*Editor’s Note: as our little site doesn’t get games to review before they come out, we have to play them when our wallets and time afford it. Here is our first in a new series of video game reviews, done in an SG way, hereinafter known as the After the Fact Reviews. Enjoy!

Assassin’s Creed is the Diseased Starlet of Gaming- pretty nice to watch; pretty bad idea to actually fool around with.

I’m a total sucker for storytelling in a game. When a game weaves me a good yarn and executes it in a way consistent with how the title feels, plays, and progresses, it gives me massive braingasms. You know that feeling you get when you pull up to your home after a long day of work and right when you get to throw the machine into park, the song on the radio ends, and that’s when you turn off the car and hop out? Yeah, it’s like that, except it lasts for the whole game. Nnnnnghhhhhh, yeah baby.

Find out the rest, after the jump!

Knowing that, you will understand why when I first looked at Assassin’s Creed, I lusted for it. It promised to be a perfect amalgamation of sandbox play-style and enthralling story. All gussied up in bullshots and demo reels, it whispered from the shelves that it was definitely going to be My Kind of Game; it was all young and hot and sexy and full of promises. I wanted to have it, to own it, to experience it in ways that would remind a sailor of shore-leave. My previous objects of desire, the best example being the Grand Theft Auto games that I owned; I had taken them in and over time I had my way with each of them, exploring every avenue and valley with patience and love, only forcing things when I had to, or occasionally after I had a long day at work… And I missed it. I was looking forward to Assassin’s Creed.

However…

There was something in the stories coming out about Assassin’s Creed that I just couldn’t understand. Reviews were… mixed. Opinions were split, some loved the title and worshipped at Jade Raymond’s graven image daily, others lamented the lost $60 and wished it had gone towards a drug habit instead. So, to be on the safe side (and because there was no demo), I rented it for my 360.

At first, I liked what Assassin’s Creed was showing me. The whole first hour of the game was amazing, awesome, wonderful to experience. Story-wise I can’t get too detailed for fear of “spoilering,” but I liked the intrigue of Altair’s tale, the assassin out for redemption and vengeance. I loved the way the main character (Desmond) was weaved into the story as the modern-day man, tossed onto the ‘Animus’ machine and forced to relive Altair’s memories through scientifically questionable means for morally questionable reasons. I love the tinfoil hat story allusions and how they’re mixed with the touchy subject matter of religious crusades. I especially was impressed with how Desmond and the Animus machine are also used in places as a seamless plot device to skip past trivial travels or technicalities.

The thing that impressed me most and made me feel as close to ‘linked’ with my assassin’s history was the health system. Basically, there’s a synchronization bar that represents the link between past memories of Altair and present remembering by Desmond; any damage Altair incurs, or general dumbassery on my behalf (like killing civilians for no reason) will ‘desync’ the link with Altair’s actual memories, rather than ‘hurt’ him. It is one of the absolute best implementations of a health system, ever. It was so simple, I still can’t praise it enough for its creativity.

This hour of glory was set in one of the most beautiful game environments I have ever experienced. Anyone who says anything derogatory about the art, the style, or the graphics of Assassin’s Creed should be sterilized to prevent accidental breeding. The visuals are exquisite. Blue skies, castles, houses, huts, and a gigantic countryside that unfurled beautifully before me as I rode my mount full-speed down various paths all pleasured my eyes in the most sexually metaphorical ways. Climbing a new, taller city tower and seeing the buildings was like ocular cheesecake, and the ‘Leaps of Faith’ were a cherry topping that never got old. But…

Before I go further, have you ever heard the old saying, “show me the world’s prettiest woman and I’ll show you the guy that’s tired of her crap?” Yeah, keep that in mind.

There’s some unfortunate reasons that I only talk positively about that one hour. If the rest of the game was as good as the first hour, Assassin’s Creed would have been life-altering for me. After that first hour though, things changed. I rode to Jerusalem and I got into my first fight in a city, and simultaneously I got into my first fight with the one-button tragedy of a combat system (more on that later). Then, I had to ride for an eternity to get to Acre. By the time I was halfway through the ride to Damascus, I was ready to turn on My Chemical Romance and use Altair’s arm-blade on his wrists. As beautiful as they are, those huge effin’ tracts of countryside that I previously gushed about riding through, have nothing more to do in them than egg-hunt worthless, hidden “achievement-whore” flags and look off the top of several towers that look the exact effin’ same as every other effin’ tower in the effin’ “kingdom” map section, and that crap gets effin’ old, effin’ fast.

