Reviews// Assassin's Creed - Xbox 360

To do a bit of the old ‘parkour’ you just hold down the right trigger and the action button and you’re away… climbing higher and higher above the rooftops until you reach one of the toweringly high "synchronization points". These are where you will find out where all the local hidey-holes are (hay bales, rooftop gardens and so on), and which of the city’s denizens you need to rescue, interrogate, pickpocket or kill in order to finally get to each of your nine victims.

Despite what some reviews are saying, the in-game combat techniques are simple and fairly straightforward and mostly enjoyable for the cool animations. While this is all plenty of fun at first, after a (worryingly) short while (an hour or two) this becomes a little bit, dare I say it, stale and repetitive. It was around the two-hour mark, when I was getting a little bit bored of hiding out in yet another hay-bale, that the realization that Assassin’s Creed was merely a very good game instead of the groundbreaking classic I’d been promised hit me like a freight train; a futuristic freight train that had travelled back into the past due to a badly cobbled together storyline.

So, what to say about that story twist? Every time I saw those funny graphical glitches that float around characters in preview builds of the game, I’ve asked Ubisoft reps what they were only to be met with a knowing look and a knock of the index finger on the nose in a “we’d love to tell you, but that would spoil everything” type way.

ANOTHER NOT REALLY SPOILER – But you’ve been warned
Well, I’m in a spoiling everything type mood, so get ready kids and skip straight down to the ‘scoring bit’ the rest of this page if you don’t want to miss the (not actually a) spoiler, because here it comes. You’ve no doubt read in on that pesky internet already anyways.

Assassin's Creed is set in the future. You are actually a bartender and ex-assassin called Desmond (Desmond!) who has been kidnapped by a shady organisation that is seemingly trying to mine some ‘genetic memory’ information he has somewhere in his brain about his ancestor. Yes, his ancestor is Altair. Then it all goes a bit Matrix with poor old Des using an ‘Anima Machine’ to relive this memory. Barking mad and utterly stupid to reveal this twist minutes into the game. Ubisoft dropped the ball big time on that front.

And no, I’m not going to say, “Or did it?” in a Life on Mars kind of way – even if I don’t know how it ends.

Overall, Assassin’s Creed is both a good game and a mild disappointment. It deserves your attention because it’s genuinely different and hugely fun. The mere fact that it is trying to do something unique is a bold and brave move by Jade Raymond and her team at Ubisoft, Montreal. However, the game was always going to find it hard to live up to the hype-machine that Ubi has been building around it since E3 last year. That was when I sat in the Convention Centre bar with a bunch of other games journos after seeing the initial demo of the game in a stunned silence. At the time many of us thought that we were seeing what the future of (back then) next-gen gaming had to offer. We have been slightly cheated in that regard. Only slightly, though.


SPOnG score: 79%

The NPC artificial intelligence, repetitive dialogue along with the niggling and frankly unforgivable little graphical glitches and the increasingly unfulfilling nature of the gameplay means that Assassin’s Creed falls short of the glorious video game it promised to be. It will be remembered more (by this reviewer at least) for its unique high concept rather than for it’s deeply engaging Gameplay. A shame. Close, but no cigar.