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.

Last Week's Games: Sacred Citadel and Necromunda

Regular readers will note that I very often complain about not having enough time to play as many games as I would like, and this week has been no exception, though for different reasons than usual. I got caught up in a family emergency of the kind not terribly considerate of the average number of hours in a day, and while that’s been mostly sorted now, a lot of the spare time I was expecting to have this week has been taken up in dealing with it. Sometimes life gets in the way, and this week there were other places I needed to be!

See what I mean? It couldn't look
more XBLA if it tried!

On those days where I had an hour or two to spare, however, I found myself playing Sacred Citadel. One pattern that regularly occurs when I’m playing games is that after I’ve finished a big, heavy game like Assassin’s Creed, I’m more likely to play a couple of light or retro games that I don’t have to think too hard about in order to have a pretty decent time. Sacred Citadel is a fantasy-themed hack-and-slash brawler with RPG elements, similar in gameplay to the old arcade brawler machines that were the staple of the arcades in the early 90s, but with a look I that can only describe as Xbox Live Arcade. I didn’t realise until I was doing the research for this blog that it’s actually a part of the Sacred franchise, which isn’t a series of games I’m familiar with so I had no pre-conceptions about the content of the game. Honestly, at this point I just wanted to hit something.

You choose from one of four characters; the Warrior, the Ranger, the Mage and the Shaman. They have different abilities depending on who you choose; I went for the Mage because it’s a refreshing change to be able to fireball something to death without having to commit to a 40+ hour roleplaying game. The game is divided into four acts each with a number of levels in there; it starts out easily enough with the game showing you the different mechanics in the first few levels and taking the training wheels off for the rest of the game. You have access to a range of attack combos and can also upgrade your weapons. The more recent brawlers I’ve played have mechanics like this and they’re not awful, but it’s an illusion of depth as your weapon upgrades etc increase in power as the game increases in difficulty, as the enemies you face can take more damage as you’re going along.

Where the game truly becomes like an RPG is in its levelling-up system, where once your character gets a certain amount of XP they level up and you have to distribute points into their characteristics. This should also be an illusion of depth, and it would be if the game didn’t have a massive difficulty spike halfway through the second act and force you to go back and grind for XP to have a hope of beating the boss. There are some challenges to make this more interesting – complete a level without dying, or in a certain amount of time, or score a certain amount of points – but it’s brought the pace of the game right down to a standstill for me. I’ll keep going at it from time to time though, as I’m not expecting to have much time this week either and I’m not quite ready to get off my casual gaming horse just yet!

Looking forward to opening this!

I also bought Games Workshop’s new release, Necromunda Underhive. Necromunda is a game that was available when I first got into the hobby but had been and gone by the time I’d considered getting in to it. Games Workshop’s smaller skirmish games have a lot of good character development rules, though, and I remember Mordheim very fondly, so I’d love to see how it works in the futuristic gang war setting. I haven’t even had time to get the box out yet, and I suspect it will be a while before I do as I want to make sure I do a reasonable job with the painting this time, but we’ll see what happens with it.

Last Week's Games: 8-Bit Armies and Assassin's Creed.

Doing this blog has opened a lot of doors for me in terms of the games I’ve been playing over the last couple of months. Most games require days, weeks or even a couple of months of my time to complete – and that’s if I play it for roughly a few hours a day whenever I can spare that time – and I have to keep my blog interesting by playing a mix of games during the week. I actually managed to beat Assassin’s Creed earlier today and had to put some time in to that to make it happen, but if that had been all I’d done all week I’d end up replacing the title of “Last Week’s Games” to “Last Week’s Blog.” Against anything I would consider my better judgement, people do actually read this; roughly 100 or so people a week depending on how many games I played. While they’re probably not all retained readers, I think I owe it to the few people who do read what I have to say week in week out to not repeat myself all the time. And it’s not like I haven’t got a tonne of games I haven’t played… 

Does this look 8-bit to you? Thought not.

