A fascinating relic to a time where the Ubisoft open-world format was not so ubiquitous, yet the experience ends up feeling needlessly repetitive all the same.

I admire this first entry into the Assassin's Creed series for how quaint it feels in comparison to later titles but in revisiting it this many years later, I am left wanting by the depiction of the Crusades era of history. So deeply engrained in this game is a centrist worldview that produces an ahistorical rendition of the Crusades as a two-sided conflict between equal foes, with little to say about either of them. It exposes how much this franchise enjoys using historical conflict as a backdrop whilst believing itself to be above the politics that defined them.

In this particular game it was hard not to find it uncomfortable in light of the parallels one can draw between the imperialism of the Crusades and that of Zionists today. Placed next to some more mundanely egregious representations of poor & disabled people, I found it difficult to truly enjoy what are (still to this day) otherwise impressively, rarely-rendered Arabic cityscapes.