Assassin's Creed Hands-on Preview

Taste my steel!

In a strange, time-travelling twist on the usual article format (one which hasn’t actually been forced upon me), I’m not going to start this section with a description of what the combat is like. I’m going to start with a conclusion and I’m going to say that combat in Assassin’s Creed is a mixed bag.

There are some incredibly nice, fluid elements to the combat and there are some incredibly annoying ones. The combat I saw Patrice do was fairly limited and within moments he had Altair diving from a rooftop into a bale of hay – at which point the hands-off segment finished and I was moved into another room.

I sat myself down next to Alex Drouin, the head of animations on Assassin’s Creed, and grabbed a controller, launching straight into a fight with a nearby soldier.

The animations are seamlessly linked and utterly gorgeous and the game controls in combat are actually quite realisitic. Altair is a master swordsman, but even he can’t hack his way through a good parry and the best way to battle opponents is either to scare them off with a flurry of blows or to wait for them to attack and unleash a devastating counter.


These counters look awesome and Alex told me that a lot of the animations were motion-captured and that he himself acted as the capture subject for a lot of the fights. It was hard to believe, watching a highly trained assassin on the screen unleash a flurry of scripted elbow-throws before twisting back on himself and stabbing his opponent twice and having to realise that I was sat next to the man who'd had to practice that.

I ever so slightly edged away from the bearded French-Canadian on my left.

There are still a number of problems with the combat, a lot of which only became apparent after I’d spent an hour or so with the game. For starters, Altair is restricted in who he can attack and hitting a non-soldier will strip Altair of a third of his health, which takes a bit away from the way that the game has been billed as having a sandbox design.


I asked Alex why Altair this way and, to be fair, his answer made sense and belies a deliberate and consistent design;

“Simply, we wanted the game to be ‘Assassin's Creed’ and we were worried that if Altair could attack anyone then it would become ‘Mass Murderer’s Creed’. We wanted the fights to feel a bit special.”

Okay, so that much I can forgive. Of graver concern though was the way that Altair locked on to his targets in a fight. The actual action of doing it makes complete sense and allows Altair to attack multiple targets at once without letting up, but did the game really have to constantly flash up streams of numbers and glowing symbols over the enemies to show they were locked on?

It completely ruined the sensation of being involved in the combat and broke the suspension of disbelief whenever I saw it.