Assassin's Creed: Altair's Chronicles (Nintendo DS, 2008)

Assassin's Creed is a bloody dive into a beautiful world of warriors and the assassins who hate them. Beautiful animation, stylish low-saturation graphics, and city-wide chases are all fundamentally wonderful in Creed. There really isn't another game quite like it. Unfortunately, there isn't another game with issues quite like Creed's, either. Assassin's Creed tries to be a stealth game, an action game, a stealth kill game and a platformer, and to innovate in each category. But for each amazing step forward, Creed takes a half-step back.

Quietly Killing Time

Assassin's Creed revolves around the assassinations of nine key targets in the Third Crusade (as well as some "other" points in history). Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus are rendered in beautiful grays and earth tones, creating the effect of free-running across a giant tomb. It's in the free-running that you'll find the game's most original and satisfying gameplay, tearing across cities as medieval hitman Altair.

By holding down a trigger and the action button, Altair can nimbly ascend anything. Once you're free-running, gameplay becomes about maintaining a perfect line of motion rather than hitting the jump button at just the right time. There's a very steep learning curve, because these free-running portions look more like platforming than they actually play. The basic idea is to hold down the free-running buttons and point Altair in the right direction. Your job isn't to micromanage jumps; your job is to point Altair towards his victims and make sure they die cleanly.


In order to secure your targets' deaths, you have to climb a few "synchronization points," the tallest buildings in a city's district. Each district has half a dozen or more of these, with each city divided into three districts. Climbing to the very highest point of these structures is really fun. There isn't any other game that quite captures the heart-pounding pleasure of simply ascending, endlessly, with nothing but your wits and fingertips to guide you.

Each sync point unveils a roundup of choices on your mini-map, including citizens to rescue (who'll then help you later) and various clues you'll have to unlock in order to earn permission to kill your target. You might have to interrogate an enemy agent, pickpocket a map, or simply kill a few Templars without being caught -- and within a time limit.
While that sounds like a forgiving, interesting way to represent "investigating" your target, the mission types all blur into a homogenous mix of unskippable introductory cut-scenes and difficulty that is always too hard or too easy. Until mission seven, the toughest job you're likely to have is to go to your HUD marker, sit at the bench, and hit the Y button to listen in on a conversation.

I've Never Run

But once you hit the seventh mission, the timed stealth murder sprees become trial and error, simply hoping you can make your hits before some random guard bumps into you, forcing you to redo the entire mission. They're not long, but it's an irritant to repeat the same mini-mission over and over again. More disappointing, chances to explain why your target deserves to die are passed up for simple chatter. Each mini-mission's cut-scene is merely exposition, always telling instead of showing.

Missions in free-roaming, open-world games give the player a sense of direction, a sense of not being lost in the world.
Overall Rating- 10/10