The “Break it Down” Blog

Summary [8 out of 10]

Assassin’s Creed, if played right, is fantastic. The epic story (dual-intertwined story arcs), flawless animations, excellent voice acting, striking environments and generally excellent graphics will have you hooked if played in chunks. Trying to burn through the game end-to-end in a marathon could leave you annoyed with some the repetitive game play elements.

Outline

1. Summary
2. Introduction
3. Review
   1. Acrobatics, Running and Getting Around
   2. Walking Around and Blending In
   3. Combat and Kicking Some Ass
   4. The World and the Environment
   5. Gameplay and Progressing the Story
4. Conclusion
5. Areas of Improvement

Introduction

Assassin’s Creed is a hard game to review, mostly because of the story. The reason for this is that the game starts off with a twist… yes actually starts with a twist and immediately hooks the player. Unfortunately I read a few reviews that ruined this surprise for me before I got the game, and while I still loved the twist that gets you hooked, I was really annoyed that it was exposed at all to me in the process. One reason for that is the surprise was blown, not as bad as say someone telling you the end of the movie The Usual Suspects, because it’s more complex than that and needs some explaining. So it just sort of takes the “umph” out of the twist, even though you still have to play the beginning of the game to understand what the twist is really all about.

Because of that, I’m not going to talk much about the story and will try and hide elements of that twist from screenshots or movies I post. I’ll just touch on the points you already know about from the PR material and demos you’ve likely seen of the game and make general comments about it, but I won’t try and ruin any story for you guys. Also the story itself doesn’t need to be reviewed, the gameplay, technical achievements and a nod to the story and if it’s worth your time is hopefully enough to let you know if the game deserves your attention or not.

With that said, the game starts and you are Altaïr, an assassin that belongs to a guild of assassin’s that all live in a castle/fortress place up in a mountain at the top of a small town. The goal of the assassin clan is to always bring peace, according to the guy that runs the place. So the guilds kills “bad” people in an effort to make more peace. Like killing a slave trader or killing a ruler that is overly aggressive and mean, etc.

Altaïr is the best assassin in the guild, knows it and is a basically a dick. He’s super-cocky and does whatever he wants; he doesn’t follow the guilds rules and doesn’t listen to his fellow assassins. The way the game starts off, is that you fuck up a high profile kill that you weren’t suppose to do and the guild strips you of your rank and makes you start at the bottom again, earning back your status as you go. This means getting wise-cracking comments from guild members as you progress through the game and so on. It’s a decent enough story mechanic if used in conjunction with other story elements, if it’s just used by itself it’s cheap… luckily in AC it’s used along with a bigger story arc and almost as a training tool to explain your different skills to you one at a time. I think it worked well.

The entire game takes place during the Crusades in the 12th century (King Richard and all that) and will have you exploring 3 ancient towns that are part of the “Holy Land”: Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. These 3 towns are connected by an area that requires a load sequence to jump in an out of, that acts like a hub. The small town your assassin fortress is in, is in this “hub” area that connects to these 3 towns and is actually surprisingly large and detailed. On horse-back, riding end to end, you are looking at a few minutes of travel time with paths diverging off for you to take and explore if you wish. Also guards will be on patrol in this area, town folk will be walking around and you can run them down with your horse if you want… it’s a nice stress reliever.

So the way the game sets up the assassination portion of the story is that there are 9 bad guys that are central to restoring piece (apparently) and you are assigned to research each one and eventually kill them. The point of the research being that you are re-earning your rank back, instead of the guild just saying “Here, go kill these 9 guys”. So they hide grind-information-until-you-can-assassinate-the-target gameplay mechanic inside the “work your way back up to the top because you fucked up” mechanic. Reporting back to the guild after each kill (don’t worry, you can be jumped back to the guild hall to report and don’t need to ride across the huge world to get back there) will earn you a piece of your assassin equipment back and usually a new skill, like block, parry, dodge, etc.

Each time you report back, you will discuss more of the story with the guild master before he gives you a rank and some equipment back and slowly the compliance Altaïr has for just doing whatever he is told to do begins fading away, and he begins asking more questions, opening the story up more and more.

So now that you get the setup of the game, let’s take a look at how fun it actually is to play…

Review

There is a lot to talk about in this game, so I’m going to try and partition the “Review” into sections instead of just handing you a 10 page thesis and wishing you good luck with it

Review – Acrobatics, Running and Getting Around

1 word: BADASS. Here, this will help you understand:

Yep, that sums it up. The developers of this game must have had a 1 word description of how to design Altaïr posted above their desks, so they would remember it through the entire design cycle and that word is “badass”.

