Assassin's Creed tells the story of Altair.........'s descendant Desmond, who, for reason's unfolding during the game, was kidnapped and thrown into a machine so that the company could read his memories and blah blah blah blah. The stories not bad, and well told/interesting enough to be followed but honestly I think most people got this game to run around a huge city, climbing on buildings, and sneaking up stealthy and killing people; and to that effect Assassin's Creed delivers, for the most part.
All the cities look wonderful, and they are gigantic. When they say you can go anywhere, they mean it (once all the entire city is unlocked). The H.U.D. is pretty simple, and from my experience rather user friendly. It's easy to tell if someones about to attack you or not. Assassinations look pretty cool, and it's nice to have the option to do a stealthy kill or a high profile, "look at me I'm jabbing a blade into someones face", kill. It's also pretty cool that you can escape by climbing on buildings and running across the city by rooftop.
The combat is........well it's simple. In the beginning of the game (after your weapons are taken away) you can execute a simple combination, and do slashing attacks. Once you unlock the counter attack feature, Combat takes on a much simpler role. Block and wait to counter, once that happens, you execute a one hit killing move and that's done with. Gets slightly tiresome to keep doing this but honestly I wasn't looking for an indepth fighting game with this. It would've been nice for combat to have been fleshed out alittle more, but you're supposed to be a master assassin so pulling of crazy sword counters seems fitting.
Graphics wise, it's beautiful. Easily one of the best looking games out. The city is huge and very rarely (if ever) do you see any sort of dip in the framerate. You can look out off of a high point in the city and see every building with not problem. Textures don't have any problems loading, everything just works. The only downside is occassionally you'll see some technical "hick ups". Sometimes guards or Altair, sort of, do things that wouldn't happen. Like Altair's sword hitting left of a guard and the move still being executed, or a few times I had soldiers disappear mid- counter. So you'll experience those types of problems, less then often, but more then normal.
Free running is awesome in this game, and not very hard at all. You'd think that it would be better for it to be a complex operation but in the midst of running from every guard from here to Palestine it's nice to be able to fluidly move.
Now for the big complaints.
One: You can't skip dialog scenes. At the beginning of ever mission you are greeted with a very long dialog scene from your mentor. The scenes are usually 3+ minutes and unskippable. This gets really irritating when you want to do less talking and more stabbing.
This also gets really irritating when you shove your blade into your targets back, only to have him have enough life and frame of mind to have a 4 minute monologue ready for you. Honestly if you go up and stab someone in the spine or face, I don't think they'll have enough breath/frame of mind to sit there and explain why what you did was wrong.
Second: Side missions are a very repetitive affair. For every assassination (there's about 9 I believe) you will have to do atleast 3 or so side missions. There are only about 5 side missions in the whole game, and they are forever repeating. Now, mind you, I did every side mission in the game because I wanted to get the most out of it, and it took me awhile to beat because I would get bored of it and put it down for a week. However doing all the side missions makes the main assassination easier to escape from. I just wish that Ubisoft had but in more side missions. Hell I wish ubisoft put in more assassinations. It's just constantly doing the same three side missions is alittle, odd.
All in all, a great game, but it leaves you with a sense that it could've been alot more. No regrets though, worth it despite it's pitfalls.
