Assassin's Creed (Director's Cut Edition): Play by Play *Completed*

Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut is the 2008 PC-exclusive version of the original 2007 release of the game. Having played the X-Box 360 version (back in the summer of 2009), I have already noticed a couple of differences but nothing significant.

Back in 2009, I lived with a 360-owner for about a month. I ended up playing Assassin's Creed quite a bit, but my roommate moved to San Diego before I had a chance to beat it. Well, thanks to a sweet Steam deal, my second chance has arisen!

Today, I played through the tutorial bits and completed the first assassination in order to get myself back into the game enough to write on it.


So, the basic premise is that you're a dude being held captive by scientists so they learn something from an ancestral memory in your DNA. The laboratory acts as a framing mechanism for the Crusades-era assassin story. It's like a game within a game.

The frame creates an intriguing mystery to follow and also a clever way to realistically explain things like tutorials and the ability to regenerate health and respawn. But as clever as it is, it also makes the story very contrived at points. For example, right near the beginning, you get demoted, which involves losing all your fancy weapons and fighting moves. You gradually reacquire these things as you complete more missions. It's like a teacher telling a very talented student to write a really long research paper, but only with the use a pen and one book. If that paper is completed, maybe next time the student can use a typewriter and an encyclopedia collection. All in all, though, the cleverness does outweigh the awkwardness.

A note on the tutorials: A tutorial for a PC game needs to label mouse buttons as Left and Right, not Zero and One. That doesn't make any sense.

Once you figure out the button names, the controls are pretty intuitive, although sometimes in the heat of battle, I forget that Right Button (oops, I mean Button ONE) is run and not Shift, like every other game in the history of running. But, while intuitive, the character control is a bit clunky, and that's something I remember having a problem with in the 360 version as well. Climbing and combat both alternate between very quick and very sluggish movements, and you can never be exactly sure what will happen. Getting on and off horses has also given me some trouble. But, as long as I can play around with parkour through ancient cities, I can tolerate some sluggishness.

The only truly annoyingly sluggish parts happen while collecting information and the assassinations themselves. Yes, the assassination part is almost the least fun part of the game. When one of these modes is entered, the view changes from a clear, 3rd-person view with a mouse-controlled camera to a hazy view with limited camera movement in which you can do little more than walk. So, if you have to follow someone, you only have the option of walking slowly behind them, even when it would make more sense to follow along unseen on the rooftops. Or, if you have reached your assassination target, all you can do is try to walk up slowly and try to get a stab in. I thought I was stuck for a moment when I first entered into my first assassination. I was up on a scaffold when I entered the area and the view changed. I had to sort of accidentally fall off the scaffold in order to get the ground because all other motions were denied me. This was especially annoying because one of the information tidbits I found in my investigation was that those scaffolds were accessible. Ultimately, there is no room for creativity in the assassinations. You have to clumsily kill the target in a very non-discrete manner and then run away from all the guards. I realize they get some story elements in there via the dying words of the target, but there's gotta be a better way to do it. Why work on all these fighting and running skills if you can't actually use them for the assassinations?

An example of a series of games that truly requires creativity and investigation (real investigation, not the "hey, go there and listen to that guy to get the next waypoint" kind of investigation) is Hitman.

Aside from the main story, there are also a few collectible items within the game, which is something I usually have a lot of fun with. After doing some reading, though, it looks like collecting flags and fighting Templars result in absolutely nothing in the PC version, and even console versions only have achievements involved. Collection minigames really need some sort of in-game reward. Rockstar knows how to do it. Take notes, Ubisoft.

When I got to the point where I wanted to exit the game (which is hard to know when to do, since all saves are automatic and vague as to whether content or location is being saved), but I found it quite difficult. First, exit the virtual Holy Land into the laboratory, then exit the Terminus device that reads your DNA, then you can exit to the menu, but then it makes you select your profile again. And then finally you can actually exit the game. Games should take seconds to exit, not minutes.

Despite the shortcomings of the game, somehow it remains fun and interesting. I had these same problems with the game two years ago, and yet I came back to it because the majority of it works well and is fun. One of these days, I'll get around to Assassin's Creed II and see what improvements were made.

In the meantime, stay tuned for my continuing experience playing Assassin's Creed.

It's pretty amazing how, despite its many flaws, this game keeps drawing me back in. Part of it is probably how little memory I have of specific plot points in the game, so a lot of the story is somewhat fresh to me. I'm also finding out more outside normal gameplay; that is, outside the animus machine and in the very limited setting of the framing story. I've found some different things to do there that are much less obvious than anything I have to accomplish within the assassination missions.

