Second Look - Assassin's Creed

Note: This review contains spoilers for Assassin’s Creed.

When I last played the original Assassin’s Creed in 2011, I didn’t think as much of it in comparison to other entries in the series and even wrote a review that, regrettably, didn't go into nearly enough detail. While playing the Sands of Time Trilogy on the PS2, however, I was intrigued by this game’s connection to Prince of Persia. After development of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time finished, director Patrice Désilets started work on another entry for seventh-generation hardware. As more information about those systems came to light, he considered an assassin character in an open world setting and called it Prince of Persia: Assassin. During development, however, the story and gameplay took on its own identity, which resulted in 2007’s Assassin’s Creed. With this knowledge, I replayed the game and found it not only better than I remembered, but a real breath of fresh air after the overly bloated direction of modern Assassin’s Creed titles.

The first thing you notice when starting the game is that it looks like it’s glitching out. However, this the game’s way of introducing the framing device that gives context to the player visiting an earlier time period. From there, the story is split between two different characters and time periods, which we’ll discuss here individually.

During the Third Crusade, Assassin Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad is sent on a mission to retrieve an artifact, but his arrogance leads to the death of one of his Assassin brethren and severely wounding the other while Robert de Sablé, Grand Master of the Knights Templar, gets away unharmed. When he returns to Masayaf, his master, Al Mualim, strips him of his rank and all of his weapons. Altaïr is then tasked with killing nine targets to restore his honor among the Assassins.

Altaïr (left, center) is scolded by his mentor, Al Mualim (right).

Compared to the protagonists of later Assassin’s Creed games, Altaïr has a very cold and professional demeanor, as well as an unhealthy amount of pride and arrogance. During the course of the game, he gains a better understanding of the titular Assassin’s Creed and grows to respect it. With each target he kills, he also gradually questions his motivations and teachings, which helps him grow wise enough to not only take his role more seriously, but also come to a crucial realization that recontextualizes his actions. While his story could possibly have more to it, there’s enough material for a solidly written story that could have wrapped things pretty neatly if not for the last few minutes, which increase the scope of the conflict and open the door for a continuation.

Meanwhile, in 2012, a bartender named Desmond Miles was kidnapped by pharmaceutical giant Abstergo and taken to their headquarters in Rome. There, he is forced by Dr. Warren Vidic and his assistant, Lucy Stillman, to participate in trials of the Animus, a machine that taps into the user’s genetic memories to let them relive the lives of their ancestors. During his trials, Desmond must relive the memories of Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, as Vidic believes they hold the key to locating a powerful artifact.

Desmond Miles (right, below) is forced to use the Animus under the supervision
of Dr. Warren Vidic (right, above) and Lucy Stillman (left).

Compared to his ancestor, there isn’t much to Desmond’s character, if only because he doesn’t get to do much apart from going between the Animus and his bed. Most of his time is otherwise spent on asking Vidic the right questions for conversational exposition and minor philosophizing, but these conversations do help bridge the gap between both time periods and establish the continued effects of the Assassin vs. Templar conflict and how it affects the modern day. As Desmond experiences further memories, he slowly grasps the weight of his situation, but realizes he can’t really do anything about it and continues playing along. At the end of each day, he also has dreams with weird symbols, but the significance isn’t apparent until the very end, when he can mysteriously use Eagle Vision and see strange symbols and writing in real life. Later games would explain this as the Bleeding Effect, but the lack of an explanation makes this event memorable.

Desmond’s story doesn’t end after the last Animus memory, however. There are pen keys in the Abstergo lab and if you know where and when to obtain them, you can view emails on the computers that help shed some light on the setting and characters. These are worth looking for, if only for additional context and information that comes up later in the series. During this playthrough, I also noticed that while Desmond uses Eagle Vision in the lab, one of the visions is a barcode with the numerical sequence 12212012. Though this wouldn’t mean anything if you’re only playing the original Assassin’s Creed, this sequence means that the developers likely planned to incorporate the 2012 Apocalypse prediction into Desmond’s story, which gets a payoff in Assassin’s Creed III, from the very beginning.

