Why Assassin's Creed Fails, and what it does right

It's not easy to criticize a game that does so many difficult thingsright. In terms of presentation, Assassin's Creed for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 is a slam dunk: Aclever premise, a unique setting, a fully-realized world, beautifulgraphics and music, responsive controls.
Having accomplished allthat, the team then failed to support their presentationwith any gameplay mechanics that go beyond the utterly mundane. And there's barely even any of that. Assassin's Creedinnovates in many ways, except for the ones that are unique and crucial to the medium.
Assassin's Creed is the Martha Stewart Wii cake, filled with cardboard and sticks: Extremely impressive, just as long as you don't eat it.

The Luckiest, Worst Assassin Ever

What It Does Right: Every item on the laundry list of things that Assassin's Creed doescorrectly ends up being vastly outweighed by some major failing. Thebig one is the grand promise that the game makes to you in its verytitle. Watching the concept videothat was originally shown for this game, the hook is revealed: In thisgame you get to play an assassin. You sneak through a crowd to a placewhere a corrupt official is making some kind of public appearance.Before he realizes anything, you leap out of the crowd and a hiddenblade shoots from your sleeve, through the hole in your fist where yourring finger used to be, and plunges swiftly into his neck, all in oneunbroken smooth motion. Guards pursue you, but you quickly outwit themby disappearing into a group of monks, who not coincidentally arewearing the same clothes you happened to pick out today.

Why It Fails:Investigate targets, carefully plan, then pull off the ultimate stealthkill? This is heavy stuff, and the concept and trailer had meincredibly excited for such a game. I still am excited at thepossibility of maybe getting to play such a game in my lifetime. Sadly,Assassin's Creed was not it. Assassin's Creed, whenyou remove all the presentational trappings, was an unfulfilling,generic collection of boring mini-games and barely passable swordcombat.
Before you can kill your target, you have to complete a few"investigation" missions around the city to gather information. Thereare only four different types. They start out incredibly easy, and geta tiny bit more difficult as the game goes on, becoming just "easy"without the "incredibly" modifier.

Interrogation: A town crier will be spreading some propaganda.Follow him until there are no guards around, then punch him four timesand he will start spilling his guts. These are actually the best of themissions insofar as you get to punch a guy four times. At first thisseems really stealthy and exciting, but within about five seconds yourealize there is no way to lose as long as you just walk five stepsbehind the guy until you don't see any guards anymore.
Pickpocket: Like Interrogation, but instead ofhitting X to punch the guy you're following you hit B to steal what hehas in his fanny pack, which apparently was the height of 12th centuryJerusalem fashion. Somehow manages to be even easier than interrogation.
Eavesdrop: Thinking that perhaps the above twochallenges were too difficult, eavesdropping missions literally ask youto sit on a bench and press the Y button to listen to a conversation.The infinitesimal chance of being caught drops to literally zero.
Informant: For all the ways Assassin's Creed attempts tocraft a more realistic environment than that of the average video game,they sure didn't mind having a guy tell you, "I'll give you theinformation you need, but first, let's see if you can collect thethirty flags that I've scattered around the kingdom in exactly threeminutes. Three two one go!" These missions are notable for actuallybeing a challenge, which is likely why they kept them in even thoughthey obliterate the fourth wall that the team had been so careful tobuild.

I want to absolutely stress to you that besides the running aroundfrom place to place to get to these missions, and the assassinationsegments that follow, the four improbably basic missions above are theonly things you actually need to do in this game. There are someentirely optional "Save Citizen" moments where you can help a citizenby fighting off the guards that surround them, but there isn't a wholelot of reason to do so -- saved citizens help when you're attempting anescape, but you don't really need them.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. After you complete a certainnumber of investigations, the assassination itself will becomeavailable. You'll travel to one point in the city, where a cut scenewill begin and you'll see your target. After it's over, he'll walksomewhere else and now all you have to do is find him without beingspotted, then kill him in secret, then run.
Which is what's supposed to happen. Technically, this is entirelypossible. Sure, the guards are everywhere, and they're on high alert,but if you stealthily take out a few of them without the othersnoticing, you'll be able to creep through undetected. The only problemis, what generally occurs is this:

The guards see you, because they always see you
They all start attacking
Your assassination target, a huge idiot, joins in the fight
You totally ignore all the guards, who don't do much damage to you,and end up assassinating the guy anyway, despite yourself, not evenknowing which one he is.

