The Onslaught Continues

Pouring more time into Assassins Creed, more that I realized as a matter of fact, has cemented this title as one of my favorites. It definitely has its flaws, which I will get into shortly, but the overall destructive force that is Altair is simply too much fun to pass up. The game plays out as a stealth game where the player, as the disgraced assassin Altair, must redeem himself for his failings by assassinating 9 prominent figures in the different cities of the holy land. Although as a twist there is a sci-fi element to the game which blends surprisingly well, and is something that I won't give away as it may be an enticement for a purchase or rental for you (you will thank me later). The idea behind this game's stealth is not one of hide in the shadows and stalk your prey, it follows the hide in plain sight school of thought, and the mechanics work for this type of game.

The hide in plain sight idea is that you, as an assassin, must make yourself so inconspicuous as to appear as just another face in a crowd. It also helps that your assassins outfit is very similar to a monks outfit and you will often find your self bowing your head in prayer in order to "blend" as the game puts it. With a number of tools and maneuvers at your disposal (ie: a hidden wrist blade, a sword, throwing knives, a short sword, and the ability to counter enemy attacks) you can pretty much kill anything with style in all situations; you aren't invincible mind you, but with the right amount of timing you can damn well appear to be so. The ability to use your stealthy removal of a guard in order to divert patrol attention away from something you are about to do is another great element to the game. Very quickly the player will find that the game is not always about staying hidden all the time, and with certain missions like save the citizen from the guards it is encouraged that you blow your cover and start piling up bodies. There is a system to lose the guards and it can lead to some fast paced high adrenaline chases until you can find a hiding spot and is another great aspect to the game.

As I stated before the pure fun that this game perpetuates vastly overshadows the flaws with the design, but there are flaws. For starters the stealth kill or at least one of them is an animation of you cupping the mouth of a guard and stabbing him in the neck with the hidden blade which is awesome and looks amazing. My problem with this is that it is fairly obvious that you are murdering this guy but despite this fact the guard less than two feet away will not react until after the body stumbles to the ground, at which point he comes and investigates his dead comrade and just can't for the life of him figure out what happened all the while I am able to get behind him and stealth assassinate him too.

Another problem is that for some reason all the guards in the country side are all suspicious of you from the start and if you don't walk around in either blend mode or stay out of their visual range they can definitely screw up exploration of the tiny villages you come across. The way I got around this was by eliminating every guard in the countryside that could blow my cover, and while it did take a little while to do this it made exploration a lot easier as I didn't have to slowly walk everywhere. The body count that I piled up also made the game more interesting as just running around looking for flags to collect and Templar to assassinate would have been very boring otherwise.

The final "flaw" with this game, while I understand where people are coming from, I don't necessarily agree with. A lot of critics are saying that the game is tedious and repetitive, and if you do all of the optional quests then I can see this as something that may be true to people of a certain mentality. I have been doing all of the investigative and free quests like scout the entire city from it's highest points or save the citizens and it may just be my ability to get into the storyline but I have to say that it adds to the character of the game. I mean you are in a huge city and are a highly skilled assassin so it stands to reason that you would want to get all intel possible on the target so the mission goes as fluid as possible. These side missions either net you that intel or do enough of the free missions and it adds to your life bar...it's like finding four heart pieces in Zelda.

As you can tell from my gamer tag I have gotten into the game, but not finished it yet. Even with that fact the game is only getting better for me, and I will post my final thoughts on the game once I get all the way through it.