DigitalBattle.com

A lot of people had fun with Assassin’s Creed on the Xbox 360. I am not one of them.

In a mindbender of a plotline, you play as the distant descendant of a legendary assassin, Altair.  You’re stuck in the middle of a lab in 2012, having memories extracted from you on the genetic level about all the stuff your legendary assassin great-great-great-many times over grandfather did.  Your character will be remembering these events, but you’ll be the one playing them.

Altair did a whole lot of damage to the so-called Assassin’s Guild, breaking all three of its cardinal rules on one mission, and thus getting demoted all the way down to novice.  This means, sadly, that all the sweet things you can do in the first level will be off limits to you until you can re-learn them.  I can’t even express how ludicrous this is–demotion equalling loss of ability is too preposterous to even try and refute.

So you’ll be going about your business, trying to regain your former status (and ability, somehow) by carrying out a series of missions related to finding something that will end a war permanently.  Worse yet, further complications will come around by introducing the now-popular Mayan end of the world date of December 21, 2012.

On a visual level, Assassin’s Creed is patently top-notch.  And all the bells and whistles are present with great sound and level design and the like.  Indeed, whoever compared Assassin’s Creed to a giant parkour run wasn’t just whistling in the dark.  And the plot is massive, if confusing in more than a few points.

But the biggest problem in this game is its lack of substance.  The missions are mostly information gathering runs, without a whole lot of fighting or action.  This makes sense on some level–it’s not Warrior’s Creed or Soldier’s Creed, it’s ASSASSIN’S Creed.  If you get in a big rolling fight then you’ve probably done your job wrong from the word go.  This makes the problem a structural one—if you don’t want to play the stealthy assassin, then you don’t want to play Assassin’s Creed.

Specialization, folks, is for INSECTS.  Robert Heinlein said it first and best.  The best games may well require you to be the most versatile.  Look at some of the greats—where you have to gather information, act on that information, and see it through to the end.  You’ll have to plan your approaches, fight your way through a legion of foes and solve some puzzles to get where you’re going.  You get to play on every conceivable level at once—strategic, tactical, and operational.  Games where you do the same thing, over and over, seldom offer as much fun as those games that offer variety, no matter how pretty they look.

So if you love the parts of the various games out there where you have to sneak around, then you’ll no doubt love Assassin’s Creed.  It’s a beautiful game with a storyline so dense that light cannot escape from its surface.  But if you want something fast-paced with a more comprehensible storyline, you’ll likely turn this one down.