Assassin's Creed: Director's Cut (PC)

While not a perfect adventure, this console port is extraordinary fun.
4/11/2008 1:53 PM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

The comparison of Assassin's Creed to the Prince of Persia and Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell games is inevitable -- and understandable, too -- given the fact that these two popular game franchises are also from Ubisoft Montreal's studio; Altaïr's acrobatic moves, such as hopping from building to building or balancing on beams, are straight out of Prince of Persia, while creeping through environments to kill targets resembles the infiltration and spy scenes in Splinter Cell. I think gamers will forgive the similarities.

Some players, however, might be disappointed that the combat in Assassin's Creed isn't as fleshed out as in past Ubisoft Montreal games. Perhaps in order to make the game more accessible, or to focus more on the planning and exit strategies, the action sequences in Assassin's Creed are simply well-timed button presses, rather than deep combat control schemes.

On a related note, PC players should be playing with a gamepad instead of the keyboard and mouse combo, which makes Altaïr's movements more stiff and less graceful with the A,S,D and F keys, and makes things like sprinting, dodging and jumping (assigned to the spacebar) more difficult to maneuver. You can, however, remap the controls in the Options menu, so if you have a multi-button mouse, for instance, you can (and should) assign some of these moves to the mouse instead of relying on the keyboard. For the purposes of this review, about a third of this game was played with the PC controls, while roughly two-thirds was with an Xbox 360 gamepad for Windows -- and frankly it was hard to go back after experiencing the game with a controller.

Another issue is the steep system requirements, which includes a dual-core processor -- 2.6 GHz Intel Pentium D or AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ as a minimum, but recommended specs include Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 Ghz or AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ or better. Yikes! The game chugged away on a new laptop with dual-core, however, probably because the recommended RAM (256 MB) requirements for the video card wasn't met.

Finally, at $49.99, the game is $10 to $20 more expensive than other PC games. Um, what gives?

Shortcomings aside, Assassin's Creed is an imaginatively conceived and wonderfully executed single-player adventure that should take a good 15 hours or so to complete on medium difficulty. PC gamers in search of a beautiful, exhilarating piece of interactive entertainment will be more than pleased with this purchase.

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.