Executing leaping kills like you see above, or just running across building tops, leaping onto 1-foot-widge ledges, swinging up onto beams, etc. is all executed with 1 button: Sprint.

To give a better idea of the type of world Ubisoft has created, let’s take the following scenario: You pop in Assassin’s Creed, skip all the cut scenes, don’t give a shit about the story and just start running around a town… chances are, you are going to have a lot of fun.

The acrobatic/running/jumping/grabbing/climbing system that Ubisoft has implemented is brilliant not just in concept, but in execution. It’s literally a 1-button activity. You sprint, and if you are holding down the “Do something frigging awesome” button, as Altaïr runs up to ledges, beams, edges, etc. he will proceed forward off or ontop those items without so much as a 1-frame hickup in the animation. If you are running towards a ledge, he will go leaping off the side of the ledge and either land on a platform across the way, jump and grab onto ledges on a side of a building, leap from post to post or beam to beam or just fall all the way down to the ground into a tuck-and-roll… all of which just looks badass.

Here’s an example of an animation I never saw in the game until half way through it and made me almost shit my pants when I thought I was going to let go of the ledge and fall… the level of polish on the animations in this game are really something to behold:

There is literally no timing issues to nail down, you just need to make sure he’s pointed in the right direction and Altaïr will (for the most part) lock on automatically to the ledge/platform/whatever in front of him and perform the necessary motion to get there (grab, leap, jump, hop down, etc.). For example, during one of the chase scenes I was booking it across buildings in Damascus with guards in hot pursuit, just leaping over alleys and looking sweet. I finally got to the ledge of a tall building and went flying off the edge of it into the leap/dive animation, only to find out there was no building on the other side… I fell all the way down into a canal and died. So in that case I should have hung a left or a right or something and kept a better eye on where I was going.

In addition to running around on the ground or leaping from rooftop to rooftop, a key element to getting around in the AC world is climbing. Climbing is crucial and lucky for us (the gamers) Ubisoft executed it almost perfectly.

Again, for the most part, all you need to do to execute a climb is point Altaïr at something you want to climb, then use the Sprint (or “Do something awesome”) button and he will automatically run up the face of the wall and grab a ledge or wall or beam or anything else and begin to scale that item. At that point you can let go of the Sprint button and simply direct Altaïr around the face of that item using the directional analog stick.

In this movie notice how pretty much anything that looks “ledgy” can be climbed… any brick, edge, railing, screen, lattice, etc:

You may need to shuffle Altaïr to the left or right in order to get him lined up with the next grabbable item so he can continue to scale the structure but that is never a problem unless:

• Guards are watching you
• Guards are chasing you

If guards are watching you, climbing around on building faces is not acceptable social behavior, so it will warrant their attention. Eventually they will get pissed off and go into pursuit mode. In case of that or in case the guards were already following you, while you climb the guards will actually try to pull you off the wall or they will throw rocks at you. Both of these are pretty sweet dynamics because it makes getting away that much more stressful. You can’t just leap out of reach any time you get in trouble, and if you are up a significantly high wall and they start pegging you with rocks and get you to fall, get ready for a world of hurt. Another really nice design touch Ubisoft added is that the guards aren’t suddenly NFL quarterbacks, throwing rocks from a mile away… they will hurl rocks at you, but most of the rocks will miss and bounce off the wall next to you, adding to the stress level of getting away that much more. I really liked that touch.

I did notice that when guards are enraged and want to beat your ass though, they tend to get fairly acrobatic capabilities like Altaïr; leaping across roof tops, crawling up god-knows-what buildings and generally pacing you pretty evenly. I didn’t mind this “cheating” because they aren’t super-powered, and they are slowly than Altaïr at these same activities, so even though they can get up to you on a roof top, it doesn’t mean they can catch you or traverse the rooftops as fast… so Altaïr still feels like a badass.

Review – Walking Around and Blending In

In addition to the extreme action movement in the game, like all this running and leaping, it’s important to take note that the premise of the game is to blend in and not do things to startle people around you or you will be noticed. You do things to avoid being noticed like gently working your way through the crowd using the “gentle push” ability which just shuffles people to the left or right away from you with your hand.

If you don’t use this ability and are just walking slowly, it’s possible to run into people carrying pots or boxes and they will drop them… breaking them and start yelling at you. This puts guards around you at a higher level of alertness which has a somewhat stupid side effect of them suddenly getting aggressive with you. I understand the dynamic it’s trying to encourage: “stay hidden”, but there is no gradual progression from just a normal-Joe on the street to a killer that needs to be hunted down.