I died during a couple of assassination attempts, but more oftenthan not I was able to get the kill in even though I was spotted. Sothe game's Big Promise, that you'll become this stealthy silent killerwho carefully orchestrates his every move, quickly fades away when yourealize that more often than not, the game will force you into asituation where the easiest thing to do is just stab the guy right inthe middle of broad daylight with a dozen armed guards standing aroundnot doing anything about it.
And then, with one assassination done, eight more await you. Eightmore of the same thing, over and over. Same cities, same lameinvestigation missions, same forced anticlimactic, fumbling kill at theend. Even if you're into Assassin's Creed enough to enjoy thefirst couple of missions, it all falls apart once you realize that thedesign team only had five ideas total between them and that nothing newis ever going to happen.
A Whole New World
What It Does Right: The three cities and vast hub world of Assassin's Creedis quite frankly one of the most impressive open worlds that has everbeen created for a videogame. Drawing off of the sandbox cities of Grand Theft Auto,the Holy Land is not only impressively rendered, with amazing drawdistance (you can scale a high rooftop and see every little thingbelow), it is artistically very pretty to look at. And it's filled withthousands of people that give it an organic feel.
It's also set in 12th-century Jerusalem instead of a war-tornnear-future space-marine alien-ravaged planet like every other videogame. I don't care if you're one of the world's most successful gamedesign teams, that takes some balls. That's original, that's daring,that's praiseworthy.
Why It Fails: There is shit all to do.
Ubisoft spent an incredible amount of time and energy lovinglycrafting this living, breathing world, and then, from all appearances,nearly forgot to actually put a videogame into it. This might explainwhy everything even remotely gamelike feels so paper-thin andtacked-on. In other open-world games, you can wander around and findall manner of things to catch your attention. But in Assassin's Creed, every part of the city that does not contain a mission is just filler.
In fact, the entire "Kingdom" hub world, a massive expanse ofmountains and fields that connects the three cities, has absolutelynothing crucial inside it. As near as I can tell, the only thing youcan do in the Kingdom is climb up watchtowers to complete the map ofthe area, which is useless because you never need to go there foranything. There are flags scattered all over creation, but you onlyneed to collect them to get the you-collected-all-the-flags achievement-- they have nothing to do with the actual story.
All Dressed Up With No Place To Go
What It Does Right: Main character AltaÃ¯r, being an assassin and more importantly being acharacter developed by the people responsible for the Prince of Persiagames, is an incredible acrobat. He scales walls, runs on rooftops, andleaps great distances with ease. This is mostly because of the game's"free-running" system, inspired by parkour.All you need to do is hold down a button, then hold the direction youwant AltaÃ¯r to go, and he'll immediately begin running, climbing, andjumping with perfect precision. You don't need to worry about makingthe jumps or landing right. It's a bold game design decision, but it'spulled off well, making for a very unique feel.
Why It Fails: Early on in the design process, the Assassin's Creed team must have been faced with the basic question: How do you make an open-world Prince of Persia?Judging from the final product, the answer is apparently that you donot. While the game's jumping, hanging, and climbing acrobatics arepulled directly from the previous series, Prince of Persia'sjumping puzzles were intricately designed linear feats that challengedyou to come up with the perfect series of acrobatic maneuvers to clearthem.
Assassin's Creed has no such thing. This is intentional --the jumping and climbing is just how you get from place to place. Butsince there's so little to do when you finally get where you're going,crafting a more interesting and difficult journey would have helped agreat deal.
Slightly later in the design process, another key question must have come up: How do you make an open-world Metal Gear Solid? Apparently you don't do that, either. Metal Gear'sstealth gameplay is a series of carefully designed scenarios. You seethe guards on your radar screen. You see where you need to go. Your jobis to read all this information, then interpret it correctly to figureout the proper course of action that will get you through unnoticed.
Assassin's Creed bills itself as a stealth game, but youcan't do any of the above. The city streets are a giant tangled ball ofdata that you can't legitimately be expected to process. There aredozens of guards, hundreds of people, and lots of little side streetsand blind corners. Even if you were a math genius and could process itall, it's still random. A crazy person might push you into a guard,blowing all of your careful planning. You will get spotted in Assassin's Creed. You will get spotted a lot.And then you have to run around the city like a jackass hoping that theguards, who were omniscient a minute ago, suddenly become stupid enoughto not see you "hiding" on a bench.
All this is to say that the open-world concept does absolutely nothing for Assassin's Creed'sgameplay. I simply can't see any reason why they decided to go thisroute other than the fact that sandbox games are the hip new thing thatall the kids are doing these days. Yes, it's initially very impressiveto look upon and roam about this vast, detailed world. But aprogressive, linear series of deliberate challenges would have suitedthe concept so much better. It could have been Prince of Persia and Metal Gear Solid all in one.
Be Sure To Drink Your Ovaltine
What It Does Right: I actually kind of liked Assassin's Creed's story because I have a softspot for trashy Da Vinci Code conspiracy theory summer beach reading, Godknows why.
Why It Fails: That infamous pre-rendered trailer that's stuck onto the attract mode of Assassin's Creed is the only CG cut scene in the entire game. I don't think this is a bad thing per se.Especially in a game that looks this good, there shouldn't be anythingwrong with just using the in-game engine to do all of the cinematicscenes. Sure works for Zelda.
But designers should use the in-game engine to show something visually interesting, not have the characters stand stock-still for five minutes explaining big plot points to each other. Guess which one Assassin's Creeddoes. The great bulk of the story scenes take place in one of twoareas: the assassins' bureau in each city (which all look the exactsame, which is not what I would do if I was trying to run a shadoworganization) and the main assassins' hideout where you return aftereach kill to talk to your boss.
Eventually I started to dread going in there, because I never knewhow long they were going to keep talking at me for minutes at a stretchwith nothing interesting happening on screen. This even happens whenyou assassinate someone. They don't have the courtesy to just die, theyhave to lay there and yammer on while you stare at nothing.
By about the third of fifty different times that I had to sitthrough these scenes, my eyes craved some kind of stimulus. I wasrunning AltaÃ¯r in little circles, rapidly switching through cameraangles, and eventually just started looking at other things in theroom. These scenes were so boring that I nearly stopped payingattention to what they were saying altogether. The only thing thatchanged was the voiceover. Eventually I realized that Assassin's Creed might have worked just as well as a radio drama. I could see Ralphie's family from A Christmas Story gathering in the living room, lying down on the rug, and turning the dial to Little Orphan AltaÃ¯r.
Mashmashin's Creed
What It Does Right: Combat in a stealth game is atough one, because you're supposed to use it only as a last resort. Soit shouldn't really be too feature-rich, because you're not reallysupposed to be using it that much. And it shouldn't be too easy,because then you could just run everybody through with your sword andwho cares if they see you because they're dead.
In that sense, I think Assassin's Creed's combat workedfine during the assassination missions. If you just tried to killeverything, they'd all block your attacks and you'd die. You quicklylearn that what you have to do is get into a defensive stance, then useyour counterattack (press the attack button when an enemy's sword iscoming in) to get in a hit on them without endangering yourself. It'sdifficult to attack, but it's supposed to be a punishment for beingcaught, not a reward.
Why It Fails: And I thought I was disappointed withthe last few assassination missions, where things got repetitive andboring. I couldn't even believe what happened in the final hours of the game. Hey, take a guess. Assassin's Creed, which is, at least ostensibly, a game about assassinating people, decides that its final climactic sequences will:

