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.