More specifically the game presents a living breathing world, which it mostly delivers on… the problem is that because really good AI and complex character interactions are tricky in a world like this, you sort of get pulled out of this suspension of reality as soon as you realize simply making a lady drop her pot causes guards to go crazy and try and kill you. So sort of shake your head and go “ahh jeez, ok I get it I get it, gotta stay hidden all the time” which is a bummer only because the rest of the world is so compelling and you expect it to deliver 100% on the whole living-world thing. I don’t think technology will be there for atleast another 5 years though, so I can’t really ding the Ubisoft team for this, they did a great job with what they could deliver.

The good news is that any time guards go nuts on you can simply run off, break the line of sight (required) then hide in either a rooftop garden or a stack of hay. I also read you can sit on a bench and blend in with others, but read somewhere else that doesn’t work all the time… so I didn’t try it.

The nice design choice that the developers made, as far as fun-factor is concerned, is that you can piss off/hide-and-reset the guards as much as you want. You can kill 10 guards, run off, hide and then walk back to the place of the crime and mostly things are OK. Dead bodies will put guards on a higher level of alertness, which means they will pay closer attention to you and you have less lee-way when it comes to blowing your cover and pissing them off though. You can counter-act this by either running away really quick to break the line of sight, or you can hold down the “Blend” button which causes you to pray like a monk and walk really slow… this sort of sucks. The good part is that even though it does suck, because it’s so easy to just run off I tend to do that, instead of walking super-slow just to blend in… any guard that wants to declare shenanigans on me can come get some!

Review – Combat and Kicking Some Ass

Ok so when this game was first showed off at E3 and then PAX soon there after, there were some rumblings that the combat was lame because it was “1 button”, “all about timing” and “only 1 guy would attack at a time”… all of that is absolutely true, but it’s still awesome.

So first off the combat is based on 1 or 2 buttons and is very much all about timing. More specifically if you time your parries or dodges right, your counter-attack can be devestating… the animations of the attacks themselves are satisfying enough that you couldn’t give two shits if it is timing-based or not, you look awesome doing it:

An because of fighting being designed this way, only having 1 enemy at a time attack was a requirement. If more than 1 enemy attacked at 1 time (sometimes they will, but it’s very infrequent) they would completely dominate you because this is not a button masher. You cannot just block everything and attack with a Tiger Upper Cut and a Hadooken… you need to time your defense and offense based on the person attacking you, which means the game needs to keep that to 1 person at a time.

You’ll also notice in the movie above that you can mash buttons like I do a few times to just flat out attack, but 60-80% of those are blocked (as you see) but sometimes you get lucky and can land a good one that kills a guard; so you don’t need to only counter.

You’ll also notice in the movie above that you can switch targets of the guards around you by simply facing towards them and they will get highlighted with that white “focus” indicator that outlines them. This allows you to keep switching up your attacks at all your surrounding enemies and keeping them at bay if you want. Eventually you can pound them down this way if you keep careful timing.

Some of the other cooler fighting sequences in the game are the roof-top fighting sequences; that is when you suddenly start using your “Grab” attack and throwing people off the ceiling because it’s so damn satisfying. Here is an example movie of me sort of getting my ass handed to me, but then turning the tides and showing these guards what super-sword-karate is all about. Notice when I got thrown, I did that side-ways tuck-and-roll to get up faster, instead of just falling on my face… you can control that with the directional analog as you are thrown down:

Review – The World and the Environment

Ok so I’ve hinted at it a lot so far, and I’m going to hint at it again… the world/environment created in this game is beautiful and during playing at least a few times you will likely say to yourself “shit… that’s pretty freaking cool”. Either because the impressive and organic level design is like nothing you’ve seen in a game before or because the environmental touches like dead bodies in the street of Acre or soiled beggers drag you back into the suspension of disbelief that sells you on this world. Maybe you’ll be walking through an alley and hear a merchant yelling he has something to sell and seeing people standing around his stand… or someone will bump into you and say something rude. The 10-min impression of this is “holy fucking shit” at just how real the world is… but after you visit a few cities and see some of the same merchants and hear some of the same lines over and over again, you have to cut Ubisoft slack and realize they can’t sample literally 1000s of random voice lines and models so they have to reuse those assets. So your impression of “holy fucking shit” goes to about “shit, very nice”.

