The Crusades, hidden blades, and diving into hay

The Crusades are both an important and interesting period in history, which is why it’s equally interesting that they are not as common a setting in video games as the likes of World War II or Outer Space (or some space-related setting, like another planet).  And I’m not talking about Fantasy games set in the Middle Ages (which was the era the Crusades took place in).  I don’t think that the Crusaders stormed Jerusalem with *insert stereotypical Fantasy element here*. Perhaps, as a history enthusiast, that is why I was so drawn to a game known as Assassin’s Creed, which featured an open-world version of three major cities during the Third Crusade in 1191, as well as other historical areas, figures, and societies.  Actually, there were a lot of factors that led me to like Assassin’s Creed, certainly enough that I breathed quite the sigh of relief when this game was announced to not be the PS3 exclusive it was initially billed as.  Now I own a PS3, but if this title hadn’t been made into a multi-platform experience at that time, I would’ve missed quite the game.  Assassin’s Creed, as far as I’m concerned, is one of the best titles in recent years.  From the art direction to the overall plot, Assassin’s Creed provides a solid and lengthy experience that still captivates many to this day.  But as it’s impossible to sum up this game in one paragraph, let’s take a closer look.  And as was with my Call of Duty 4 review, I will be taking into account that this game is two years old and thus, not much consideration will be taken for spoilers (mostly).

Assassin’s Creed story is not at all what it seems, and that is perhaps the most interesting part about it.  Most of the game has you playing as Altaïr – one of, if not the, most established assassin in a society of assassins during the Third Crusade. Altaïr meets with failure during a mission to retrieve an artifact (or part of an artifact at least) called the Piece of Eden, endangering his fellow assassins, even getting one killed in the process.  Altaïr’s failure is eventually reported to the leader of the assassins, Al Mualim, and Altaïr is disciplined for his actions.  What ensues, in true Metroid fashion, is Altaïr assassinating nine of the leaders of the Knight’s Templar to restore his status among the assassins, as well as retrieve his lost gear and abilities (the latter being more of a game mechanic I guess but nevertheless, a lot like Metroid).  However, this is only one part of the story.  Truthfully, the game actually takes place in September of 2012, where you play as a kidnapped bartender named Desmond.  Desmond is a descendant of Altaïr who was kidnapped by Abstergo Industries to be placed in a machine called the Animus, which allows one to recall the memories of their ancestors, found in their DNA.  Altaïr’s memories are very important to Abstergo and thus, Desmond is being used to retrieve them for use in some grand scheme.  This plays largely into the mechanics of the game (which I’ll get to later), reminding you that all that you’re seeing as Altaïr is in fact, a simulation.  Yeah, Ubisoft just M. Night Shyamalan’d your ass.  You know, with the whole twist thing because…it’s a Daily Show joke, never mind.

Anyway, I always thought that twist actually came too early, and the other twist in the game that I won’t spoil is a bit…predictable, to say the least (or maybe I’m just good at guessing plot twists).  Still, both these twists are great, and frame the game in a whole new perspective.  The story overall though, is incredibly well crafted.  Much of the game is historically accurate, which adds a lot to the story by utilizing the setting.  The cities the game portrays as its worlds (Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus) were crucial cities during the Crusades.  Even the site of the assassin’s castle, Masyaf, is a real city.  The leader of the assassins, as well as the nine targets that are killed by Altaïr, were also real people who died around the time the game takes place (as in the memories of Desmond, which is 1191).  Whether or not the nine targets were assassinated is a different story, but I’m pretty sure that they were at least all Templars.  This level of historical accuracy adds a lot of depth to the game and provides a better (and more realistic) setting than in many other games.  In addition, there is also a lot of detail put into the cities themselves, further adding to the complexity of the setting.  Each and every city is well detailed, from each brick on every building to the towering cathedrals and palaces that dot the horizon.  Even Masyaf and the land between these cities (which is called the Kingdom by the game) are like this.  Admittedly, some of the areas look similar, but not so much that they are virtually the same city.  So basically, the entire world, from its characters to its buildings, is built with amazing graphics that add to the historical accuracy of the setting, thus pairing a great story with a greater setting.  There’s also a lot of conspiracy in the game, but talking about that would spoil a lot of the plot, including the ending, which I never like to give away despite me not being that cautious with spoilers.  Plus, it’s something that’ll be addressed to a greater degree in the sequel, when it can hopefully be analyzed more than the bare-bones assumptions that players are left to.  Still, even that shows the complexity of Assassin’s Creed plotline.