The missions themselves are starting to get very repetitive. The fun part is really just running over rooftops from one location to another. Actually getting there and having to interrogate, eavesdrop, or complete some task for a fellow assassin who is apparently completely incapable gets a bit tedious, especially when so much of the information gleaned is pretty useless for the actual assassination. The one bit of information that is never given out is where the deed will take place. Yes, they mention the name of places, but there are no signs or building labels in the game, so that doesn't help much. Knowing that would allow for study of the area and the planning of entrance and escape routes, which would be phenomenally more helpful than knowing a couple guards are sick. Most missions only require you to pick up two or three pieces of information, but I've been getting all of them (usually six or so) on the off chance there will be something useful. I think there have been one or two things that have actually helped.

As I go further into the game, Altair draws more and more attention to himself. Obviously, word gets out about an assassination in a city. And when there are three cities to go to, I guess the guards get to know who is up to no good. So therein lies the question: Why can't Altair use any disguises, or even just wear something more normal. As much as I love the design of the assassin garb, it really does stand out quite a bit.

So, since I stand out so much more, I end up getting in fights and getting chased without even really knowing what I did. Once, I just tried to walk into a courtyard and the guards started yelling. It can be a pain to lose those guys, especially with how temperamental the controls can be. Between it being very difficult to disengage an enemy in order to run and the trickiness of getting into a hiding spot, it can get a bit frustrating. And seriously, why can every Tom, Dick, and Harry in the Holy Land do parkour?

And yet... I keep playing. I think I'm just around the halfway mark, so I'm sure there will still be a bit more coming.

I've decided that every problem I have with this game comes from it feeling unfinished. Buggy controls. Extreme repetitiveness. The length of time it takes to get in and out of the game. All these things point to it being released a bit too early. It's kind of sad when things get pushed out the door too fast, especially when all it would take is a little streamlining for everything to be ready.

This dawned on me today when I decided to go back out into the "Kingdom." At the beginning of the game, you have to travel by horse to each of three cities: Jerusalem, Damascus, and Acre. The area between is the Kingdom. It's full of small towns, military encampments, and towers to climb in order to see the lay of the land. Once you ride through the Kingdom to get to a city, after that, you can fast travel, which happens fairly quickly. So that begs the question: what is the point of the Kingdom? It doesn't add anything to the story or help learn any skills, aside from riding a horse, which is only used out there. As it stands, it is no more than another location for collection minigames, which, as I said in a previous post, serve no purpose at all. The reason I went back to the Kingdom in the first place was curiosity at getting the last two viewpoints completed, but that also resulted in nothing.

This lead me to believe that there may have once been greater plans for the Kingdom, or at least a greater purpose for collecting flags and such. And if that were the case, couldn't they have tried to finish it for this "Director's Cut" version?

I had to stop playing today out of sheer frustration with how unresponsive the controls can be. Problems include going down a ladder when I am clearly pressing up, sitting on the edge of a hiding spot instead of going in, refusing to drop from a ledge, jumping towards the unscalable wall I wasn't facing and then dropping back to the ground in slo-mo while my pursuers retain normal speed, or any number of unclear workings of the combat system. Also, why the hell can't this Olympic-level athlete not swim? I know he's from the desert, but still. It's really irritating to die when a drunk sailor pushes you into the water.

I seem to have reached the fanale, and boy oh boy does it feel unfair. Nothing in the game really leads up to having to fight off 25 soldiers at once in a narrow corridor. Throughout the game, the strategy was to alternate running away and fighting. Here, I'm stuck on the ground surrounded by swordsmen with only cumbersome controls and an unforgiving combat system to protect me. And if I somehow make it through all the dogpiles to the last one, I still have to start over if I become frustrated enough to exit.

And speaking of exiting, I figured out a much faster way to do it. If I minimize the game and then maximize it again, there's no way to make if full screen again. That's annoying if I just want to minimize it, but at least it gives me a good way to "slam the door" on this game if it refuses to heed my commands.

With no desire to keep replaying the same long, intense fights over and over, I went all in and was determined to finish this sucker up tonight. And it worked, I'm done. It took 22 hours, which I suppose is a pretty decent length for a game, although it felt shorter because of the repetitiveness.

The repetitiveness took a turn at the end, especially with that long corridor of nigh-impossible fights. Not wanting to start over at all, I spent over half of that last bit running in circles to regain my health. That was by far the most difficult part, but it wasn't the end. The true finale was sufficiently challenging without feeling overwhelming.

The ending of the story was pretty good, although I had predicted the big "twist" at the end very near the beginning. The story in the Holy Land was well-contained within itself, and the framing story had a cliffhanger that makes me want to play Assassin's Creed II, although it probably isn't nearly as complex as it's pretending to be.

And yes, I do want to try the sequel at some point. Despite all my issues with the control system, it was mostly a fun game. And I'd like to believe they worked out many of the kinks in the second installment.

And now, a final note on something that I haven't mentioned at all: the graphics. I didn't have things turned up all the way, but for the most part, stuff looked great. There were just some odd inconsistencies here and there. For example, all the people you can rescue have tridactyl hands; did they not have time to split up everyone's fingers? Also, not everyone's mouths moved when they spoke, and not just minor characters. Some major characters in cinematics just shook their mask-like faces as they spoke. And that's all I have to say about that.