On the paper, Assassin's Creed seems great. The premise alone gives me wet gamer-dreams. Playing as an assassin in the 12th century, with free-roaming and the alleged possibility of choosing how to take down you target, combined with a interesting sci-fi plot? Yes please! Sadly, what we are left with is nothing short of a huge disappointment. The plot starts out interesting, but gradually loses it's freshness, and all the flaws shows. Hopefully the story picks up stronger in the successors, but I do not know. The main negative point with AC is the gameplay itself though. We are given the illusion of free will in AC. Before each main target execution, Altair must gather information about the target, through terribly dull and repetitve small-missions (seriously, they are the same for each target). You can choose how many of them you want to do, and you will get more information for each one. If you do all of them, you of course have more information before the actual assassination, but the problem is you don't need any information. Save for a few assassinations at the very end, every mission can be completed with just finding the target and killing him. The whole concept of choosing how to end your targets life is not fleshed out well at all. Yes you can take different routes to his location, but that's it. Forget the diversity you can find in for example Hitman: Blood Money. The game also struggles on some pure gameplay related notes, for example in the way the climbing is programmed. For the most part, it works fine, but Altair does have a mind of his own from time to time. He figured he would jump in any direction other than the one i was pointing towards. In the end, Assassin's Creed is a dull and disappointing experience. It has a great concept, but the execution is poor. Hopefully the successors are better.
