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Assassin's Creed
Author: Andy FairPublished: 27th November 2007
Don't Fight It
Thankfully, combat is slightly more interactive, with a number of combo moves and counter-attacks available. Counter-attacks are also rewarded by a slow-motion animation of one of several gruesome ways in which Altaïr kills his attacker, which offers players an incentive to spend longer in combat.You also have the option of performing the "flying assassination", where you jump at a target and take him out instantly with your assassin's blade in one super-slick move.
What let the combat down, however, is not Altaïr, but his enemies and their AI. While it's possible to be in combat with a dozen or more guards, you'll only ever be attacked by one or two at a time; all the other guards just stand around waiting for their turn to die.
Similarly, it's easy to lose guards in a chase by hiding in a haystack or rooftop building: apparently, these guards haven't heard of thorough searches before.
Altaïr starts the game with a limited range of weapons and skills which are then enhanced and expanded as the game progresses. You start the game with only a sword and your fists but eventually you get the your other weapons back and a set of fancy throwing knives.
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You don't have an endless supply of throwing knives, but must either replenish them from the Assassin's HQ or pickpocket them from thugs around the city.
When completing missions you can choose whether to run in like a bull (albeit an assassin bull armed to the teeth) and just start killing indiscriminately or you can go for the quiet assassination.
It's also possible to start a fight by assassinating one or two guards quickly, then fighting the rest openly with your sword, but sometimes the game doesn't recognise that you're trying to change weapons and you find yourself in the middle of a fight trying to impale people with a knife the size of a sardine.
Each assassination mission throughout the game follows the same pattern: climb to high viewpoints to get map markers for the mini-quests. Perform these mini-quests to gather clues about your target. Perform the assassination itself. Rinse and repeat for each and every target in the game.
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Clues are gathered in one of only four ways: eavesdrop to get information from two careless people discussing important things in the middle of the street; pickpocket the information which some thoughtful person wrote down to make your life easier; beat the information out of a well-informed person; or perform some tasks for an informant.
For each mission, there will be six different mini-quests, although you actually only need to gather two clues in order to progress. Strangely, the information you gather doesn't affect the way you perform the final killing – all that stuff about guard placement and secret entrances doesn't actually get used, which is a massive shame.
Once the target has been killed, you're treated to a protracted dream-like cut-scene where you're given more information leading towards the final showdown. Once the assassination is over, you may visit the labs at Abstergo as Desmond, but then it's back to Al Mualim to get your upgrades and instructions for the next mission.
The major flaw in the game is that that is literally all there is to it in terms of gameplay. There’s a massive sandbox-style area for players to explore and lots of missions to do, but these missions only come in three or four generic types.
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