Something interesting that I’d like to note is that each review I read of AC mentioned “the towns are amazing, there are probably thousands of people in them!” and then I would watch a movie of the town and think… “wait… I don’t get how 1000s of people are in there”. Well the trick is that most of the reviews don’t give you a perspective of just how big the towns are. Realistically speaking, they are probably to-scale with historical documents… here’s a video of me from what I believe is the highest lookout point in the entire game. It’s on top of a cathedral in (I believe) Damascus that takes a while to climb up to the top of because the hand-holds you have to find are tricky and I think all said and done took me like 15mins to climb to the top of (the suicide part was just a nice personal touch):

Ok so you just watched the movie… do you see all those buildings? Yea, you can WALK to those… there are people in the street around those buildings and you can go there and stab them in the face if you want. So I do agree with those reviewers… there are likely 1000 or more citizens in that city. I’m sure they do the magical-pop-in GTA-style, but unlike GTA you don’t have a long enough direct line of site to ever actually see people popup, it just always feels like a hustling bustling city.

While some portions of cities are magically walled off (don’t worry, makes sense in the context of the greater story arc) they open up over time until you can literally walk everywhere… and there aren’t constant load times, I think it just streams off the disk… in which case I can’t figure out why there are any load times in the game at all, because the levels are so F-ing big to start off with, you just can’t really imagine what the limit they ran into was that caused them to place any load sequences in. Either way, the game is brilliant when it comes to having little to no load sequences (the only one I’ve seen are the ones between the central hub area and each of the 3 major cities, where 1 city is the size you saw in the movie above).

I would ding the game for the length of the load sequences though… when they do popup, especially when you are going from 1 major city back to your home-fortress to report an assassination, they can be pretty lengthly… like 20-40 secs. Luckily they do allow you to run around in a circle if you want and just puts around in this white-backgrounded “sandbox” while you wait (again, makes sense in the scope of the greater story arc)… so it’s not horrible.

Review – Gameplay and Progressing the Story

So the last thing to cover in the review is the elusive story that I said I didn’t want to discuss and ruin for you at the beginning of the review… and I want to stick to that. For the most part I will say this, the game starts off with what I think is a great hook, continues through the story, filling in holes but clearly uncovering some goings-on that aren’t what they seem, and ends with a cliffhanger which will lead us into Assassin’s Creed 2.

To initiate the story for each of the people you have to kill, after you are given the assignment to go kill person X in area Y, you show up to that new area and need to first talk with the local guild chapter leader and get some hints from him about how to research this person. From there you must crawl up on top of tall lookout points and use the “synchronize” button to “look around” the area and discover stuff you need to know. All these points of interest will be marked on your map after you synchronize so you’ll know where to go next, who to pick pocket, who to beat up, etc.

Here’s a movie of me synchronizing in Damascus then doing a “leap of faith” off the tower:

Every tower has a bale of hay at the bottom of it so you can always leap off… it’s really fun. Also you can climb back down if you choose to, so you aren’t stuck only awesome-jumping off of everything.

You can also “synchronize” while standing around town, but all it does is switch you to a first-person perspective, and show you a “ghosted” view of everyone around you where their auras glow a certain color to indicate their relation to your (Red = enemy, like a guard, Blue = friend, etc.). I never used this mode to get through the game or help me, and the few times I did fire it up just to see what it did, I wasn’t really helped by any of the information it gave me. So I think for the most part you can skip this feature.

The progression of the story as you kill the 9 leaders is a bit slow… you only get a piece of information after each assassination, but I didn’t find that to be a problem at all. Some game reviewers made the comment that it was “too slow”, but I have to imagine they were trying to steam-roll their way through the game, in which case yes it likely felt slow. But I thought the story progressed really naturally… meaning if I were an assassin in Altaïr’s position it’s not like my guild master is going to crack down and give me the entire scoop on what’s going on… I would slowly grow more curious and ask more questions, etc. All the things that I saw the character, Altaïr, do in the game. So I was totally satisfied with the execution of the story and thought it was done well.

But again, I’ll emphasize that this game needs to be played in installments… trying to marathon your way through it will suck because it’s a longer game, so if you want quick satisfaction it will take a lot of hours to get there, say 10-15. The reason for the big gap is that with each assassination target, you have to research them first and get to know their habits before the local guild charter leader will release you to kill the person. You can do as little as 3 portions of investigation (interrogate people, pick pocket people, eves-drop on people’s conversation, etc.) or as many as I believe 10 or so (multiple pick pockets, multiple interrogations, etc.)

