[JemyM]

Assassin's Creed
This game promises a free-roaming, stealthbased gameplay as you play an assassin during the crusades. Does it deliver?

Story
Desmond, a bartender in a near future, find himself trapped in a machine that can visually let him relive his ancestors experiences through his DNA code. It turns out that one of his ancestors were Altair, an assassin during the dark ages. Having broken the rules of the assassins once too many, his master have given him the mission to redeem himself by killing targets in three cities; Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus.
The story is superb, it delivers loads of philosophical questions, on morality in particular.

Engine: Graphics & Sound
Assassin's Creed looks amazing. Most of the graphics is inspired by real history, with each of the major religions represented during the crusade. The large cities looks absolutely amazing, and the become even more realistic with people walking everywhere, along with birds on the rooftops. It might not be an exaggeration to claim Assassin's Creed have the best animations in a game ever. You will almost never see a repeated animation. Altair can move in any direction, grabbing onto stuff, dropping down, fighting etc and it's all fluid. The audio is pretty good as well. Almost every presented nation is voiceacted. You will hear french, british, german in the crusader camp, as well as arabic and hebrew. It's not uncommon that some audioclips will play a few times too many though which is annoying.

Gameplay
And this is where Assassin's Creed break down. For a game that look as amazing as it does, and have a really great story, why does the majority of everything you do in-game remind me about MMORPG quests? Let me tell you how the major part (maybe 90%) of Assassin's Creed breaks down. Each time you get a target you have to go to the area where the target resides and search for clues. The best way to do this is to begin by reaching outlook points where you climb up a high point to get a glimpse of the map, once you do, that part of the city and everything important is revealed to you. Well, to do this properly you will climb X (6-12) number of outlook points. Then you can unlock more health by rescuing citizens that is harassed by the cityguard. This is as simple as going there, killing all guards and talk to the citizens. You will do this X times (6-12). Then you gather clues which means you are going to solve 6 quests that always plays out the same. When you found a quest it means you found a NPC who have information. He will give you this info if you do things like "kill targets on time", "kill targets by using stealth", "guard me from A to B", but it can also be extremely silly "collect 10-20 flags I hidden in this area" or "destroy X shops by throwing guards into them". Then there's eavesdropping which means you have to find a bench to sit on, then press a button to listen in on a conversation. Finding the bench is the difficult part here, but often it's just there next to them. And no, you wont be able to listen from your convenient rooftop or hiding place, you have to sit on the bench. Then there's interrogation, which means listen to a guy making a speech, then follow him and fistfight him until he talks. Finally there's pickpocketing, which means sneak up behind someone and press a button.

Now get this; there are 9 such areas in the game, that means you have to repeat this 9 times. 9x6-12 outlookpoints, 9x6-12 civilians harassed by guards, 9x6 miniquests to get clues, and if that's not enough for you you have the option to also find hidden flags throughout the entire area, which on PC will grant you nothing.

The simplicity and repetition of theese quests is what sucks the fun out of Asssassin's Creed like a bat on a bloodbag. If one would release a savegame pack in which they already did all this so you can only play out the assassination itself, then they would boost the fun you can have in this game tremendously.

Final Verdict
Assassin's Creed offers superb visuals, controls, and story, but fails blatantly when it comes to make the quests fun and interesting. It's as if they hired the best talent in the industry, only to give the quest-design to a former MMORPG designer with no clue on how to make anything beyond grinding quests for an MMO. The game is a test of patience, for hours of boring tedious gameplay you are offered perhaps 10-15 minutes coolness in reward, only to get back to the grind, because grind is what Assassin's Creed is mostly about.