In revisiting the Assassin’s Creed series, I have a confession to make. Before this review, I had never completed the first Assassin’s Creed game. The first game in the series I played was Assassin’s Creed brotherhood, followed by 2 and then revelations, and after that I played them in order. I tried to play the first game but was unable to get through the first main tutorial section of the game due to the substantial changes and improvements made in the subsequent games. The most important aspect of these games for me, a fact that will become apparent as these reviews progress, is the story, and as such I’ll cover that first.
Playing AC: 1 was akin to finding the old fan fiction a famous writer wrote before they got big: you can see glimpses of what would come to be good, or even great, but at this point it’s average, bordering on terrible. I can’t say that I enjoyed my time revisiting AC:1, nor would I recommend it outside of curiosity of where the series came from. This isn’t a case of the original Doom, where there’s significant value in returning to the game on its own merits, instead AC: 1 has much more in common with a prototype of something good. In fact, the whole game has this unfinished, prototype feeling, starting most prominently with the voice acting, and writing. To get the elephant out of the room, the character named Altaïr Ibn-LaʼAhad is voiced by the most obviously American voice actor they could have cast. Distractingly, the voice of Altaïr is the only truly misplaced voice, a fact that one cannot escape, as he is the main character. Its problem enough that people of color have trouble finding work in video games, but to add insult to injury, the actor doesn’t even attempt to properly portray a person who is actually from Syria and Palestine. So, it’s remarkably strange to revisit a game series that was later so famed for its historical accuracy that the reconstruction of Notre Dame was helped by the recreation of the structure in Assassin’s Creed: Unity (although the lack of French characters speaking in French accents perhaps is perfectly inline, if less offensive, as this game’s accent blunders). Irrespective of the voice acting, the writing itself could still redeem the game, but it unfortunately doesn’t. Although the Altaïr plot itself is interesting, the dialogue that guides the player through that plot feels like a high school play written by an overworked and underpaid English teacher. Frequently robotic, cardboard lines read with the enthusiasm of a depressed art student doing a presentation on computational neuroscience in their philosophy class. In this sense, Assassin’s Creed 1 has a lot more in common with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion but lacking in that game’s charm. Thus, all that’s left is an average plot voiced by poorly cast actors, many of whom are themselves subpar, all with gameplay that feels familiar, yet distinctly unpolished. With that said, onto gameplay.
There’s a certain tragedy with the gameplay of AC: 1. Although it is unquestionably worse than the later instalments of the series, there’s a certain glimmer of ambition that is lost by the time Ezio is jumping from rooftop to rooftop. Yet this ambition is marred by poor execution, which likely contributed to the removal of many systems and ideas that could have been fantastic if expanded upon. To illustrate this, we can focus on one of the better aspects of AC: 1—the fact that you actually get to feel like an Assassin. Unlike the games later that prioritize conspiracy-ridden narratives with as flashy of combat as can be afforded with button mashing, AC: 1 wanted to attempt something similar to the Witcher series: allowing you to Roleplay within the role of an Assassin’s within the Holy Land during the crusades. Each main mission requires you to collect information on a target, spy on them, find a good location to carry out the murder, and then execute. This emergent gameplay isn’t taken anywhere beyond the basic premise of a good idea, but the idea itself is exceptional. Later games would still have plenty of Assassinations, but much less of the logistics of being an Assassin was required. Instead, you’d be given a mission, that mission would have a quest marker, go there, do that, bam boom, dude is dead. Although AC: 1 follows this formula as well, it flirts with a more open-ended structure. Rather than having one objective you have to complete in order, there are a set of objectives to complete that all get you closer to your target, with some of these being optional. If this idea was expanded to a much more open-ended structure, I could envision a version of the Assassin’s Creed series that bordered on immersive sim, where the act of being an Assassin was a role that must be filled through actual roleplay, similar to the role of Geralt in the Witcher series. There are a lot of strange parallels between Assassin’s Creed and The Witcher, as the connections between the games don’t start at the most recent series copying the basic open world formula of The Witcher 3. In fact, the start of these game’s similarities was in AC: 1, with the combat feeling an awful lot like a worse version of The Witcher 1’s combat, which is a sentence I never thought I’d type. As strange as it may seem, the actual actions taken by the player are identical in both games. In AC: 1 you left click to attack, and then you’re expected to left click again the moment your sword contacts your enemies to perform a more devastating attack. In practice, it’s unreliable to pay attention to the visual of the sword’s clashing and is instead better to memorize the timing of when to click and then click again. This the game’s combat is made up of click -pause- click -pause- -click- pause, with the occasional block. The Witcher 1’s gameplay involves left clicking to attack, then waiting for the sword icon on your screen to light up with fire, then you click again to do a more devastating attack. Thus, the only place where The Witcher 1 and AC: 1 differ is in that The Witcher 1 provides superior feedback as to when you’re supposed to left click. Thus, The Witcher 1, which is at its weakest when trying to approximate the combat of a Witcher, has much better combat than AC: 1. However, if the evolution of the Assassin’s Creed combat system had gone in the direction of The Witcher, it is possible that the games could have had combat better than their polish counterparts. The combat isn’t really the focus of the game, though.
