As promised, I give you the Assassin's Creed (PC version) review.
As a prelude, I just want to mention that I'm not a professional reviewer, these are just my thoughts on the game, so bear with me.
Plus, you pretty much have to play the game to get what I'm talking about, lets say that this is more for game designers/enthusiasts and less for buyers.
OK, so I'm gonna divide the review into three parts: The Good, The Bad, and The Stupid.
The parts reference the design of the game and its features.
The Good:
There are many good things that Ubisoft Montreal did with this game, that it's no wonder it's such a success.
The graphics, they came out with a great graphics engine for this game.
Things to notice about the graphics:
- Realistic sunlight, throughout the game, sometimes you can even see ugly building models (especially in the office level) that seem real only because of the lighting.
- Cloth, it looks like they put a lot of work into making the cloth move realistically, especially in the main character.
- The cities, the cities you visit a huge and you can walk thorough the entire city eventually, but we've all seen huge cities before, in open world games, like GTA, etc.
Character design, the main character has so much Cool-Factor™, that he can sell the game by himself. Nonchalant kinda guy, means business, and an assassin of course, which is by itself a great idea for a character.
The character's hidden blade is of course the cool, silent, signature assassin weapon of the game from others, like the garrote wire was the signature weapon for
Hitman.
You'll find yourself using it more and more as the game progresses.
The story, has a lot of interesting points in it, and above all has ties to real life events, which is always good, in my opinion.
Climbing mechanics, they really put an effort into this one, the climbing itself looks cool and feels controlled by the player, plus the level design is that good that you can practically climb everything in the level, which is really cool.
Addictive way points, there are a couple of things here that are genius design-wise.
- Through out the game you have to get a high vantage point to get a glimpse of the city, and find out things in it, this is quite a tedious task to perform, something along the lines of:
Find a high place -> climb it -> look at city, rinse and repeat.
To make it interesting to do, since it is an integral part of the game, they reward the player for doing that with a really cool overview of the city from that high point.
And after you finish the look, you drop from this high place into a big haystack, it feels like falling off a 10-story building (not that I know how it feels).
You got to see it to understand, but it's cool enough to make you want to find those high places over and over again. - Saving civilians, throughout the game you see people in need, that you can save to gain bonus points. I'm a pretty lazy player and I don't really like to gather bonus points, but they made it a bit more fun to do.
Since the entire game is pretty much sneak attacks and hiding, you don't get to fight a lot of people in the open, pretty much the only time you get to do this (without getting in trouble) is when you save civilians, so you just seek them out, to get some fighting action and bonus points.
The Bad:
Camera angles, really shoddy camera angles all along the game.
The most frustrating of them all is the in-battle camera angles, you might miss someone attacking you completely, because the camera decided it wants to show you the
really interesting innocent by stander and his stand.
Repetitiveness, I can say that the entire game is repetitive, you end up doing the same thing over and over, the loop is something like this:
Go to a city -> investigate the case (do 3 "special" things) -> find the main guy -> kill him -> run away and hide, rinse and repeat.
The whole ordeal can be quite tedious, but the shiny graphics, cool features and story keeps you in the game, which is all they need from you.
Fighting engine, I don't know if it's just the PC version, or is it all versions, but I found the fighting system a bit off.
Although it gives you a lot of options, remembering all of them and using them in real-time is a bit of a problem, and it can get confusing. And the lock-on system can mess up at times too, but most of the time it's OK.
AI, the AI in this game is simply stupid, or less than what I've come to expect from a game.
For example, an enemy soldier can be on the same rooftop as you, see you, suspect you and then you move two meters aside, effectively hiding you behind a roof fixture, and he doesn't even follow you he just keeps going on with his day, as though you never existed.
I've just seen better AI in other games.
The Stupid:
This section is dedicated to the stupid features in the game, that don't make any sense.
Eagle Vision, this is a mode you can enter to distinguish between friend and foe, which sounds really great at first.
But after a few minutes of playtime, you know which is which, since all classes wear basically the same clothes, in some variations. This is specifically stupid in the case of enemies, they are the main reason for this feature i guess, the enemies are
soldiers they all wear the same clothes, how can you
not know they are enemies?
Control inside a cut-scene, in the game during a cut-scene, which is shown in-game and not as a movie, you can move your character around to get different angles.
When I first saw this feature, in a preview movie it seemed really cool, but it's actually really unnecessary, at first I thought I can change stuff by moving, like the camera angles of the cut-scene movie, or actually performing some actions while in the cut-scene, but nooooo.
You can't do anything, you just move to different places, while in the cut-scene, I prefer to watch a dramatically "filmed" cut-scene, than to just move around inside a cut-scene, because you're effectively
inside a cut-scene.
In conclusion, this game has its share of problems but overall it is a very good game with good looking graphics. I give it a 8.5 out of 10.
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