Assassin's Creed Review

Caution: Some Spoilers in the following post!

The introduction to the series produced by Ubisoft, Assassin's Creed was released. They begin the story by introducing Desmond Miles the protagonist, entering the animus but it encounters problems. The animus is a device which can simulate ancestral memories of the person who enters it. In this opening scene you also introduced to Lucy Stillman and Warren Vidic who work for Abstergo Industries. This company is owned by Templars and they kidnap Desmond to be able to access his memories through the animus.

Desmond enters the animus and along comes the introduction of Altair, who seems very careless and ambitious. The first mission show Altair attempting to retrieve one of a series of artifacts known as the "Pieces of Eden" from the Solomon Temple, but unfortunately get stopped by the head of the Templars Robert de Sable. While trying to retrieve the artifact, Altair breaks all three tenants of being an Assassin, "Stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent", "Hide in plain sight" and "Do not compromise the Brotherhood", all broken while trying to assassinate de Sable and fails. Altair returns to Masyaf, the home of the Assassins, to Al Mualim (the leader of the Assassins) demotes Altair to a novice but gives him the chance to rise through the ranks once again by assassinating nine templars across the Holy Land in order to restore peace between the Crusader and Saracen forces.

After all this, you begin your journey with Altair on the mission to assassinate each Templar, soon to learn how each target is connected to de Sable and how they aim to end the Crusades and place the Holy Land under their own control. This is where you learn how to become an assassin from the basics all the way to the most advanced of skills. This aspect of the game is good and it helps you build a good understanding of the game and as you progress through the game it can become quite difficult towards the end of the story. Probably the most impressive of the things you do are all the animations such as the eagle vision which comes very handy as you progress, view points and the best of them all the animation while you assassinate a person. The most impressive animation of them all is when the leap of faith is performed, just how you drop into bale of hay, it is quite amazing as well as totally unrealistic but that doesn't matter. I enjoy this game overall because it can keep you busy for quite a while do meaningful missions to get to your ultimate goal.These are many aspects of the game which are quite good but there are others that a quite poor.



To begin on the negative side of things, the biggest problem with the game is the map. I don't know who designed the in-game map but they absolutely did an atrocious job at it. You cant even see the paths, buildings or anything except the icons which are on the full map which you can use to get to a certain mission. This makes the game quite frustrating as you can go the wrong way at times and you constantly have to open the full sized map to find where to go and its very irritating! The next thing which was quite bad was the animus walls which prevented you from accessing areas of the map. I understand the purpose but it is quite bad because if you go to a place, you do expect to be able to access everything and everywhere in that place or at least make it more mysterious like block off the entrance to the place. Then you have the Kingdom where someone would attack you just because you walk near them. It is quite frustrating that you are constantly running away from people. Also, you have all these collectables which are meaningless other than just for the fact that you have got them all and you don't even get rewarded for your efforts as well. Finally outside of the main gameplay, you would come out of the animus to play as Desmond, but you couldn't do anything at all with him despite interacting with some options which I found to be quite lame and a bit of waste of time. They should of let you do more around the room and allowed you to learn more aout everything that was happening.

Eventually, you will kill all 9 Templars and Altair comes to relise that all these Templars believed they were doing good and despite you killing 9 they mention that there was a tenth member, this member being the leader of the assassin's Al Mualim. You were basically used by Al Mualim to kill the other members so he could have to artifact to himself. Altair returns to Masyaf where he confronts Al Mualim and kills Al Mualim who carried the "Apple of Eden". Once Altair gets his hands on the Apple, it lights up and it shows the world with numerous locations of the other Pieces of Eden across the globe. Once this is done, you come back to play with Desmond who finds out that Absergo is a modern-day front of the Templars who seek these other artifacts which are identified in Altair's memory.

Overall, the game is a great opener to the series. The story is great and there are many surprises plus you do learn quite a lot on where the game and allows you to understand the game better. There were several issues as I mentioned before with the gameplay, which made the game more difficult to play and made the experience harder which could put people from playing through the series. Despite these issues, I still loved the game and I highly recommend this game.

Rating: 8/10

By Armaan Nawaz