RetroGame: Assassin’s Creed

Assassin’s Creed came out five years ago and if you’ve been following our candid posts on the IHOGeek fan page, you’ll notice mine have been about Assassin’s Creed lately. Being the busy (read: not busy at all, just lazy) person that I am, I’ve finally settled into my new position at work and have begun playing video games I missed due to being broke as fuck. Before I dive into my thoughts about the game itself, let me tell you a little story about how I can now afford to play these games. I recently got addicted to the Facebook game, Marvel: Avengers Alliance and I needed an ass ton of “gold” in order to recruit Beast. Or Hercules. Or Emma Frost. Either way, I needed this “gold” so I took a peek at their “Earn Gold” offers, where you would receive X amount of gold in exchange for completing an offer, such as applying for a credit card, and so forth. GameFly gave you the most gold for the least amount of work, and hey, I already have Netflix, why not have GameFly as well!?

It’s not my finest moment, but now I can get games and play them and you, my lovely readers, get to read my thoughts as I complete each one, because I know that’s really what you wanted for Christmas.

I began my quest with tutorials galore and after a confusing bit of back story about my present time character Desmond, a scarred lip of a douche bartender in a line of assassins, I began to revel in all his past form in the late 1100’s was able to do, until my skills and weapons were taken away because this past form of Desmond was an arrogant jerk off.

See? Total douche.

Story aside, I enjoyed running from building to building and leaping from the tallest peaks I could reach and I did this quite often, lazily searching for hundreds of flags in different cities, but neglecting to get them all, cause fuck flags. The scenery is drop dead gorgeous, but this too ceased to matter as I hopped onto a horse and galloped around. Gameplay was pretty basic and if I had any complaints it’d be the camera, but I’m super picky when it comes to camera control in video games.

After several hours of just not being able to pickpocket anyone successfully, I had just about had it with Assassin’s Creed, but a sticky button showed me the error of my ways and with that I was able to game the hours away.

The storyline was quite linear, with the quests being easily laid out for you with waypoints all but yelling which direction to go, so if I had any gripes about this particular aspect, it would be that I wished you were able to explore a bit more freely. Thankfully, this appears to have been amended in later games in the series. As you might expect, a large portion of the story revolves around you assassinating people of note during the Crusades and I must say, it was an absolute pleasure shoving my knife into people’s necks and watching the blood squirt.

Nothing is as gratifying as a leap through the air ending in someone’s death.

Predictably, your old as fuck mentor is the bad guy and after an exhilarating boss fight, the game ends abruptly. I sat there with a dumbfounded look of WTF on my face, blinking at my television screen in confusion. There were no credits or any sense of finality (I figured out how to activate the credits after sitting there and pressing buttons for 10 minutes) so for me, the overall story of the game was pretty shitty, warranting a 5/10.

I’d like the say the music was beautiful but it made no impression whatsoever except for the couple of times it blared  out of nowhere, startling me. The soundtrack I would also give a 5/10.

Effects were the only time I felt this game really shine as the landscapes were gorgeous with the insane amount of detail given to them. Bonus points are awarded for the dubious amount of violence I was allowed to wreak on both innocent and criminal peoples and for my very unique looking outfit which still allowed me to blend in with anyone at anytime so a 9/10 is awarded.

Beautiful, but if you leap wrong, you die.

Overall, I honestly don’t see myself continuing the series as I felt the amount of time put into it did not reap a proportionate amount of satisfaction. It was fun, particularly the Informer missions where you’d have to do stuff in a set amount of time (usually assassinations or flags), but not enough fun. Definitely not worth buying to me. Since I’m sure most of you have played this, what do you think? Should I give part two a try? Let me know!

Leia Calderon
Editor
@ladyvader99