Last night I decided to pick up the latest Assassin’s Creed game, now that is has been released for the PC. I was able to toss in a couple hours before I had to call it for the night.
I picked up the first game a little while ago while it was on sale on Steam and played about 10 hours of it but lost my interested due to repetitive gameplay and overly confusing controls. I mean, how many buttons do you need to press to jump off a tower? But even with it not quite grasping hold of me, the game style was intriguing enough for me to keep my eye on the release of the new one.
Since I never finished the first game or played the second game, Brotherhood was nice enough to give me a nice recap of everything that happened in the first two games. The super quick synopsis is that you aren’t actually the assassins that you play as, but rather you are a guy named Desmond that uses a machine to tap into the memories of his ancestors that happened to be magically stored in your DNA.
When you are running around as the awesome assassins, it’s actually you playing as Desmond is trying to “sync” their memories to unlock awesome secrets that are important. INCEPTION!
After a brief discussion with a friend who had a chance to play Assassin’s Creed 2, I educated myself on what features had been included in in the second and third installments. Returning from number two is the ability to purchase armor and weapons from blacksmiths.
In addition, you also now need to repair your gear from wear-and-tear. Apparently in the second game you helped your uncle renovate his city, and from what I can tell, the same sort of feature has been included in the third game, if the renovation of a stable is an indication. This unlocked the ability to call a horse whenever I liked to help traverse the massive rendition of Rome.
As you accept quests it will tell you your objective that you need to complete as well as the higher requirement to achieve “full synchronization.” For example, early on you are asked to kill a guard captain. Which for a skilled assassin such as yourself, this is an easy task. However if you want to a full sync, you need to kill him by pushing him off a tower into the scaffolding. As you progress through the game, you can revisit any of these “memories” if you want to try and unlock the full sync. If this plays any effect on the game as a whole remains to be seen.
In addition, some annoyances have been perpetuated through all three games. The random beggars who serve no purpose other to get in your way have returned in full force. Why they are there or whoever thought they were good idea I will never know.
My biggest pet peeve is the save game function. Assassin Creed games save as you reach certain checkpoints, which is fine and dandy. However I want to be able to save the game whenever I want. While I realize this might somewhat defeat the purpose of replaying an entire memory if you screw up, but it is 2011, and sometimes people need to stop a game and they don’t want to replay everything they did. Especially if they did it right.
I haven’t had the chance to play the multiplayer yet, but I hear it is a nerve-wracking experience as you attempt to blend in with a crowd of NPCs so you don’t end up with a sword in your gullet.
It’s been fun so far, but it throws you around town pretty quick without really getting your bearings before it sends you off following people without really gauging your location. I am hoping that it picks up a lot in the near future though. While free-running is entertaining, it’s been about 85% of my gameplay so far.