Since Desmond’s story doesn’t have much in the way of gameplay, bordering on walking simulator levels of interaction, most of the actual gameplay is in Altaïr’s part of the story. While it’s hard to imagine how groundbreaking its systems were at the time, it did help advance open world games at the time, especially the fun parkour element that lets you traverse the game’s cities across rooftops. This part of the game is where you can really see Prince of Persia’s DNA, as that series revolved heavily around using parkour for traversal and, in some cases, combat. Placing that core element into an open world game really opens up a lot of possibilities for other elements and feels like a better thought-out version of Warrior Within, the closest Prince of Persia had gotten to an open world game beforehand.

Altaïr can observe the city from above.

Assassin’s Creed introduces a puppeteering concept for controlling the main character, which in some ways feels like an evolution of the parkour system from Prince of Persia. Each of the action buttons generally corresponds to a part of the body, with Triangle controlling the head, Square and Circle the arms and torso and Cross affecting locomotion. Pressing them normally activates a Low-Profile action, but doing so while holding R1 turns them into a High-Profile action, including running or climbing up walls and structures, much like in the Sands of Time trilogy where R1 let the Prince run on walls. Among the Low-Profile actions, Eagle Vision is useful for highlighting NPCs with different colors so you can easily distinguish civilians and guards and keep track of your target, but the effect doesn’t linger for very long when you return to normal view. When you reach a viewpoint, you can synchronize it to view more of the city on your map screen, easing the task of locating side activities for Altaïr’s mission.

Another core feature is Social Stealth, which makes whether you use High- or Low-Profile actions important. Since Altaïr must remain as inconspicuous as possible while gathering information, you have to keep in mind what actions are or aren’t socially acceptable, like running up a wall versus climbing a ladder. There’s an icon in the corner of the screen that changes or flashes different colors depending on how close guards are to spotting you, so hiding or blending into crowds or other parts of the environment comes in really handy. For the short term, you can use the Low-Profile blend action with Cross, but for other situations you may need to pretend you’re with a group of similarly white-clad scholars or sit on a bench with other civilians. In the event that guards chase you, evasion and hiding are your top priority, but you can’t hide effectively if they see you enter your hiding place, so it’s worth getting a feel for the immediate area for a quick point of reference. The best evasion move is the famous Leap of Faith, points in the map subtly marked with birds or worn surfaces that let you leap into a pile of hay, which usually hides you instantly, especially if you make it to a viewpoint.

Performing a Leap of Faith is good for both evasion and traversal.

While Assassin’s Creed is an open world game, it has a more subdued approach compared to both its successors and other games in the genre at the time. Instead of one giant map faithfully recreating a large county or even a whole country, Assassin’s Creed has six submaps that represent different cities in the region. Five of these cities, Masayaf, Damascus, Acre, Jerusalem and Arsuf, are connected by a hub world called Kingdom, which has a minimal amount of side content while physical guideposts help point you to the right city if you’re not looking at the map. Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem each have three districts, but since you’ll visit each city three times, the game paces the experience by walling off certain districts until they’re actually relevant to the next visit. Compared to later Assassin’s Creed games, this approach actually feels refreshing, since the maps are generally smaller and more focused on giving you more meaningful side activities that actually have an effect on the story and gameplay instead of overstuffing a map with repetitive quests that only change the context.

Completing side activities like Save Citizens or synchronizing viewpoints gradually increases Altaïr’s maximum health, so completing these as they come up will help you get at least very close to the highest maximum by the end of the game. The Save Citizens activity also provides you with another benefit, allying yourself with vigilantes who will help slow down guards so you can more easily escape them. Since these activities also don’t take very long to do, there’s pretty much no reason not to do them.

Although the game doesn’t have any form of fast travel within the cities, the maps are actually small enough that you don’t really need it anyway. Fortunately, after you kill each target and report back to the city’s Assassin Bureau, you get the option to automatically go back to Masayaf, which saves a lot of precious time on a return trip. Similarly, you can’t freely summon your horse to your side like in later games in the series, but the last one you rode still follows you around for easy access in areas where they’re viable.

As well as the game handles its core systems, however, there are some rough edges. Although Altaïr can ride a horse, they’re only useful for riding between cities and he can’t go beyond the city’s walls by himself. Instead, he’s forced to blend in with a group of scholars to get past the guards at the gate. There’s also no convenient form of fast travel, so you have to manually ride the horse between cities the first time you visit them. It’s only starting from Memory Block 4, or about the halfway point of the game’s story, that Altaïr can select which city to visit when leaving Masayaf and automatically skip the trip.

