Assassin is pretty, boring

By Lucian Tucker
Collegian Editor
December 5, 2007

Assassin’s Creed is an interesting game with an interesting story, but gamers, be sure to keep this one off your Christmas list. You’re better off making a visit to Blockbuster or Gamefly.com. Or better yet, simply borrow the game from a friend, unless he or she trades it in before you have a chance to ask.

It’s 1191 and the Third Crusade is nearing an end. You play Altair, a member of a clan of assassins. Using a sword, a short blade, a hidden knife, throwing knives and your hands, you have to assassinate nine people who are orchestrating the crusade. Interestingly, the nine people who you must assassinate are real historical figures who actually died in 1191.

To assassinate these people, you must navigate three of the major cities of the Holy Land: Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus. Ubisoft, the game’s designer, went through extreme measures to make sure these three cities were as accurate as possible, and as a result, they are all breathtakingly realistic and live and breathe on their own.

These locations are populated with guards, politicians, beggars, drunks and civilians that all add to the experience the game brings. You can run through a crowd of people, forcing some to scream and others to drop objects they’re holding, or stealthily walk and blend with crowds. Cause too much commotion, and guards come running after you, in which case you’d want to run as fast as you can—climbing buildings and jumping from rooftop to rooftop—in an attempt to break the guards’ line of sight of you. Once this has been done, hide in a pile of hay, sit on a bench with your head down or blend in with a group of scholars until the guards give up their search and wander away.

When you’re not running, you can listen to politicians as they speak to crowds about how they agree or disagree with the crusades and the work you’re doing assassinating people.

Each person you must assassinate has a story, and none of them think that they’re a bad person. Their intentions are much like those of the character you are playing. In this sense, the game is doing much more than simply glorifying murder. It will make you think and perhaps change your thoughts and feelings towards war, debate and religion.

Story aside, the most fulfilling aspect of the game is climbing up to viewpoints. Viewpoints are located at the top of towers and other high buildings, so you have to scope out the architecture to figure out how to scale them. Reaching a viewpoint allows Altair to survey areas and locate side-missions such as “pick pocket,” “intimidate” and “eavesdrop.” These missions help him attain information about his assassination targets and learn where and when the best time would be to attack.

Reaching viewpoints is surprisingly fun, but completing the side-missions is not. The range of side-missions barely changes throughout the game, so once you do each of them a handful of times, you’re going to grow tired of doing them over and over.

I found myself completing all of the side-missions I could find early on in the game, but once I noticed that I only have to complete three side-missions to find out the location of my assassination target, I stopped. I did, however, continue to reach all of the viewpoints.

If you don’t get all of the viewpoints and don’t do all of the side-missions, the game can be completed in 10 to 15 hours, and there is little reason to play it a second time. Because of this, I recommend not buying this beautiful and thought-provoking game. Instead find some other way to play it.

Assassin’s Creed has a lot of potential, and was designed with the intention of being part one of a trilogy. Although it has a solid foundation, Ubisoft has a lot of work to do on Assassin’s Creed II to make it hopefully live up to the hype Assassin’s Creed I fails at fulfilling.

tuckerl1@lasalle.edu