Reviews: Assassin's Creed

This week is a very downtempo week for me, with all my friends gone and school wrapped up, I'm working 9-5, M-F, and after work I'm just kind of bumming around. From several of my friends, I've heard Assassin's Creed 2 is a terrific game. I don't really buy video games, I use Gamefly, and since it just came out, it's certainly not available. That's okay, I can wait. So I decided this week to rent the first game, I figured it might be useful to play it before the second. My friends at work that had played the game said it was "pretty good" albeit repetitive, but worth a play-through.

They were wrong. I'm not a intense gamer (anymore) but I play through maybe one game a month, or every other month, because it's pretty fun. I can unequivocally say this is the worst game I have played, in a long time. Which is surprising a bit, because the online reviews were decent and my friends said it was an entertaining game. But I got about 50% through and was sick of it already, I can't stomach the idea of finishing it, even with the massive amount of free time I have this week, I'd much rather go to the gym.

Where to start? I'll hit the plot, in one word, trite. It's 2012, and you're some random guy mugged off the street to run through a memory machine and reclaim your "genetic memory" of an Arabic assassin in the Third Crusades. Or at least I think you're Muslim, it never really mentions. For whatever reason, your genes can remember specific lectures from your master from 1000 years ago, but not finding the freaking Holy Grail. It's not actually the Holy Grail, but it's some similar "deity" item. So you have to play through your ancestor's memory to get it, all the while you are being used by this modern corporation that wants this deity item. Indiana Jones and Lucasfilm, you probably have a lawsuit. I forget to mention most of the time you're not seeking this "deity" item, you're running on errands killing guys that your master think is corrupting the world. And voila, turns out they aren't that bad and your master is the bad guy. Boy, you never saw that coming.

Anyways, it's a video game, so I'm willing to stomach a lot of stupid stuff. That is pretty awful, but as long as the game play was entertaining, so be it. It's not. One of my friends, and several online reviews label it "repetitive." This is the understatement of the century. They did well to allow you to climb cities and run across rooftops, but there's 5 things you do:
1st- Travel to cities that are way too far away.
2nd- Interrogate people, consisting of listening to them talk, then following them until they get in an alleyway and beat the crap out of them.
3rd- Pickpocket people, which is the same as interrogating them, except you press a button to steal an item instead of beating them up.
4th- Save citizens- For some reason, the 3rd Crusades was a time where civil police were even more corrupt than NOPD during Katrina. They gather in groups, and push around citizens calling them thieves. You kill any guards nearby. Woohoo.
5th- "Synchronize" your maps, which to expand your barely intelligible map, you have to climb a tower, look around, and then jump off. Climbing a tower consists of holding "free run" and waiting till you get to the top.

Oh, and occasionally, you actually kill these bad guys your master tells you to. But you have to do each of these several times to gather evidence your guild is voluntarily withholding from you (because you're reckless) before killing them. Mindnumbing.

The game was praised for the "awareness" factor it gives to crowds, if you kill someone in plain view, citizens get scared and guards get angry. This is innovative? Fable 2, and probably a dozen other games had this. Regardless, when you flee an area, people remember what you look like and you won't necessarily immediately escape attack. For some reason, you cannot hide in an alleyway and restore your status to "unknown." There are four things- passing by monks, haystacks, roof "gardens", and benches. For some reason, if you sit down on a bench when guards are not looking at you, they forget about you. But not, for example, if you are on a rooftop 2 miles away. Unless that rooftop has a "roof garden" which is a little gazebo with curtains. All of this just reeks of very rigid "in-the-box" thinking. As does the integration part, where you learn how to play the game. A good game will make this entertaining and not obviously "we are teaching you how to do everything." The developers probably said "screw it" and spent time teaching guards to look everywhere but haystacks, roof gardens, monks, and benches. Oh, and speaking of repetitivity, the AI comments are unbelievable. Everyone says the same thing, people getting mugged by soldiers say one of two things, the soldiers mugging say maybe two or three, but it seems incredibly lazy of the developers to have so little variation when you spend the entire f***ing game doing these activities.

I've savaged the innovative AI (which is anything but) and the awful plot, let's talk about combat. It is terrible. Combat doesn't make a game, it's a confluence of a lot of factors, for example Fable and Fable 2 are not particularly challenging, but they are still top-notch games in my book because they have decent plots and entertaining quests. This has 5 quests (see above) repeating over and over, in environments that look the exact same. (It is the Middle East) Anyways, on to combat. In what may have been a redeeming factor of the game, it falls short. Danny de Vito short. It is painfully simple, the enemies are impossible to kill if you just hack and slash (bonus) yet you can defend against 10 enemies pretty easily, and kill them by countering. Which consists of defending, and then pressing X when they start to attack. It is stupid.

Character development is another important part of a game. I guess since I've been using Fable as a "world game" benchmark, I'll say Fable does pretty well in this. The GTA games excel here. Assassin's Creed does not. I read some reviews where they say the character is "fascinating" in his complexity, or some similar crap. I want to beat them over the head with my Xbox, because this is the most one-dimensional stupid character I may have ever played, and given I played Donkey Kong as a kid, that's saying something. The main character has a stupid voice, it's supposed to be ominous I suppose, but it rings even more fake than my British accent would to a Mancunian. He's a rebel, who doesn't follow the tenets of the Assassin's Creed, and thus, an outcast. Wow. A non-conformist. Will the innovations never stop? As for the original character mugged by this evil corporation (another brilliant new innovation) there is zero character development, at least in the 50% of the game or so I played. He's a bartender. He doesn't know why he's there. That's about it, no mention of how the evil corporation found out his DNA contains evidence from 1,000 years back of an Assassin, which the memory machine can amazingly skip to the important sections.

All in all, this is an awful game. I started it, wasn't that impressed, but figured the next day I'd continue to see if it got better. I did that Sunday, Monday, and now today, but I will not be making that mistake again. The graphics are totally unimpressive too, some areas have pretty nice vistas, but are simple objects are completely undetailed. It would look totally mediocre on a large HDTV. On my video game scale (Buy it, Gamefly it, Avoid it) it will not surprise you to know this is an Avoid it game. Seriously, the most boring unentertaining uninspired piece of crap since Donkey Kong 64. It makes me very, very hesitant to pick up the 2nd one...though I must say, the location of Renaissance Italy is more interesting to me. Maybe this was a key factor in me not liking it, but ancient history isn't very appealing to me, and Middle Eastern history even less so. I don't know why, it's like China, I have no interest in going there. Ditto to Syria, Israel, and northern Egypt, but I just wasted the last few days doing it on this worthless POS of a game.

ps- I will give them minor props for the historical accuracy of the game. Apparently almost all the characters (including the bad guys you kill) were real historical figures, though I doubt each of them were assassinated. It doesn't come close to making up for how awful of a game it was, though.