0verhyped

Spoiler: The world will end in 2012!
Other Spoiler: It’s 2013 now…

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Seeing as we’re in a new year and possibly a new gaming generation, I figured now is a good time to look back on what games from the last few years really defied my expectations. Either because they went above and beyond what I was expecting of them or because they were horrible letdowns that made me feel stupid for buying them. Today’s disappointment is Assassin’s Creed, the convoluted science-fiction/medieval/fantasy/futuristic something that sucks so hard that they had to put the word “ASS” in its title, twice.

…fuck this game. Really, fuck it. I actually didn’t have much in the way of expectations when I heard about Assassin’s Creed. You get to jump around and assassinate people, that should be fun right? How badly could you fuck something up like that? Bad! Really fucking bad! Even some of the mainstream gaming media were taken back by how bad this thing was. IGN called it one of the most disappointing games of all time and gave it the deplorable score of 77 out of 100…

This is another game that I could go on for hours about but will try to keep it down to a few pages for brevity’s sake. My first complaint is the story. Leading up to the release, Ubisoft kept a lid on a major story point that you’re actually playing someone in the future sitting in some weird time travel bed who dopples into his past self, adding a weird ass scene-fiction element in what was advertised as a medieval action game.

And what was the point of this? I’m guessing it was done for mostly marketing reasons. On the one hand it gave them an excuse to hand wave all the glitches and story inaccuracies as just the magic time travel bed thing malfunctioning. “That’s not a mistake in the game, it’s a mistake in the actual program they people are using!” The other thing is this decision let them move the series from time period to time period, which is a good gimmick to keep things looking fresh. The downside is to explain this shit they had to write an insane convoluted story to connect the dots.

So you’re playing as a guy who was kidnapped by people who apparently are modern Knights Templar, even though one of them blows off the bible and Templars were Christian Crusaders. And apparently this guy is a descendent of the original Hashishins or something, and their causing him to relive his past life as an assassin with a magic bed. And apparently instead of fighting the Templars for control of Jerusalem there is some conspiracy to do…something, and your master has some religious artifact, except it’s from aliens and not god, because Adam and Eve were aliens, and…

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Oops, how did that get in here?

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I’m paraphrasing this from information I gleamed from the sequels, but I seem to remember yelling bullshit at my T.V. loudly during most of the ending of the original Assassin’s Creed. Especially when I was reading through some e-mails and noticed one talking about how the last movie just premiered, ever. And apparently there won’t be anymore because piracy put all the movie companies out of business… Fucking really? Was that suppose to be some sort of send-up for video games and how they’re going to replace movies? Because video game companies whine about piracy more than the RIAA. I don’t think movies are going anywhere anytime soon.

Whatever, none of this matters if the gameplay is good, but big surprise, gameplay sucks. It’s incredibly stilted and scripted and there’s almost no creativity in the missions leading up to the assassinations or the assassinations themselves. The “investigation” missions are six recycled basic objectives that often have nothing to do with investigating anything. They’re so bad that the PC port of the game got lower scores because they included MORE of them. Yeah, they suck so hard that adding more of them actually hurts the game.

Then you’ve got the actual assassinations, which you’d think would be the big show stopper. This is Assassin’s Creed, so assassinating people should be fun right? But the assassinations are basically the same damn thing as the rest of the game. Either your mark runs away and you have to chase him down, you have to navigate some convoluted hidden route to reach him, or both. That’s about it, you don’t need any foresight beyond figuring out how to get there and then catching the bastard.

That brings me to the next problem, the combat, it’s fucking awful. In a game where fighting is usually one of only two options (the other is running/hiding) it’s pretty amazing that the fighting is so terrible. First, every enemy in the game obeys some bizarre set of ethnics where only one guy will fight you at a time. Probably because it’s harder to program situations against multiple opponents. Arkham Asylum sorta did this too, but the battles moved quick enough where it wasn’t a major issue. In Assassin’s Creed you’ll have entire squads of guards just calmly waiting in a circle for somebody to get the balls up to attack the guy in the white robes.

Unlike Arkham Asylum, the fighting is really fucking boring. Basically you can just win every fight by waiting for someone to attack and then you use counter and kill them instantly. That or just mash buttons or throw knives. It didn’t really fucking matter. I could literally win fights with my eyes closed. I’d just hold block, listen for a familiar sound of a sword striking mine, hit the counter button and repeat until everyone was dead. Arkham Asylum let you counter attacks too but it wasn’t an instant K.O. and you couldn’t block enemy attacks so you had to pay attention.

Actually, now that I think about it, Batman: Arkham Asylum did all the same stuff Assassin’s Creed was trying to do. You investigate things, stalk people from above, fight off a bunch guys with flashy counters and throwing weapons, use a special vision mode to target your enemies, collect a bunch of junk scattered across the map. The difference was Arkham Asylum was super fun, this shit wasn’t. It’s like the people who made Arkham Asylum played Assassin’s Creed and asked themselves “Okay, how can we can fix this stuff so it doesn’t suck ungodly amounts of ass?” and then they somehow did exactly that and slapped Batman on top as a bonus.

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How the fuck did I not notice this before now?
O_o

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Damn, never really connected these two games together like that before just now, but it definitely fits. Assassin’s Creed was released in 2007, Arkham Asylum 2009. So at least some of the people making Arkham Asylum probably did try Assassin’s Creed at some point. The gameplay in both series is kinda fractured between stealth roaming and semi-automated beat’em up parts. Shit, I guess I have to say at least one good thing came out of Assassin’s Creed, and it was that it gave the people making Arkham Asylum a decent tech demo to work with. But I still wouldn’t want to replay Assassin’s Creed, because that’s all it was, a tech demo.

Just some fancy looking product to show off a new graphics engine and a lot of undeveloped gameplay concepts that was hastily glued together with an insanely idiotic storyline for the benefit of being able to package it and sell it as a fully working game. Supposedly the sequels are “better” but seeing as I felt the original Assassin’s Creed was just a game demo sold as an actual game, I don’t feel all that motivated to check them out. In fact, I’d rather just go play Batman: Arkham Asylum, again.