Psychosis Syndrome

After several days of intensive gaming, including one day of shifting between me and a mate, I have at long last finished Assassin’s Creed. I haven’t played many (any?) Ubisoft games before, including the notable Prince of Persia games, so I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I can safely say now that all the PoP games are now on my list.

My first impression of the game wasn’t great. In retrospect, I can’t imagine why, but at the time, I wasn’t really drawn into it. But, I pressed on, and very quickly, the game consumed me.

Most importantly of all, the game is fun. They’ve created an excellent world, and moving around in it is exhilarating. I spent hours just running and jumping from roof to roof, and climbing up every tall building I could find. It feels incredibly natural, too. Seriously, dude is a ninja. Not just a ninja. A monkey ninja.

Combat, I know, is a big sore point for a lot of people in this game. I want to come right out and say that I enjoyed it. A lot. It wasn’t perfect; not by design, but by unfortunate unresponsiveness. I wouldn’t change anything about their combat system, but I would like it to work a little better. But it’s very rare that a game can pit one person against anywhere between one and seven (the most I ever fought at one time, though there were as many as twenty others waiting to jump in) enemies and still make you feel like you’re in control. Instead of being overwhelming, it’s very easy to manage, and combat flows smoothly, when the system works. As the game progresses, enemies get smarter instead of tougher, by using new tactics and responding more intelligently. It’s a much more refined system than enemies simply gaining more health and doing more damage. It was very satisfying to pull of my first successful counter, which resulted in my dodging the enemy’s blow, slicing through his kneecap then stabbing him through the chest. Awesome. Also, the variety of weapons were excellently chosen and implemented. My main concern with it is that the gameplay through the middle of the game is fairly repetitive, and your investigations for assassinations are very formula based. New city, climb high to get a good view, then find bitches to interrogate, pickpocket or eavesdrop on. Also sometimes there are informants, who’ll give you information if you collect flags or kill people stealthily for them. They feel like the least organic but most rewarding sources.

The story was definitely a high point for me, though I didn’t think it would be at first. Mostly because it’s actually to concurrently occurring stories, neither of which are particularly compelling at first. The basic plot is as follows: it’s the year 2012, and you’ve been kidnapped by some organisation. This is because your DNA contains the genetic memories of one of your ancestors and hence the location of a valuable treasure. They’ve developed a device which will let you relive those memories, but it’s too unstable to jump to the last memory, so instead, you have to work your way through all of them. The memories are divided into blocks, and as you progress through them, the real world story progresses too.

It’s a very clean and fairly original idea, and one they’ve implemented well. More importantly, though is how it ties in with and effects the gameplay (they also do an excellent job of this). As you’re reliving a memory, obviously it would be possible to stray from that. The game handles this in a few ways. Instead of a health bar, you have a sync bar. If you get completely desynchronised, you die, and have to start from the last checkpoint. If you get hurt, or do something your ancestor wouldn’t do (like kill an innocent civilian for example) it goes down. If you do the things he did, like climbing view points, it goes back up. It also comes back over time. Slowly.

Another important issue with this is the idea of failing something. For example, you want to pickpocket some guy, but he catches you. Obviously, it’s a game, and you need a way to redo it. But most games don’t cover it very well (there aren’t many organic ways of handling it, really, unless you introduce a spontaneous amnesia virus or something). Assassin’s Creed divides it into a memory pattern. If you fail, that little part of the memory re-loads itself, and the rest of the world stays in tact. It makes sense, and it works, something a lot of games don’t bother with, or else fail miserably.

Another highlight of the game for me was the dialogue. It was well written, and competently acted. Most of it was intriguing, though like any movie or novel, some of it was weaker than other parts. More interesting for me, though, was the (possibly unintentional) social commentary that emerged from some of it. For example, if you jump of a roof and land in the street, obviously, people are going to react. Same if you just randomly start climbing a building. Some responses to this include “He’s going to hurt himself, and I won’t help him”, “When will he stop acting like a child” and “Why is he being such a fool”. As I’ve mentioned previously, I think it’s a serious concern that people will do away with harmless actions as being childish, or foolish. I found it interesting that it would feature in this game (and since I did a lot of wall climbing, I heard it a lot). Weird.

An interesting point is the game’s cultural sensitivity. It’s set in 1191 in the ‘Holy Land’ including Jerusalem, Acre and Damascus. Templar Knights, Saracens, King Richard, all of these feature in the game (the last is only mentioned, I think, but still). There is a religious war going on, and in today’s climate, that’s ballsy territory. A lot of media today shies away from that kind of content. Granted, it’s in the past, but they still thought it was big enough to warrant a disclaimer at the start stating the game was developed by a multicultural team from a plethora of faiths. They didn’t seem to receive a lot of backlash over it either, which pleases me. Mostly, I’m glad to see that not everyone is terrified to include Muslims in their work. It also features as an interesting piece of history, though the further it goes on, the more they bend the truth, but it’s all in the name of the story they’ve concocted (you even have a conversation with your captor/scientist dude) about how it’s starting to be a little different to how you were taught.

Last of all, the game ends with a slight twist and a massive cliffhanger, so now I’m all fired up for the next one, which may be released in 2010. Great. Overall, I was very impressed by Assassin’s Creed, and I’d heartily recommend it. The mid-game is repetitive, but I found that the gameplay was still interesting enough to make me keep playing it, even if I did have to break it up over several days. Also, the end game is totally worth it story wise, but not so great gameplay wise. In every category, this game scores high with me. Of course, I don’t believe in actual scores (you may have noticed I’ve stopped actually grading things) but if I did, this would get some high numbers.