Despite its great looks and cities with lots of activity, Assassin's Creed is unbelievably frustrating in its repetition and flatness. The story certainly has potential, particularly the story outside of the Animus. However, the biggest drawback for me was how bland Altair was, with his arc happening but it never feeling like I had any sort of connection with him. His actions remained the same throughout the game despite his supposed changing throughout, so the change that Altair is having that he and other characters are talking about never really feels present.

The game does a fine job with creating an immersive environment, with great looking worlds and lots of places to jump and climb about. The frustrating part is that none of the cities feel like they have any distinguishable personality. Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus all look and feel the same, with everything that you do in the city feeling the same pretty much. The lack of interesting environments piles onto the general repetitive nature of the game. Assassinating 9 different people, but always getting stuck doing the same types of investigations prior to the kills, the same types of people around the cities and the same type of action. It becomes mind-numbing after a time and certainly did not leave me excited to press on.

I will say that the story leaves me intrigued to see where it goes in the next games, and the changes in the story after the 9 assassinations definitely was more intriguing. But really, it ended up boiling down to the repetitive fighting that populated the rest of the game up to it. And a lot of it got really clunky and frustrating at times.

Assassin's Creed is a super neat concept that feels like such a bare bones game. The freedom to move around is worthless since the additional content like flag searching, saving citizens and climbing the towers doesn't really add anything; it's just filler to try to justify the open world.

I am looking forward to seeing how this franchise builds upon itself, especially the environments since the concept obviously has lent itself to blending in numerous different time periods and settings. The potential is there, and I am hoping that as I go through these games, it is fulfilled.