Posts tagged assassin’s creed

This is the game I spent most time on this weekend. At least five or six hours of it. It’s repetitive, yes, but that doesn’t matter at all, as the mechanics are so much fun. Run, jump, fight, run, jump, fight, run, jump… Repeat for hour after hour without getting bored. I’ve done six assassinations now and there’s been a big jump in difficulty. Not so much in combat, where I still feel very hard done by if I die, but in the “stealth” – which is less about not being seen and more about not being noticed.

Some people, I’m sure, must get very angry with the game when a lunatic pushes them into a guard during a stealth kills mission, ruining a few minutes of careful stalking and stabbing. I can understand that. To me, though, it always feels like it’s my fault. I need to allow for them, to stay away form guards when they’re around, make sure to stay back, work out where the guards are and how to get past. The stealth missions now tend to have time limits, but they’re not so tight that you need to power through and get lucky. You have time. Failure is caused by overconfidence, impatience and, yes, some luck.

Anyway, I’m loving it. I’m finding it more difficult to lose pursuers – and running away is the better option than fighting now, for the most part, as a heap of dead bodies left lying around near a mission starting point is a very good way to make things more difficult.

It takes a while to work out the rules of the game – and it is a game with simple rules rather than anything approaching reality – but once you do there’s a brilliant game in a brilliant world. Taking things slowly, refusing to “teleport”, doing everything you can, exploring and just running across rooftops for the sheer joy of it, it’s a wonderful world.

(Being pulled out of the game for lengthy cut scenes full of exposition still grates, though. I don’t care about the plot at all and would be quite happy without any.)

Played this for quite a while last night and – apart from the last ten minutes or so – I didn’t set foot in one of the major cities. I roamed around the kingdom for quite a while, fighting Templars, collecting flags and climbing Eagle Points, found a few more flags in the starting village and then made my way to Jerusalem, where I found the Assassins Guild and saved.

I throughly enjoyed it all, too. The more I play this game the more I like it. I’m still expecting it to get too hard and/or annoying later, but I’ve played for hours now and only done two of the assassinations. I think I’m having a completely different experience to people – especially reviewers – who decided to go through it s quickly as possible. It’s a game that gets better the more you breathe and the more you just mess around, I think.

Last night, this was just about the best game ever… for the most part.

It was the best game ever when I was exploring cities, fighting guards to save citizens (or just for fun), galloping over the countryside knocking guards left and right, running over rooftops to assassinate a guard before he knew I was there and posing like Batman on top of tall buildings.

It was a bit rubbish when I was actually playing the main game. The missions you use to gain intel aren’t very interesting. They’re very short, but just not very fun. There are three types, one of which involves, er, finding a bench to sit on. Yes. That really makes me feel like an assassin. Picking pockets and roughing people up to gain information are more interesting, but not as fun as rooftop escapes or counter-filled fights against six guards at once.

I only did one real story assassination in the four hours I played, but that was just a fairly standard fight bookended with annoying cut scenes. It’s not Hitman, by any means. In Hitman fights against multiple opponents generally mean death and stealth is the way to go. In Assassin’s Creed stealth is the far more difficult option, with combat against multiple opponents being reasonably easy (so far) and more of a way to show off than anything else.

It’s as if they’ve got the world right, the controls right and the combat right, but then tacked on a main game unworthy of all the rest. Combat is really superb now I can counter, the cities are wonderful and the simplified running and jumping controls that sounded so rubbish from previews actually work superbly. There’s enough control to make it feel like you’re doing everything, but it’s automated enough to stop you from constantly falling over, cursing and dying. Sometimes things go wrong and you end up throwing yourself off a building when you meant to jump up a wall or leap a gap, but it doesn’t happen very often and given the nature of the game they’ve done a really great job there.

I’m not sure if the fun will last, but right now it feels a lot like a GTA game to me. That sense of freedom, coupled with the annoyance of having to do annoying story missions to open up new areas to play. (I’ve never liked the story missions in GTA games. Ever.) The other comparison that springs to mind is with Crackdown and I think Assassin’s Creed would probably have been better structured in a similar way, with all the targets open and available from the beginning.

Oh, and it crashed on me last night. I was in an enemy camp out in the kingdom and I’d just slaughtered a load of enemies with my amazing sword skills. The last one fell, I started to walk towards my horse and my 360 froze up completely. Grrr.