Assassin's Creed (2007)
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Assassin's Creed is an action-adventure stealth game developed by Ubisoft Montreal and published by Ubisoft.
Plot
The game primarily takes place during the Third Crusade in the Holy Land in 1191, with the plot revolving around the Secret Order of Assassins, based upon the Hashshashin sect. The player is, in reality, playing as a modern-day man named Desmond Miles, who, through the use of a machine named the "Animus", is allowed the viewing and controlling of the protagonist's genetic memories of his ancestors, in this case, Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, a member of the Assassins. Altair is a part of a struggle between two factions: the Knights Templar and the Assassins, over an artifact known as the "Apple of Eden", an ancient artifact used to control minds.
Good Qualities
- Good graphics for the time.
- The player is able to do parkour and climb any building they want.
- The game plays with the idea of it being a Conspiracy Kitchen Sink with it revealing that everything you know about history is wrong and that there are secret societies. This would be enhanced in future games.
- An interesting story that is split into two stories.
- The first is the Present Day story about a man named Desmond Miles, who is kidnapped by a corporation named Abstergo and is forced to use a machine to relive his ancestor's memories to find something they're looking for.
- The second is about Desmond's ancestor who is a part of a secret society called the Assassins and is tasked with killing 9 main figures of their opponents: the Templars.
- The game manages to accurately recreate the depicted the major cities of Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus to their real life counterparts.
- Good soundtrack.
- The concept of using a machine to relive your ancestor's memories is a very interesting and original concept.
- The game introduces Eagle Vision, which works as a sixth sense that allows the player to instinctively sense how people and objects relate to them, which manifests as a colored glow, much like an aura. Red indicates enemies or spilled blood, blue indicates allies, white indicates sources of information or hiding spots, and gold indicates targets or objects of interest.
- The stealth is similar to the Hitman franchise in the sense that it's a social stealth game. Instead of remaining completely out of sight, the player has to avoid the attention of the authority. Altaïr is able to hide amongst either a group of religious scholars or people sitting on a bench.
- Great voice acting (with the exception of Philip Shahbaz as Altair).
- Despite being a 7th gen game, it's optimized to run on low end PCs.
Bad Qualities
- While it was good for its time, this entry is now considered one of the weakest in the series due to the lack of features and enhancements introduced in later entries.
- Eagle Vision is only available at full-synchronization (health) and is in first-person — meaning that Altaïr can't move.
- The stealth is more cumbersome than in later entries. Altaïr is only able to hide amongst either a group of religious scholars or people sitting on a bench when it comes to concealing himself in a crowd. Furthermore, if Altaïr either assassinates his target or is confronted by them, a city-wide alert is initiated, which sets all of the guards to informed status.
- The same can be said for the combat. It's a lot slower, not as agile, and doesn't require much strategy.
- The concept that all major breakthroughs of the 20th century are the result of the Templars reverse-engineering Precursor tech is never mentioned again in the series.
- For non-Xbox 360 players, the game has no trophies on PS3, or achievements on Steam.
- Despite having a map in the menu, the HUD doesn't show the map, it only shows blips and markers, making it just a compass.
- Although there isn't a need for it, you can't swim. Instead, Altair will immediately drown. However, this does have an in-game explanation that it's a glitch in the animus.
- Padding: The 9 assassination missions for Damascus, Jerusalem, and Acre are very repetitive. Once you've done one of them, you've pretty much done them all as the build up for each assassination always plays out the exact same way. The only real differences for each of the missions is the final section when you finally have to go about assassinating the target. This is due to the fact that you go virtually the same four missions every time: Eavesdropping, Interrogation, Meeting with informants, and Pickpocketing. Granted, you don't have to do them all to unlock the final memory.
- The PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 versions have problems.
- The game initially shipped with a doozy of a bug occurring in the Arsuf level on the Xbox 360 version. Halfway through the level, the landscape would become a void and Animus glitches would appear as if signifying Desmond desynchronizing. If you didn't fall through the level geography to your death at this point you would encounter an Altaïr clone that copies your moves as you make them. Then the cutscene of Altaïr's final confrontation with de Sablé would not trigger, leaving the game in a state of limbo as you stand staring at motionless Templars. This made the game unwinnable until it was patched.
- Both versions suffer from screen tearing. It's a fairly minor problem on the Xbox 360 version, but the screen tearing is so severe on the PlayStation 3 version that it makes it almost unplayable, it also has framerate issues.
- The game looks dull sometimes due to the game choosing to go for a more muted tone in art design. Although, this direction is broken when when entering Damascus since everything is a lot more bright and sunny.
- While the voice acting is great, Philip Shahbaz's performance as Altair can be pretty monotone at times and his delivery of dialogue varies between good and bad. Along with that, his voice is very American, which doesn't fit with the time period. According to the developers, this was done on purpose solely because they thought Philip had "such a cool voice".
- You have the ability to leave the animus, but there isn't too much to do other than look at Warden and Lucy's emails, which is mostly for lore.
- There are several achievements that are annoying.
- Throughout the game are a multitude of flags for the player to collect, however, collecting them is a chore given how many there are. There are 20 Assassin flags, 100 King Richard flags, 100 Saracen flags, 33 Teutonic flags, 34 Templar flags, 33 Hospitalier flags, and 100 Jerusalem crosses which adds up to 420 flags. The worst part is that there is no map to reveal the flags, and aside from a few achievements, you get nothing special for finding all of them.
- The achievement for killing all of The Templars is also just as hard to get, as there's 60 of them across the entire game and also no indication of where they are.
