Assassin's Creed



I love books, especially fantasy/sci-fi. But video games are supposed to be different kinds of experiences. In Portal you learned by doing. In Assassin's creed you learn by standing around having people tell you stuff. And by the way, giving the player limited control of the character during a cut scene make it no less boring. Actually, that's not true - running in circles and making the camera spin in opposite circles while some king / priest lectures you for 15 minutes about responsibility and the "Assassin's code" is more fun than standing still and listening to it - but only just barely. Creed is doubly bad because first you get lectured in the present by a crazy doctor/scientist and his attractive but stilted nurse before getting flung into the past for your king / priest lectures. It's a relief when you finally get to do something, but then that something quickly turns into a repetitive task.



"Unng ... At least I don't have to sit through another cut scene."

For example, you're in a pretty impressive looking bustling city and you have to eavesdrop on people to find information on the bad guy. This would be fun if eavesdropping meant actually listening to people until you learned something. In Creed eavesdropping involves following your map (radar) until you reach an eavesdropping icon, and then sitting on a bench and listening to two guys by pressing the left trigger. This is supposed to draw you into the game but it does just the opposite. You feel more like you're performing tasks for the computer to continue the story than playing a video game. This boring eavesdropping mini-game would be fine if you only had to do it once, but your map is soon littered with "eavesdrop" points.

There are times when you actually get to assassinate someone, and these moments are pretty fun, although you should know you're going to have to endure long cut scenes before (to establish that the victim truly deserves to die) and after the deed (to give him his dying soliloquy) and then back in the present with the creepy doctor/scientist (for absolutely no good reason at all) and then with the king/priest (to longwindedly set up your next mission). It's enough to make you wonder if it's worth it, and here's a tip - it's not.
At it's best Creed borrows from the  PS2 game "Shadow of the Colossus". The character animations are really nice. you get to ride a horse, and the act of climbing is a great device for developing a sense of achievement. Yet in all of these circumstances Shadow did it better. Their animations were more complex, the horse was yours (not some ubiquitous horse you discarded after your ride), and climbing stuff in Shadow of the Colossus was both the main goal of the game and not super-easy.

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