As always after throwing a podcast out the door like an orphan child hoping that they would star in in a musical about being an orphan, we are now throwing out the orginal text from the Assassin’s Creed review hoping that it takes flight and makes us money in some silly fashion. Enjoy!

Assassin’s creed is a game by Ubisoft, in which basically you go around killing people and run around big places, larking about. We could call it a day there but that wouldn’t do it justice.

You play two people through the game, Desmond, the name of whom conjures up the Channel 4 sitcom with the same name and then there’s Altair, the ye olde man who crafts his living by making sure other people aren’t living. There’s the evil Takazuki Corporation who wants to explore your mind to find a shiny thing and that’s basically what everything you do throughout the game leads up to.

Over the course of the game you do find out more what the shiny thing is, the state of the world in the future present and also in 1191, and of course where would we be without a couple of plot twists along the way? Sounds good so far? Let’s press on then.

The story is one that actually is rather good, and the premise with the sci-fi angle is something I am more than happy to praise Ubisoft for. It keeps me hooked to find out what happens at the end, having avoided YouTube from spoiling that for me, and the bizarre behaviour from the good doctor in the future time is bizarrely watchable, a man who believes what he is doing yet is constantly troubled, perhaps in fear of failing in the overall task.

You actually have to give both Ubisoft and the voice actors credit for creating characters who seem to be believable despite the entirely premise of the story.

The main bulk of the game takes place in one of three cities, with you visiting each three times, each time, more of the city is open to you as your memory allows you to progress. Each one has its own distinct look and feel to the place, with dozens of people wandering about the streets, carrying various things, going about their business. Clearly effort went into the production of the environments.

Just a bloody shame about the huge number of “special people” Ubisoft slotted into the cities who all push you around constantly annoying you, but you push back or hit them in response to just having enough of this dilly dallying, you’re the bastard.

Same goes for those women who stop you and moan about wanting coins, sex, or whatever they aren’t getting, I’m sorry it really will get to the point where you figure “What the hell?”, kill them and never mind the fact you lose some of the mental health bar in game.

So after hitting the numptys and scroungers in a city, you will have a range of missions to complete before moving onto killing the evil baddie such as eavesdropping a conversation, integrating a man about where the evil baddie is going to be, beating up guards who are harassing innocent people, escorting a fellow assassin to someplace without him being killed, baking a cake for Mrs Miggins, no wait, that’s not in there.

But in any case you do have a bit of le way in terms of what you do to complete the objectives before being allowed to assassinate your prey, which we will approach later as there is a big question I wish to pose in terms of the level content first; what exactly is the point of the horse travel in-between the cities?

Because to me, the humble reviewer, there was no reason to stick around there whatsoever aside from the silly flags, and I really do wonder, how can galloping on a horse in-between two far places make the authorities mad?

You would surely have to think that to travel so slowly as to not make them miffed, you would take hours to reach the city of your choice. Surely riding fast to not prolong the wandering shouldn’t be penalised?

Or it is girl, that it’s rude in general to ride really fast when all you want me to do, is to take it nice and slow? Arrrr yeah!

Thankfully after you’ve been to each city, the game gives you the option of skipping ahead to the assassin’s bureau in the city you want to go to. Since that came about, I have not had the need to venture back onto that landscape except when needing to go after a bloke after it turns out he really is doing naughty. See, gave away story without saying who it was I was referring to. Genius.

Now after you completed the objectives for the man at each Assassin’s bureau they give you a feather to go and kill one of the 9 victims you were sent out to kill. And off you go.

The Problem I guess is that the art of assassination is always a big foul-up worse than the bloke who shot from the Texas book depository hoping not to get caught.

Because no matter what you try, they see you coming and try to run in most instances with 500 guys all chasing after you wondering why you were trying to introduce the man to Mr. Knife.

There has been the odd exception when you are able to do a one hit high profile kill, when you jump up in the air, pounce on your target and achieve victory. That was a fantastic plus, but one that was very hard to pull off, making it even more enjoyable when you do.

As you go on further into the game it appears that the “stealth” element which has been sold as a feature of the game goes out the window but in some way it makes sense.

At first, you can go about your business as required, blending into the background, using the crowd to get around un-noticed. As time goes on, if you so much as fart out of place, the police-type people are onto you faster than when a fat person spies an all you can eat buffet.

When they do start chasing you, it becomes immense fun, it truly does, scaling up buildings, grabbing hold of ledges, running over the rooftops, hiding, basically making use of the city any way you can, it actually shows you why there was so much hoopla about the game in the first place.

You maybe just a fat bloke sitting in a chair from the outside world, but in here, in Assassin’s creed you truly can get to a hell of a lot of places and scale great heights, and this audio doesn’t do it justice.
The combat unfortunately does become a bit crap and repetitive later on: Get into a huge fight with lots of people surrounding you all taking their time to try and murder you one by one with you holding them back with your big sword, or as mentioned earlier your lovely hidden blade which is close to impossible to use.