Comprise one final intricate assassination, which blendsinterrogation, free running, stealth, and one final hidden blade killto serve as the culmination of everything that you've learned before, or
Throw all of that crap out the window and make you button-mash yourway through an interminable series of fights against increasing numbersof guards, but not making the combat any more fun to make up for it,and making me wish I was still doing eavesdropping missions.

Give up? It is of course number 2. All the stealth gameplay dropsout and suddenly you're forced into combat literally until the gameends, sometimes against a couple dozen guards at once, just slammingthe X button until it's all over, which takes forever. The combat isstill very basic and not much fun, but now you have no choice. By thispoint I was absolutely in shock that this was the way they decided toend their game. Even the final boss battle is a big huge ridiculousfight against like ten enemies.
My friend Andy Eddy called it the "kitchen sink" approach,"where it gets harder and harder until the point that everything getsthrown at you, seemingly in an effort by the developers to keep you atarmâ€™s length from finishing." I call it the Shredder fight from the endof Ninja Turtles, only terrible, and instead of zapping you with a de-evolution ray and turning you into a baby turtle he zaps the entire game with a de-evolution ray and sends it back to 1988 before the invention of subtlety.
Conclusion: Why Pick On Poor Assassin's Creed?
I'm sure there are plenty of people who are downright angry havingreached this point in the story. There are probably fifty worse gamesreleased this week. Assassin's Creed does so manythings right, so why single it out for such attention? Because it's amassive, high-profile product. Ubisoft has been hyping it up for nearlytwo years. Apparently it's selling very well.
Also, I'm personally disappointed. I was totally into this conceptand couldn't wait to get my hands on it. I loved the time-travel plotgimmick and wanted to know what AltaÃ¯r's big secret was. I was ready tokill some people based purely on my own ability to puzzle out theperfect assassination plan. I wanted everything that was promised, andnot only did I not get it, I didn't even get an average game.
There's absolutely no doubt (especially to those who've completedthe game and seen the lurching drop-off of a cliffhanger ending) thatUbi plans to continue on and on with this series. If they're seriousabout this, I hope they throw out everything that doesn't work, and goall the way back to the drawing board for the sequel. Because I thinkthey could make the game they promised.

Why else does it work?