The real focus, evidenced by the perhaps overabundance of towers you can climb to look around, is the open world. Similar to the other Assassin’s Creed games, AC: 1 features several open world zones that may be traversed between on horse, or through some limited fast travel. In this way, AC: 1 is great, although I wouldn’t describe it as a masterpiece. The world itself is beautiful, if dated in appearance, but the geometry and vertical design of the world itself makes for interesting exploration. Moreover, the world is packed to the brim with detail, as should be expected of an Assassin’s Creed game. The cities in particular are breathtaking, given the graphical limitations, with densely packed alleyways paired with gorgeous vistas. The game does truly feel like a fairly faithful recreation of life within the Holy Land during the Crusades, with plenty of NPCs going about their day-to-day activities, guards patrolling the streets, and Templars behind every corner looking to do some conspiracy nonsense, as is typical of Assassin’s Creed Templars. In this way, AC: 1 is immersive, although not quite as much as the subsequent games, each of which are not nearly as immersive as some of their open world competitors, such as The Witcher or The Elder Scrolls. Although the detail within AC: 1 is remarkable considering the game’s age, where the game is lacking is the reactivity of the world. Everything feels fairly static, with the artifice of the NPCs even thinner than in Oblivion, with random background characters frequently behaving in strange ways, or lacking in textured detail (although this could have been a glitch, as the PC version is fairly buggy in my experience). Moreover, the NPC aren’t reactive in interesting or realistic ways, often behaving more like Sims than real people. This is a recurrent problem in the series that, as of the most recent games I’ve played being Odyssey, has not been fixed. As compared to The Witcher, where NPCs seem to exist in the world as much as Geralt does, reacting to Geralt and their surroundings in realistic ways (if sometimes repeating the same dialogue a bit too much), the NPCs of Assassin’s Creed frequently act in surreal, bizarre ways, such as jumping off of cliffs, climbing objects for no apparent reason. Although like the Witcher NPCs do comment on the player’s existence in the series, these comments don’t often feel as if they’re coming from the NPC in question, and just blends into the background, as if it were part of the soundtrack. Although not perfect, the thus far gold standard of NPC interaction and reactivity is Fallout: New Vegas, in which NPCs directly speak to the player character and each other regularly, and very clearly have their own existence outside of the player but are abundant enough that the world doesn’t feel as hollow, if detailed, as Oblivion or Skyrim. Assassin’s Creed once again has more in common with The Witcher, and the other Ubisoft open world games, such as Far Cry, in that NPCs exist, but lack that additional level of detail present in New Vegas. What’s left is somewhat disappointing, although not game breaking, as some of the Assassin’s Creed games remain my favorites, even having played arguably better examples of NPC interaction.
more important to the world than the NPCs of an Assassin’s Creed game is the Parkour, which has generally been very good in the series, although going back to the first game after having gotten used to some of the quality-of-life improvements of the later games, is rough. Although it is fun, the Parkour feels slow and stunted as compared to the later games, although it does feel like there’s more thinking to do as to how to get to point A and point B. Because of this, I can’t rightly say that the Parkour is truly worse than the other games, only slower in comparison. That being said, it is true that I didn’t enjoy the Parkour as much as the other games, there is something lost in later games as they streamlined the Parkour, making it easier to just hold down the free running button and go crazy.
So far, I’ve ignored something very important, something that has plagued the Assassin’s Creed series since the very beginning, and only recently has begun to shed. The recurrent problem of the Animus
The animus, abstergo, everything to do with the modern-day plots in Assassin’s Creed sucks, its just terrible. Every single game in the series that bothers to have a modern plot in addition to the past Assassin’s plot has felt like two games: one fun action-adventure story about globe-trotting Assassin’s at war with Templars, often with charming and likable characters, and more than a few somewhat ham-fisted references or appearances of historical figures, and one with a boring, dry loser talking to more boring dry losers in the modern-day, as the fun adventure story is rudely interrupted so Desmond Miles or whoever else you play later in the series fucks around for half an hour. I hate Desmond, I hate the Animus, I hate everything to do with the modern-day in these games. The gameplay is always worse, the characters are always worse, the narrative is always worse. Although rarely outright bad, it is always distracting and annoying. The worst of these is, of course, in the first game, where growing pains prevented many things from being truly good. In AC: 1, Desmond is boring, Abstergo is boring, the scientist that I don’t remember the name of is boring, and Lucy is boring. This never changes, but by the time we get to Brotherhood, interesting things at least start happening in the Desmond story, and by the time of Assassin’s Creed 3, the game almost managed to make me care. Not quite, but almost. That being said, the presence of the Animus in the story can be mostly ignored in the later games and is only a series issue in the first and second game, although in these games they are huge problems.
Assassin’s Creed 1 is a deeply flawed experience, and one that is largely not worth having any more outside of experiencing where the series started from. Almost everything the game attempted is improved upon with the sequel and subsequent games, and the aspects of the game that are truly unique to it are unrefined and held back by the rough edges that make up the entire game. Ultimately, the game is painfully average, with so many elements that are almost good, but miss the mark because of poor implementation. I can’t say that I enjoyed my time with AC: 1, but I am glad to have finally experienced it for longer than 2 hours.
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