Ubisoft is marketing their latest Assassin's Creed games as "a return to classic AC". Well, I don't know what that means, and I'm not about to trust Modern Ubisoft to do literally anything right. The only way I'm starting this franchise is at the very beginning, for better or for worse.
I'm sure the twist is common knowledge to literally anyone who owned a 360/PS3 in 2007, but I was genuinely taken aback by the actual premise of this game. Nothing ever gave me the idea that I would be diving into the DNA of a mild-mannered American, taking control of his his ancestor's memories, all done through a machine known as the "Animus". Basically, Desmond's scientific captors insist that he comes from a long line of assassins, and there's clearly something tucked away in his long-gone relative's memories that they need. Seeing as Desmond is reliving the events of his assassin ancestor in the middle east, Altair very much sounds like a modern-day American, which is pretty jarring when everyone around him sounds perfectly natural, given the setting. It's like he's a tourist in his home country. Still, the Animus is a really cool framing device for the events that unfold, and it kinda stole the entire show for me. I was more eager to escape the assassin simulation and see what new stuff I could find in the cold, cramped, and claustrophobic lab. The developments that occur between the long bouts of assassin gameplay were the carrot-on-a-stick that kept me going up until the end, no matter how repetitive, tedious, and annoying the game got.
Ah, fighting, hiding, and climbing; the three pillars of assassin-ing.
Controlling Altair feels like maneuvering a playable bag of bricks, which is decently realistic, in a sense. That's what they were going for in many aspects of this game, realism. NPCs and guards interact with you and each other in appropriate ways, even with dozens of them walking the streets at any given time. Realistic real-world locations, copious amounts of mocap, it's all here. Altair can't swim though. Guess they forgot to add that feature to the Animus, I'm sure they'll add it in a firmware update or something.
This game marks the first time that I've been exposed to the Ubisoft Tower, the genuine article. What do they do? Well after you climb it, you press a button, the camera pans around, one or two points of interest are marked on your map, and not much else. "Not much else" is a real running theme with this one. Climbing anything can be obnoxious due to a variety of reasons: unclear footholds, unknown jumping distance, and even Altair just not cooperating. I've been spoiled by Sucker Punch's offerings (Sly Cooper/Infamous), but I feel like an action you're going to be doing all game should be enjoyable at the bare minimum.
The objectives themselves are nothing to write home about. You'll have seen them all before you clean out your second area. They can be mind-numbingly easy, like eavesdropping on a conversation, inconsistently difficult, like pickpocketing a guy, or my absolute least favorite, the ones where you have to eliminate multiple targets without being discovered. The fact that it's extremely easy to be caught during these is one thing, that's an instant fail state. The part that gets me is that there's no instant retry. You have to lose your pursuers, backtrack to where you started the mission originally, wait through the mission-giver's 20-second spiel, and then you get to retry. Sometimes I even just let the guards kill me, because I know the last checkpoint the game set was right where I started the mission. May as well cut out all that nonsense in favor of putting the controller down. Completing at least a few of these menial tasks is mandatory, as they give you information that may or may not be critical in making sure your assassination goes off without a hitch. It can be interesting to ogle and plan around this knowledge, but nothing really beat the "fuck it, we'll do it live" approach I usually brought to the scene. They try to build it up like a big heist, but it's working within the incredibly limited constraints of AC1's gameplay variety.
The combat is middling for entirely different reasons. Mechanics such as "combo kill" are tied to timing your button presses in a really unclear rhythm. Aside from yeeting people off rooftops, I never really found a good use for grabs. None of it really matters by the time you unlock a counter maneuver, which you can use to take out entire small armies with little effort. They also seem to run away in terror after you kill enough of them in a single encounter. Maybe it's designed that way to give the player some room to breathe, or maybe it's like that to prevent more corpses from piling up and occupying precious PS3 processing power.
Fighting isn't your only option, and that brings us to the stealth. Escaping guards requires two things: breaking line of sight, and finding a hiding spot before any other guards see you. Even if you flee to the rooftops, the guards are relentless, have eagle eyesight, and are omnipresent. Shaking these guys is way harder than it has any right to be, I turn a sharp corner like the game wants me to, try to find a bench to sit on, and there's just another guard there anyways. I climb up a building only to be spotted by the guards stationed there anyways. Again, I frequently found letting Altair die dishonorably to be the more effective option.
Outside of combat, you can "blend" by pretending to be a scholar by holding X, which is basically a free pass through most obstacles, at the cost of minimum movement speed. Perhaps the technology wasn't quite there yet, but Assassin's Creed should fit the bill for being a social stealth game, where you hide in plain sight amongst the people. The groups of scholars you can blend with are getting there, but they're a binary choice; you're blending with them, or you aren't. Social stealth is an idea Ubisoft didn't try again until early builds of Splinter Cell: Conviction, which then turned into Watch Dogs, which didn't even deliver on that aspect anyways. Did I mention that modern Ubisoft sucks?
At the end of it all, I'm not quite sure what Assassin's Creed even is. I don't feel stealthy, so it isn't a stealth game. It's "open world" only in the sense that you can approach your objective in whatever route you see fit. It's a collectathon if you're a FREAK and think collecting the flags isn't a completely pointless waste of time. For 2007 though, open world/sandbox games weren't exactly plentiful. The genre had room to grow, and I think it's commendable that Ubisoft Montreal built a sufficient skeleton to build upon and support the series for over a decade and counting, even if it meant their fate as a studio was sealed.
