Assassin's Creed®: Director's Cut

The game tries to hold your hand a lot, but thankfully you can turn off many of the GUI settings quite easily, for you don't need them to enjoy the game. (In fact, it hampers your experience) The game is so well crafted that you don't need a map for all but the racing and target missions. The NPCs give you plenty of hints on where is what, and the city layout is easy to read and fun to navigate. The mission types are repetitive, yes, but not for the sake of being repetitive. When you progress down the storyline, you'll slowly teach yourself to listening and watch for other behavioural cues what NPC's to pay attention to. This is where the repetition comes in play. Things become natural to you, especially when you play without the map and have to 'pay attention' to the beautifully crafted world around you. The game expects you to become a master of it's environment. I have to say, if played 'blindly', Assassin's creed is a very relaxing, leisureable experience.

As Altaïr the assassin, you are tasked with nine assassinations, which indeed can take only mere seconds or a minute or two to actually execute - but finding them and preparing for the assassination can take hours. One must investigate the areas, represented by the icon filled maps that Ubisoft has really grown to love, and only by securing your exfiltration route by pre-preparing the areas means getting to your target and just as importantly, getting away intact, is 90% of the game (think pacifying outposts in Far Cry games). The learning curve is short and the game has a very unique control system. You control Altaïr pretty much like puppeteers marionette as you need keys or buttons bound to eyes, feet and hands. It feels very strange at first but you'll free running over rooftops and eliminating sentries before long. Some of the games highlights, are scaling vantage points in the cities to reveal new map areas and looking below to see dozens if not hundreds of people going about their business. You will occasionally come across a Templar knight, they are quite unhappy to encounter you as evidenced by the fact that they will draw their blade and attack you on the spot and until you learn how to fight them, they can be dangerous foes (Pro Tip: Approach from above or behind). They're all mostly French, so are fair game and they shout French obscenities at you which remind me more of John Cleese in Monty Python and The Holy Grail than anything. But I think the most exciting part of the game is when you eventually have to cut and run; you've been discovered, the bells are being rung in alarm, citizens are screaming and running in panic, the music has ramped up in tempo and every guard in the city is after you, yelling in their native tongue. Eventually, you're so skilled you probably could fight them all, but it would take hours, running is the better and more exciting option - until you fall - so don't fall!

Runs on integrated graphics (Intel UHD Graphics 620) in full detail without a problem, only had to run via the DX9 executable (DX10 had no sound) and add the "203.132.26.155 127.0.0.1 # AC1" line (without quotes) to c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file to stop the periodical freezes (even non-DRM games seem to ping back home to momma; just unplugging the ethernet cable together with disabling wifi also worked). Plus you can move the *.bik files in "Videos" folders elsewhere for faster startup (a subfolder in Videos is enough) once you watch them.

i've read too many bad reviews about this game... "it's too repetitive!" "it's boring",ecc... the truth is... it's not all true... yeah, maybe the missions are "go to point b and try to kill this guy" but, hey, the storyline is very good. templars, conspiracies, ecc... with a very interesting plot-twist. but, imho, the thing that really steal the scene is desmond when he discover that he can use... i'll stop here or i'll spoil too much ;) as i said, very good story but is little repetitive.

It has its detractors, and I can understand why, but I for one love the first foray in to the Assassins Creed universe, and it is the only one in the series that I have played more than once - in fact, I have completed it 5 times across 3 different systems. Though admittedly not as characterful, cinematic and engaging as its sequels and widely derided because of its repetitive nature, it nevertheless has a purity of gameplay and a strong focus and compelling fluidity that the later games lose due to their ever-increasing feature creep, bolted-on mini-games and over reliance on jarring expositionary cut scenes and copout quicktime events. Yes, it is somewhat clunky at times, and the modern day sections of the game feel a bit flat and even turgid, but the core gameplay of exploration, investigation and assassination in a very well realised virtual world set against an appealing backdrop of history, conspiracy and morality is highly addictive and very satisfying. You can explore as little or as much as you want, and it can be as easy or as hard as you make it, though bear in mind that if you do not perfect your combat skills, the last sections of the game can be annoyingly difficult, almost impossibly rage-quittingly so. But aside from the issues and arguments for or against this game, there is nothing quite like it for its basic ambience and attractions... Free-running across rooftops, hiding among crowds and completing a kill can be both exhilarating and relaxing, whilst climbing to the top of a minareted tower and synchronising a viewpoint with the cries of an eagle in your ears, then taking a leap of faith safely into a cart full of straw... That's what makes Assassin Creed special to me. Not the endless collecting and crafting and curating and other assorted confusing craptrap that mire and bog down the later games in the series.