Please note this review does not give away spoilers but does contain frequent and mild sarcasm from beginning and throughout.
I've seen a few reviews for Assassins Creed by now, no doubt you have too, some hate it some love it. What I hated about some of the reviews is them spoiling the bloody game for me, well sooo be it now I'm going to spoil it for all of YOU, so this is exactly what happens from beginning to the gory end. Stabbey stabbey jump jump, chatty stabby stabby jump jump, staaaaaaaaaaaabey, jumpy jumpy chatty jumpy jump jump. Repeat for about 9 levels and you've pretty much there, oh yes there is a bit of horse riding too. Yep Assassins Creed really does not have a lot going on in terms of massive mission variaty or a deep and complex story line. Ok so if you've played it you might think the story is all Tolstoy but it ain't and your kidding yourself, just because you don't understand what is going on, does not mean it's a deep and complicated plot, it's waffley balls.
In fact there is more waffle than a waffle sandwich with extra waffle filling and a sprinkle of waffle dust on top. These guys just DO not shut up and say sod all the entire time of any bleeding use. For example your wise and all knowing mentor does not trust you to understand why you are killing all these guys, just to say, in around 7 conversations and 2 hours of ear bleeding dialogue "it's for the good of the people", k fine, then everyone of these mo fo's you kill tells you they are not really bad for maiming, killing and stealing from the civies because they and their pals doing it for a greater good, right k fine, so you ask your Mr Miyagi "What's up with that?" and I kid you not, he tells you, "Well they are all bad dudes that are part of a big bad dude organisation" and you go "ah I see k no probs". Crikey Charles and Diana's marriage was more convincing than this clap trap.
Then there are the people on the streets, with around less than 20 pieces of dialogue between them, a sodding preacher on every street corner, a beggar down most alleyways and the most hilarious of all the retards who push you into the nearest officer before you can say, "Your nicked sonny Jim". Sadly my only relief from these constant prattlers and other irritating degenerates was to murder them horribly and without remorse, which I admit was a lot of fun especially as it was so easy to do. Now here come the good bits about Assassins Creed, the actual control that you have of Altair is really REALLY sublime. It's so smooth and intuitive, granted it will take you a little while to get accustomed to his movements but when you do he is a shear joy to throw from building to building, knifing innocent bystanders and retards then slipping away into the crowd with the greatest of ease and satisfaction. Of course I should mention that the game does frown on you randomly knifing morons and those "special" people that get in your way by making you desynchronise a little bit every time you do it. This is kind of your life system, if you desynchronise all the way to unsyncronisasys then game over, and you start back again a few minutes away from when you last desycroniasyssysyaasieeesed no biggie, but that hardly ever happens as you seem to resynchronise back up to full syncroniassyasysaysyayis in a couple of minutes anyway so getting to a state of unsyncro...DEATH is kinda easy to avoid really. Therefore I can only assume the game designers hate all the civilians as much as I do and want you to knife them in the arse at you soon as you get the chance, fine by me.
There may be some large annoying niggles to this chatty hunter but all in all I really like this game. The game play might be repetitive but it's great, climbing buildings, jumping from roof top to roof top and stalking your pray is a massive amount of fun. This is even one of the very few games where I've been given tons of extra side missions and I actually want to do them all, oh yeah apart from the collection of flags, there are about 500 of the dam things, nice try ubisoft but you'll have to get some other lackie to play fetch with those for you. Oh and the cities, the cities you climb around are so god dam gorgeous at times it felt as though I was crawling over the face of the Mona Lisa, it's all soooo pretty and detailed.
So in conclusion it does have it's faults but for the first game of a new IP with this much ambition it was never going to be perfect, what you should really take away from this review is the parts it gets right it gets spot on and although repetitive it's a hell of a lot of stabby jumpy fun.
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