Assassin’s Creed Review

Ah, Assassin’s Creed. I really wasn’t planning on playing this game until my friend let me borrow it the other day. This game is great, but it definitely has some minor flaws.

Let’s start out with the graphics. This game is gorgeous; there’s no other way to describe it. The lighting, the textures everything is beautiful. The framerate is smooth and the draw distance is very good. Any graphics whore would faint when seeing this game. Well, since we’re on the topic of graphics, I’ll bring up the animations. The best animated game I have ever seen. Everything looks realistic and has a different animation. The climbing up the walls and all of the combat looks totally fluid without the usual jaggedness usually attributed to video games. Everything about this game visually is stunning.

Now onto the slightly less enthusiastic part: the gameplay. No, I’m not saying it’s bad, it’s just that it’s not great. The actual combat pales in comparison to the graphics but by no means is it bad. The swordplay revolves around a counterattack system in which you wait for the enemy to begin to attack, then gruesomely kill them. The scaling of various buildings is insanely fun; It’s kind of like how you loved climbing buildings in Crackdown. Again, it gets a very good score on this part.

So thats marked off the list; let’s get to the story. The story is actually very interesting, if dull at times. That may seem like an oxymoron to you so let me explain. The whole premise the story that (SPOILER) you go back into your ancestors memories is quite interesting. But, it’s plagued with overlong scenes with you just listening to other characters speaking. Sure you can move around a bit and change the camera angle, but that gets old fast. One, thing I’ll give this game is that some of these scenes are actually quite gut wrenching. During one scene, you actually helplessly see a prisoner’s legs being broken ruthlessly by a crazed doctor. These scenes have gone relatively unmentioned by most reviewers, so I thought I should mention them.

The rest of it is pretty good. The AI is very good for the citizens of the city, but is merely passable for the soldiers, because I’ve killed a soldier right, in front of another and him not do anything. But, that only happens rarely. Getting from one city to another, I got lost a few times, and it gets annoying, but thankfully you can skip it after one time.

All in all, this is a great game. I would definitely recommend picking it up if you haven’t got it already. If you liked Crackdown or Prince of Persia, you will probably like this game. At least give it a rent.

Rating: