Nothing like this had ever been done before, and—to my knowledge—has ever been done since.

While the controls feel a bit weird at first (like, PS1 007 weird), you start understanding that they're literally perfect for this game after a while.

At the end of the day, they didn't have to do this. They did not have to do this. But they did. They went above and beyond.

And when you're done? You can play an alternate version of it as a different character. Genius.

Actually very cool. It's a very unique game. What other horror franchise has a video game this dedicated? Dedicated to the tone, and the aesthetic, and the world frankly.

I love how it kind of leaves you to figure shit out on your own. It makes it much more anxious and stressful.

But the combat is absolutely horrid. Which I guess adds to the feeling of helplessness and anxiety over the chance of dying as soon as you see another human being, but it really is absolutely horrid.

I like the concept of the different people trapped, like the wife of Detective Sing, and the guy who coined the Jigsaw name, and a guy who wants to be tested by Jigsaw. I wish they were a bit closer together, though, and I sort of wish you could lose.

And I really like the puzzles.

I absolutely love the ending.

I'm getting really sick of shooting people.


Voice-acting carries this whole game.

And fuck Nathan for making Elena drop her camera. Just fuck him. No redemption.

It's fucking good.

This game starts with a Planet Terror-style scene of a stripper with a gun pole dancing.

Also, the soundtrack is straight fire.

They met as adversaries.

Isaac Washington is the coolest name.

The game just takes your ass and throws you right in there.

"Varla Guns. A voluptuous vixen vowing violent vengeance."

Isaac and G is the greatest duo in video game history. I don't remember laughing this much while playing a game ever before.

It's motherfucking good.

This does not work.

This is definitely a tech-demo. There's no way this is a full game. This is a proof of concept. This is an early-access pre-alpha build for a Steam indie game.

How DARE this game be this long?!

And how dare the environment be this open?! There's nothing in it!

You know how we say a game is "unfinished" when it's buggy and stuff. But this game is barely even started. WHO SAID THEY COULD RELEASE THIS?!

These guys have never seen a cutscene before.

These guys have never played a stealth game before.

This color grading sort of works in what it wants to do, but everything looks so fucking boring.

They're lucky they put the game on the Revelations disc for free 'cause if I paid money for this game I'd legitimately burn their offices down.

This gameplay sucks.

It probably has the worst basics tutorial.

The traversal is a good starting point, especially for 2007, but it is SO SLOW! And it's not even slow as in just physically slow, it's almost never smooth. You climb up a building because it looks like you should be able to climb up it, and then Altaïr stops halfway up because he can't climb the rest of the building, even though it legitimately looked just like the bottom part of the building, and very much looked like you should be able to climb it, so you have to slowly shimmy your way to the side and climb another part of the building while people are throwing rocks and shooting arrows at you. Fun. Sometimes I might hold the stick a bit to the left, because the left thumb's axis is on the left, and Altaïr will just shoot out to the left and die.

The goal in this game is to get from point A to point B, and then listen to a boring-ass conversation, and then get from B to C, and hit a button, and then go to another C, and then another C, and then walk back to B, and then go to D, hit a button, and then walk back to B, and then back to A, and do it again, and again, and again. And while there are different B's and C's, they still look and play exactly the same. D is the only thing that sort of changes enough to not feel too monotonous.

This structure could be really interesting, if it wasn't for the fact that every segment of the game is the same as the rest. And there is some beauty in its simplicity, but there's also boredom.

Oh, side quests? You want me to do side quests? You want me to collect 420 flags? Hehe... HAHA... HAHAHAHAHAH! You fucking idiots. Why in the FUCK would I do that?

And also, there are just random-ass pedestrians whose only goal in life is to push you. Fuck them. Fuck whoever programmed that shit. It does nothing but annoy me.

Informer Assassinations reset if you get discovered. Even if you kill both, and then bump into a fucker two feet from the informer, that will reset the whole thing and you have to kill both again.

There's a part where you have to jump across small boats and posts to get to a ship to assassinate a guy. What happens if you touch the water? Instant death. INSTANT DEATH!

I'm sure that, if this was the first game of the generation that you tried out, it probably blew your mind, but this is not a game. It is a "wow, this is so cool" experience demo for the new generation. But it isn't new anymore.

Now, I'm not gonna lie. Desmond's story is fucking gold. It is gold. I love the atmosphere of it. And even Altaïr's story goes hard towards the end.

I don't like that Desmond can't go faster than a slow walk, but that's the gameplay aspect again, and you just have to deal, because this is the most interesting part of the game.

I honestly couldn't remember if I had finished this game before this replay, until I hit the credits and instantly remembered the absolute perplexity and stupefaction I felt at how jarringly this game ends, and I had the same experience this time. These guys were on some other shit. You really have to get past the disappointment of the ending before you can really appreciate how fucking ludicrous it is.

As a storytelling technique, I absolutely love it, but fucking tell a story, assholes.

If I could have the atmosphere and story of this, with the smoother and faster and just more polished gameplay of the sequels, then great. But I can't.

Great storytelling, great world-building.

3/10. I love this game.


It's this dilemma. Between knowing that I love the story and atmosphere and everything like that, but also knowing that I did not have fun playing the actual game part of it.

But, now knowing how much I enjoy the last couple of hours of this game, I definitely have to replay it at some point, hoping that, just by having that knowledge, it'll be without the first hours of boredom. But it'll be after I replay all the other AC games, so it'll definitely also be more jarring. So, it loses anyway.

But all this makes sense because the Animus was made by Templars.

Gameplay is a 2/10, everything else is a 7, nearing an 8. I hate splitting ratings up like that because that's not a thing, that's not how this works, but I have to with this fuck.

8/10 tech-demo. 3/10 game.

To be honest, this would still have been an amazing stand-alone video game. If the movie didn't exist, this would have been the coolest ambitious PS2 hack-and-slash. I found myself wishing it would never end.

There are so many small details about this game that makes it so much more impressive than it has any right to be. It was the studio's second PS2 game, and only three years before becoming defunct. The game is Devil May Cry in Castlevania. It's bad-ass.

And the hat mechanic is awesome!

Masterpiece opening to a game.

This game is fucking AWESOME!

This is among my favorite tones for a game. Just the overall feel and concept is definitely me.

This game is so me that Nick made the EXACT same Punk'd joke that I make all the time. I had no idea.

Also, that one song from Tokyo Drift plays while you run up on the final boss, so that's an extra point.

"Whoa! Zombies suck dick at driving!"

I love the style and the overall gameplay. The way they've set up combos is obviously very neat, and the little segments with gameplay switch-ups are really nice.

But the camera can be pretty garbage at times, especially when you just start up the game for the first time in a while.

And the combat does get kind of clunky. The recovery time between combos is kind of ridiculous, and the fact that you can't exit out of those combos with a simple push of the dodge button.

But the style, and the era, and the dialogue and everything there just completely makes this game.

This game doesn't need a remake. At all. But after the remake, let's finally have a sequel that starts with Juliet and Nick going out to a cabin in the woods and then Nick gets bitten again and Juliet has to chop his head off again.

If a game doesn't have 'Lollipop' by The Chordettes playing on a loop in the items/upgrades menu, it's pretty much a flop.

"My favorite president is Warren G. Harding."

WANNA KNOW THE NAME? DEVIL MAY CRY.

CAPCOM!!! 2005!!!!

How the fuck do you make Devil May Cry 2, and then go and make Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening?

Capcom coming in with the bomb-ass cutscenes. Some of my favorite cutscenes. Inspired my whole being.

People who play this game on Yellow are satan.

But why does the map system have to get worse with every game? I didn't even like how it was in the first one, but I'll gladly take that over this. Literally, the only mission where I even look at the map is the one where you're spinning the castle.

WELCOME TO HELIX!

This series has me so badly that I'm legitimately exited about the fake software the evil company in the fictional video game universe has been working on.

It's like a swashbuckler. But it's a video game. Or I wish it was. That's how it starts.

The traversal is a LOT less liberal with the specifics. And the controls just don't work.

