can click another button and watch Altair kill people. There’s no real challenge to doing it, you just wait for the correct time and hit a button, then a short cutscene plays of swirling, twirling death. Even the moves you perform are totally random, giving you about as much control over the action as a fat man sitting on his remote control. He can shift slightly and change the channel, but changing the universe he ain’t. However, if the God of War school of combat strikes you as the pinnacle of gaming excitement, then I’m sure this title won’t give you any trouble.

At least, until you try the missions. For a game called Assassin’s Creed, you actually spend far more time eavesdropping on people and picking pockets than you do killing anyone. Before you can go after your intended target, you must tediously gather information through various means. This often involves sitting on benches and pressing the Y button, or holding down the B button while walking behind someone, or gathering flags on rooftops and other non-assassinating things. There are also about 12 towers in each section of the city that must be climbed before you can locate most of the missions, which is admittedly more fun than anything else.

If you persevere, your local guild contact in the city will give you the go ahead for the killing to begin. Finally, a chance to put these skills to use. Having walked every damn inch of the city at this point, you creep quietly across the rooftops, removing guards as you cleave a line straight towards the victim. As you draw near, security is far tighter, requiring you to make distractions and manipulate your enemies into opening a gap, clearing a path, pushing people aside until you run out of the crowd, leap into the air and—

--kill the guy just like anyone else.

Sure, now you have to run away again, but you’ve spent so much time at this point running from the guards and engaging in pointless combat that it won’t really tax you. I mean, all you have to do is hold down two buttons and let Altair get on with what he’s doing. After all of the planning, all of the waiting, all of the tedious, redundant missions that repeat endlessly throughout the entire game, everything comes down to a sequence that plays out no differently from any other you experience in the game.

It’s like finishing a 1,000 page novel, only to discover that instead of an ending, the creator has just copy-pasted the first five chapters into the back of the book, assuming that no one would ever make it that far. It’s outright ridiculous for a videogame in this day and age to have so little payoff after so much crap, but there you go. Assassin’s Creed, a game that makes killing people feel like doing the damn dishes.

However, the game isn't a total loss. Days after playing it, I was driving through town and I pulled up to a stop sign next to this First Methodist church with a tall bell tower. I sat there in my car for a few minutes, staring at the windows and the architecture, noting the handholds without thinking about it. It took me a moment before I realized what I was doing, but by that point, I’d already said it.

“I’m going to climb that bitch.”

So, I guess that’s something, right? It gets under your skin like a bad habit. Too bad Assassin's Creed is well worth breaking.