Difficulty:

Just Right

Time Spent:

10 to 20 Hours

The Bottom Line:

"Total letdown"

Lets get something straight, Assassins Creed was "fresh" when it was first released. The concept was great and the thought of running through cities and jumping from roof top to roof top was extremely appealing. I followed Assassins Creed from its first trailer to its release. I held back on purchasing it for years (I was possessed by Halo 3 and Oblivion) at the time. After finally purchasing and playing it, I am greatly disappointed by the unused potential and some questionable design choices made by Ubisoft Montreal.

GAMEPLAY: The ability to free roam and perform awesome moves such as jumping from roof top to roof top, climb walls and other structures is the main highlight about the game. The controls for these actions are intuitive and simple to learn. Other then that, the game is extremely repetitive. The core game centers around being in a city and performing menial tasks in order to find and kill a target. This is repeated for each city. Even when finding the intended target, the fun of the kill is taken away as the game flashes into a cutscene. After playing older assasination games like Hitman: Blood Money, Assasins Creed falls short. The game has a few peculiarities. For example, galloping on your horse as you travel between cities attracts the guards attention but moving slowly past doesn't. This makes traveling between cities slow and tedious and rather painful.

GRAPHICS: The graphics in Assasin's Creed are great, rendering the Holy Land in all its glory. Nothing to complain about here.

SOUND: I am not sure if its my system or not, but the dialogue outside of cutscenes is rather muffled. And the voices of the pedestrians isn't that great either. What left me confused however, was how the protagonist Altair spoke with an American accent.

STORY: The storyline in Assassins Creed is rubbish. There. I said it. Besides ruining a perfectly good game with a sci-fi time traveling aspect, portions of the in game map is locked off due to not having them in memory.