Assassin's Creed (2007, Xbox 360)

Format: Xbox 360
Developer: Ubisoft Montreal
Publisher: Ubisoft
Release Date: November 13, 2007
Playtime: 31 hours, 40 minutes (finished game, completed all side missions, did all viewpoints, did all save citizen missions, collected all flags, killed all templars, and earned all achievements)

My best friend Dylan is a huge fan of the Assassin's Creed series. Back when the first game came out I told him I would play through it. It took almost ten years, but I finally did it. This first game takes place in the (then) near future year of 2012. A bartender named Desmond Miles is kidnapped by the company Abstergo Industries, a giant pharmaceutical corporation which seems to be the equivalent of the Illuminati. Dr. Warren Vidic and his assistant Lucy force Desmond to use a machine called the Animus. Desmond has to figure out what Abstergo wants within his memories and how he is going to survive. This machine causes the user to relive the past memories of ancestors. In this case, Desmond's ancestor Altair. Altair was an assassin in the year 1191 during the Third Crusade.

At the beginning, Altair and two other assassins attempt to kill a man named Robert and retrieve the Ark of the Covenant. Altair breaks multiple rules of the assassins and fails the mission due to his arrogance. One of the other assassins is killed and the other loses an arm. However, the other surviving assassin still manages to retrieve the Ark (although Robert escapes). Al Mualim, the leader of the assassins, demotes Altair and takes away many of the his weapons due to his arrogance. From there Altair is instructed to assassinate nine targets to slowly regain his ranks and his honor. Along the way Altair soon learns that things are not as they seem. Altair has to get to the bottom of it and figure out what to do from there.

I enjoy the plot. The story in the Third Crusade has a lot going on and while at first it feels like a bunch of unrelated events it slowly starts to connect and come together. The modern day story is interesting as well and does eventually connect with the story in the past. While I do like the "real world" parts they unfortunately feel like they break up the action as after every few story missions the game suddenly pulls you out of the Animus. This makes the pacing feel somewhat uneven even if it does service the plot.

The game is broken up into a few distinct areas. There is Masyaf, the assassin's capital. It is a relatively small area of the game and mostly serves as an area for story purposes as you regular go back to talk to Al Mualim. Next is the Kingdom which is the largest area in the game. It is basically a large open area which connects all of the cities in the game. Horses are available here to ride to cross the territory faster. Lastly, there are three cities: Damascus, Acre, and Jerusalem. Each of these cities are broken up into three districts which are unlocked as the story progresses. At first you have to travel from point to point manually but about halfway into the game you become able to fast travel instead of having to go through the Kingdom to get to each city.

The game originally started as a Prince of Persia game before becoming its own IP. Some of the climbing and historical aspects of that series carry over here but for the most part it feels like its own series. 99% of your playtime will be inside the Animus with the "real world" parts basically just functioning as a framing narrative. Basically the gameplay is a combination of three elements: stealth, parkour, and combat.

Each of the areas in the game are filled with guards. As you move around the game you can draw attention of these guards. Sprinting, climbing, going to a restricted area (like a rooftop), or running into guards will set them off and make them come after you. From here you can either fight them all off in combat or run away and hide by either sitting on a bench, hiding in some hay, blending in with a group of scholars, etc. You have a marker which determines how much the guards see you. White means no one sees you, yellow means they are onto you, and red means they are suspicious. Once they are actually hunting you down it turns fully red. This is where the stealth elements comes into play. I have mixed feelings about the stealth elements.

On the one hand, I like the way it is designed and for the most part it works well. It is fun trying to sneak around and things like that. However, my big complaint here is that I feel like it is far too easy to set off the guards. Often I will be walking through the city and simply walking by a group of guards will put the city on alert. This makes travelling around the game far less enjoyable when I am constantly having to fight off guards. Hopefully in the future games they make it a little bit more difficult to set them off. One part that is a complete pain in the ass is that there are mentally disabled people in the game. These people will push you whenever you walk by. You cannot retaliate or kill them as they count as civilians so you lose health for doing so. They are very common and in one case I was working on a main quest and one of them pushed me into a group of guards which ruined my stealth and caused me to fight to about twenty guards.

