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Review

Assassin’s Creed

by J Nash (November 17th, 2010 at 9:00 pm)

Game: Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles. Publisher: Ubisoft. Authors: Gameloft. Price: 59p/€0,79/99¢. Buy the game or play the demo.

Man, these things really drive home how tremendous Sands of Time is. Ever since Ubisoft nailed the third-person platformer with the revamped Prince of Persia (then banged that nail into a big coffin with Warrior Within for which I blame you, YES YOU PERSONALLY, the idiot non-Sands of Time buying public) everyone’s been copying the copy of a copy.

Including Ubi themselves: Assassin’s Creed: Altair’s Chronicles is currently on sale for 59p/€0,79/99¢ and has triumphantly forgotten nearly every single lesson established by its venerated ageparent.

Out goes the carefully plausible architectural peril in favour of clumsily stringing together fights and traps (you’d be positively amazed how many 12th century buildings kept just enough snakes and crates on their tarry roofs). Out goes the whip-smart level design (within 30 seconds of starting I’d managed to trip behind a building and jam invisibly until I fell to my death).

Never mind the friendly shortcuts, let’s send anyone who slips up all the way back around the rooftop obstacle course again. Hey, you want to climb that ladder? No, I’m sure you wanted to ineffectually wall-scramble beside it instead and completely waste just a little more of your time.

(The perspective and context-sensitivity are all over the shop. At one point I tried to running-jump a gap and instead the game swerved me at the last moment to cling to an off-centre ledge something like 15 times in a row. You can switch between a “360 degree pad” and an “8-direction pad,” making no difference that I could tell.)

The auto-help is clumsily wonky: usually you’re guided through the level by optional marker arrows with every new bit pointed out, but suddenly you’ll be left to blindly thrash around until you twig there’s an off-screen platform or that you have to swing on a rope to increase your hurtle distance over some snakes living up a wall in exactly the way every jump so far hasn’t.

Also — and I haven’t played the game Assassin’s Creed is based on, Assassin’s Creed, so this might be perfectly normal — but there’s an awful lot of generic swordfighting compared to creepy-uppy assassinate-y creeding. (At one point, I crept up and assassinated someone and then the guards I’d cleverly avoided jumped in for a big swordfight anyway, which did not surprise me in any way at all.) You can power up your button-mashing fighting technique in a way that immediately reminded me how Sands of Time‘s elegant simplicity felt exactly right seven years ago. There’s a silly swipe-y mini-game for pickpocketing and another timed-tap one for torturing informants.

Anyone who’s played Assassin’s Creed will recognise that all of this comes from the first couple of levels. (Evaporation of my patience is clearly accelerating — see my review next week of 50 games’ desktop icons.) The game has nothing at all to keep me going. It’s pretty, it’s slick, it’s unsuitably cramped on to the iThing, it’s in my bin, it must be — it is! — it’s Gameloft.

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