Assassin’s Creed III, the fifth proper instalment in Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise is due to release at the end of October. Hypable plays through the previous games in the series from the viewpoint of a newbie to the Creed’s universe to see what we hope stays and what we hope goes in the next evolution of Assassin’s Creed. This post contains spoilers relating to the original Assassin’s Creed game.
First impressions
I have never played an Assassin’s Creed game before. I’m even scratching my head to remember the last time I played a stealth game, or a game that focused around assassination. Skyrim’s hilariously poor sneak system hardly counts, does it?
Regardless, I still find it extremely satisfying to get around a problem in-game through subtlety and fooling the AI system rather than running in all guns (or axes) blazing, so perhaps Assassin’s Creed would be my kind of game after all. Yet I remained cynical as I booted up the first Creed game on my PC, wondering how long it would take before I muttered either “stupid console port” or “dumb NPCs,” or else slam my head against the desk in frustration at a stupid story, racial stereotype or glaring historical inaccuracy.
The opening cinematic of the original Assassin’s Creed game did little to dull my usual skepticism for highly successful triple-A standard games. Bad guys killing people. Brooding, buff, hooded protagonist looking on from atop a tower. Then it gets better; a neat play with camera angles and a clever use of a bell chiming made me sit up and take notice – this trailer was more than the usual “I AM BADASS” statement that usually drowns out any vaguely artistic messages or even any relation to the actual gameplay itself.
Every English teacher, movie snob and scriptwriter loves a good bit of symbolism, and the opening trailer, to my surprise, dealt out a nice little bit of imagery, cutting directly from a hawk to the main character.
I don’t need to go into the obvious connections between an assassin and a bird of prey here, but it was a nice little touch in the trailer that was satisfying to spot. But it got better as the protagonist, Altaïr, got going with that trademark loping gait of his, as he runs down alleyways, knocking empty pots from people’s grasps, climbing up walls, running along rooftops, and disappearing into a crowd of similarly white-robed people. I raised an eyebrow: that looked awesome, but I wouldn’t be able to do anything close to that in the game, would I?
Wrong. The reason I’ve gone on about the trailer so much was because it actually reflects Assassin’s Creed‘s gameplay. 90% of the game is a pot-smashing simulator. The other 10% is roof jumping and chilling out with groups of scholars that conveniently dress in the same colours as your character.
Desmond the bartender
First, however, Assassin’s Creed threw me another curveball. The protagonist isn’t really an assassin? He’s a bartender from the present day called Desmond? What?
I had to rapidly reassess what to expect from the game. Was it going to be part modern-day thriller? Was I going to be sneaking a machine gun into the 12th century?
I was introduced to the Animus, a machine which used my character’s genetics to effectively put him in the shoes of his ancestors. Altaïr is one of those ancestors, and there were to be no machine guns. After a quick tutorial in the guise of a simulation that involved plenty of pot-smashing, I started getting sucked in to the actual game.
Learning the ropes
Thankfully, the first level served as a second tutorial. The default PC controls were clunky and unintuitive, but I persevered, eventually getting to grips with holding down the left mouse button to go into “active” mode, using space to both sprint and blend in, and so on, but not before I’d accidentally assassinated a poor patrolling soldier in broad daylight in the middle of a crowd.
Undaunted, I proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes climbing ladders, scaling walls and jumping between roofs. I soon found that jumping off roofs scared the living daylights out of passers-by, so naturally, I went out of my way to do so several more times. I was also quickly introduced to Altaïr’s arch enemies – trees. I could climb sheer ten-foot high stone walls, I could survive three-story falls, but I could not jump into trees without being deflected by what must have been invisible tree ninjas.
After these lengthy distractions I headed to the assassins’ HQ, where they’d clearly bought white robes in bulk, and got berated by the boss, who had a beard as formidable as his nose.
I was introduced to the “leap of faith,” which was perhaps all I really associated with Assassin’s Creed prior to playing it: a dive off a plank from a ridiculous height, with a stack of hay to cushion the fall. In-game it looks insanely cool, and introduced me to another one of the main characters of the game: hay bales.
I drew to the end of the first mission (or “memory block”), which involved my character having to help clear out some enemies from the town, Masyaf. During the closing stages of the mission, my first major gripe with Assassin’s Creed arose. I got to a dead end, or what immediately looked like one. I stopped to consider what to do next, but before I could get anywhere, my character drew his sword and the game told me to press a button. I pressed the button, slashing through rotten wood and sending a dozen wooden logs rolling down onto the enemy soldiers below.
It was an unexpected moment, but being left to figure out what to do myself without being prompted would have made it satisfying rather than leaving me shrugging indifferently. The game could have just told me to “break the wood” or “release the logs” rather than spelling it out for me, if such a prompt was required at all. This might seem to clash with my previous assertion that the controls were too complicated, but here the problem wasn’t me knowing which button to press – it was that I wasn’t allowed to figure it out on my own. The constant hand-holding continued, unfortunately.
Assassin’s Creed did surprise me with the conclusion of the first memory, where Altaïr appeared to be killed by formidable nose beard guy. Another early welcome surprise was the inclusion of cutscenes, which weren’t too long, allowing me to spot “glitches” to switch cameras, and letting me control my character to a certain degree.
Having Desmond pace around restlessly whilst being talked to earnestly was always entertaining, as was having Altaïr stand inappropriately close to his superiors when they were lecturing him, jarring nicely with the dialogue. All silliness aside, the cutscenes were of a high standard for a game that released back in 2007, with solid animations, good voice acting and writing and, most importantly, they weren’t too long or frequent.
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