Assassin's Creed (2007)

Soo it seems that the this game has some really mixed reviews here. Either you love it or hate it. Personally I think its a great game. It was my first foray into the Assassin's Creed games and its still my favorite of them all.

I loved how interesting everything was, the lore of the assassin's and how you explored memories and went to all of these ancient cities. The story was pretty good, and not nearly as convoluted as later games in the series. I loved the combat even if it wasn't too complex. I loved the parkour, climbing up buildings and jumping from one to the next in order to hide from the templars. It was such a rush to me. Everything about this game made you feel like a bada**. There was even a nice little story arc for the main character. Just a really sweet game that I will always remember with fond memories.

For an almost 10 year old game it still holds up to this day and is definitely worth picking up if you've never played an Assassin's Creed game before.

The game tells a story of Desmond Miles - a descendant of Assassins - a secret organisation fighting with Templars. While Assassins strive to preserve freedom - Templars seek to control people. Desmond who lives in modern times is put by Templars into Animus with which he can access genetic memories of his ancestors and re-lives the events happening in the third crusade times.

The game is very atmospheric. The cities you visit during the game are big and extremely atmospheric. It really does feel like a crusader movie. The movement - ability to climb any building, run on the rooftops is very well done. The whole scope of the game does look impress. For the times this was released it is very impressive. Even today it still looks very good and holds its own.

During the game you will kill a number of templars. And while all the tools seem to be present the game feels a bit repetitive. Each mission follows pretty much the same schematic - follow someone and eavesdrop on conversation to learn something, beat someone up, pickpocket someone else. In the end it does not affect the main mission much though. With additional Ubisoft dis tractors - climbing towers to reveal map and so on it's a completionist nightmare. Even more so that the side missions are even more repetitive than the core plot. The main missions at least vary from each other and are really fun to do.

The strength of this game lies within stealth. Blending with the crowd, picking routes to avoid detection to deal the final blow. When executed properly it's really satisfying. The combat is a bit too easy. All you have to do is wait for a queue to counter and you can fight off a hundred men.

The only problem I had was with an XBox controller which for some reason does not work well with the PC version of the game. And some keys are bound in a strange way without ability to re-bind them. Even using community fixes I couldn't get it to work exactly as it should.

The whole story of Desmond Miles is a bit weak - and personally I would prefer for it to be strictly about Altair.

Overall the game still holds up - worth picking up and playing through.

I came to this game having never played an AC game before. The novelty of the setting and mechanics was engrossing although it ran the tedious combat into the ground during the last quarter of the game.

This would be hard to go back to if you have played any of the later AC games but if you haven't, it is a great place to start.