Ahh, it's always nice to get a chance to play a decent singleplayer game. This much-hyped game about murdering tyrants in the war-torn region a heck of a lot of religions call "the holy land"... for peace. You take the role of an assassin, as you might expect from the title, and, well, I could give you the whole bog-standard review crap, but if you need me to tell you what the game is about, you haven't heard of it, and probably don't care enough to finish reading.

First impressions are good. The game is beautiful. The cities are enormous and you can't miss the gorgeous vistas... literally, you can't miss them as the game grabs the camera as you first enter each and makes it very hard to keep steering your horse until the view returns to normal. "Fortunately", you can't quite get lost in these moments as the loss of camera control puts your character on a leash, unable to wander too far away.

This leashing technique is also applied during the rare odd jobs of investigating your prey prior to actually getting to start the mission. More on this in a bit... but first I want to bitch about a breach of the first sin of gaming here. Cutscenes that are repeated verbatim when you start a minor task... and cannot be skipped. This is a bit of a problem later in the game as the player gets jaded over the gameplay elements and the challenge starts to kick in. I was asked by a supposed assassin to basically do his work for him, killing 5 templars without any guards getting suspicious. And on a timer. In exchange for a fortune cookie tip on how tackling an entire funeral procession of armed men would be a bad idea. As silly as this setup sounds, that's not my complaint. It took a few tries to avoid leaving dead templars anywhere that a guard would get suspicious and start looking for the guy with the bloody swords, and every single attempt was prefaced by a total replay of the pointless exposition.

If you're ever designing a game and you ponder whether or not there should be an option to skip a scene that doesn't, say, further the plot, or provide essential information that you can't glean from the targets on your map and compass, the answer is yes.

Failure is a punishment in and of itself. You have to try again until you get it right. That's fine. But sitting through the elite killer complaining about a bad back so, before he'll give you the information you might find useful, he'd like you to fulfill his mission for him... for the fifth time... that's not adding insult to injury, that's pouring salt and tobasco in the wounds.

Back to the rest of it then.

The game's one claim to uniqueness is the ability to climb almost anything in order to escape pursuit... or just to avoid the need to find a ladder... or if you're bored. And for the first few hours of the game, it really is a treat to sprint up the side of a small building, or free-climb a tower or three-story building... but it's the central gameplay element, and the only way it really differs from walking is to muck about with the topology.

In addition to being able to reach impressive heights after climbing for a minute to get a fabulous view of the terrain... and often to fill in parts of the map, you have to get down again. Since the game withholds the ability to catch yourself on a ledge for about the first third of the game, the primary method of descent is 9.8 m/s^2. A "leap of faith" from a high point to land in a pile of hay. Now, when you drop from about 50m up into 2m of loosly piled plant cellulose, there's a bit of cognitive dissonance.

These leaps of faith are marked by, I could not make this up, pigeon shit on the edge of a roof. Usually accompanied by pigeons. Well, they needed to have some sort of visual element to steer towards when you're fleeing for your life from the guards... but somehow, having your salvation be a slippery line of excrement takes a bit of heroism out of what's already a distinctly cowardly retreat.

Not that there's anything wrong with this. It's rather more subtle than a large sign saying "hiding place here", and when you ARE running full tilt over a city that's beautiful from a distance... and made up actually of a surprisingly well-done bit of copy/paste, it's very easy to get lost, and the rare time your mad dash takes you past one of these roosts and the pigeons go flying... you'll be glad to have them.

The gameplay consists of well disguised minigames, combat, and running away to hide. The combat is actually quite well done. Although I'm rather at a loss as to how being demoted as an assassin causes your hero to forget how to counter-attack, dodge, and throw off a foe's defenses, I have to admit, learning one trick at a time does work fairly well here. Your foes get tougher and more numerous, and I actually did, by the game's end, find myself using more and more of the techniques in order to level the playing field. It's terribly rare of a game to hand you multiple useful techniques... there's usually a dominant strategy. Instead, you have a very flowing combat. Counterattacks are lethal and easier to pull off than combos. Later on, you get a few more options, including a neat counter to being grabbed and thrown. The enemies also use a lot of these abilities... although without any finishing moves, even without massive health, you'd have a good advantage. Dispatching a foe is a matter of style... and even the hidden blade used to kill an unwary foe can be useful (critical for ending a boss fight) simply by throwing your opponent to the ground, switching weapons and pouncing before they can finish rising. Although, throwing someone off a three story building is also fun.

