The year is 1191, and the Third Crusade is tearing the Holy Land apart. Saladin has captured the city of Jerusalem, and Richard the Lionheart has arrived with an army to take it back. Caught up in the war and beset by slavery, poverty and disease, the Kingdom of Jerusalem is a dark place, but all hope is not lost.

You are a member of the mysterious Brotherhood of Assassins, and as you delve into the heart of the crusade and the powerful wills that drive it, you will get a chance to alleviate the suffering, and punish the guilty. Silent, fast and deadly, you are Altaïr.

Developed by Ubisoft Montreal, Assassin’s Creed is a third-person stealth/action game. Playing as the assassin Altaïr ibn La-Ahad, you are allied neither with the Crusaders nor the Saracens, but sent to kill nine historical figures who are propagating the Crusades.

Your quest will take you across the Kingdom of Jerusalem to three major cities: Jerusalem itself which has recently been surrendered to the Saracens; the coastal city of Acre which serves as a stronghold for Richard the Lionheart; and the Saracen capital of Damascus.

Great care has gone into maintaining a sense of realism. Each city has a distinctly unique look and feel to it, and has been constructed to closely resemble how their medieval world counterparts were thought to look. The brotherhood of which Altaïr is a member is based on the original assassins, the sect of hashshashin; and the nine men that he is sent to kill are (with some artistic license taken) real persons of importance who died in the Holy Land around the year 1191.

The events of 1191 Palestine are not all of the goings-on in Assassin’s Creed though. The game also follows a storyline taking place in 2012, where one of Altaïr’s descendants ends up under great pressure to find out what exactly his ancestor was up to all those years ago.

This plot is rather minor in terms of time spent playing and feels more like an intermission in between Altaïr’s assassinations, but it has a significant impact on the story. As it appears, something that Altaïr did or saw during the time of the Third Crusade is of critical importance even many centuries later, to a point where some people will stop at nothing to find out just what it was.

While playing Assassin’s Creed, it’s easy to feel like Altaïr. The controls are intuitive and responsive, and leaping from rooftop to rooftop and grabbing onto walls doesn’t take much more than holding down a single button. Unlike in Ubisoft Montreal’s earlier Prince of Persia trilogy, there is no set “level path” to follow, nor any telltale flag poles or outcroppings to look for. Almost any kind of architecture you can see, you can also climb; so for any place you’re trying to get to, there’s a multitude of paths to take you there.

The combat system, while not all that deep, still features some variety. Altaïr carries several weapons, his main assassination tool being a blade concealed in a sheath on his wrist, complete with a spring-mechanism that can quickly eject it when the situation calls for it. It’s a good weapon for a quick kill, but using it successfully generally requires your target to be unaware of your intentions.

For general combat you also have a long sword and a dagger, the latter being a bit faster but suffering from shorter range. They handle pretty much the same, though. Finally, you carry a number of throwing knives that come in handy for taking out fleeing opponents, or when you happen to be spotted by faraway sentries.

Even when surrounded by hostile guards, the combat isn’t all that challenging, and after a bit of practice you’ll probably notice that you can take on entire patrols by yourself. Once you unlock the counterattack feature, you will also be able to dispose of enemies quickly and in very cinematic ways, depending on what weapon you use and your position in relation to that of your opponent.

Like with the acrobatics, it makes you look cool and feel skilled without actually having to do that much controller-manipulating. As you progress through the main story, you will also continuously receive better equipment and unlock new abilities, such as the abovementioned counterattack, or the ability to grab onto ledges in mid-fall.

The core gameplay, and the general feel and atmosphere of the game, are without a doubt Assassin’s Creed’s strongest points. Superbly motion-captured and with excellent graphics, it’s a pleasure just watching Altaïr make his way from one place to another.

In the major cities, whether you gently push your way through ubiquitous crowds who have no idea of your true nature, or watch from a tower high above street level; the game really manages to make you feel like a predator. You can be like a lion moving among sheep, or like a bird of prey gliding silently above them.