For the most part the parkour elements are pretty solid. While sprinting you will automatically jump across gaps in front of you or grab onto objects and start climbing. Almost everything in the game is climbable and it comes pretty naturally after a while. The controls take a little getting used to. There was quite a few times where I was high up on a building and then Altair jumped off of it (to his death) instead of climbing higher as I intended. This wasn't a super common occurrence but it wasn't exactly rare either.

I am happy with the combat in this game. It feels similar to the later released Batman: Arkham series. In the game you have a short blade. You can walk upon behind an enemy and stealthily stab them in the back to avoid drawing attention to yourself. Most of the time combat will be done with your sword. You can block attacks as well as attack (of course). There are a couple of different moves in the game such as countering. Countering is when the enemy starts to attack you press the attack button instead which will either result in knocking the enemy to the ground of killing them. Lastly there are throwing stars. These do an instant kill and act as a ranged weapon. However, you have a limited amount and must pick pocket them off of civilians to get more.

There are also combo kills which are much harder to pull off. If you press the attack button the second your sword makes contact with the enemy then you will do an instant kill. In addition to these moves there are dodge moves and things like that. The combat is enjoyable although I found that I relied very heavily on counter attacks because trying to pull of combo kills often resulted in the enemy using a counter attack on me.

The graphics and sound within the game are very well done. For 2007 it is some of the best graphics I have seen. The number of people on screen is extremely impressive and the draw distance goes very far. The sound fits very well with the setting. My only complaint is that whenever your sneak bar is yellow (telling you to hide) it beeps incessantly which is obnoxious.

The game itself is broken up into "memories". Al Mualim assigns one to three assassinations that you must complete. With each assassination comes a district in one of the cities which is opened up to explore. When you enter a district you have to find tall buildings known as viewpoints. Climbing to the top of these and pressing the sync button reveals more of the map. Often it ends up being necessary to go to all of the viewpoints in a district to make the map usable. At this point there are six side missions to complete within a district. Before you are allowed to move onto the actual assassination you must complete two (later three) of the six side missions within a district (although the game will let you do all six if you want).

These side missions can get monotonous as there is not a very large amount of variety. There are basically five types of side missions. Eavesdropping is definitely the easiest as you just have to sit on a nearby bench and listen into a conversation. Then there is pick pocketing which requires you to follow a target and take an item from them without them noticing. Next is interrogation. In these you must find a target and follow them into an alleyway where you fight them with your fists until they give you information.

Last is the informant. The informant can give you two types of missions. First is flag collecting. In these you have a time limit to run through a small space and pick up a lot of flags (about twenty). On the internet a lot of people seem to say these are difficult but I had no trouble with them. The informant may also assign assassinations. In these you must assassinate one to five targets without alerting the guards (and in the later ones you also have a time limit). This is probably the most difficult because it is very easy to set off the guards which will automatically end the mission and make you start again.

While that sounds like a decent amount of variety, it really isn't. If you do all of the side missions you will do each of these about ten times (give or take). After completing the minimum number of side quests you can start the main assassination. These usually have a cutscene and then you have to kill the target. The game gives you a lot of freedom in how you achieve this. Stealthily is the best way, but often I got caught so I ended up having to win with pure combat (which also works). After that you have to get back to the assassin's bureau with the city on high alert, then do it all over again. There are a total of nine of these main assassinations which must be completed.

The main missions are definitely the best part of the game. Doing only the bare minimum amount to complete the game, I'd guess that it would take about ten hours. It is the side content that adds another twenty or so hours to the game. In addition to the viewpoints and side missions (which are technically side content but it would be very difficult to make progress without them) there are also save citizens. In every district there are a handful of citizens that get hassled by a group of guards. You have to kill all of the guards and talk to the civilian to complete it. Side missions, viewpoints, and save citizens will appear on your map which makes them easy to find.