Running away is... almost done right. You have to accept that the guards find the concept of searching hay to be pretty foreign. And the rooftop "gardens" which are like telephone booths with blinds pulled down to make the middle... pretty dark... no one looks in those. Now, I will buy the trick of sitting down on a bench and just watching your foes come around the corner and keep going. But as the game progresses, I find the trick of joining a group of monks to be steadily less plausible. Mostly because you're increasingly obviously armed. None of the actual monks have a sword at their hip, a small sword at the back, and a few throwing knives in a belt, on a boot, on the shoulder... Especially when it's 4 monks with you in sort of a plus sign formation. The nature of the hiding places is such that I found myself wanting to shout out "olly olly oxen free-ee" while waiting for the alert to die allowing me to break cover again. (Thankfully, this takes a lot less time than a cutscene instruciton for a minigame.) The hiding places only work if you're not actually in sight of a guard. This makes cornering tightly a bit of a plus, makes the flight about as challenging as the fight, and ensures you will not be turning this into any more of a keystone cops routine than necessary. (But feel free to play some benny hill.)

Now, prior to your main targets, the game has you do some background investigation. Six clues per. You can pickpocket a courier, eavesdrop on a conversation, beat up a town crier in their pay, and do favors for your fellow assassins in exchange for what they've uncovered. Other than the implausibility of spotting the first two from your tower spying, the fellow assassin's are the most worthless lot I've ever had the misfortune to see. Suddenly, it makes sense that you and you alone get to eliminate the game's high-profile targets... "I dropped some flags, can you get them?" "Oooh, show me how fast you can do my job for me!" "Um, I think these guys are going to kill me for being an assassin, which means I was found out and probably deserve death for disgracing the order... could you take care of this for me?" The game doesn't require you to do all of them, and their value is pretty random. Some give plot information in letters, some give maps indicating where the guards will be, where an unguarded entrance is... and some just say where it is that your attempt will take place. All of this information is, ultimately, pointless. Rooftop travel takes care of the need for sneaking around patrols, and since archers can be killed without raising alarm or being noticed by the rest of the town... there's not really a huge benefit to these questionable scraps, although the plot-relevance is quite interesting.

The running around has a few hickups to contend with. Often, when cllimbing, you'll find yourself stymied for no obvious reason. You'll be shimmying your way around a tower to get to the beam you can view from before taking a victory plummet... and you'll be stunned to find that just holding right doesn't have your guy continue moving his hands that way... as he goes under it. So you back up and get a bit more insistant about going up and right... and then when you get to the right spot, he hops and grabs the beam. Quirky. But consistant every time that particular building gets copied in the world. Another one, by the waterfront, although there are handholds on two sides... only one set works, in spite of both being practically identical. I suspect the design of each building includes a very detailed map of routes for the myriad climbing options... explaining why one little vertical "hop" could go missing on the tower that's used only twice.

The copy & paste scenery also provides a few useful tips. When you find something that's unique... you know that's where the showdown shall hide.

Oh, yes, I almost forgot... the most fiddly bit of the movement controls. Jumping.

For 99% of the game, you will not give a single thought to how you are going to jump from one building to the next. We've come a long way from tomb raider, and now we get to have the player character's AI determine how far to jump. You hold down the "high profile" button and the "legs" button to set yourself into the right sort of adrenaline-soaked frenzy needed to scale a vertical wall in seconds, while rocks are thrown at you.