I'm sure the twist is common knowledge to literally anyone who owned a 360/PS3 in 2007, but I was genuinely taken aback by the actual premise of this game. Nothing ever gave me the idea that I would be diving into the DNA of a mild-mannered American, taking control of his his ancestor's memories, all done through a machine known as the "Animus". Basically, Desmond's scientific captors insist that he comes from a long line of assassins, and there's clearly something tucked away in his long-gone relative's memories that they need. Seeing as Desmond is reliving the events of his assassin ancestor in the middle east, Altair very much sounds like a modern-day American, which is pretty jarring when everyone around him sounds perfectly natural, given the setting. It's like he's a tourist in his home country. Still, the Animus is a really cool framing device for the events that unfold, and it kinda stole the entire show for me. I was more eager to escape the assassin simulation and see what new stuff I could find in the cold, cramped, and claustrophobic lab. The developments that occur between the long bouts of assassin gameplay were the carrot-on-a-stick that kept me going up until the end, no matter how repetitive, tedious, and annoying the game got.
Ah, fighting, hiding, and climbing; the three pillars of assassin-ing.
Controlling Altair feels like maneuvering a playable bag of bricks, which is decently realistic, in a sense. That's what they were going for in many aspects of this game, realism. NPCs and guards interact with you and each other in appropriate ways, even with dozens of them walking the streets at any given time. Realistic real-world locations, copious amounts of mocap, it's all here. Altair can't swim though. Guess they forgot to add that feature to the Animus, I'm sure they'll add it in a firmware update or something.
This game marks the first time that I've been exposed to the Ubisoft Tower, the genuine article. What do they do? Well after you climb it, you press a button, the camera pans around, one or two points of interest are marked on your map, and not much else. "Not much else" is a real running theme with this one. Climbing anything can be obnoxious due to a variety of reasons: unclear footholds, unknown jumping distance, and even Altair just not cooperating. I've been spoiled by Sucker Punch's offerings (Sly Cooper/Infamous), but I feel like an action you're going to be doing all game should be enjoyable at the bare minimum.
The objectives themselves are nothing to write home about. You'll have seen them all before you clean out your second area. They can be mind-numbingly easy, like eavesdropping on a conversation, inconsistently difficult, like pickpocketing a guy, or my absolute least favorite, the ones where you have to eliminate multiple targets without being discovered. The fact that it's extremely easy to be caught during these is one thing, that's an instant fail state. The part that gets me is that there's no instant retry. You have to lose your pursuers, backtrack to where you started the mission originally, wait through the mission-giver's 20-second spiel, and then you get to retry. Sometimes I even just let the guards kill me, because I know the last checkpoint the game set was right where I started the mission. May as well cut out all that nonsense in favor of putting the controller down. Completing at least a few of these menial tasks is mandatory, as they give you information that may or may not be critical in making sure your assassination goes off without a hitch. It can be interesting to ogle and plan around this knowledge, but nothing really beat the "fuck it, we'll do it live" approach I usually brought to the scene. They try to build it up like a big heist, but it's working within the incredibly limited constraints of AC1's gameplay variety.
The combat is middling for entirely different reasons. Mechanics such as "combo kill" are tied to timing your button presses in a really unclear rhythm. Aside from yeeting people off rooftops, I never really found a good use for grabs. None of it really matters by the time you unlock a counter maneuver, which you can use to take out entire small armies with little effort. They also seem to run away in terror after you kill enough of them in a single encounter. Maybe it's designed that way to give the player some room to breathe, or maybe it's like that to prevent more corpses from piling up and occupying precious PS3 processing power.
Fighting isn't your only option, and that brings us to the stealth. Escaping guards requires two things: breaking line of sight, and finding a hiding spot before any other guards see you. Even if you flee to the rooftops, the guards are relentless, have eagle eyesight, and are omnipresent. Shaking these guys is way harder than it has any right to be, I turn a sharp corner like the game wants me to, try to find a bench to sit on, and there's just another guard there anyways. I climb up a building only to be spotted by the guards stationed there anyways. Again, I frequently found letting Altair die dishonorably to be the more effective option.
Outside of combat, you can "blend" by pretending to be a scholar by holding X, which is basically a free pass through most obstacles, at the cost of minimum movement speed. Perhaps the technology wasn't quite there yet, but Assassin's Creed should fit the bill for being a social stealth game, where you hide in plain sight amongst the people. The groups of scholars you can blend with are getting there, but they're a binary choice; you're blending with them, or you aren't. Social stealth is an idea Ubisoft didn't try again until early builds of Splinter Cell: Conviction, which then turned into Watch Dogs, which didn't even deliver on that aspect anyways. Did I mention that modern Ubisoft sucks?
At the end of it all, I'm not quite sure what Assassin's Creed even is. I don't feel stealthy, so it isn't a stealth game. It's "open world" only in the sense that you can approach your objective in whatever route you see fit. It's a collectathon if you're a FREAK and think collecting the flags isn't a completely pointless waste of time. For 2007 though, open world/sandbox games weren't exactly plentiful. The genre had room to grow, and I think it's commendable that Ubisoft Montreal built a sufficient skeleton to build upon and support the series for over a decade and counting, even if it meant their fate as a studio was sealed.