Assassin's Creed Director's Cut Edition

Assassin's Creed feels like a tech demo, cynically stretched into a full-length game through shameless, grinding repetition.

It's reasonably nice to look at by 2007 standards, and the traversal and crowds had a gee-whiz factor which wore off pretty quickly even when it was new. The cities are busy and dense but kind of anonymous and soulless. There's just very little to this game, and in padding its length, Ubisoft introduced some of the hideous open-world design "innovations" that are still with us, blighting game maps with a vomit splatter of collectible garbage, which gives this game particularly unpleasant aftertaste. There's a story here, but the writing and characters didn't make me very invested in it.

There's just no good reason to spend ~20 hours playing this anymore beside historical curiosity. AC2 built upon the tech and made a proper game of it, and did everything AC1 does, but much, much better.

Assassin's Creed is a bit of a mixed bag. It's very well presented and entertaining, albeit repetitive and mundane at moments. My favorite aspects of the game are the story and general ambiance.

The plot follows Desmond, a bartender who's kidnapped by a corporation due to his lineage to assassins. After he's forced into a simulation that recreates the past through the user's DNA, the player assumes control of Altair, a Crusades-era Middle Eastern assassin. After failing to follow a tenet of his organization, he's ordered to assassinate a set of targets in order to redeem himself. As he investigates his targets, he and Desmond begin to unearth a series of conspiracies. It's an interesting, well-written, and believable story. While it isn't remarkable, it manages to entertain.

In terms of atmosphere, the game has a great aesthetic due to it's blend of a Crusades-era Middle Ages and confined modern-day setting. The art direction is also great, and as a result it's visuals are arguably better than some later iterations in the series.

However, gameplay-wise, it fails to live up. The story segments are enjoyable, however, in order to reach these segments, Altair has to investigate his targets. This consists of repeatedly racing across the map, beating up a target for information, and so forth. The game is also infamous for it's collectibles, which are arduous to collect and fail to provide a proper reward.

Overall, Assassin's Creed is worth playing if one's interested in it. It's a game that was too ambitious for the time and was rushed out in order to sell to the new console generation.