Backlog Beatdown: Assassinating Creeds with Assassin's Creed

Assassin’s Creed is one of the first games I owned for the Xbox360; I bought it back in 2012 not long after I bought the console. By then, the series that had gained some acclaim, but had started to lose its way with the almost yearly sequels and rushed production. I bought the first game in the series; I already knew the later games had done it better but I prefer to play games in sequence and I also wanted to see the core mechanics of the game before the later games introduced a lot of extras. 

I don't know what it is about scholars that compels
 people not to attack them, but I'll play it to my advantage...

The series follows the story of Desmond Miles, who is descended from a line of Assassins and has been kidnapped by agents of Abstergo industries in order to recover the memories of the early years of Altaïr Ibn-La'Ahad, a senior member of the Assassin’s brotherhood during the time of the Crusades. Through the knowledge gained, Abstergo hopes to recover a lost artefact. You play the bulk of the game as Altair, who has to redeem his honour after a botched attempt to recover the Ark of the Covenant by killing nine specific targets. This takes you into a journey across three cities of the Holy Land: Damascus, Jerusalem and Acre, where you have to research your target’s movement patterns and weaknesses by listening in on conversations, stealing maps and intimidating people for information. This done, you finally have a chance to kill your target, taking you through each stage of the game. But, as is so often the case, all is not as it seems…

The gameplay is very good at what it does, but very repetitive and it took me a while to get through the game. I’d play it for a while and then not play it again for a number of months or even years. The plot is an odd mixture of being straightforward enough to understand, massively contrived and ruined by several Youtube videos that have come out over the years, so thankfully I didn’t feel the need to return to the start at the game for the sake of the plot. I also found more fun in the game when I stopped taking it so seriously. An assassin would aim for his target and avoid as much collateral damage as possible, and in the early part of the game, that was how I played – only getting in to fights when I needed to. This lead to a slow, methodic traversal of most of the environments in the game which became very frustrating after a while. Within the last couple of weeks, however, I found it far more fun to run across the rooftops and throw knives at any guards who happen to see you. This made getting around much easier, and the game more comfortable to play.

Can't honestly remember this happening in the game...

The bulk of the game is not that challenging, and even the final boss battle doesn’t present much of a curveball. I generally only died when I was careless with the blocking, and even then, my health bar was so high after a certain point that this was rare. So I breezed through the second half of the game quite quickly. Now that it’s done, am I going to go for a completionist run?

Well I would, if it weren’t for the flags. In almost each area, there are 100 flags you need to pick up for achievement points. A lot of them aren’t hard to find, but the environments are so expansive that searching every conceivable nook and cranny for them would get old very quickly. There is a map available on a Wiki that gives the location of the flags, but there are so many that unless you had the foresight to print it off and mark them off as you go, it’s hard to keep track of which ones you have collected. The achievement available for defeating all the Templars runs into the same problem, although there are only 60 of these in the game. So, I’ll probably leave Assassin’s Creed alone for now. I might come back to it if I need to kill an afternoon, but I’m satisfied that I’ve reached the end of the plot.