Finished the original Assassin’s Creed yesterday on PC.
TL;DR Version:
Overall, I enjoyed my time but it’s a pretty mediocre game with very little to do outside of the main missions.
It felt like a tech demo (the detailed parkour concept) with a story added onto it, and then that’s where the budget & time ran out.
The only other things are simple lead-up missions to each main target, saving civilians with only 4 voice-lines, and collecting hundreds of flags (yeah, hundreds) that offer ZERO benefit to you, the player.
The Long Version:
The parkour was a very fun, surprisingly complex and detailed system (It’s pretty cool how realistically Altair grabs onto and places his feet on the environment to climb buildings), but albeit kind of slow and rigid sometimes which I hope the sequels improve.
This video makes me excited and afraid of the additions/removals to mechanics the rest of the series does.
The quests you need to complete to unlock the Main Assassination of the level are very repetitive, and tedious, which is probably made worse by the vague guard detection system that will either cause you to run and hide and reset the mission, or slow your gameplay to a crawl to blend in…
The Main Target missions are where the meat of the game’s story and intrigue come in, as you’re tasked with killing 9 important Templar people, all evil and cruel in ways, because they’re seeking an item to cause world domination.
But, they also plant seeds of doubt in the main character’s head about what his own organization may be hiding from him and controlling him to do…
The guard “social stealth indicator” is a small triangle on the top left of your screen.
Its either white when you’re safe from a guard’s gaze, turns yellow when you’re being watched, and blinks red with an annoying noise when an “Informed” guard is spotting you, forcing younto either hide or hold “Blend” which causes you to very slowly walk in prayer.
But it’s difficult to know which guard does this and honestly I can’t figure out if there’s any specific indicator (apart from when you’re on rooftops, which is illegal)
Apparently the PC Director’s Cut version replaces/adds certain lead-up mission types to the main assassination of each chapter, which are Archer-Stealth Assassination missions, Rooftop Time Trials, Escort Missions, and Merchant Stand Destruction missions.
That last one is a baffling inclusion. Merchant stands feel like set dressing or an occasional parkour-stepping-stone, and while there’s a mechanic to throw an enemy into the stand to collapse it and insta-kill them, it’s a pretty niche move and it’s strange how simple/trivial/random this mission type is compared to all the others… doesn’t exactly feel like anything useful for an Assassin or a Parkour fiend…
The story itself I enjoyed, even if it was kind of basic.
Basically, there’s the Modern Day story where Desmond Miles is kidnapped by a secret group and forced to plug his brain into this magic-tech machine that can read DNA and recreate his ancestor’s memories
…This is what you play in the historical setting where you’re parkouring around the place and part of an Assassin Order.
The “Memory” story of the game shows the story of Altair – a skilled but cocky assassin – who is stripped of all his fancy tools by his Master/Handler because he was an idiot who broke the Creed by which the whole Assassin Brotherhood operates. (This is literally the first thing you see him do and his friends chastise him for - not a great first impression, dude)
He then uncovers a secret plot to install a New World Order by controlling the populations of Hebrews and Christians and must stop this mysterious enemy from fulfilling their goals.
Oh, and also get humbled along the way about how to behave like a good, noble person.
The ending of the game
has a shocking twist where it’s revealed your own master - the Assassin Leader - is actually a secret Templar agent who wanted to kill off all his accomplices so he could have the magic treasure to himself.
Honestly a pretty good twist I didn’t expect, and had a pretty tough final boss battle, since he does extreme amounts of damage and the counter timing is super tight.
However, the combat is pretty basic and I found myself wanting extra tools to get around annoyances like everyone always blocking attacks, barely getting a hit in because no one gives you time for offense, and the end-game throwing you into arenas with hugs amounts of enemies that always take way too many hits/counters to take down.
So… yeah. This was a neat introduction to how the whole series started and how all this Assassinating and Parkouring works, but you can definitely tell it was still in its early stages of being fleshed out. The main concept is there, but everything other than that feels extremely lacking.
The Modern Day Story ends on a cliffhanger too, and I hope to see the gameplay in that evolve in future entries, since they were essentially slow walking interludes.