It's that remaining % that mocks you like the final hidden collectible flag in a city the size of a CITY. The issue is, the game keeps jumping managable on an analog stick by not having it be anything resembling 360 degrees of motion. It's more like chunks of 15-20 degrees. This isn't obvious for the most part, as the cities have mostly everything in good positions for jumping from one awning's edge to someplace useful... and if you end up on the street, it's correctible, and may even have landed you by a good hiding place.

But it's a "can't swim" game, and there's posts that stick out of the water... and the game has no qualms about letting you drown in eerily calm liquid death because when you thought you were pushing the round stick perfectly straight up in the round socket of your controller, you were actually off by 5-10 degrees so you clearly intended to commit suicide instead of jumping to the nice dry bit of wood placed as a proper boating hazard and assassin's highway. Granted, the one area where I was approaching the mark's ship by the waterway, there was a point where I goofed, and was spotted, and a quick death was the easy way to get a retry without spending 10 min trying to not die and not let the target escape... and the other 10-15 tries were exercises in severe frustration as I somehow nail a jump to a 6" post from a 25' platform 10' away... but miss the next one in a line that's only an 8' jump. This is an amazingly poor setup considering how polished the movement is in the rest of the game. I actually couldn't jump off a castle wall anywhere but the safe place... so I know the game was capable of it, but the designers chose to be dicks. I can't imagine this watery grave issue never came up in testing.

Lets see, I've covered the running, the jumping, the climbing, the fighting... the investigating... what else isn't obvious from the hype? Oh, right, the sidequests.

There's a few collection quests that run through the game. Kill all templars. Collect all flags. (awkward pause) Oh, that's about it. There's 60 templars and 420 flags. And the reward for completing these... um. There doesn't seem to be one. I guess you could count the gamerscore... if you're high, or stupid enough to care. Look, we put up with this pokemon crap in GTA games because they unlock weapons that make it more than slightly worthwhile. A frustrating search in exchange for something to take out frustration with, and to make the rest of the game a lot smoother. Not to say there's no in-game benefit here. The flags do seem to count as one-time checkpoints and health-restoral. Of course, you normally regenerate health, so this isn't a really big deal except in very special emergencies.

The voice acting is... decent enough. As you run around, you get to be cursed at in french, russian, german... etc... not all things are translated into english, which gives you a nice feel as you are around different types of troops in the world and cities. You also get to hear the town criers trying to recruit people to the armies... stirring but three-statement speeches that repeat indefinitely... but you'll never complain much about them. Really, they're more like a landmark. "Ah, I must be near that square, I hear an orator." Just as "I hear chanting, I must be standing on a church"... but you will consider massive acts of violence against the beggars, and the beavis & butthead impersonators (drunks & madmen who push you around a bit).

The plot goes a long way to explaining a fair amount of odd gameplay elements. You're not playing the part of the assassin, you are playing the part of his descendant, caught by a covert group, strapped into a device that allows replaying of genetic memories. But it's in beta, so to view the memory of a very important map your ancestor saw, you have to relive a significant chunk of his life. So you're playing a game, as a character forced to play a game. It does explain why you can't get to certain areas before it's time... and there's a big blue wall in place to represent this computer's inability to load that terrain. You're not the assassin, you're approximating his memories to prompt the next memories. While this setup goes a long way towards explaining away the staples of gaming, it's a bit of mixed bag for immersion. Still, it's honest about what's going on, and it works more often than not.

The chapters are broken up by getting to interact in the "real world" with your captors. As you learn more about the ancient events, you get told a little more about current events. The plot is decent, but it's also very obviously intended as the first part of a series.

I hate that, because it means the metaplot is going to take a VERY long time to go anywhere, at the rate of game development, we could see the next installment sometime around when the mayan calendar rolls back over to zeros. It's also the type of metaplot that doesn't necessarily go anywhere. There's artifacts hidden around the world, with great power to them. Some want to rule the world with that. Reminds me of a number of tv action serial plots. It's the sort of plot that can be drug out if the game gets popular, to milk it to death, so that you don't get real resolution until the last half-hour of the last of the series. It's not bad, by any means, but it's not special... and the "current events" were kept so damnably vague that future installments can take whatever direction they like.