Even in the fairly large “Kingdom” area that lies in between all of the cities, you get a sense of immersion just from riding around. The horseback riding in Assassin’s Creed feels realistic like nothing we have seen before, even in games that feature horses as a much more central part.

When the dust rises up off the ground as you slowly trot your horse through the middle of a small village to seem inconspicuous to a passing crusader patrol, it’s like you can almost feel the heat of the Sun on your shoulders even as you sit by the screen. Assassination has never felt this up close and personal before.

However, in spite of the attention paid to detail in making the world and its inhabitants seem alive, Assassin’s Creed is not an RPG. Much like in a Grand Theft Auto world, other than killing them, there is very little you can do to interact with people that aren’t directly involved with your quests. Passers-by will get angry if you bump into them or comment if they see you climb a wall, but that’s about it.

The audio works fairly well too. In the cities there is a lot of hustle and bustle as you’d expect, with merchants, beggars and town criers calling out; though after some time, the messages will start to feel very familiar. As you scale a high building, the noise will start to gradually soften and die down, and when you reach high enough it will be near quiet, save for the wind and the screeching of the occasional eagle.

So far, it would seem like Assassin’s Creed could be a great game. It looks great and plays very well, and it manages to tell a good story as well as making you feel like an assassin. On one point though, it falls short.

Explaining their original smash hit Halo, Bungie Software employees talked about a concept that was at the core of their game design, called “30 seconds of fun”. The point of this was to time and again put the player in heart-pounding, roughly half-minute long intervals of great gameplay before offering some respite. Variations on this will then repeat over and over throughout the game. As long as they managed to nail those 30 seconds of fun, the entire game would by extension be fun too.

Ubisoft Montreal, it seems, has utilized a similar development strategy, but not quite nailed it. You certainly have your 30 seconds, as most things you do in Assassin’s Creed are great fun, the first time around – but you will end up doing them over and over again, and eventually the novelty wears off.

As it stands, when you get an assassination assignment, you go to the city where your target can be found, and once there you will have to do some reconnaissance in order to find a good time and place to strike. There are a handful of these recon quests you can do, such as pickpocketing, eavesdropping, and beating down criers for information.

While moving around a city you also have some other side quest options, like scaling the district’s high buildings to get a better view of the area, and more points of interest revealed on your map; or saving citizens harassed by city guards, which will make them help you in turn when you are in similar trouble.

All these side quests are decent in their own right, but after your very first assassination mission you will probably have done them all at least once, and subsequently know exactly what to expect when you get to a new city. Toward the later missions of the game, the “reconnaissance” you have to do will feel like little more than a checklist of objectives that you’ve already completed ten times each.

Producer Jade Raymond mentions in one interview how repetition is something they’re definitely trying to avoid in Assassin’s Creed, when ironically enough it ends up being the game’s greatest shortcoming. Closing up on the halfway point you will have been in each of the three major cities once, by which time you will to some extent have experienced the best the game has to offer, and it’s not until toward the end that things start becoming really interesting again.

If Assassin’s Creed could somehow have extended its “30 seconds of fun” from the first half of the game and made it last all the way, it would have been a truly great game. As it stands, it’s “merely” a very good one. The more you are into the type of games that make you feel like you are the character you are playing, the more forgiving you are likely to be with the element of repetition. Even if you are not that kind of gamer though, we feel that you should still try Assassin’s Creed out at least once.

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When Creed was first released in 2007 we were assured that the PC release would be close behind. For whatever reason (and there have been many speculated) this didn’t happen and we were left waiting for the better part of another year before it finally arrived, bringing with it a fair number of problems I might add. So it begs the question, was it worth the wait?

That, of course, is entirely a matter of personal opinion. And in my opinion I would have to say that it was. The system requirements are almost frighteningly high, being described on the Official Ubisoft forums as having been made for some mystical future computer.

Having said that, my own PC is far below even the minimum requirements in a number of areas and, apart from the now infamous random crash bug, I’ve had no trouble at all running the game smoothly on a 1024×768 resolution with all settings apart from crowd density at the highest level. This, of course, has lead to some rather poor frame rates in places, but I think it stands as a testament to just how well the game has been coded that I can even run the game at all.