I HATE the difficulty and level system they created. Like, why? Why do I need four different kinds of currency? Just give me my abilities! And the outfit thing seems like a neat idea, but it's just a whole bunch of time you could have spent somewhere more important.

And the cover system sucks and never does what I want it to do.

I thought the new eagle vision system was cool at first, but during stealth and more tense moments, it just doesn't work. I hate how enemies disappear from the minimap. Enemies will be right in front of me and I won't even know.

Enemies spot you without you even knowing that there are enemies there or where they're spotting you from.

People see you in the street and immediately try to kill you.

I don't think I've died in combat since Brotherhood, and I've died more in this game than I have in all the others combined.

And I think the game is way too punishing with where it places you after you die.

The stealth is so infuriating, I wish they would have just not incorporated it at all. Just fully made a swashbuckler video game. Instead, not even the swordplay is that enjoyable because the new combat system really loves watching you die out of pure slowness.

And the new wannabe-Hitman assassination system is fucking stupid and repetitive. It adds nothing. It was cool for one mission, and then they gave up. It just makes the game more tedious and the missions longer. And if you fail the mission, you have to restart the whole thing, so, no, fuck you and your game.

Élise being a Templar has no point between the moment you find out, and the moment she stops being one.

The French Revolution feels less like a part of the story or a set piece, but rather more just like something that happens to be going on at the same time as the plot. They never really give a shit about it. Some stuff happens, and then the king is being executed and it means nothing to you because it hasn't before now.

And the modern day stuff doesn't really continue what Black Flag and Rogue did, and is basically just nonexistent, so, garbage game.

The real tragedy in the whole thing is that they didn't spend their time polishing this game to be THE next-gen Assassin's Creed title.

The foundations are all here, but it's bare bone, and for some of it, it doesn't even feel like they haven't polished it, it's like they just didn't finish making the game. Like it's 70% done. There's shit missing.

And FUCK Marie Lévesque and her fucking gala!

People still don't love this? Are you, maybe, uh, not a cool person? THIS is how you make a game.

I've always found that the games that really speak to me are the games that never lose traction or pacing. That never drags, and never goes too fast, and just constantly leaves you with new things to think about and do, and is constantly not only switching up enemies and locations, or weapons, but the actual gameplay.

And that's Resident Evil 6, baby! It's fucking awesome! And my favorite game in the franchise.

I've never played a game where, I've gone to bed after playing, just longing for the next day so I can play more. Sure, I've been excited enough to think about other games while going to bed, but not actually been gleeful and jittery thinking about going to bed and sleeping and waking up and eating breakfast and turning on the TV so I can play more of the game. The experience just warmed my heart.

No lie. After Leon's campaign, and I started Chris', I legitimately smiled and felt such joy to the point where I almost started crying because of how much I was loving it. It was so fucking cool.

THIS is how you utilize cinema storytelling in video games. I absolutely love the way they've taken filmmaking techniques and philosophies, and have actually successfully translated it, and made it work in a video game format, and even enhanced it sometimes.

I've never seen a cold open be utilized in a game before. Not actually. I've seen video games open in the middle of stories before throwing you back to the beginning, but not an actual legitimate cold open, before the title screen. Before the main menu. That's so insanely cool.

And the story ACTUALLY UNFOLDS as you play! It doesn't just get told to you with each checkpoint. You play, and you figure out this bit, and then you come back later with that previous bit, and you get a second bit, and you now have two bits that fit together to form a bigger bit. And it's like that for the entire game! It's magic before your very eyes!

The structure just pumps me with cocaine. Or another fun drug of your choosing. It's like any other insanely awesome game, but it's four games. And I legitimately can't pick out one that I like more than another. All four are just so special, and actually unique. Even if one does one thing worse than the rest, it turns around and does another thing better than the rest.

Just when you think you've started a bad section, it throws you in some 720 loop that flips your whole world and you come right back down to the same conclusion as you had before: masterpiece.

Absolute, unequivocal, masterpiece.

The best game ever made. Literally.

Good night.