Why Assassin’s Creed is Awesome
- The process of investigating a target leads to some interesting options. You have to do at least half of the investigations, but doing all of them give you a clearer picture of how you should go about killing the dude you’re supposed to kill.
- The Middle East crusades setting is a nice change from the typical game setting. Despite being in the Middle East, it’s actually less brown than some other games!
- The game is really beautiful. Climbing to the tops of tall buildings is required as a gameplay mechanic but it’s also an amazing view.
- I like that the bulk of gameplay is (in the game) a guy basically playing a video game. It’s a sci-fi premise in a historical fiction setting!
- There’s a fair amount of non-english spoken dialog, even if all the non-background dialog is in poorly accented english.
Why Assassin’s Creed Fucking Sucks
- The sword fighting is god awful. There are essentially two options: mash the attack button and hope you win, or hold the block and wait until each attacker takes a swing so you can counter it. And sometimes the counters don’t result in a kill, so you have to do it again.
- This game is so, so, so repetitive. To complete those investigations, you have to find informants. To find informants, you have to either search every corner of a large city or climb specific tall buildings. Even then, most of the objectives are saving citizens, which involves sword fighting between three and five soldiers. Saving people gives more options to help escape soldiers, which becomes important post-assassination when you’re trying to escape.
- Some of the actual investigations tasks suck. Stealth archer assassinations are awful because if you fail one, you have to start all over. Escorts, like all escort missions, suck because it’s just more sword fighting spread out into four or five small fights.
- Beggars, drunks, and crazy. They’re people in the streets who are there to be obstacles. Did you know a slight female beggar can stop a deadly assassin from walking past her entirely? Me neither! And forget about getting past two or three crazies in an alley. because they just push you into each other. It’s awful. And if you punch them to get them out of the way, the city guard takes offense and then it’s time for more sword fighting!
- The final sequence of events is a series of sword fights. But by that time I’d spent so much time sword fighting that it really just ate up my time as I waited to counter attack 20 separate attackers three or four times in a row.
- The “real world” ending is really underwhelming. It’s like they just stopped the game right where it was without a lot of resolution.