As a history enthusiast, I give some serious props to Ubisoft for so perfectly designing and detailing each of the cities during the era in which the game takes place

Something else that’s great about the story is how often it reminds you that you’re not really in the Crusades, and that it’s just a simulation of sorts. For instance, the health bar is instead a synchronization meter and every time you take damage, Desmond and Altaïr go out of sync more, to the point of disconnecting from the memory. Also, you’ll often see technical “glitches” in the form of DNA strands that will allow you to view things from a different perspective. This really adds a lot to the duality of the story, which is good because the Desmond part of the story is much more secretive and thus, not as developed (the game was announced as a trilogy though so I guess they’ll cover that more in future titles).

There is one really annoying part about the story though, and that’s the cut scenes. The cut scenes are interactive and you can walk around in most of them and change the perspective of the scene, but you can’t skip them. Considering that you can replay any of the nine story missions (I’ll get more into that later), it’s annoying to have to watch a ten minute discussion over and over again any time you want to replay the mission. They’re cool cut scenes and great to watch, don’t get me wrong, but one time is enough.

The gameplay in Assassin’s Creed is split between good mechanics and bad structure.  First though, I’ll start with the controls.  Basically, the entire design relies on passive and active actions.  What’s any of that mean?  Well, as an assassin, Altaïr must be cautious of what he does, so that he does not alert attention when attempting to assassinate a target (I’ll get to that later on as well).  However, he does often need to fight or move quickly to escape.  Here in lies the purpose of these active and passive actions.  Each action is mapped to one of the face buttons, no matter active or passive.  The difference lies in what they do.  A passive action might be something like gently pushing a person out of the way to move through a crowd or looking like you’re praying to blend into a group of scholars.

However, when holding the right trigger (at least on Xbox, I think it’s R1 on PS3), your actions will switch to their active forms.  Active actions include sprinting, wall running, and attacking.  Speaking of attacking, combat is also similar.  During combat, your actions will switch to different combat moves, such as dodging and slashing.  It all equates to a very simple system that will have you leaping across rooftops and cutting down soldiers in no time.  However, the one problem with combat is the dodge mechanic.  Dodge isn’t bad or anything, its actually too good.  Once you get down the timing for dodges, you can take down legions of soldiers without breaking a sweat.  Hopefully in the sequel, it’ll be a bit harder to do this.  Overall though, the controls are solid and combat can be fun, despite being easy.  Assassinating any random person off the street though, that’s always awesome

"Nobody will ever see me lodging my blade into this soldiers neck!" said Altaïr, "And even if they do, my dodging abilities will make what should be a challenging fight very easy!" Sigh...

The gameplay does have its bad parts in regards to the structure of the game itself. Basically, there’s more to each of the nine assassinations than just killing the guy. Before you can do this, Altaïr must go to local assassin’s bureau to get the mission (in the form of the cutscenes I mentioned earlier). Then, he must investigate to learn more about his target. These investigations take the form of several different mission types, such as listening in on a conversation, interrogating a public speaker, or pick pocketing some valuable information. Then, Altaïr must report back to the assassin’s bureau to report his findings, where he is finally allowed to pursue the target. After assassinating the mark, a chase generally ensues, during which Altaïr will attempt to elude the pursuers by doing things such as blending into a crowd of scholars or hiding in a haystack. After this, Altaïr returns to the assassin’s bureau to report his doings. Sounds fun enough, so what’s the problem? Well basically, it’s incredibly repetitive. This same layout occurs nine times, with the exact same investigation types over and over again. The assassinations themselves are unique and each feature a very different situation, but everything else is the same. What’s more, I didn’t even realize how to see some of the information until the end of the game, so a lot of it didn’t even matter (admittedly, you only have to do two or three investigations, the rest are optional but help you greatly. It just becomes very boring, to the point that I just did it to advance the story. Thankfully, the sequel will attempt to fix this, but for right now, this is the games biggest problem.

