Assassin's Creed®: Director's Cut

a

The game itself is alright if stylish retroish 3D platforming and crusades setting is your type of thing, production quality is high, design, sound and music are great, so I'm mostly concerned with technical issues. I'll list the ones which I believe are really bad ones in order of appearance. - I randomly get garbled screen and blank white image instead of the intro video, it happened in maybe around 80% of cases I started the game. Looks like there are no other videos in game, so this is only mildly annoying and but still an ever-present reminder that the port is mediocre, because you see intro every time you launch the game. - Was very hard to configure my controller. The options menus have very dumb names like "gaming hat" for d-pad or something along those lines and the actual direction is not spelled out, all 4 directions are just "hat". Trigger buttons don't work. Unfixable without extra third-party downloads. Default settings are completely wrong so had to I spend a ton of time addressing these issues before I could even start playing. - It's impossible to play with gamepad only, you have to use your keyboard to get in-game and only then gamepad kicks in - annoying. - The game is unplayable with v-sync off, you simple won't be able to progress past certain point in the first 30 minutes of the game and even in the first 30 mins you'll encounter very glitchy physics. Why have this option at all is beyond me (broken by default by the way) - Gamepad randomly locks and becomes unresponsive. Very annoying during intense fights

Assassin's Creed is a game, that promises a lot with its settings, plot and game play but ends up delivering very little in the end. The best aspect of the game are the graphics. The game looks good and the medieaval towns are well made. But the game itself manages to be borinf trial of running through four different types of missions several times until you get to the end. Assassin's Creed 2 is much better game, but this first part of the series is more of a miss fire.

The control is partly immature: Running freely to escape is not possible because the control does not react fast enough. In addition, narrow alleys and corners must be avoided, because the character quickly runs against the wall and holds on to it while the enemies thrash on you. The last fight against de Sadre (or something) is disproportionately difficult. While a good dozen knights stand around you, many attacks are miserably blocked by them, although you block, and parry in time - this rarely succeeds. And if you cancel the game - close the game completely - you have to start all over again and you can't stop the dialogue, you have to listen to all the talk again. That's one of the worst: you know what they're saying and you have to listen to the simple talk again. And every mission in the cities involves the same thing: storming out, eavesdropping, stealing, boring to extremely pointlessly complicated challenges. And most of the main targets are simply captured by partisans, who are then assassinated. All in all, the game runs stable, the graphics are pretty good. But the design is quite monotonous. The music again very appropriate.

The game follows Altair, an assassin, who is stripped from his rank and has to do highly repetitive tasks over and over again until, 20 hours later, he enters an highly underwhelming final arc by which 90% of the people should've lost their interest in this overrated piece of software altogether. It's not good, it's not old - so why would you buy it?