I finished Assassin’s Creed this weekend. Everyone keeps asking me if it was fun. Things didn’t change much from what I wrote when I wrote my first post about the game last week. It was a mixture of cool and repetitiveness, moments of grace broken up by vast tracks of the same old stuff.
The end of the game was a total setup for a sequel. And I’ll definitely want to give the sequel a try, so I guess I liked the game. But of course, there were things that drove me nuts about the game, so I’m going to complain about them for you!
Harassers
There are several types of civilians in the game who basically just impede your progress. The first and least troublesome are the beggar women. They run around after you and get in your way. If you get two on you it can be hard to move. They’re just irritating, plus they’re accompanied by constant voice telling you “I’m poor and sick and hungry! You don’t understand! Just a few coins, sir!” Well, I have no money so I can’t give you any coins. Leave me alone!
Next category are the crazy men. These guys mutter to themselves and shove you when you try to walk by. These guys drove me totally nuts. If you are under the watchful eye of some informed guards you have to walk slowly - “blend”. If you are doing your slow blend and get shoved into the wrong person, BAM! the guards all notice you! Even worse, you can’t swim and a few times I had these jerks push me into the water where I drowned. This is not fun!
Neither of these harassers are fun. I don’t think they add to the positive experience of the game. They make the streets a bit more alive but the gameplay they instill is frustrating, not enjoyable.
Climbing
Ok, for the most part climbing is great. You can scale buildings, run up walls, and generally get to the top of huge peaks with ease. Maybe it was bugs, maybe it was my lack of skills but there were times when I could *not* get up a building. I knew it was climbable because there was a goal point on the top but I would just keep pushing up and not move. One time I just kept coming at it from different angles for about 5 minutes before it finally just worked for no reason. Argh.
Interface
To select a target you hit the left trigger. This keeps the target selected until you toggle it off. However, the shortcut to bring up the map is to hold left trigger and push select. I can’t tell you how many times I picked up a timed quest from a quest giver, they’d give me some spiel about what I should do, the clock would start and I’d bring up the map. When I came out of the map I’d selected the guy and he was giving me some long line about how I hadn’t finished his quest yet and come back. Meanwhile the countdown timer was running. Argh!
Also, the buttons do different things when you’re in combat or not. If you lock on to a guard while you’re detected you enter combat mode. You always face your target, you can’t run, and you have attacks available to you. My problem with this was sometimes I would be trying to run and somehow I would end up in lock on mode and not understand why I couldn’t run. There’s no clear indication of what mode you’re in. Well, there’s some buttons in the upper left that tell you what pushing them does, so I guess that was an indicator. But it’s so subtle. A big colorful indicator somewhere really would have helped.
Which leads to the last comment
Color palette
The game is beautiful, I’ll start with that. But everything is the same muted colors. The only shocks of color is the red on the occasional Knight Templar you stumble across. But otherwise my memory of the game is beige and tan. It was probably realistic to the period, but my eyes become starved for color.
I got 835/1000 achievement points on the game so I guess you could say I was pretty thorough. I definitely feel like I saw everything important there was to see. I’m curious to see what they do next. I heard they spent most of their time building the technology on this game. It shows, the tech is amazing, the world is vibrant and alive with people. They’re not the smartest of people but they’re interesting and reactive. And the ability to run from one side of a city to another with only a minor loading hitch is pretty darn impressive. So I’m looking forward to what they’ll do when they’re spending their time refining gameplay in this world, rather than building it.