Review Taffer 1/5 · Mar 11, 2025
It's bad. Half of most of the game is janky platforming with 1001 cheap deaths (at least there are very frequent checkpoints, which are very necessary) which makes me think of the Hades part from the original God of War (the part of the game that they "forgot to playtest"), and unlike the level design in mainline AC, this one …
It's bad. Half of most of the game is janky platforming with 1001 cheap deaths (at least there are very frequent checkpoints, which are very necessary) which makes me think of the Hades part from the original God of War (the part of the game that they "forgot to playtest"), and unlike the level design in mainline AC, this one will make you wonder when Bowser joined the Templars owing to the complete lack of an attempt to hide the ridiculousness of the sundry death traps placed in your path. The other half is clunky combat which consists of spamming one or two moves that work and hoping that's enough to win you the war of attrition.
The most unique parts of the gameplay are the pickpocketing and torture screens, which nonetheless manage to feel like an afterthought and are only seen a handful of times. There's only one or two very brief segments very late into the game which incorporate any of the stealth gameplay that's supposed to be an AC staple, though that does give you the benefit of seeing how Altaïr actually fully becomes an old bald guy when he disguises himself as a scholar thanks to a zoom-in on him whenever you fail the last pickpocketing section (which will happen several times), and one of the goofiest scenes imaginable when Altaïr launches himself out of a catapult to escape the Templar camp. I could say that one scene might made the whole experience worthwhile, but I feel like that would be coping.
Honestly, a less masochistic person would have stopped playing this game way sooner than me, but I guess I just can't stay away from a certain brand of critical-mass shovelware jank. My excuse for actually reaching the (extremely underwhelming) ending scene from this game is mainly that this was my designated toilet break game for a while. This game really should have stayed on mobile (the map screen in particular definitely has the "2000s java game" look to it), where it would be way easier to forget, but to their credit, despite sharing the same unfortunate roots as their Ubisoft licensers, Gameloft was capable of making decent games every once in a while (see: Soul of Darkness). This also did make me slightly curious to retry the AC Chronicles games, which have a similar gameplay design premise but I vaguely recall not being quite as bad from what I played of the first one.