While inside a city, there are some things that players would have to keep in mind. As part of Social Stealth, for instance, if Altaïr runs too fast within a crowd, he can trip and lose his balance, which, while accurate, can cause problems when outrunning guards in awkward places. On the streets, beggars and drunks are also annoying, since there’s no easy socially acceptable way of getting rid of them and they can easily interrupt your progression by either stopping you in place or pushing you a few feet away. Drunks can get especially annoying in the rare circumstance where you’re trying to go through a narrow alleyway, but there are two right next to each other. In that case, it’s best to hug the wall and hope for the best. You also can’t rely too much on tracking people, since you can only activate Eagle Vision while standing still and at full synchronization (aka full health).

Fighting guards is also not socially acceptable.

Notably, unlike his successors, Altaïr can’t swim, instantly drowning when he comes in contact with a large enough body of water. Fortunately, this doesn’t come up very often, but there’s one target that requires Altaïr to parkour his way across a dock and it’s surprisingly easy to fall into the water, forcing you to attempt this section again from the beginning. It didn’t take very many tries to realize what I did wrong and compensate, but restarting enough times does get annoying.

Getting your bearing with the map is an uneven experience. You can’t see the whole map at once and have to synchronize viewpoints first, which isn’t too much of an issue since you don’t always need to see the whole map. However, this is also the only way to view activities outside of stumbling into them, necessitating the viewpoints so you don’t fumble around like an idiot. Viewpoints themselves are marked on the map, but you can’t see any in a new district unless you find one manually, in which case you have to look out for eagles circling around a high ledge. While the main map shows the layout of the city, the mini-map doesn’t and isn’t very helpful outside of gauging the distance to a destination.

While Altaïr’s gameplay focuses a lot more on actually assassinating people, his mission structure gets repetitive. For each target, he follows the same steps: Check in with the city’s Assassin Bureau for your mission, gather information on the target through activities, check in with the Bureau again to tell them what you’ve learned, arrive at the target’s destination and assassinate them after viewing a cutscene, then return to the Bureau a third time to confirm your kill. As for the activities, there are only four varieties, Informant, Eavesdrop, Pickpocket and Interrogate, but they feel natural for the mission and aren’t that difficult. The only exception is dealing with the Informant, who gives you increasingly difficult timed tasks to the point where I eventually just avoided them altogether in favor of the other activity types (it helps that you only need to complete three of six possible activities to advance).

Dealing with guards through combat or evasion isn’t too difficult if you can figure out how to exploit their AI, but combat is a little clunky. Altaïr gets stronger after each assassination, with increased damage and more weapons and combat moves available with each earned rank, but it doesn’t make combat any smoother. It also doesn’t help during the rather linear final stretch of the game, beginning from the journey to Arsuf, where the focus on stealth is stripped away in favor of just throwing a bunch of enemies at you.

For an early PS3 title, Assassin’s Creed looks dated, but still holds up pretty well. There’s an interesting minimalist aesthetic in the modern day with the sci-fi technology and the small areas that Desmond can explore are designed mostly with utility in mind, but you still get the sense that it’s a hidden research lab without the developers overcompensating and going overboard. I also like the glitching effect that occurs during cutscenes that lets you know when you can view a more cinematic camera angle and the understandably lengthy loading areas have an interesting design that fits the Animus aspect really well. As an interesting detail, if you look closely at Altaïr's character model, you'll notice that he doesn't have a ring finger on his right hand, since that's where his Hidden Blade comes out.

As this official screenshot highlights.

Unfortunately, the aesthetic of the cities really screams that this was the earliest Assassin’s Creed title. Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem have different layouts, but look very similar visually, with similar design philosophies, lots of browns and grays coloring the buildings and streets and, owing to early attempts at developing for the PS3, a comparatively primitive lighting system illuminating everything. The framerate is also pretty inconsistent, only running buttery smooth when the game didn’t have to render much of anything in the camera’s view.

Similarly, the voice acting is fine and this game establishes the series’ signature sound design very well. However, a lack of subtitles lowers the accessibility and can sometimes make certain conversations hard to make out, particularly when it’s an eavesdropping activity where the ambient noises of the city still play out.

Looking back at the original Assassin’s Creed, it’s easy to see how Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time influenced its design and how later games strayed from the actual assassinations in favor of overly bloated open worlds and heavily RPG-inspired design. While certainly pretty rough as a first outing, this game is actually worth going back to if you’re tired of the current direction of the series or you want an interesting take on stealth and assassination mechanics.