

It's not easy to criticize a game that does so many difficult things right. In terms of presentation, Assassin's Creed for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is a slam dunk: A clever premise, a unique setting, a fully-realized world, beautiful graphics and music, responsive controls.

Having accomplished all that, the team then failed to support their presentation with any gameplay mechanics that go beyond the utterly mundane. And there's barely even any of that. Assassin's Creed innovates in many ways, except for the ones that are unique and crucial to the medium.

Assassin's Creed* is the Martha Stewart Wii cake, filled with cardboard and sticks: Extremely impressive, just as long as you don't eat it.

The Luckiest, Worst Assassin Ever

__

What It Does Right:__ Every item on the laundry list of things that *Assassin's Creed *does correctly ends up being vastly outweighed by some major failing. The big one is the grand promise that the game makes to you in its very title. Watching the concept video that was originally shown for this game, the hook is revealed: In this game you get to play an assassin. You sneak through a crowd to a place where a corrupt official is making some kind of public appearance. Before he realizes anything, you leap out of the crowd and a hidden blade shoots from your sleeve, through the hole in your fist where your ring finger used to be, and plunges swiftly into his neck, all in one unbroken smooth motion. Guards pursue you, but you quickly outwit them by disappearing into a group of monks, who not coincidentally are wearing the same clothes you happened to pick out today.

__

Why It Fails:__ Investigate targets, carefully plan, then pull off the ultimate stealth kill? This is heavy stuff, and the concept and trailer had me incredibly excited for such a game. I still am excited at the possibility of maybe getting to play such a game in my lifetime. Sadly, Assassin's Creed was not it. Assassin's Creed, when you remove all the presentational trappings, was an unfulfilling, generic collection of boring mini-games and barely passable sword combat.

Before you can kill your target, you have to complete a few "investigation" missions around the city to gather information. There are only four different types. They start out incredibly easy, and get a tiny bit more difficult as the game goes on, becoming just "easy" without the "incredibly" modifier.

Interrogation: A town crier will be spreading some propaganda. Follow him until there are no guards around, then punch him four times and he will start spilling his guts. These are actually the best of the missions insofar as you get to punch a guy four times. At first this seems really stealthy and exciting, but within about five seconds you realize there is no way to lose as long as you just walk five steps behind the guy until you don't see any guards anymore.

Pickpocket:__ __Like Interrogation, but instead of hitting X to punch the guy you're following you hit B to steal what he has in his fanny pack, which apparently was the height of 12th century Jerusalem fashion. Somehow manages to be even easier than interrogation.

Eavesdrop:__ __Thinking that perhaps the above two challenges were too difficult, eavesdropping missions literally ask you to sit on a bench and press the Y button to listen to a conversation. The infinitesimal chance of being caught drops to literally zero.

Informant: For all the ways Assassin's Creed attempts to craft a more realistic environment than that of the average video game, they sure didn't mind having a guy tell you, "I'll give you the information you need, but first, let's see if you can collect the thirty flags that I've scattered around the kingdom in exactly three minutes. Three two one go!" These missions are notable for actually being a challenge, which is likely why they kept them in even though they obliterate the fourth wall that the team had been so careful to build.

I want to absolutely stress to you that besides the running around from place to place to get to these missions, and the assassination segments that follow, the four improbably basic missions above are the only things you actually need to do in this game. There are some entirely optional "Save Citizen" moments where you can help a citizen by fighting off the guards that surround them, but there isn't a whole lot of reason to do so – saved citizens help when you're attempting an escape, but you don't really need them.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. After you complete a certain number of investigations, the assassination itself will become available. You'll travel to one point in the city, where a cut scene will begin and you'll see your target. After it's over, he'll walk somewhere else and now all you have to do is find him without being spotted, then kill him in secret, then run.

Which is what's supposed to happen. Technically, this is entirely possible. Sure, the guards are everywhere, and they're on high alert, but if you stealthily take out a few of them without the others noticing, you'll be able to creep through undetected. The only problem is, what generally occurs is this:

The guards see you, because they always see you They all start attacking Your assassination target, a huge idiot, joins in the fight You totally ignore all the guards, who don't do much damage to you, and end up assassinating the guy anyway, despite yourself, not even knowing which one he is.

I died during a couple of assassination attempts, but more often than not I was able to get the kill in even though I was spotted. So the game's Big Promise, that you'll become this stealthy silent killer who carefully orchestrates his every move, quickly fades away when you realize that more often than not, the game will force you into a situation where the easiest thing to do is just stab the guy right in the middle of broad daylight with a dozen armed guards standing around not doing anything about it.

