Ass-ass-in… Durhur…

Hello again guys, just a quick post to recap on my Game Analysis from a few weeks ago. As you probably know I chose to analyse Assassin’s Creed.

Assassin’s Creed is set in the 1190s, and the main character is Altair, except not. It’s actually set in 2012 and the protagonist is Desmond, Altair’s great great great great grandson (or something of the sort). The gist of the game is that Desmond has been captured and forced to explore the life of his ancestors (using some mad science fiction plot device) to unearth some deep dark secret.

Assassin’s Creed art is fantastic, the cities are well designed and the graphics are still considered visually attractive today. However a major issue I had with this game is the shifting between ‘past’ (Altair) and ‘present’ (Desmond) pretty much destroys any feelings of immersion that was beginning to develop, and in addition to this every time you begin a mission as Altair you start atop a huge mountain and have to travel for roughly ten minutes before arriving at your destination.

Unfortunately this is only one of the games major shortfalls. The combat feels awkward resulting in large battles feeling like little more than a glorified version of space invaders, this accompanied with the pretty terrible AI made the cities quite tedious to navigate. And finally we have the Assassinations, they become repetitive and become very boring.

However it is not all bad, the game does have it strong points. Playing, as Altair is undeniably fun, this combined with the large sandbox world and fantastic parkour system creates a very immersive experience.

To conclude, Assassin’s Creed is not a bad game, but it is by no means a great game. I feel that there is a lot of missed potential, which will hopefully be fixed in the sequel.

Just finished playing Braid, so expect another analysis soon(ish)

- David