It really is a joy to play. Each of the five main maps have been beautifully rendered, and whilst retaining a sense of familiarity are each distinctly unique in their own way. From the small village of Masyaf where the Assassin stronghold resides, to the bleak, utilitarian city of Acre painted in wide swaths of grey, giving the city as a whole the appearance and feel of nothing less than an huge, old English castle past it’s hey-day.

The maps themselves are also rather extensive. Even the smallest of them, Masyaf, takes a full five minutes just to walk from the gate to the entrance to the Assassin stronghold I even posted a video on YouTube to show this, using the Massive Attack single Teardrop which has so expertly been used to advertise UK. And with Altaïr’s impressive stride it can be surmised that the distance is at least somewhere akin to a mile, if not more.

Having said that, you can take a more direct route over buildings, thus cutting out much of the twisting and turning between them, but this still will take you a good two minutes. And as already said, Masyaf is an extremely small map compared to the rest of the game.

Having said that, Assassin’s Creed is not without it’s failings. The extended delay for the PC release of the game has lead to no small amount of enmity from a not insignificant number of people. And then to find that even in spite of the delay there are still a number of persistent problems has not helped the matter. Even the recently added 1.02 patch seemed to have done little to rectify the situation.

I myself am now afflicted by an occasional freeze which was not a problem before applying the patch. It has also been noted, again in the Ubi forums, that the game is extremely fragile to other programs running in the background, and since those of us who use computers extensively are all to aware of the dangers of not making use of programs such as AVG Anti-viral and Spybot – Search and Destroy (amongst a plethora of others) this, again, has caused some amount of consternation amongst the PC gaming community. Especially since the 1.02 Patch listed a fix for the Alt + Tab issue which, so it seems, has done nothing whatsoever to solve the problem.

Of course, I am not a programmer so I would advise patience as Assassin’s Creed is clearly a complicated game, containing some of the best collision physics I have seen in any game. Long gone are the days of sliding through NPCs and bumping into objects that really should not be anywhere near close enough to have any impact on the protagonist.

Of course, during some of the more action oriented sections of the game, most notably during the counter attacks, I have been known to disappear into a wall for a moment, but this is as close to perfect as I suspect we are likely to see for some time.

The game really is a true technological marvel, with an involved, if somewhat linear, plot-line and a diverse cast of characters that we are sure will be expanded on even further in the following instalments. The movements of Altaïr are fluid and extremely well rendered, as are the plethora of NPCs that you will interact with throughout the course of the game.

It has, however, been commented on by some that the number of skins in game is limited at being approximately only two-hundred. But you must consider that a lot of the skins you will see repeated are from guards and knights who, obviously, would look not at all dissimilar to one another as they are all in the employ of their respective Lords and Fiefdoms.

Another issue which has caused a lack of satisfaction for some of the PC audience is the inclusion of the four new mission types. None of which are essential to the game, and do very much feel like a last minute addition as a vain, and somewhat misguided attempt to appease the disgruntled PC users.

We would have much preferred a game that was less problematic than one which had been given a few extra tid bits purely as a “sorry it took so long”. However, in spite of all this, I still think the game was well worth the wait. Yes, it still has it’s persistent problems, but as the time goes by patches will be released and stability will be improved.

Also, we have to remember, this is an extremely high end game, and some of us just do not have the necessary system resources to run the game efficiently. I know we’re all sick of hearing the “it’s your system, not the game” excuse. But we have to accept that in a large number of cases this is true.

In closing, I would highly recommend the game to any, and fiercely defend my decision to do so. Most importantly we must bear in mind that this is the first game in a trilogy (and perhaps more if the game does well enough, which it certainly seems to have done so far) and the opening chapter is always the hardest to execute because you have to build everything from the ground up.

Assassins’ Creed is a year old now, and I am certain that Ubi have been taking a lot of attention of to what people have been saying about it. Both in favour and against. Come May 28th, when we get our first official announcement about Assassin’s Creed 2, I think we should be privy to some exciting news to expand on this original, and engaging franchise.

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