Digital Paper Revolution

Game Review: Assassin's Creed

Who doesn't love assassins? They're sneaky, they're stabby, and by god they can run from angry guards like nobody else. Well, perhaps like pansies.

Assassin's Creed follows a curious framed story structure, with the "realtime" storyline following a chap named Desmond who had been kidnapped by a ... pharmaceutical company, I think, called Abstergo. Desmond is forced to relive the "genetic memories" his DNA contains of our second-but-primary hero, Altair, an assassin in the time of the third crusade, and one of Desmond's ancestors. Over the course of the story, we learn about a long-standing struggle between the Assassins and the Templar Knights over a collection of artifacts called "Pieces of Eden," which continues into the game's present with Abstergo being a front for the Templar's forces.

The Animus

The Animus is a machine that allows its subjects to engage in these genetic memories. Desmond is half-willingly thrown into the Animus by the doctor (if he had a name it's long forgotten now) and the Animus technician, Lucy, a digital copy of her voice actress in the English version, Kristen Bell. This machine, of course, offers the means for the cross-era plot, but also acts as a training ground for Desmond due to the "bleeding effect" by which he learns the ways of the Assassins.

This is a great piece of pseudo-science, and covers a lot of questionable ground in video games. Because Desmond is not actually in the memories, he simply becomes "desynchronized" whenever Altair falls to his death. Or drowns. Over and over again. (I had problems with water.) It also offers a good excuse for the mission-based format of the gameplay: get an assignment, kill assignment, repeat. Abstergo is trying to get a key piece of information, so they jump from one assignment to the next, which often offers the player the ability to skip certain scenes or journeys. And the more Desmond engages in the memories, the more "synchronized" he becomes with Altair, allowing for more extensive and more complicated missions.

The only problem I have with this is that memories are not interactive. Perhaps I am missing who exactly is supposed to be the player's avatar, but throughout the game I assumed I was playing as Desmond playing as Altair. They even go so far as to set up the control scheme as a "puppet system" with the four buttons on the controller controlling head, left arm, right arm, feet, respective to their positions on the controller. The whole "desynchronizing" aspect of dying implies that Desmond is doing things that never happened to Altair, but that's a rather shaky analogy when you consider that your "synch bar" depletes whenever Altair gets hurt. What if that actually happened? Or did Altair never get hurt? Or is that just a grey area in the DNA memory storage system, something that the Animus fudges, and it's really only the key events that matter?

Taken that way, the Animus works pretty well as a metaphor for playing video games: the player needs to hit key points to continue (defeat a boss, finish a level), but how they handle the bits in between doesn't really matter. Whether or not this meta, self-referential nature is really intentional, I can't really say, though the concept of the bleeding effect leads me to believe the metaphor has its limits.

The Mission System

While I found the various sub-goals to be rather addictive in their attainability, the whole system was exceedingly formulaic: get your mission, pop into the Assassin's Guild to say hi, gather information, return to the Guild, find your target, kill said target, run like hell back to the Guild. Repeat 9 times.

Your target was always in a new section of town, and there were maybe 4 or 5 ways to gather information. If you are a completist like me, you did all of the reconnoissance tasks for each mission, and they felt very dry by the end, like you had done them half a dozen times before, because you had. It didn't help that the script writers only provided about 2 responses for the NPCs to say in each task. (Priests saying "I wish my son were half as brave as you" is funny, but that's exactly what the other guy I just saved said.) I didn't even realize that these tasks yielded actual information for me as a player until the 6th or 7th mission. Maybe that's my bad, maybe it was a missing tutorial that would have been helpful, but clearly not having that information didn't really hold me back.

In any case, it felt like the scenario designers had a flow chart that they stuck to a little too rigidly. This might be the biggest failing of the game for me, and really, that's not that bad.

Historical Research FTW

That said, they made a gorgeous game. I am not in any way shape or form knowledgeable in the styles of the late 12th century, but it felt like the artists did an amazing amount of research into the architecture, costumes, and ambiance. There were distinct style differences between the Muslim, Jewish, and Christian cities that, I assume, were appropriate for the period.

My roommate tells me that the music was surprisingly anachronistic, given the research that went into everything else. [Edit: She has corrected me that this statement applied to the sequel, not the original.]

So, was it Fun?

Yes, until the end. You could argue that I just wasn't good at the game, but I found some of the tasks required towards the end to be maddeningly frustrating in a way that was unnecessary. If your character cannot swim, maybe make it more difficult to jump into the water as you hop from pole to pole in the harbor. If you're going to encourage stealth throughout the game, maybe don't make me run headlong into an army with no other options.

These and a few other aspects I've already mentioned made the game feel like it had a solid base, but was lacking a little polish. However, I've already started up the sequel, and it's proving to be much cleaner, so here's to progress.