Assassins Creed

Assassins Creed is the kind of game which infuriates me. The gameplay itself is unbelievably fun, engaging, and constantly and impossibly cool, but the story, the menus, the way in which the game handles it’s delivery is so unbelievably flawed that it’s difficult to talk about anything else than the bits which constantly shit me.

The basis of the story is that you are a man who jumps around a lot, trying to find a succession of people who have un-necessarily fancy clothes and stab them, at which point you’ll be forced watch them lie on the ground bleeding for 2 minutes, at which point their clothes have been sufficiently ruined and you can go back home. Or maybe it’s about something else. As I play games mostly on my laptop, sound is usually a luxury I don’t have, and so I’ll play on mute with subtitles so that I still get the story, and if it’s a particularly atmospheric game, I’ll simply wait until I can get sound before playing. Assassins Creed is not nearly atmospheric enough to warrant headphones, and it also doesn’t have subtitles. I’ve no idea why I’m doing what I’m doing, so now I’m the friggin’ medieval fashion police, with a very over-the-top enforcement strategy.

The problem with this is that the game spends a lot of time telling you its story, and while it does this, it always, always takes control from you and forces you to stick around the same area whilst someone tells you something. Playing on mute, it’s like you’ve decided that the place you’re in requires exceptionally close inspection and that you should hang around for a while. There is absolutely no reason that these couldn’t have been skippable, nobody bought this game so that they could hear a succession of ludicrously bearded men whinge that the man over in the church said some mean things. On the plus side, you get to stride about dramatically during these cutscenes, so it becomes a very entertaining Days Of Our Lives style soap opera if you’ve got the mood to make your own dialogue.

The gameplay is by far and away the star here. Running around the rooftops of a medieval city, getting into fights with every guard in the city, and accidentally knifing a street beggar when you press the wrong button are all exceptionally fun, and the game seems to specialise in making you an accidental badass. At one point, after killing about 7 guards, the last guy standing decided (rather sensibly) that he had very little chance of killing me, and decided to leg it. I gave chase, because I’m pretty much just a greyhound dog chasing whatever mechanised rabbit is available, and as I was running, I ran into a crate. Rather than thudding into it and getting winded, I leapt up mid-stride, continued up off the crate, and landed on the fleeing man. I paused for a moment, thanked the gaming gods and then climbed a nearby wall, jumped a fence and fell off a roof.

The various cities you run around in are all realistic looking, there’s never any buildings which seem obviously placed for you to climb on,  and it’s rare that you’ll be stopped dead in mid-run whilst you’re trying to escape the guards by a lack of something to grab. The entire world feels natural, and barring the fact that there are benches EVERYWHERE, it really does feel like an organic city, which has spread and grown like a real-life town would.

To be honest, there’s a hell of a lot more that I could write here, and I’ve really barely scratched the surface of the gameplay itself, but it’s hard to praise a game when you’re spending a stupidly large amount of time doing things that aren’t fun, aren’t interesting, and aren’t the reason that you’re playing. I really recommend playing it, and it’s an amazingly fun game when the game lets you take control, but it’s just so frustrating at the times it doesn’t that I find it hard to speak about anything else.