Assassin’s Creed gives you something few other games can: an addiction inside an addiction: an addiction inside your addiction to video games.   And that addiction is one most of us will never have a desire to let have a chance to take hold of us.  And that addiction is killing. 

     About a third of the way into this game I started waking up every morning needing to play it.  Before I would wake up, shit, shower and then eat something and play a game.  Now I would wake up, boot Creed and wander through one of the streets of its many ultra-detailed, ultra-alive cities, and send some Middle-Eastern PUNK to his eternal dirt nap.  I would find maybe a civilian in the market, or maybe a lone guard wandering an alley, or an archer on a roof, walk up behind him and slit his fucking throat.  Oh yeah.  Or maybe I would just say fuck it, and in a dead sprint, leap onto him and jam my wrist blade, balls deep into his face. Or maybe… alright, hold on, ‘gotta catch my breath.

     What I’m getting at here, is just how well this game immerses you in its world.  You play an assassin in the days of the Templar, probably like 1300 AD or so,  who has violated a few rules of his sect and has to atone by killing nine men instrumental in your organization’s master plan of world peace.  Of course it’s not all black and white, and as you learn, things are not as they seem.  But the real fun here isn’t in the story or the message, but in the immersion.

     You’ll travel to great cities - Damascus, Acre, Jerusalem and many others, on missions of death.  These cities are huge and full of people with different personalities and different views of who you are.  Some want you dead, others ignore you, others are suspicious of you and some are begging for coin.  You can change their views toward you by how you act.  For instance you may see a young lady being harassed by some militia.  Step in and massacre the fools and she will repay you by perhaps telling her brother about you, who will come to your aid if you’re in the area again. Or maybe she’ll let a local group of monks know about what you did, and they will let you disguise yourself within their ranks to move more freely through hostile areas.  Maybe you’ll be wandering through the marketplace a little faster and more aggressively than you should be, and you cause someone to drop their things and they yell for a guard.  Depending on if you are wanted or not in the area, you are either going to have to cool it down or maybe flee or fight for your life.  People remember what you did and where, causing you to act in different ways in various parts of different cities.

     The control scheme is interesting, and you’ll definitely need a gamepad for this.  I recommend one set up like a PS2 pad: two analogs, four face buttons, a digital hat switch, a start, select and four top left/ right buttons.  The four main buttons control various parts of your body.  Regularly, the head is used to look about via first person (default is third), the left hand arms a weapon, the right pushes people aside and the feet have you walk stealthily.  But hold down the aggressive button and your hand buttons change to attack or tackle and the feet are used to sprint and jump.  Also these buttons change depending on where you are. Riding a horse, the feet button becomes gallop and the left hand becomes attack and the right is dismount.  Being close to a wall, you get options like drop, grab and jump.  It’s all very intuitive, once you pick up the basic control scheme.  If you have the knife equipped and get close enough to someone, the left hand will turn to assassinate. Of course, there are hidden moves too.  My favorite is when you have your wrist blade equipped and sprint toward somebody and before reaching them, you hit attack, and you leap into the air and land on them, driving them to the ground with your knife into their throat.  Combat changes the buttons too, depending on all the skills you have learned.  You can grab people and throw them, execute sword slashes, break grabs, step forward, block and my favorite, counter, which allows you to turn someone’s attack against them, finishing them in an awesome, gore-rife, death move.  Also, some different mission types allow for more specialized controls.

     When you first enter a city, you have a main target, but first you need to gather intelligence about him.  You locate various high points in the city and climb them, hopefully stealthily, and hit the head button which allows you to survey the land, learning about areas where to gather intelligence.  This opens up mini-missions, which you can tackle in whatever order you wish, you don’t even have to do them all, even what cities you go to are your choice, a surprisingly non-linear game for one that was released on consoles first.  Some of these mini-missions include pick pocketing, interrogation, guard assassination and errand running.  Interrogations are fun: you listen to some guy speak publicly and then stealthily follow him until he reaches an isolated area.  Then you beat his face in until he talks.  These missions do get a little repetitive, but you can tackle them in different ways which helps take the monotony away and, of course, the payoff is great: your main target.  The main target is always in some hard to get at spot surrounded by guards.  He is an authority figure in the city and is usually respected and/or feared by all.  How you infiltrate his area of locale and how you kill him is entirely up to you.  Of course, once you nail him, you have to get away.

     When you have hostiles (people who want you dead) who can see you, a handy little meter by your health turns red. Normally, when you are safe, it is green and when you are around suspicious people, it is yellow, warning you how to act.  Running from hostiles, you must first break their line of sight, and then dive into either a hay bale or a gazebo on top of a roof.  This can seem simple and trite, but if they made it more complicated, well, the game may have been too complicated, or maybe they wouldn’t have anything to improve in Assassin’s Creed 2, which has recently been announced.

     I can’t imagine how that game is going to look considering how insanely gorgeous this game is.  It even looked amazing on my old Geforce 8800 dual core desktop.  What I am saying is you don’t need a killer rig to run this baby.  Which is good, because now this game can be had for anywhere from ten to five clams and no gamer should miss this title.  One serious gripe, though: you actually play a guy from the future who is inhabiting the memories of his ancestor through advanced technology, and part of the story progresses through these intermissions in the game.  I found this to detract from the immersion, and though it helps the story, and explains some of the game’s silliness, I thought the payoff wasn’t there.  Other than that, Assassin’s Creed is an unrivaled experience in interacting with huge numbers of people in live, changing cities and as an experience as a fictional assassin.

-jr

SCORE: 9 Exceptional