Nothing is True. Everything is Permitted.

The Assassin’s Creed:

1. Stay your blade from the flesh of an innocent.
2. Hide in plain sight.
3. Do not compromise The Brotherhood.

 

So I finally beat Assassin’s Creed.  I loved parts of this game, hated others, and can say with 100% confidence that it was the most frustrating game I have ever played.  By far.

You are two characters in two different time periods.  The first, Desmond Miles, lives in 2012.  The second, Altaïr (all-tie-ear) lives in 1191 in the Holy Lands during the Cruisades.  Desmond is the supposed descendant of Altaïr, who is an assassin and a member of The Brotherhood (also known as the Assassin Order or Order of Assassins).

Some company, basically Massive Dynamic in video game form (geez, what’s with all the Fringe references lately?) has kidnapped Desmond and is trying to access memories that he doesn’t realize are his.  They develop a machine called the Animus.  What it does, basically, is allow one person to view — and even participate in – an ancestor’s memories.  So, since Desmond is the descendant of Altaïr, he then can become Altaïr and gain knowledge from memories that weren’t his to begin with.

A really cool-but-confusing story line, nothing gets clarified during gameplay.  You wind up with more questions than answers, and I’m sure Assassin’s Creed 2 will help answer some of them.  But man, there is a lot of confusion.  I don’t know if the guys you are assassinating are telling the truth or their version of the truth.  Nevertheless, people still need to die.  And this game is awesome in the way it allows you to go about doing just that.

While, yes, going back to the same three cities (Damascus, Jerusalem, and Acre) three different times gets a little old and repetitive, the fighting and way you kill people is so awesome that it actually cancels out.  Also, this game is really hard.  You wind up killing like 500 guards, so that gets a little old, but when you’re surrounded by literally 20+ guards and you have to fight and kill all of them, it gets hard as shit.

I got this game for Christmas and just started playing it earlier this week.  I became pretty obsessed with it, as Kelly and people on my Xbox Live friends list can attest, that’s all I’ve been playing for the past week (and playing it a lot, at that).

I really want to play AC2, and I hear it’s amazing, but I’m glad I went through and got all the back story, however confusing and complicated, so I wasn’t even more confused and complicated while playing the 2nd game in this apparent trilogy.

Play this game, and you’ll enjoy it.  You’ll also break at least one controller out of frustration.

8 out of 10.