Assassins Creed - An Acquired Taste

I'm several hours into the original Assassin's Creed, and I'm wondering what all the fuss is about. The controls are clunky, the graphics are dated (okay, maybe I can't blame them for that), it's full of annoying little glitches (I encountered a game-breaking glitch in the tutorial and had to restart), and I'm just bored. The side missions are so repetitive that I'm only finishing the ones that I absolutely have to. I like the parkour - even today it feels like something different than anything I've seen before - and obviously informed games like Infamous, Prototype, and Horizon. I've had to traverse the Kingdom a couple times, and completely don't understand why it exists, and I find myself bored to tears during most of the cutscenes. There are some interesting little philosophical tidbits here and there, but overall it feels a bit overbaked.

And then, well, I don't know. Something changed. I found that, despite myself, I was enjoying the core gameplay loop. Get a mission, go to a city, do a couple investigations, unlock the viewpoints, assassinate one of the 9 baddies, and go back to Masyaf to receive my new equipment and extra health. Then do it all over again, until the end. The combat could be a bit infuriating on a mouse and keyboard, but the counter-kills made it sometimes worth it. I'm not sure if I just sucked at the assassinations or they were deliberately quite hard, but I usually found myself detected and fighting my way to my target. And towards the middle of the game you gain the ability to fast travel between the cities, which makes things move along a bit smoother.

Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus could do to feel a bit more distinct, but between the different architecture and the color-shading applied to each city, there's enough to tell them apart. Perhaps I would have been more interested in those cities if I knew much of anything about the architecture in them, but I feel like I might have to wait for a more recognizable (to me) city for that. Now is a good time to point out that this is my first Assassin's Creed game. In more than a decade of gaming, I've somehow avoided playing even a minute of any of them. In a fit of boredom, I purchased the entire series, DLC or all, so those will be the games I plan to write about for a bit. I'll admit, not knowing what to expect, the size and scope and even beauty of the open world stunned me for the original game. It's just a shame it feels so...empty (of side activities or connection to the world, not NPCs, which populate the city with an impressive density even today).

I also had some problems with the writing. While Altair - the game's player character - had some real character development by the end, he's written as such an insufferable shit in the beginning of the game that it's hard to develop any real connection with him at all. Al Mualim has a bit of an odd character arc, and honestly it's difficult to pull the strings on exactly what motivates him. And De Sable and the Templars are referred to as the most evil men out there - and while certainly some of their motivations and actions are good - it's hard to think of the Assassins as particularly better given the way Altair and Al Mualim dispatch hundreds of people across the Holy World. As for the modern day, while an interesting and novel concept, it was hard to develop any kind of connection with Desmond, Vidic, or Lucy, and these side scenes didn't seem to serve any purpose except as a brief respite from the gameplay loop. I did adore Malek's character arc though.

The game is set in an interesting period of time - the Third Crusade - and offers some interesting commentary about the motivations of the crusaders and their Saracen enemies. It was a bit odd that Altair could just traverse from one side of the conflict to the other without much more than a couple run-ins with patrols, but it seemed reasonable to handwave that for gameplay purposes. But beyond some commentary on the part of your assassination targets, not much is done with that setting. You could imagine some fascinating side missions exploring the conflict, its motivations and human actors. The game just...doesn't. This combined with the extremely repetitive nature of the side missions that do exist brings the game down well below the level it could have achieved.

In totality, it's a fun game that just doesn't reach the mark it could have set. That being said, I know one thing today that was beyond the game's reviewers in 2007, this game spawned one of the most successful, profitable, and iconic game series of all time. It remains possibly Ubisoft's most important IP, and is somewhat of a cult classic among millenial gamers. So with that in mind, I'll say Assassin's Creed provides a solid foundation for what came after. But on its own merits, I can't recommend it to anyone who doesn't already have some sort of interest in the series and/or stealth games.

2.5/5