Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut

Verdict: Ubisoft's much-hyped third person stealth game finally makes it to the PC - does its distinctive medieval Middle Eastern setting raise it above other games, or is it another muddled console port?

I tell you what grinds my gears: games that are released on the PC months after they come out on console. It’s fair enough, or at least understandable, when there’s a promotional deal in place, as seen with Halo and Gears of War for the Xbox 360, but Assassin’s Creed came out last November on both the PlayStation 3 and 360. Call me a cynic, but I’m guessing some producer was cracking a whip over the coders yelling ‘finish it before Christmas or I’ll kill you all. Don’t worry, you can do the PC version after the holidays.’ Trouble is, after a nice long break, you’re hardly fired up to work like a dog, so the game didn’t make its allotted release date and PC gamers have had to wait almost six months to get their teeth into the game. Bah humbug!

I STILL BELIEVE
Still, the premise of Assassin’s Creed is actually pretty inspired. The game kicks off with you playing the role of Desmond Miles in the year 2012: an average guy with an average job who wakes up to find himself strapped to a laboratory desk, while a deranged scientist messes with his mind. 821 years previously, Desmond’s Great¹¹ Grandfather was one Altaïr Ibn La-Ahad: super assassin, keeper of balance, resident of the Holy Land, and – in his younger days – complete tosser. In the here and now, the good doctor and his friends at Abstergo Industries have evidence that memories of previous generations are imprinted on your DNA. So they’ve come up with a machine – the Animus Project – that allows you to replay those memories as if they were your own. It’s actually less complicated that it sounds and is a very clever way of twinning two plots that take place millennia apart without getting caught up in lots of time-travel nonsense.

ALTAIR THE ASSASSIN, NOT THE OLD COMPUTER
So, you’re Altaïr, or at least, reliving the events he went through in 1191AD; after a basic tutorial, you’re thrown in at the deep end. Now, we said Altaïr had a bit of an ego. It turns out he was sent on a rather important errand – i.e. getting hold of a sacred treasure known at the ‘Piece of Eden,’ which is in the possession of the Knights Templar. Rather than conduct the mission according to the Hashshashin’s code (don’t kill innocents, be discreet, and don’t jeopardise the clan) Altaïr botches the job, killing an old man who’s in the way, getting the crap knocked out of him and leading the Templars back to his family village. Not really a good day at the office.

Rather than getting your P45, your boss takes pity on you, stripping you of all rank and forcing you to relearn your trade, and more importantly, the code. Of course, this isn’t just a refresher course in murder – this is the height of The Crusades. Richard the Lionheart and Saladin are knocking nine bells out of each other. The Assassins want to bring peace while the Knights Templar have more nefarious plans. You’re given a list of seven targets and sent on your way. We’re not going to give any more of the plot away, but it’s both inspired and twisted in equal measure. Few games have a storyline as good as Assassin’s Creed.

So what of the game itself? Thief meets Tomb Raider in the Middle Ages would be a fair summary. Altaïr is an assassin and true to form, he’s not known for full frontal assaults. He is, however, not averse to scaling buildings, leaping from cliffs and stabbing people in the back, and all without being detected. While Thief was all about staying in the shadows and not being seen, Assassin’s Creed is all about not being noticed. The logic goes as follows: if you’re a patrol guard in a busy city like Damascus and there’s fifty people walking about, a chap running past waving a sword over his head is more likely to catch your attention that someone walking past at a leisurely pace minding their own business. At the top left of the screen is an alert icon, which goes from white (safe) to flashing red (bad men are about to do bad things to you). You can reduce your profile by staying out of line of sight or being innocuous, which entails slowing your walking pace down so you look like a scholar not an assassin. While it’s a nice idea, walking across an entire military camp at 1 mile per hour (and you have to on more than one occasion) ends up being a monumental pain in the arse; and one slip of the keyboard and you’re toast.

It’s here problem #2 rears its ugly head. This is a console port and it’s not flawless. We originally tried playing using a 360 gamepad as the tutorial flags up the same coloured buttons. Except the buttons don’t corresponded to what they are in reality, and the way Microsoft seems to have set up the 360 gamepad on PC (with the left and right triggers being used for Z-axis ) means that it’s tricky to actually play Assassin's Creed using a gamepad. This means it’s back to keyboard and mouse, and having to hold down ‘W’ and ‘Space’ while looking round with the mouse means there’s a keyboard jam waiting to happen.

OPEN WORLD AND PC IMPROVEMENTS
The first mission confines you to a rather linear path but then the map opens up, allowing you free-roaming play that’s reminiscent of Oblivion here. To say the graphics are jaw dropping in places isn’t overstating the case. Just have a look at the screen shot of Damascus: every building is a real object (rather than just background wallpaper). There are also a number of bonus side missions you can complete that will give you extra skills – these are very console in nature, so depending on how charitable you’re feeling, tasks such as ‘collect 100 flags’ or ‘climb 12 towers’ will strike you as a little arbitrary or they’re either intellectually subnormal.

The PC version of the game is being sold with the 'Director's Cut' tag appended to the name, as there are four new side-quests included that weren't seen in the original console release. A few other tweaks have also been applied to the game, as detailed by Charles Beauchemin, Technical Lead at Ubisoft, in this interview from 1Up, including some updates to the AI of the guards in order to make their behaviour more realistic.

CONCLUSION
Assassin's Creed's plot has been designed with a lot of care and attention, featuring many subtle touches: the seven victims you have to hunt down are historical characters, for instance, yet the actual game requires not brain power, but a heroic amount of patience. It’s visually stunning, starts with the best of intentions but ends up being a bit vacant – as if Albert Einstein had fathered Paris Hilton. Despite the less than perfect control system and the fact that the game never delivers on the quality of its premise, Assassin’s Creed is far from a bad game. It could have been a whole lot more, but it’s still an entertaining piece of work that’s sure to find plenty of fans.

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