Another thing that annoys me about the structure is how you replay the story missions. How this works is that every time you enter the Animus, you can select which memory you’d like to view. This also seems to work well, but there is a key problem. With each new mission, Altaïr regains an ability. Thus, if you want all of his abilities, you’ll always have to replay the last mission. It’s a real shame you can’t replay any mission with all of Altaïr’s abilities after you beat the game because it takes away from some of the re-playability value.

Speaking of replayability, your probably wondering what else this game has to offer, being an open-world game and all. Well, it has some interesting aspects, but much of it gets boring and annoying. There are two other things you can do related to story missions for starters. One is that you can perform “Save the Citizen” missions. These have you killing soldiers to defend a citizen, which nets you groups of scholars you can use to blend into. The other thing you can do is scale viewpoints. These eliminate the fog of war in some parts of the cities, as well as revealing new investigations. You can then leap off these towering viewpoints into a barrel of hay, which never gets old despite it not being scientifically plausible (there’s actually an interesting article on Kotaku about how much hay you would need to survive one of these falls here - intertesting read). Besides that, there are things unrelated to the story to spend time on. One of these is killing the 60 Templar Knights scattered around the Kingdom and three cities. They’re more challenging than the average soldier, but the dodge mechanic still holds up, so it becomes an easy chore after a while.

Diving off viewpoints like this one never gets old

The other thing to do is the now infamous flag collecting. There are 420 flags to collect between the three cities, Masyaf, and the Kingdom. Now look, there’s collecting Vault Tec Bobbleheads in Fallout 3, which are both small in number and have great bonuses attached to them. Even the 800 orbs in Crackdown grant benefits (for a while). The flags in Assassin’s Creed do NOTHING outside of an achievement, making it relatively pointless and VERY annoying, even more so than the Templar Knights. If you do want to undertake this endeavor though, it is not only annoying as I said, but difficult as well. From personal experience, I spent a week looking for all the flags with a checklist and map off my computer, and still managed to miss one flag that, to this day, I cannot find – despite going through the list several more times. So yeah, be warned. But anyway, once you finish the story, the rest isn’t terribly entertaining.

A review I read of Assassin’s Creed when it first came out had the title “Flawed Genius”. Personally, I believe this perfectly suits the game. Despite how many features it has going for it, and despite how good it is, there are some unfortunate missteps that hold this game back from being as good as it was intended to be. With Assassin’s Creed 2 on the horizon, the original game’s mistakes will hopefully be corrected in such a way that the sequel will be everything that the original was and more. And what better a setting for the sequel’s evolution over the original to be represented in than the Italian Renaissance. This was an era that, spurred on by events such as the Crusades, pushed humanity out of the religion-bound, Feudalistic Middle Ages and into an era of scientific and artistic evolution, as well as a change to a more modern society. Nevertheless, the Crusades cannot be overlooked and still remain an important event in our history, just as the original Assassin’s Creed, despite its faults, remains one of the best gaming experiences to date.

+ An exceptional and original story combined with a masterfully crafted setting built with fantastic graphics and a fluid control scheme create one of the best gaming experiences to date

- The repetitive mission structure and investigations, the oddities of the story structure, and the annoyances of both the cut scenes and the dreaded flag collecting (however pointlessly optional) hold this game back from near-perfection

9.0

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