Assassin's Creed®: Director's Cut

Simply put, there's a great idea behind AC. You play as a cool assassin ( Altair ) with great acrobatic skills wondering the streets of some notable medieval cities ( Damascus, Acre, Jerusalem ) tracking and hunting down your targets with the gadgets and abilities you got. It's fun to play as Altair mostly he's fast, agile and gets around easily. But the main problem of the game is that there's little variety and challenge put on your way and if it wasn't because of the unique settings, story and fairly good depiction of historical characters and events and capturing the whole " crusade wars" atmosphere, it would have been a really forgettable game. There are 9 targets for Altair to kill and every one of them is in the poor/average/rich districts of the three cities in the game. To gain access to enough information for attacking your targets, you have to do limited tasks like pick-pocketing, eavesdropping, interrogating , killing archers and guards silently, racing through some checkpoints in a limited amount of time and saving citizens from guards. Doing these tasks is easy and repetitive and killing your main targets is hardly any difference. There are some moments when you get exposed and guards start following you. You can easily lose them with a bit of running and jumping, but if you decide to stay and fight, they are no match for Altair since he is seriously overpowered and can kill a whole bunch of guards with some quick counter attacks. Fortunately, the game features great visuals and soundtracks which makes the experience a lot more pleasant than it should be. AC is not a bad game by any means. It's fun while it lasts. But it could have been done a lot better. But as the start point for a very interesting franchise and story ( Desmond story ) , I think it definitely deserves to be played.

This game has stunning environments and the middle ages Middle Eastern setting is one I would love to see expanded on in some way. The devs at Ubi meticulously researched names and locations and created a historically accurate replica of the Crusade era Middle East, and injected a fantastic fictional story of parkour assassins into it. The combat can be repetitive at times, but mastering it can be tough at higher levels, and while you can spam the attack and counter buttons, there is a depth to the combat that gives deep satisfaction when you take out a pesky patrol without breaking a sweat. However, if you have ANY hoarder proclivities, this game will keep you wake at night. Flags. That's all I will say. It's well worth picking this game up to try, and I doubt you'll forget the experience.

Reading reviews here, I understand how fortunate I was to have played, or better said, lived through this game without reading any reviews beforehand. So I enjoyed the game totally oblivious to the well known fact that it is redundant, buggy, too easy and has a confusing ending. I just bought it, started playing and fell out of reality for a week, and loved every minute of it, except the ending - it was really sad to realise that it was finished and I couldn't play any more. I must admit I'm not a "gamer", I enjoy games since my childhood, but I do not play them professionally, and I'm more on the intellectual side. I get bored with shallow keyboard-smashing action titles, and more appreciate a solid story and an adventure that allows me to use logic to solve the problem. I've never played games like Assassin's Creed before (were there any?), so I was totally blown away. I found it very similar to the original Prince of Persia from 1990, the same realistic animations, same classic approach to a level-based story progression. One fight was a bit too hard for me, but I generally loved the idea of not dying. Since it was a memory, I could not really die - desynchronisation merely meant I was not doing it right. Psychologically it's much less stress than getting actually killed. This game is much more logical than its sequels - here you live through a genetic memory of an ancestor, and you have to follow it very closely. In the sequels you had much more freedom, you could buy property, get various weapons, heal yourself, dress in fancy clothes through uPlay rewards (sometimes losing a finger), visit same place during a day or night - that really broke the concept of a DNA memory and moved the franchise from a science fiction into a non-science... better said: nonsense-fiction genre. I have found the plot, the graphics and Altair so realistic, I was saying sorry to him each time I was clumsy enough to make him fall off a wall :) I don't understand what "redundancy" people are talking about. I guess I'm not blessed with a consumer's mind, and to me consistency, integrity of a story is more important than the "fun value". So, if anyone hasn't yet played the original Assassin's Creed and makes up his mind by reading my review, I'd say that if you're jumping through the games while chatting to your friends, and you pay no attention to dialogues and story, this one is not for you, and you will be disappointed with it. However, if you immerse into games and live through them, this is something you'll most likely appreciate.

Gorgeous graphics, and lovely fluid animation. Jumping around the cities is a joy. Unfortunately, playing the game is not. All the way through, you are doing the same thing and it gets dull very quickly. Climb up a tower, rescue a person from the guards, follow this person, assassinate this person. It should be fun, but it's not at all. The worst part is that the same voice samples are used constantly throughout the game, they will make you want to punch something: "THIEF! You are FILTH!" "You dare steal in my presence?! That will cost you your life!" The combat is deeply flawed and unintuitive. The story has its interesting points, but the voice acting and writing is pretty horrendous. The worst parts are the terrible speeches each major boss victim gives as they die, just painful to listen to.