A Critical Analysis of Assassin’s Creed

I just finished playing through Assassin’s Creed. The original, not the recently released sequel. What a waste. Not a complete waste, but a waste nonetheless.

Assassin’s Creed (henceforth known as AC) is a stealth assassination action game released in 2007 for the Xbox 360 and PS3 (PC came later). You play the role of a guy named Desmond, a descendant in a long line of assassins. He’s kidnapped by a “pharmaceutical firm” because they want a piece of his memory. To do this they’ve developed a machine called the Animus, which lets the user to relive the memories of their ancestors.

Spoilers abound in this post.

Despite how I described it in the intro, Assassin’s Creed is not an action game.

It’s also not a stealth assassination game, like Hitman.

Instead, it’s a weird hybrid, lacking the most important elements of each genre. It’s unique, but not quite in a good way. Playing through most of the game is like playing the same six songs in Rock Band over and over. Rinse and repeat.

Assassin’s Creed is made up of two stories – there’s Desmond in the present, surrounded by Angry Doctor (Vidic) who’s trying to get into his mind and Sympathetic Nurse (Lucy) who takes all of Angry Doctor’s crap. Then there’s Altair from 1100 AD, the irritable member of the clan known only as the Assassins (Village People was already taken). Their stories are similar and similarly weak (plot summary spoiler here):

Story 1, Desmond (present): Big bad corporation kidnaps bartender to find pieces of an ancient artifact that said corporation will use to take over the world.
Story 2, Altair (past): Former assassin bad boy gets demoted, kills a bunch of famous people, finds out clan master is bad guy who wants to take over the world with ancient artifact, kills said clan master, settles down and has a family. (not sure about last part)

But Desmond’s story is more engaging because you, like Desmond, are left completely in the dark. Desmond’s been kidnapped, but how he’s going to get out is an ongoing mystery. The highest point of the plot (the end) is also the worst: after a narrow brush with death, Desmond emerges from the Animus with a new power (one that has been transferred from his ancestor) that allows him to see things he couldn’t before (that Vidic is evil, Lucy is good, etc). He’s also able to see the blood writings of the previous Animus test subject, a point in the game that I’d compare to the girl coming out of the TV in The Ring. Freaky, powerful stuff. And just when things were starting to look up for this farce of a game, we get Desmond, ever the smart guy, wondering “is that blood? who were they keeping here before me?” Game over. Uh…you serious?

In the grand scheme of things, the abrupt ending barely skims the surface of issues. The biggest issue is that Desmond is only, at best, 10% of the game. The other 90% is purely Altair, a lot of repetition and crappy one-liners.

Killing the same city guards over and over is, believe it or not, not the worst this game has to offer. It’s mechanical and occasionally a little unfair, but acceptable. What is not acceptable is the manner in which your character must take to assassinate each key figure. In a nutshell, your character (Altair) must conduct several “investigations”, gathering evidence of the bad guy’s crimes. This includes, for some odd reason, having to climb towers and churches and “Synchronizing”, which directs you to the investigation points. Each area has a decent number of towers, and you generally cannot do anything until you’ve climbed most of them.

Does this take a lot of fun out of the game? Does Charlie Daniels play a mean fiddle? (love that Geico commercial) The worst is when, attempting to climb up tower #481, you trigger the alarm and all the guards start throwing rocks at you. All because you climbed one of their towers!

The other investigations are equally meaningless, requiring you to continually punch some guy until he gives you information (not as fun as it sounds), or throwing random people into shopkeeper stalls, or collecting flags. There’s also pickpocketing and listening in on conversations.

The game spans three cities, split into three areas each. But every area has you completing the same tasks – climbing the towers, conducting the investigations, etc – that the only difference is really some architecture and graphics elements.

And while I could sit here complaining about the game for hours, there are some bright spots. The graphics are well done, the controls are fairly tight, the voice acting is excellent (Kristen Bell as Lucy? Fine choice), and free running through the cities is a hell of a lot more fun than jumping over holes in Prince of Persia. Not to mention those short, but sweet, moments when you’re taking down a major figure while being chased by city guards – they’re an adrenaline rush.

Assassin’s Creed gets a C+.