Assassin’s Creed (360): COMPLETED!

That’s right. Completed. Although I was only about half the way through yesterday, I played it rather a lot this afternoon. And this evening. Yeah, so pretty much all day. Oops.

Naturally, I assassinated the last few targets, leaving me with Robert – the guy who I ran from at the start of the game. However, he’d left a decoy in his place, so I had to go off to meet King Richard on the battlefield to tell him of Robert’s treachery. This involved lots of tedious multi-participant fighting, which was just long rather than hard. In fact, most of the fights towards the end of the game turned into “block-and-counterattack” confrontations, making it all a bit samey.

After bumping off Robert, I learned something I’d suspected for a while – the real baddie, the guy behind everything to do with “the new world order” that was being set up, was none other than Al Maulim. The old guy in Masyaf. My teacher.

So I won’t spoil the rest of the ending, but it finishes up in the lab having bumped Al Maulim off (finally – he was bloody hard!), and some truths are discovered. Oh, and exploring the lab and siderooms is a must afterwards too…

The verdict then. The good points are the story, the graphics, and the free-running across the rooftops. The down points are the annoyingly repetitive fighting (especially later in the game when you have to block every attack and can’t just wade in) and the dodgy sensitivity of the wall running and ledge-grabbing when sometimes you can’t climb up even though you know you can – it just won’t let you, you have to climb down and back up the exact same bit to make it “work”. The way the save points work is irritating too, since it saves for you, but sometimes you still have to go back a fair way if you quit and reload.

Having said all that, it’s not a bad game at all, and is worth far more than the 5/10 scores some magazines (like EGM) seem to be giving it. I won’t be going back to it to get all the flags, though – that’d just be silly.