Even at full-throttle, traveling took a ridiculous amount of time to get from one city to the other, and even as beautiful as the landscape is, navigating it is a pain in the ass. It was as if someone intentionally made the outer Kingdom as beautiful, frustrating, and boring as humanly possible, like that hot chick I knew in high school who only talked about shoes. The only saving grace to the Kingdom is that after the third assassination mission, someone on the dev team threw me a bone and let me warp from city limits to city limits, turning the massive Kingdom into Assassin’s Flyover Country. I found my feelings torn between wondering why the developers even bothered making the area and borderline Stockholm-Syndrome love towards them for not making me have to experience it ever again.

What’s more, I discovered that the guards in general couldn’t care less about the citizenry. My trusty steed and I ran over several people (totally on accident, I swear) in front of a guard on more than one occasion, but that bastard didn’t so much as bat an eyelash unless I really kicked the horse into overdrive. Apparently in Altair’s world, running over civilians was status-quo, but if you speed, buddy that’s your ass.

The guards were never as frustrating as when I tried to make it through a city on foot, but I’m getting ahead of myself. At first, sneaking around any of the cities was fun, but the act was quickly made counterproductive when any target was more than a couple of blocks away. Of course this is where the game’s rooftop “free-running” system is supposed to shine, so I took to the archer-guard-infested rooftops to get from point A to point B. Indeed, the rooftop runs were fun at first, but with no superpowers or grappling hook-type toys I was just climbing and jumping really, really well, and well… Try to imagine watching 10 straight hours of Cirque Du Soleil and you’ll know exactly what Free-Running becomes. Eventually I found places where there’s just no way to get across the street without doubling way the hell back, or biting the bullet and plopping down amongst the populace, and that’s where a massive failure manifests itself.

The whole system for being incognito in a crowd was also buggy and flawed. There were as many occasions of my triggering a guard’s ‘hey you’ alarms while walking in the fully-undercover stance across the street, as there were of me just running full-bore past him. What’s worse, was that these guards apparently procured about half of the housing in the entire city, as fighting with even ONE of these chuckleheads will turn quickly into a fight with anywhere from literally five to fifteen (and occasionally a few more) of them. This gangbang was not a result of citizens running to get help, and wasn’t because of some walkie-talkie psychic guard network either; it was purely because there’s just SO DAMN MANY of them. Even the save-a-citizen mission side-quests are frustratingly hindered by the overpopulation of these obnoxious bastards.

As ridiculous as the overabundance of guards was, the combat system in this game dwarfs even that mountain of stupidity. To put it quite frankly, the combat in this game couldn’t have been less intuitive if I were a coked-out epileptic in bad need of a fix, and it was the most egregious sin this title commits. I had one button to attack with, one to grab-and-throw enemies with, and one that I could use for other meaningless stuff if I weren’t better off just using the counterattack. I tried the other moves, I really did, but folks I kid you not when I tell you that successfully winning sword combat in this game literally revolves around One. Single. Move. There was no exaggeration there, no hyperbole, it wsa the overuse of the counterattack that wins all of the swordfights in this game, and it was as boring to do as it sounds. Their clever attempt at an innovative control scheme fails miserably.

But wait, it still gets worse!

The first 8 of my targets were all about the stealth, the timing, and being the (however mediocre) Assassin of the Creed. Starting at target number nine, the last levels seem to have come from an entirely different game. The pace of Assassin’s Creed goes from a layout of track-and-kill to a constant stream of repetitious zergfests with wave after wave of mindless butt-hats in armor coming to be counterattacked to death in the most boring gameplay scenario imaginable. If I were to tell you that the last levels comprised of “Hold down the big right shoulder button and press X when someone swings at you, then keep doing it for an hour and you win,” you could credibly say that I just spoiled the end of the game for you.

You could also say I did you a huge favor, and thank me with a frosty import beer.

I had high hopes for this title, but in the end Assassin’s Creed was the Jessica Alba (or if you prefer, pre Hep-C Pam Anderson) of games; it looks hot from a distance, but it was harboring some nasty problems that you really don’t want to fool around with. The investigations leading to assassinations were repetitive and uninteresting. The sandbox playstyle feels like an afterthought, the combat system was fatally flawed, and no amount of looking pretty, or good storytelling can make up for the frail, monotonous gameplay.

After the fact, here’s what I think: Do yourself a favor; just look at the box for Assassin’s Creed to get hot and bothered, then go play Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. It’s cheaper, you won’t get any ugly surprises when you pull the covers back, and the moneyshot at the end won’t abuse you for two hours before leaving you feeling dirty and in need of a shower.

*Trav is a new contributor to SG that will specialize in videogame reviews. 

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