And then, with one assassination done, eight more await you. Eight more of the same thing, over and over. Same cities, same lame investigation missions, same forced anticlimactic, fumbling kill at the end. Even if you're into Assassin's Creed enough to enjoy the first couple of missions, it all falls apart once you realize that the design team only had five ideas total between them and that nothing new is ever going to happen.

A Whole New World

What It Does Right: The three cities and vast hub world of Assassin's Creed is quite frankly one of the most impressive open worlds that has ever been created for a videogame. Drawing off of the sandbox cities of Grand Theft Auto, the Holy Land is not only impressively rendered, with amazing draw distance (you can scale a high rooftop and see every little thing below), it is artistically very pretty to look at. And it's filled with thousands of people that give it an organic feel.

It's also set in 12th-century Jerusalem instead of a war-torn near-future space-marine alien-ravaged planet like every other video game. I don't care if you're one of the world's most successful game design teams, that takes some balls. That's original, that's daring, that's praiseworthy.

Why It Fails: There is shit all to do.

Ubisoft spent an incredible amount of time and energy lovingly crafting this living, breathing world, and then, from all appearances, nearly forgot to actually put a videogame into it. This might explain why everything even remotely gamelike feels so paper-thin and tacked-on. In other open-world games, you can wander around and find all manner of things to catch your attention. But in Assassin's Creed, every part of the city that does not contain a mission is just filler.

In fact, the entire "Kingdom" hub world, a massive expanse of mountains and fields that connects the three cities, has absolutely nothing crucial inside it. As near as I can tell, the only thing you can do in the Kingdom is climb up watchtowers to complete the map of the area, which is useless because you never need to go there for anything. There are flags scattered all over creation, but you only need to collect them to get the you-collected-all-the-flags achievement – they have nothing to do with the actual story.

All Dressed Up With No Place To Go

What It Does Right: Main character Altaïr, being an assassin and more importantly being a character developed by the people responsible for the Prince of Persia games, is an incredible acrobat. He scales walls, runs on rooftops, and leaps great distances with ease. This is mostly because of the game's

"free-running" system, inspired by parkour.

All you need to do is hold down a button, then hold the direction you want Altaïr to go, and he'll immediately begin running, climbing, and jumping with perfect precision. You don't need to worry about making the jumps or landing right. It's a bold game design decision, but it's pulled off well, making for a very unique feel.

Why It Fails: Early on in the design process, the Assassin's Creed team must have been faced with the basic question: How do you make an open-world* Prince of Persi*a? Judging from the final product, the answer is apparently that you do not. While the game's jumping, hanging, and climbing acrobatics are pulled directly from the previous series, Prince of Persia's jumping puzzles were intricately designed linear feats that challenged you to come up with the perfect series of acrobatic maneuvers to clear them.

Assassin's Creed has no such thing. This is intentional – the jumping and climbing is just how you get from place to place. But since there's so little to do when you finally get where you're going, crafting a more interesting and difficult journey would have helped a great deal.

Slightly later in the design process, another key question must have come up: How do you make an open-world Metal Gear Solid? Apparently you don't do that, either. Metal Gear's stealth gameplay is a series of carefully designed scenarios. You see the guards on your radar screen. You see where you need to go. Your job is to read all this information, then interpret it correctly to figure out the proper course of action that will get you through unnoticed.

Assassin's Creed bills itself as a stealth game, but you can't do any of the above. The city streets are a giant tangled ball of data that you can't legitimately be expected to process. There are dozens of guards, hundreds of people, and lots of little side streets and blind corners. Even if you were a math genius and could process it all, it's still random. A crazy person might push you into a guard, blowing all of your careful planning. You will get spotted in Assassin's Creed. You will get spotted a lot. And then you have to run around the city like a jackass hoping that the guards, who were omniscient a minute ago, suddenly become stupid enough to not see you "hiding" on a bench.

All this is to say that the open-world concept does absolutely nothing for Assassin's Creed's gameplay. I simply can't see any reason why they decided to go this route other than the fact that sandbox games are the hip new thing that all the kids are doing these days. Yes, it's initially very impressive to look upon and roam about this vast, detailed world. But a progressive, linear series of deliberate challenges would have suited the concept so much better. It could have been* Prince of Persia* and Metal Gear Solid all in one.

Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine

What It Does Right: I actually kind of liked Assassin's Creed's story because I have a soft spot for trashy Da Vinci Code conspiracy theory summer beach reading, God knows why.