This is a great shame, as you hope that you would be able to find a hidden way in and out of an area like, in Hitman for instance and maybe blend into the background a lot more, perhaps even changing clothing to avoid the authorities. Perhaps that will make an appearance in the sequel we all know is coming.

After you complete a kill, it all changes around so the picture involves just you and the murdered naughty person dying. What is rather confusing is that when you’ve finally killed your target, blood running from their soon to be corpse, they proceed to read you a novel about why they did what they did, all without croaking. How the hell can that happen when they’ve been stabbed in the throat and dying?

I’m surprised they don’t say to you on their death bed: “Ah yes, that reminds me of the time I was Budapest for my mate’s stag doo” and they spend another 7 hours reciting the details, while you’ve already ran off 3 hours earlier because your mum called you back home for tea.

Worse still, you can’t skip it. There is no way you can move on unless you sit there and watch. Don’t get me wrong, they forward the story in a good way, just if you are replaying the game, it would be a nice touch to have that ability to move straight onto the running away from the fuzz.

The control system for the game does show up its console roots, however the way it works on the mouse and keyboard is not overly bad, it just takes some getting used to. The right mouse button gives you extra context options to do like running or killing, while move your finger off, the same options are move covert. Pretty simple.

The graphics engine showing the whole city at once is quite an achievement in itself with a great little addition of the scaling certain heights to get an overview of an area, you just get a grand view of the place and again is worthy of mention. There is the added reason of finding missions from these heights so it’s not just for looks.

I would like to also say to Ubisoft, that thank you for at least putting some effort into the graphics for the PC, with far less glitches visible than the previous effort I played known as Splinter Cell: Double Agent. That was a good game let down by bad coding for the PC, and at least there have been less issues, although of course there are people out there who will beg to differ judging by the postings in recent times. I can only say for certain from playing the game on my uber beast of a PC.

Assassin’s creed at 1900×1200 with everything turned on, is very nice. Some stuttering to be had which you could say is a result of everything running on full, but it seems the issue was down to internet polling mentioned in another post somewhere on the digital landscape, and disabling the net connection solved that issue.

It was a similar experience from Guitar Hero 3 on PC, where adding DNS entries to the local host file stopped the polling to advert servers and thus did improve the game. Once again, a bit of a shame that issue exists but that would lead to a whole discussion on the piracy / advertising in game issue when you’ve already paid money for the product etc and that’s best left for other people for the time being.

And as a surprise, Assassin’s creed system specs maybe high, but it’s not as bad as you think. Yes it needs a powerful machine, but it runs alright on the 4 year old laptop with the single core 1.8GHz processor and the geforce 6800 256MB card built in, granted at 800 x 600 and there is still some big slowdown when lots of people are on screen, but it does suggest that it may be more scalable than people think, you may be able to get away with it on an older machine. Just give it a go.

I have been actually pretty balanced so far in terms of what Assassin’s creed does but there is a sour note to end on and I had saved it to last on purpose because despite this next bit, there are things the game does very well.

The sad fact overall from Assassin’s creed is that after 3 hours it becomes a one trick pony. The same thing over and over again, just with different baddies, and after a certain point it does lead you down the narrow story corridor with no stealth or using the area to avoid the authorities it just comes to the big fights and how you can best them again despite the odds. It’s the story that will keep you going to be honest beyond that, once you done the first mission in the first city, you have got the jist of the entire game.

Perhaps that’s why there was no demo released, fearing people would only want the demo as that would be what’s in the full game just rinsed and repeated. And that harms the game the most, that one single point while short, is the most significant.

We all know there is a second game on the way, the story leaves that gate wide open, and perhaps the issues will be sorted out then. But for now, we have this PC version and we shall judge it on that.
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So to sum up:

• Good story and characters, certainly one of the more original to appear in years
• Variety in side missions leading up to main assassination
• Game repeats itself after a few hours
• Assassination’s are often botched with huge crowds of guards after you, which adds to the fun strangely.

• Game repeats itself after a few hours
• Horse riding bit is rubbish and pointless. Would be nicer not to have the speed cameras about.
• Game repeats itself after a few hours
• Appears to have greater scope of systems to run on despite high requirements and runs quite well.

• Combat despite being well executed, becomes repetitive and narrow.
• Game repeats itself after a few hours
• The ability to run around huge cities is too much to pass up, you have to love that!
• Those cut scenes are like Marmite, you either love them or hate them.

So using the crystal ball of fortune telling and a pulley system designed by the Greek gods to send Hercules to the underworld, we now pluck out the score for Assassin’s creed, it’s out of 10 or indeed could gain the score of twelve if it’s a game that you must drop everything else to play right now.
What do we have then?

Oooh, not sure about that, it was enjoyable, liked the story, the free running was great fun. Must be the fact that you do the same over and over again through the game. Whatever you draw from the review, it is most certainly worth a go.