Assassin's Creed (PS3)

Ubisoft's stealth stunner is flawed, but ultimately unforgettable.
2/18/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 4

The well-crafted cut scenes that precede every major assassination do a decent job of salvaging the narrative presentation. Indeed, it's during these sequences that you are most effectively galvanized to carry out your ghastly duties. They showcase your targets at their most hideous and inhuman and fill you with the very sort of righteous fury that I suspect is responsible for some of the heaviest moments in human history. Not surprisingly, Altaïr keeps his mouth shut during these sequences.

And, thankfully, he doesn't open it for much of the game as a whole. Assassin's Creed is very much a sandbox-style game, and true to form, you only experience its narrative when you actively seek it out. Most of the time, you'll be meandering around its majestic play spaces, in the process of homing in on an assassination target, and getting into (or working yourself out of) trouble as a side-effect. The grand irony here is that Assassin's Creed doesn't do the sandbox thing all that well. Without any real side-quests to speak of, there really isn't much to do outside of the legwork that enables you to actually track down your targets. You will quite often stumble upon a citizen that's being harassed by guards, but those isolated rescues are about as far as it goes. Though it is technically a sandbox game, Assassin's Creed focuses quite squarely on directed content.

The not exactly scale, but still damned impressive, model of the Holy Land does beg to be explored, however, and luckily, the critical path's course ensures that you'll take in all the marvelous sights. The three major cities in the game -- Acre, Damascus, and Jerusalem -- have been realized to an awe-inspiring degree; their representations affirm the undoubtedly staggering amount of research and vision that enabled their creation, and they're hands down one of the most moving things I've ever seen in a videogame. The designers seem to be hip to this; one of the key gameplay tropes involves scaling the tallest structures in the environments in order to reveal the mission objectives scattered throughout the cities. In the course of doing this, you'll traverse the busy streets and heavily-guarded rooftops before arriving at your destination -- which provides a stunning bird's-eye view of your vicinity. Say what you will about the game's paint-by-numbers structure, Assassin's Creed certainly knows how to play to its strengths. While the game looks uniformly brilliant, the frame rate does dip a tad more frequently on the PlayStation 3 than in the Xbox 360 version, but it's hardly an issue.

At the risk of understating the character's athletic dynamism, Altaïr has a third-degree black belt in freestyle running. Despite how dense or impossibly tall the environments in which he finds himself may be, he unquestioningly proves their master. The game's controls are remarkably intuitive; the apparatus is completely in service of the interactive and visual experience here. Things never feel like they're on cruise control -- you have to be mindful of where you're "aiming" yourself, for lack of a better description -- but you'll never find yourself stumbling over what button to press. Whether you're scaling a wall, tightrope-walking on a narrow beam, or bounding from flagpole to flagpole, the game lets you feel like you're always in control without compromising the nagging awareness of your precarious situation. It's a wonderful balance.