Why It Fails: That infamous pre-rendered trailer that's stuck onto the attract mode of Assassin's Creed is the only CG cut scene in the entire game. I don't think this is a bad thing per se. Especially in a game that looks this good, there shouldn't be anything wrong with just using the in-game engine to do all of the cinematic scenes. Sure works for Zelda.

But designers should use the in-game engine to show something visually interesting, not have the characters stand stock-still for five minutes explaining big plot points to each other. Guess which one Assassin's Creed does. The great bulk of the story scenes take place in one of two areas: the assassins' bureau in each city (which all look the exact same, which is not what I would do if I was trying to run a shadow organization) and the main assassins' hideout where you return after each kill to talk to your boss.

Eventually I started to dread going in there, because I never knew how long they were going to keep talking at me for minutes at a stretch with nothing interesting happening on screen. This even happens when you assassinate someone. They don't have the courtesy to just die, they have to lay there and yammer on while you stare at nothing.

By about the third of fifty different times that I had to sit through these scenes, my eyes craved some kind of stimulus. I was running Altaïr in little circles, rapidly switching through camera angles, and eventually just started looking at other things in the room. These scenes were so boring that I nearly stopped paying attention to what they were saying altogether. The only thing that changed was the voiceover. Eventually I realized that Assassin's Creed might have worked just as well as a radio drama. I could see Ralphie's family from A Christmas Story gathering in the living room, lying down on the rug, and turning the dial to Little Orphan Altaïr.

Mashmashin's Creed

__What It Does Right: __Combat in a stealth game is a tough one, because you're supposed to use it only as a last resort. So it shouldn't really be too feature-rich, because you're not really supposed to be using it that much. And it shouldn't be too easy, because then you could just run everybody through with your sword and who cares if they see you because they're dead.

In that sense, I think Assassin's Creed's combat worked fine during the assassination missions. If you just tried to kill everything, they'd all block your attacks and you'd die. You quickly learn that what you have to do is get into a defensive stance, then use your counterattack (press the attack button when an enemy's sword is coming in) to get in a hit on them without endangering yourself. It's difficult to attack, but it's supposed to be a punishment for being caught, not a reward.

Why It Fails: And I thought I was disappointed with the last few assassination missions, where things got repetitive and boring. I couldn't even believe what happened in the final hours of the game. Hey, take a guess.* Assassin's Creed*, which is, at least ostensibly, a game about assassinating people, decides that its final climactic sequences will:

Comprise one final intricate assassination, which blends interrogation, free running, stealth, and one final hidden blade kill to serve as the culmination of everything that you've learned before, or Throw all of that crap out the window and make you button-mash your way through an interminable series of fights against increasing numbers of guards, but not making the combat any more fun to make up for it, and making me wish I was still doing eavesdropping missions.

Give up? It is of course number 2. All the stealth gameplay drops out and suddenly you're forced into combat literally until the game ends, sometimes against a couple dozen guards at once, just slamming the X button until it's all over, which takes forever. The combat is still very basic and not much fun, but now you have no choice. By this point I was absolutely in shock that this was the way they decided to end their game. Even the final boss battle is a big huge ridiculous fight against like ten enemies.

My friend Andy Eddy called it the "kitchen sink" approach, "where it gets harder and harder until the point that everything gets thrown at you, seemingly in an effort by the developers to keep you at arm’s length from finishing." I call it the Shredder fight from the end of Ninja Turtles, only terrible, and instead of zapping you with a de-evolution ray and turning you into a baby turtle he zaps the entire game with a de-evolution ray and sends it back to 1988 before the invention of subtlety.

Conclusion: Why Pick On Poor Assassin's Creed?

I'm sure there are plenty of people who are downright angry having reached this point in the story. There are probably fifty worse games released this week. Assassin's Creed does so many things right, so why single it out for such attention? Because it's a massive, high-profile product. Ubisoft has been hyping it up for nearly two years. Apparently it's selling very well.

Also, I'm personally disappointed. I was totally into this concept and couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I loved the time-travel plot gimmick and wanted to know what Altaïr's big secret was. I was ready to kill some people based purely on my own ability to puzzle out the perfect assassination plan. I wanted everything that was promised, and not only did I not get it, I didn't even get an average game.

There's absolutely no doubt (especially to those who've completed the game and seen the lurching drop-off of a cliffhanger ending) that Ubi plans to continue on and on with this series. If they're serious about this, I hope they throw out everything that doesn't work, and go all the way back to the drawing board for the sequel. Because I think they could make the game they promised.

*Note: The above contained Assassin's Creed spoilers.