The events in the holy land were well strung-together, in spite of half of the revelations delivered by dying men taking their sweet time at croaking. That part is exactly as advertised... and includes hiding the background completely, so that you're not interrupted. The guards evidently let you have a nice chat with their boss after you've fatally stabbed him before charging in for revenge and justice and whatnot. There were some very good moral arguments presented and I do enjoy some thought-provoking discourse instead of pure congratulatory ego masturbation. Of course, you get some that too as you rescue townsfolk so they'll abuse guards you trail through their neighborhoods to give you a short headstart on a hiding place.

And, of course, the advertised bit about taking down your mark any way you choose... is a total fabrication. You cannot even get close to the memory of the assassination while pursued. You cannot throw a knife from a distance and be done with the fight. You cannot pick the location of the fight worth a spit. You can choose whether to be sneaky and clever or bullheaded. And you can choose your weapon. You are boned for pretty much the rest of it, getting one cutscene beforehand and then being permitted to move into position. You have discretion over your route after the cutscene... and that's about it for choice.

To sum up: It's pretty until you've played a few hours and see how much set reuse they got away with. It's still got pretty damned good level design, as you have a lot of options for how you leap about, and you never "just miss" a jump in town.

The metaplot is interesting until you discover that there's no real payoff. There were a couple of hidden messages, and if you worked at it a bit, you could get into your captor's e-mails for some information about the world. The ancient plot is much better written, acted, and doesn't rely on future installments that may never come and could be less enjoyable.

The combat and running around is good, even enjoyable. Pretty intuitive interface, although I had some problems with having the sword equipped from the last fight when I wanted to make a stealth kill with the hidden blade. The icons there just are not different enough.

The gameplay doesn't have you worrying about pickups for anything non-plot related... with the exception of throwing knives. But since they're one-shot kills, and you pickpocket large angry men in towns for more, it's really not a problem, and not tracking that would be too imbalanced to be fun as you would simply snipe everything.

However, in addition to the world being made of copy&paste buildings (although artfully placed for maximum utility and least obvious copying), the challenges themselves are really heavily repeated. Tower climbing in every area to fill in the map and find investigation points and folks in need of rescue... "Ah, you saved someone! Now do that about 25 more times in *this* town..." "Oh, you liked climbing that tower? We've got about 80 more just like it! Well, actually, three precisely like it, the rest are just thematically similar." Once I got 99 flags out of a hundred for a town and could swear up and down that I'd not really missed any, I stopped merely questioning why I was trying to get them at all, and gave up on them entirely... dropping the time taken for a given area from a matter of hours to a matter of hour. This explains why this stupid flag quest is in the game at all, it's to pad out the content into a more solid length than the modern game normally bestows on its purchaser. Still, it's stunningly optional, so I've none to blame but myself for trying.

The first two days I played this game, I thought it was excellent, with forgivable and understandable design choices and interesting gameplay. The last day... I was just going through the motions for the sake of the story, and finding some of the design choices a lot more bland and boilerplate than when I started.

The areas in which the game excels are the plot of the ancestors, which is the meat of the game... the running, and the combat. I can't give full marks to the running not only for the fiddly jumps over the H2O lava, but also the inability to adequately handle running to a usable hiding place. At one point, with the city after me as a result of a successful mission, and needing to hide before getting into the safehouse undetected... I discovered I'd actually traversed the entire map before getting far enough ahead of pursuit to get into a decent hiding spot. The blue dots for hiding holes on the compass don't help because they lack height information. And they don't show on the map. The compass doesn't show anything about terrain. So you can either memorize the city layout or run like hell 'till you get lucky. Or stand and fight. The combat, again, is pretty well balanced, considering that you're one man taking on a dozen soldiers at a time and thinking it's fair odds.

I'm certain this isn't for everyone, and I'm going to recommend renting before buying. If you can tolerate the flaws, it's got a rich, thought-provoking story in there, in spite of having a wrapper that smells like neverending schlock sci-fi adventure.