To this end I found myself alone with my laptop for a few hours and played a game I downloaded quite recently: 8-Bit Armies. This is an isometric Real-Time Strategy game that purports to have 8-bit graphics, although that’s more to do with the design aesthetic because anybody who’s ever played an 8-bit game would know they don’t look even remotely this polished. I was aware of it because TotalBiscuit did some coverage on it a while ago; at the time he said something along the lines of while the mechanics of the game were solid enough, it was difficult to recommend because out of the proposed six factions, there were only two in the game at that point and they functioned more or less identically. I was reluctant to buy it straight away for that reason, but when it came up in a Steam sale a few weeks ago, I bought it and its two sequels, which is where I expect the four remaining factions ended up: 8-Bit Hordes (medieval combat) and 8-Bit Invaders (Sci-fi combat.)

I really enjoyed playing it for the relatively short amount of time I had. It controls well, and I’m mature enough now to know when the game is teaching me its mechanics of its various component parts as we progress – letting me see the purpose and function of the lower-tech units before letting me loose with the big stuff. So far it hasn’t challenge me in any massive way, but there’s a certain amount of satisfaction in executing a plan. An early mission has you destroying the enemy’s motor pools in each of the three bases in the area, and it was good fun to send my armoured cars in their first to scout the area, establish where the traps are and plan the best attack route before attacking with a horde of rocket launchers and infantry. This isn’t a set piece; the game doesn’t hold your hand. You have to work that out for yourself, and it’s all the better for that. It’s not perfect; with an isometric viewpoint some of the things in the game are blocked from view and there’s no way to rotate the map that I’ve found yet. But it’s a solid game and I’m looking forward to coming back to it.

Lots of people to save. Kind of contradicts
the point of an assassin, honestly...

And, I beat Assassin’s Creed. I’m not going to say too much about that as it’s going to get its own blog in the next few days, but I will say this: I might play the other games in the series at some point, and with each effort to innovate, the original Assassin’s Creed has become more obsolete to the point where many people now find it unplayable. I know I have an almost-obsessive compulsion to play all the games in order and that rarely does me many favours, but in this case, I’m glad I had the chance to be the game that forms the core experience of Assassin’s Creed –before all the innovations came in.

Last Week's Games: Assassin's Creed, Pathfinder

I decided when I came home late on Monday Evening to give Streets of Rage 2 one last hurrah, but I found that I wasn’t concentrating properly and making too many silly mistakes. So instead, I had a look at some of the bonus games on the Sega Megadrive Ultimate Collection: Space Harrier, Alien Syndrome and Tip Top. They are all very difficult early arcade games, and I didn’t really give them a lot of time engage me; it was just a way of winding down after a long and not very easy day. Realising I was getting nowhere, I moved on the following evening.

You can't see me...

I started playing Assassin’s Creed, of all things! I’ve had a bit of an on-off relationship with this game. The series itself has come under fire in recent years for releasing the same game over and over again with naught but a token effort to innovate, but having only ever played the first one, I haven’t really noticed that. The game is decent enough, and follows a core loop of the Master Assassin, Altair, researching and investigating a target for assassination in the Holy Land, before planning your attack and delivering the killing blow. It’s good at what it does but the gameplay is very repetitive, and not in a way that I find particularly enjoyable, so I play a bit at a time and then not touch it again for months, sometimes even years. Thankfully, this isn’t a game I feel the need to return to the start of for the sake of the plot, or we’d be here for a very long time.

During the last time I played, I manage to get the achievement points for surviving one hundred fights without dying. It’s not that hard if you know what you’re doing; once your health bar gets to a certain point the fights are generally over before you take any significant amount of damage. So this would normally be of little significance but I came very close to messing it up! I started off in the city of Acre, and had forgotten that you’re supposed to blend in with the scholars in order to leave as most of the guards in the game will attack me unless I’m hiding. So I ran right through the guards, who promptly attacked. I tried to fight back, but I’d forgotten the controls too and it was taking me a while to get an attack pattern going, by which time I was surrounded by six or seven guards that I knew I hadn’t got a hope of beating. I ran off to avoid being killed, managed it, and got the achievement about half an hour later. I realised that the bulk of the work I’d put in for that would have been done years ago, and that if I got killed I’d have had to start all over again, so I was very grateful I’d had the sense to run from that fight!