- "Conversationalist" is legendarily annoying. The actual method of getting it is rather simple: go through every possible dialogue with Lucy. The problem is that this has to be done across a single run, and several of them are very easy to miss (the one after memory block 6 actually has a glitch that can potentially break the achievement for that run), and if you miss a single talk, then you have to start all over. There's no real way to tell how many times you're able to talk to her except to mash every button to try to get her to talk until she finally says, "Aren't you tired?"
- Hungerer for Knowledge: While playing as Altair, there are several glitches during cutscenes that you have to press a button at the exact moment they show to contribute to the achievement. You have to get at least 85% of them (if enough were hit, the achievement should pop up during Sibrand's assassination mission). One way to ensure you get it is by constantly pressing any button during the cutscenes, though this is still an annoying process.
- Disciple of the Creed: You have to complete all investigations, civilian missions, and map reveal towers prior to assassinating your target, though some players have reported they still obtained the achievement for doing less.
- Altair doesn't have much of a personality, something that was fixed in Assassin's Creed: Revelations.
- There's no reward for 100% synchronization.
- There are some things that aren't explained to the player.
- The game never informs you that it's possible to perform counter-kills with the Hidden Blade. This wouldn't be a problem, except enemy groups get very large toward the end of the game, making it necessary to thin down their numbers quickly. Not even to mention that a Hidden Blade counter will always cause one nearby soldier to recoil in horror, during which you can assassinate them. Meaning, essentially, you can pull off counter-chain kills - four whole games before it was officially implemented.
- Air assassination can be performed in this game, though from smaller height than in sequels.
- What boss fights there are aren't very good.
- Robert de Sablé (Maria Thorpe in disguise). There are archers stationed around the cemetery that you can't take out. You actually have to run away in order to survive (unless you can dodge arrows and the highest tier mooks at the same time), but doing that will lead you through more guards than you've seen in the entire game to this point.
- The first part of the boss fight against Al Mualim has him summon clones of the nine men you've assassinated over the course of the game, which sounds like an epic battle, but the clones are at the same level as basic level guards and constantly attack, meaning the fight will likely be over in nine counters. The only thing that makes this fight even remotely difficult is the enemies no longer attack one at a time, so it is possible to get hit multiple times in rapid succession if you're not careful.
- Due to the game's mechanics, the fight with Robert De Sablé can end quite abruptly if the player manages to knock him down early on in the fight and follow it up by stabbing him with the Hidden Blade as he lays on the ground, or countering one of his attacks with the same blade. This can be done in a matter of seconds after the fight with him starts, effectively having Altaïr curb-stomp the man who who deflected Altaïr's assassination and threw him across the room back at Solomon's Temple.
Reception
Assassin's Creed received "generally favorable" reviews from critics, according to review aggregator Metacritic.
Several publications such as Eurogamer, while still awarding the game decent scores, pointed out a number of significant shortcomings. Eurogamer stated that the gameplay "never evolves and ultimately becomes a bit boring, and quite amazingly repetitive." In Andrew P.'s review for EGM (Kage), he wrote that the game features "a challenging parkour path of escape..." Famitsu awarded the Xbox 360 version of Assassin's Creed a 36 (9, 9, 9, 9), while the PS3 version received a 37 (10, 8, 9, 10) out of 40, positively citing the story, presentation, and acrobatics, while criticizing the one button combat, map layout, and camera problems. Game Informer awarded Assassin's Creed a 9.5 out of 10, praising the control scheme, replay value, and intriguing story, but expressing frustration over the "repetitive" information gathering missions. On The Hotlist on ESPNEWS, ESPN's Aaron Boulding called the game's concept of social stealth "fairly original" and added, "Visually, the developers nailed it." GameTrailers similarly praised the story (giving a 9.7 score to its story), and also cited repetitive gameplay and "moronic" AI as somewhat stifling its potential. "Assassins Creed is one of those games that breaks new ground yet fails in nailing some fundamentals," said Gametrailers. The game also received a 10 out of 10 from GamesRadar. According to GamePro, Assassin's Creed is one of the "finest gaming experiences ever created" if you are willing to be "patient" due to the lack of fast-paced action. Hyper's Darren Wells commended the game for its "great story, great graphics and intuitive controls." However, he criticized it for "some missions that don't feel right on the PC and its loopy menu system." Hilary Goldstein of IGN gave the game a 7/10, stating that "a bad story, repetitive gameplay elements, and poor AI lead to the downfall of one of the more promising games in recent memory." Conversely, he complimented the combat animations and the climbing mechanic, and admired how accurately Ubisoft depicted the major cities of Jerusalem, Acre, and Damascus to their real-life counterparts.
As the years have went by, however, fans have stated how the game hasn't aged well compared to future entries due to those entries featuring much more variety in missions and abilities.
Awards
Assassin's Creed won several awards at E3 2006. Game Critics awarded it "Best Action/Adventure Game,"; from IGN, "Best Action Game," "PS3 Game of the Show," "Best PS3 Action Game," "Best PS3 Graphics"; from GameSpot and GameSpy, "Best PS3 Game of the Show"; from GameTrailers "Best of Show," and from 1UP.com, "Best PS3 game." Creed was nominated for several other awards by X-Play and Spike TV. Assassin's Creed was listed by Game Informer at 143 in their list of the top 200 games of all time. It also received the Editor's Choice award from GameSpot. In December 2015, Game Informer the game as the third best game in the Assassin's Creed series to date.
Sales
Sales for Assassin's Creed "greatly outstripped" the expectations of the publisher.
In the UK, Assassin's Creed debuted at number one, knocking Infinity Ward's Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare from the top; the majority of the debut sales were on the Xbox 360, which claimed 67% of the game's total sales. The Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 releases of Assassin's Creed each received a "Platinum" sales award from the Entertainment and Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA), indicating sales of at least 300,000 copies per version in the United Kingdom. On April 16, 2009, Ubisoft revealed that the game had sold 8 million copies.
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