For example, here is an eves-dropping session between two characters discussing a target of mine (no spoilers) followed up by me pick-pocketing one for the information he had:

When I played the game I did every unit of investigation every time, so my experience lasted much longer and I felt it was more satisfying. There weren’t any crazy revelations during the extra investigation segments which is something I regretted, but it was still entertaining.

Once you are ready to attack your final target there is always some sort of cutscene-esque sequence before the confrontation; I thought they were all great and gave you a chance to “get to know” the character you were about to kill better. In addition to that, right after killing each character, there are long sequences where you are talking to the character in limbo, and get a bit of information from there perspective as to what they are doing.

These sequences tend to shed slightly more light onto the story and confuse your original goal of just “kill whoever my master told me”… the people you are killing have their own reasons for doing what they are doing, and hint at bigger things that are beyond themselves and you. Overall it kept me interested and I liked the chance to get to know the people I just killed a bit better, it gives more depth to the game.

Conclusion [8 out of 10]

Well I think I’ve covered everything about this game that can be covered and now it’s time to wrap up.

Assassin’s Creed is an all around excellent game, especially because of the story.

How’s that for a conclusion? Well that’s it. The game, just like any other game, has some short comings that I’d like to see changed, but the execution of a game this ambitious and releasing it on-time and in such a complete state, already earns Ubisoft major kudos.

I cannot recommend this game to everyone though. I you live off of Unreal Tournament 3, Halo 3, Team Fortress 2 and to even some degree BioShock or Mass Effect that are action and story-heavy games, constantly moving… you might find the pacing of Assassin’s Creed a bit too methodical. The story is spread out and fed to you a bit more slowly than was probably necessary, so while it’s excellent, getting there requires a repetitive investigations and cut scenes to finally dole it out to you.

However, if you have found yourself really satisfied by playing through a level of Splinter Cell (or other slower/stealthy game) and staying in the shadows the entire time then you will love Assassin’s Creed. It really just depends on the types of games you get satisfaction from and I hope I’ve done a good job of describing what kind of game AC is so you can ultimately decide if it’s the right game for you.

Areas of Improvement

Unfortunately Assassin’s Creed is not a terribly stable game. While I rarely saw any sort of glitches in the game itself (like bad geometry, textures, etc.) I did have the game lock up my PS3 no less than 5 times. So this wasn’t a 1-time fluke, it happened a lot and was really obnoxious. But then AC earned back points for having a fairly detailed checkpoint system, so I never lost any progress.

UPDATE: Ubisoft has released a patch for the PS3 to correct these issues. The score has been adjusted to reflect this.

UPDATE: Laurence Hartje did point out that on the thread above, the patch is only for Europe right now, and while it does seem to help some folks (no more crashes) others are saying they are still seeing lockups, and one guy said he only sees “New” as an option at the opening game screen and no longer sees “Continue”… doh! So we are holding off on passing judgment on if this patch fixed everything or not.

Also the key to enjoying this game is playing it in installments, and not trying to play it end-to-end. If you do, the sheer repetativeness of the investigation activities you need to do in order to get to your target in each town can start to wear you down but not for the reasons other reviews gave. More specifically, there are something like 5 or 6 types of actions you can choose from when investigating a target, but you only ever need to complete 3 of them before you can perform the assassination. So in a sense, the reviewers that have said “there needs to be more variety”, I don’t really agree with. There already is variety, it’s just that the information extracted from executing those 5 or 6 actions that you can choose from each time is mostly unsatisfying.

Here’s what I mean… you never eavesdrop on a conversation that has some critical story point to it… you never pick-pocket someone that has some amazing document in his sachel… you never beat the hell out of someone only to have his family run over and beg you to stop or to have him cough up some really compelling information. The investigation process in general is sort of plain. You find out just enough information to focus on your target (e.g. he goes for walks during the day or he leaves his window open at night), but the information doesn’t contribute to the story arc at all, so you can just throw that information out, get just enough to be allowed to kill the person, then run off and stab them in the neck.

For the complete-ists out there, you are going to get annoyed with the investigation part. There is just not enough payoff there and it has nothing to do with the variety of types of actions… it’s just sort of “meh” when you take the time to do them all. But for the XBox achievement points junkies, I’m sure you’ll do it anyway

Other than those things I found the game a complete joy to play. The environment created for us to play around in, in this game, has Triple-A written all over it. Since I took my time, played slowly and just enjoyed the world, I found Assassin’s Creed to be a generally excellent game with a few quirks that were hardly worth more than just mentioning them.

Thanks for reading!