David’s Retro Rewind: Assassin’s Creed

It’s time to turn the clocks way back again, folks – in more ways than one this time. I recently played through the original Assassin’s Creed for the first time, so I thought I’d use the Retro Rewind banner as a means of discussing my thoughts on it. Assassin’s Creed was the first PlayStation 3 game I ever bought, not long after it was released back in 2007. That was back when I basically never finished games, however. Now, nineteen years later, I’ve finally gone back to properly finish what I started way back then. Let’s begin!

In Assassin’s Creed, you technically control two characters. In the modern day, you play as Desmond Miles, a hapless bartender who was kidnapped by Abstergo Industries, the world’s largest pharmaceutical conglomerate. Afterward, Desmond is forced to help Abstergo with its research. Rather than forcing Desmond to undergo trials of potentially dangerous new drugs, Abstergo forces him to enter a machine they’ve developed called the Animus. The Animus can pull the memories of one’s ancestors out of their genetic code and turn those memories into a simulated reality, so that someone in the Animus can relive past events exactly as their ancestors did.

It turns out that many of Desmond’s ancestors were members of the centuries-old Brotherhood of Assassins, the archenemies of the Templar Order. The Assassins and the Templars have long been at war over so-called “Pieces of Eden,” biblical artifacts that grant either side a significant advantage in terms of establishing each faction’s preferred method of attaining world peace. Desmond is instructed to relive the memories of one such Assassin ancestor: Altaïr Ibn-La’Ahad, who was active in what we would now call the Middle East during the Third Crusade. You spend much more time controlling Altaïr compared to Desmond.

In the year 1191, Altaïr and two of his fellow Assassins are dispatched to Solomon’s Temple to retrieve one such Piece of Eden before a group of Templars can get to it first. Right when the Assassins are about to succeed, Altaïr’s arrogance gets the better of him. Altaïr ends up violating all the tenets of the titular Assassin’s Creed and, in doing so, he inadvertently allows the leader of the group of Templars to escape. The Assassins still manage to obtain the Piece of Eden and return it to their headquarters in Masyaf, albeit at a heavy cost.

The leader of the Assassins, Al Mualim, is furious with Altaïr for having botched his mission so spectacularly. Rather than killing Altaïr outright for his blunder, however, Al Mualim decides to offer Altaïr a chance at redemption. Altaïr is stripped of his rank as master assassin, as well as all the equipment that said rank granted Altaïr the right to carry. Altaïr finds himself considered a novice once again, which means he must now answer to everyone in the Brotherhood of Assassins rather than the other way around. Al Mualim gives Altaïr a list of nine assassination targets.

As each one falls, Al Mualim will restore Altaïr one rank and one accompanying piece of equipment at a time. Honestly, the benefit of hindsight works against Assassin’s Creed. While its gameplay (especially its parkour elements) certainly and deservedly impressed audiences of its time, seeing what later Assassin’s Creed games would bring to the formula of the franchise really makes the original game feel dated. The core gameplay loop becomes increasingly repetitive the further you progress. You always have to complete at least three “investigation” objectives to learn about your current target’s whereabouts and routines before you can actually assassinate them.

These “investigations” almost always consist of the same busywork, especially when time limits and other restrictions are tacked onto them for no good reason. What’s more, you will first be expected to find where each investigation objective actually is by climbing viewpoints near landmarks you’re told to visit, which serves only to add even more repetitive steps to pad out the campaign. On top of all that, I can point to two major aspects of Assassin’s Creed that hurt the player’s ability to become and remain immersed in the story Assassin’s Creed seeks to tell.

You would think stabbing each assassination target in the neck (as you always do) would cause them to die quickly, but Assassin’s Creed sees no reason why a ruptured jugular vein would prevent each of your targets from monologuing at you for five minutes before finally having the decency to shut up and perish. What’s worse is how jarring it feels when you’re suddenly pulled out of the Animus and forced to play as Desmond again, even though these segments usually don’t last long. Every time this happened, I audibly groaned because I felt like the story had been interrupted for nothing.

I understand that all these aspects are necessary to properly tell the story of Assassin’s Creed, but just because they’re important doesn’t mean I have to like them. All of that isn’t even mentioning all the technical issues I encountered, but I can’t solely blame Assassin’s Creed for that. After all, that’s part of the “fun” of trying to get decades-old games to run decently well on modern PC hardware. I’m glad I can now say I’ve finished Assassin’s Creed after nearly twenty years, but now that I’ve done so, I doubt I’ll ever have the urge to play through it again.