Cuddly animals driving cars in a race, throwing hedgehogs at each other! Forget the acid rains of post-apocalyptic zombie-infested wastelands, and drive a few tracks as a panda. Funny sounds, nice graphics (for its age), and a split-screen multiplayer mode. I played it with my dad many years ago.
I think it was something like an "indie game" of the 90's, it felt amateurish, but in spite of that, it was quite enjoyable! I think anyone who likes EGA "quests" in Sierra style will enjoy these games too. I give it 4 stars just so you would not expect a lot... and then perhaps it will surprise you :)
It's a positively beautiful game that is fun to play. Some places are easy, some are pretty hard, together it makes a balanced experience. I find the whole concept of cleaning the world of corruption very appealing, I wish it could be done outside of the game as well. The visuals are great, the voice acting is superb, dialogs are full of humour, the female companion is pretty, overall I find it an enjoyable experience. I thought it's mostly for a younger audience, judging by that huge sword in the screenshots and videos - it looks so console-ish. But when you play, it's all fine, and fights are fun, especially since you can't exactly "die". Lots of cool movements and tricks you can pull with the enemies. Just as you're getting tired of jumping and performing acrophobic acrobatics, there comes a fight for a change. A few dialogs afterwards ease the tension. I only wish the prince had more clothes on; having half-naked men on my screen is something that could be misinterpreted by an accidental witness. But I understand it's a tradition of the series, I remember the first one was jumping about in something that looked like white pyjamas. After all, it's pretty warm there, in Persia.
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.