Those kind of stories are what make the experience for me, but on a broader scale the game has a lot going for it. Graphically it’s gorgeous, and the level design is on point for a game of this size. I’ve progressed about half way through the game and I’m actually finding it a lot more enjoyable now that I’ve realised I am supposed to be killing the guards as well. When I played the game previously I was trying to do what an assassin would do, which is try to kill his intended target with as little collateral damage as possible. Then I read the achievement list and realised I was actually supposed to be assassinating the guards. I find the game a lot more fun having discovered this!

I also continued running Pathfinder for my friends Dave, Victor, Shane and Ian. I’ve been running Rise of the Runelords for them monthly for a year and I’m really enjoying how the campaign and the characters are setting up – particularly Victor, who’s played through the vast majority of the campaign before with a different system but is enjoying the different approach this group is taking. We should get another session in next month.

Last Week's Games: Streets of Rage 2 and Hydro Thunder Hurricane, plus buildng Warriors of Khorne

It’s been a bit quiet on the gaming front this week, due to being extremely busy for most of it and asleep for the rest. Here’s what I’ve had going on:

For a while I’ve been meaning to start a new game on my Xbox360. Which one? I don’t know yet. I’ve got quite a few single-player narrative-driven games to play, many of which I’ve never even touched despite having owned for years, and I’d like to get down to playing some of them. However, because I’m out most evenings, and because I’m very tired when I come home, I put on my Xbox, try to work out what I’m going to play (Current frontrunners are Blue Dragon, Shadow of Mordor, Of Orcs and Men and Enslaved) and invariably go “Never mind, I’ll have another bash at Streets of Rage.”

I can cheese that big fat guy on the right -
but only if I face him alone...

So that’s the principle game I’ve been playing this week, and I find myself using Axel more than Max for my play through these days, perhaps as way of keeping the game fresh for me! Interestingly I got as far as the fifth stage and found that I wasn’t concentrating anywhere near as much as I should have been; for this reason I lost the game on the elevator boss rush on the seventh stage. I don’t usually get much further than that but I could barely keep my eyes open!

It's big, it's dumb, it's fun. I love it!

I’ve also been playing Hydro Thunder Hurricane; I’ve been really enjoying going for the gold score on every level. I don’t play many racing games; there’s fun in learning tracks and optimal customisation options, but it is a long-winded process which gets tedious after a while. With Hydro Thunder, you pick the right boat for the track and away you go; any customisations are purely cosmetic – so I know if I’m going wrong it’s because I don’t know the track very well, not because I don’t know how to set up my vehicle and am therefore knackered from the start. It’s the kind of arcade racer I used to play when I was younger, and I’m enjoying it a lot more than I might for not taking itself too seriously.

In my quest to tackle my ever-growing backlog of hobby models, I had some time in Warlords ‘n’ Wizards on Sunday and put together some of the Warriors of Khorne from the Age of Sigmar boxed set that came out – and I bought – over two years ago. I built and painted most of the Stormcast Eternals, and some of them appeared in my previous blog, but it was so long ago that I can’t actually remember how I painted them. (Yes, I know they’re blue. I can’t remember what I did to get the highlights etc. I don’t want half my army looking different from the rest!) This is a problem I never even considered I would run in to before, but with many, many paints in the Citadel range, I’ve started keeping track of my paint schemes a little better now. I build all of the character models and monsters, and five of the Blood Reavers; I’ll do the rest at some point but that should keep me going for now.

If I have a large number of models from the same army I like to alternate painting the “rank and file” models in blocks of five, and then paint something else. That keeps it as fresh as it’s going to get and I get more done for not having to paint the same model over and over again, or take ages to see any progress for painting too many models at a time. I like to do a good job – or as good as I can manage – but I fall foul of many of the fallacies that plague many amateur painters: Rushing the last few parts, trying to get as much as I could do in the time and not taking breaks when I need to. I try not to paint to a deadline anymore, as this puts pressure on me to do something I’ll never manage and I get disillusioned.

Went on a bit about the paint there, but I’ve not got much else this week!