What doesn't appear on your map are the collectables. First are Templars. There are sixty Templars hidden throughout the game which must be found and killed in combat. These are probably the hardest opponents in the game so it is best to kill them stealthily if possible (although most of the time they are in a corner which makes it difficult) or at the very least fighting them one on one with no guards around. Second are flags. Flag collecting takes up a very large amount of time within the game as there are a whopping four-hundred-twenty flags! Since they don't appear on your map it is practically required that you use the internet to keep track so you don't end up wandering around a city or the kingdom for hours on end looking for flags. These collectables take up a large amount of time and honestly are not very enjoyable to complete. It is incredibly tedious.

Completing this game took a lot of planning. There are multiple achievements in the game which are "missable", meaning that if you don't do it right then you have to restart the entire game to get another shot at it. As long as you pay attention they aren't very difficult though. These achievements are ones like "get 85% of glitches". In that case the screen will flicker during a cutscene and you have to press a button to change the camera angle (this is a "glitch"). Another is that you have to exhaust every dialogue with Lucy whenever you get out of the Animus. Again, not hard to do but easy to forget and mess up.

Beyond that were a few grinding kinds of achievements. The harder ones were to kill one-hundred guards in a single life, survive ten straight minutes in a single battle, and get fifty combo kills. Other than paying attention to the achievements I made sure to do all of the side content as soon as it was available. Most of the side content was enjoyable but keeping track of and collecting all of the flags took a long time and wasn't very much fun. The best part of the game was definitely the main story assassinations.

There are three versions of this game available. Usually from this generation I gravitate toward the PlayStation 3. However, in this case the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions are the same except that the 360 version has achievements while the PS3 version was released before trophies existed (which is why I played the 360 version). One year after the consoles versions came a PC release. This version is called the "director's cut" because it adds more mission types to counter complaints of the game's monotony. However, the PC version has no form of achievement support. Due to this, I played the 360 version but later down the line will be giving the game a second playthrough for PC to see this extra content. Hopefully a remaster will be released at some point which has trophy/achievement support as well as these extra missions from the PC version.

Overall, I mostly had a positive experience with Assassin's Creed. The gameplay is a lot of fun and was very enjoyable. It took a little while to get a hang of the controls and combat but once I did it worked well. It was too easy to get spotted by guards and sometimes I would unintentionally jump off of walls due to the controls so there is still some room for improvement. I would recommend playing through this game at least once although I wouldn't recommend going for 100% completion as it added about twenty hours to the playtime which mostly consisted of monotonous and tedious item collecting. The story starts off slow but slowly gets more complex and more interesting as it goes along, eventually ending in a cliffhanger. If you like what you hear and still haven't given this series a try then this isn't a bad place to start.

Spoilers

The storyline for this game really threw me for a loop. At first the nine assassination targets seemed independent and disconnected but I liked the reveal that they are all secretly Templars. This played into the politics of the Crusaders versus the Saracens which reminded me a lot of one of the campaigns in Age of Empires II. At the end I liked the way it all came together and the reveal that Al Mualim was behind it all. While the Apple was kind of a McGuffin it got the plot going and hopefully will be less generic in future titles.

I felt like the "real world" part of the game didn't go too far except for setting up future installments. I highly recommend talking to Lucy whenever possible as it significantly fleshes out this area. I got a big Illuminati vibe from Abstergo and have no idea how Desmond is going to get out of the situation he is in at the end of the game. Honestly, I didn't like that the game ended on a cliffhanger. Ubisoft couldn't have known that the game was going to be successful so ending it on a cliffhanger could easily have left the storyline unresolved if a sequel never happened. I am fine with cliffhangers in sequels but not in the first title within a series.