Feb
Continuing to play last year’s games, I’ve been pouring a lot of time into Assassin’s Creed. This isn’t necessarily a game I would have played before I started working on The Force Unleashed, but I’ve really been trying to play more genres of games. Though maybe that’s not true, I did play Prince of Persia when it came out, though I gave up on that game pretty quickly.
Regardless, I’m pretty determined to get all the way through Assassin’s Creed (once again, I think I blame Xbox 360 achievements). I change my mind constantly on how I feel about the game. The core mechanics of the game are stellar. You’re an assassin roaming the cities of the Holy Land in the 12th century (well, most of the time you are, the rest of the time you’re stuck in sorta-interactive sequences that are just questionable). You have some of the Prince of Persia type skills, you can run on roof tops and leap from ledge to ledge, you can climb up tall buildings and anything with the tiniest handhold. You have 3 weapons, a sword, some throwing daggers, and your assassin’s blade that you can use to kill someone silently in a crowd.
The more I play, the more I get to really cool moments where I’ve scaled a building to find a clueless guardsman wandering around on top. I position myself careful, then make a flying leap attack and he’s dead before he knew what hit him. I’m rewarded with a really cool animation and custom camera zoom. Next I bounce from building to building and try to see how far I can get without ever touching the ground. It’s just super cool how open the environment is and how gorgeous it all is as well.
But. Of course there’s a but. The core gameplay is the same thing over and over again. Go to a new area of a city, scale all the tallest buildings, save all the citizens being harassed by guards, gather all the intel on your assassination target, then kill kill kill. I’m not sure what more there is to experience, to be honest. I think I’m about 1/2 way through the game and there’s just a lot of repetitiveness. Without the lure of impending achievement gain I think I’d probably stop playing around now. But I have an assassination to complete and citizens to save! Gotta catch ‘em all.
As to the other part of the game, they seemed to want to explain the whys of gaming. Why do I control a character by pushing buttons? Why do I have a health bar? Why can I fail a mission and repeat it over and over again? To be honest, I don’t care why! It’s a game, we accept standard gaming conventions. But maybe I’m the wrong person to be saying that, since I’m what you might call a hardcore gamer. Maybe just a little. Anyways, there’s this meta-story about you being a modern guy put into this machine called the Animus to relive the memories of an ancient ancestor of yours. They explain the health bar as how “synchronized” you are with the memory. But come on, it’s such a thin explanation to begin with, so why even bother.
One more major gripe is that all the cutscenes are interactive. But the interaction serves no purpose! You can move around, within limits. You can turn the camera. You can end up with terrible shots were a citizen is obscuring your view because he’s wandered in between your camera and the target. I frequently just end up moving my character around spastically because I’m waiting for control to return. This ruins the feel of the cutscene and diminishes the game overall. If there’s nothing of import to do, don’t give me control. I’ll just try to figure out what I can do and get disappointed when the answer is “nothing”.
Oh, and I guess I should be a tester or something, because I keep finding bugs in the game. Yesterday it was actually a progression blocker where I ended up having to reset the game because I had completely lost control of my character. My movement inputs just stopped working. It was just awesome.
But all these gripes aside, the game is beautiful, the main character moves so smooth (like buttah!), and I’m just going to keep on playing until I can’t play no mores!