A beautiful bore.
Let me first say I realize some people love this game. I'm not one of them. I'd certainly like to be one of them, but it ultimately depends on what you personally think is "fun".
Is "fun" gazing at lushly drawn and animated medieval figures in jammed cities with roughly the same amount of personality as a Ken & Barbie playset? Then you will have fun here. Is your idea of "fun" being railroaded from one mini-game objective to another with absolutely no chance to veer off-course? Then you, too, may find some fun here. Or perhaps your idea of "fun" is participating in clunky combat, button mashing with bad controller feedback, trying to follow a convoluted, boring plotline developed by entirely bland NPCs devoid of personality. Then perhaps Assassin's Creed is your game.
I get no pleasure out of hating well-received games, but I really can't pinpoint what it is about this game that makes it so popular.
Obviously, there's the graphics. It's a beautiful console game with a fresh artistic direction. Looks alone, Assassin's Creed can easily transport your eyeballs to another era. The animation is also incredilby well executed.
But the beauty is so plainly skin-deep. You play in these large Medieval cities but interact with hardly anyone except specific targets for the varied mini-games (Eavesdropping, Pickpocketing, Defend Citizen). You see hundreds of people pass you by, but they are nothing but human salad dressing -- robotic garnish devoid of humanity or speech, designedly solely to make cities look full of "life" and mask how completely empty and soulless they actually are.
I think I've realized what really is the most fun about Assassin's Creed, and that is the architecture. Climbing over it, looking at it, running over it, jumping over it, escaping from guards, running down alleyways, making daring rooftop leaps across markets below ... these are the moments when Assassin's Creed stops feeling like some developer's cool design document and actually achieves some adrenaline and whimsy and fun and interactivity. And how sad is that, for a game so lavishly praised and wonderfully marketed, all it really amounts to is jumping around a bunch of pretty buildings.
Well, at least I can trade this game away, hopefully to someone who can enjoy it more than I did.
