Spoiler Alert!!!

Assassin’s Creed puts you in the role of Altair (pronounced al-ta-ear), a member of the Hashshashin, (where the modern term Assassin comes from). The game starts with a killing – and a short tutorial on how to leap, scale walls, and kill an enemy. Altair and two of his companions are on a mission. No matter what you do at this point, Altair will be unsuccessful and thus will be stripped of his rank and his weapons. He will need to learn the basics again – and earn his weapons back.

Developed by Ubisoft Montreal, Assassin’s Creed is visually stunning. I’ve never seen a game with such breathtaking graphics. The three cities that Altair will explore (Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acres), and his home city, Masyaf, brims with life. The sounds are amazingly real. You hear vendors selling their wares and prophets spouting religious and political issues. High above, you hear birds squawking and down below, a citizen might cry out for help. It is never too much though. The blend is just enough to make it sound as if you really are there.

For me, much of the excitement is in the vertical game play and the swordfights. Altair scales and leaps through walls and buildings just like Spiderman – without the web shooting. And he does a lot of these particularly when guards chase him.
The most spectacular thing is diving off a viewpoint. Altair uses these viewpoints to scan the city, which in turn, opens up part of the city map. And then, he dives off – while my stomach does somersaults – and lands safely in a haystack. I’m almost tempted to scale the towers again and again, just so I could experience that magnificent dive. I really don’t mind repeating the thing.

Unfortunately, that’s what you end up doing in Assassin’s Creed. The game is just a little too repetitive for my taste. The first kill (and the second, and even the third) yeah, they’re all right. You pick pockets, gather information, eavesdrop, and beat up some citizens (and kill them after – I really have no choice because Altair, the main character, kills them right after the interrogation).
You have minor objectives like saving citizens, gathering flags, scaling viewpoints.

And that’s it.

Once you’ve saved one citizen, you might as well have saved all of them for the variety it gives you. They say the same thing. And you can only talk to them once you’ve saved them. Any other time, the only interaction allowed is shoving them or performing a ‘gentle push’. That’s it. I was hoping I could at least buy something from the marketplace but the game doesn’t even have currency – which means no weapons or armor to be bought. Or food. Skill and weapon upgrades happen after a successful assassination. It’s a reward given to you. When you get wounded in a fight…your health bar called the DNA synchronization bar, returns to normal after a few minutes…I suppose they have this ‘healing’ skill…then again, I suppose it has something to do with the twist.
And what’s with the eternal daylight? I mean, come on! I was hoping to scale the walls of Jerusalem in the middle of the night and lay a dagger on my target’s pillow…or kill them in their sleep. But I suppose the game is faithful to the Hashshashin’s way of killing – slaying their victims in public with their weapon of choice, a dagger.

But I still wish I could do some upgrades :}

There is one twist in the story that you see about five or ten minutes into the game. And that twist doesn’t make sense at all…that the game is only happening in the mind of one Desmond Miles, a modern day bartender…who was an assassin. You find him in a laboratory. And like I said…this twist is useless…unless maybe, they’re planning a sequel…

I’m not done with it yet – so I’m hoping that halfway through the game, something exciting happens. Still, it is a beautiful game and I don’t mind plowing through it – like I said, diving off from a viewpoint is rewarding enough. I wish we had a 60 inch TV for this.