Wi-Philes

Because I am poor and behind the times, I've been playing Assassin's Creed lately on loan from a friend. It's probably the best game I've ever played and got bored of within a single week.

Everything about the game is very "YES!!!! but..." Example: Is this the most beautiful game I've ever played? I think so. The depiction of Crusade-era Mediterranean landscape is something to behold. I'd recommend seeing the game to pretty much anyone. Riding horseback through the overworld, past cypruses and palm trees is incredibly immersive and imposes a stinging desire for time travel every time I play it. I just want to be there, which is an effect video games haven't had on me since pre-puberty. There are small thinly-manned camps along the valleys and hills, and the attention to detail in both the soldiers' crudley constructed camps and authentic-looking wardrobe gives a definite sense of place. It has a very wilderness feeling to it, and not an American frontiersman kind of wilderness, but a blurring of the lines between civilization and the natural world, before history was stamped indellibly with the rule of law. Out there, whoever has the most soldiers makes the rules. Foreign soldiers are inately mistrustful of you and will kill you simply for being the "Other", and it feels so right that it's easy to forget that that's just how video games work.

The flipside of the coin is that the game doesn't take place in the 11th Century Mediterranean. It takes place somewhere in the future, where a machine scans a man's "genetic memory" so he can relive the Crusades as his ancestorial assassin. So in the midst of one of the most gorgeous and immersive game worlds I've seen, there's all this Matrix looking shit popping up all over the place. When you lock onto an enemy, weird glyphs and percentages start flying around him. The effect is decently rendered, but I mean... save that shit for a boring looking game to give it some spice. This is already great, and it's the kind of great that's lessened by exact-opposite genre standbys poking their head in.

The cities look like something out of a period piece, and are bustling with competently-voiced citizens. Running along the rooftops, often from guards, is a very Aladdin Meets Batman experience. Or maybe just Aladdin If He Killed People. You break up some police brutality and save a citizen, or get caught pick-pocketing, or just run into the wrong guard in the wrong place, and they'll chase you damn well all over the place. And it's fucking great. The music swells, Altair hops from rooftop to crossbeam to balcony like a methed out Jackie Chan, and now and again the guards corner you and you bust out some badass swordplay and cut a few bitches before dipping out to continue the chase. I couldn't get enough of it. Or, I guess I could, but not until about 10 hours later.

The thing is, the developers put together a really well-crafted game of tag in a gorgeous backdrop. But that's all it is. You complete a mission, the guards chase you, and you kill them or run away and hide. Again and again.

The laddering element is that after each assassination, you get more weapons and techniques, but after you try them a few times it's almost as if they dilute the game. And this is where I wade into the realm of "what makes video games fun" but here's my point: If the fun of the game is to run from guards, then why can I so effectively take on as many as 20 armed guards at once? And if the point is to fight the guards, why would I want to run away? The Grand Theft Auto solution to this problem is that you can't just fight police to a surrender. Sure, you can blow away a few squad cars' worth of pigs, but any act of aggression only upscales their pursuit of you. And since shooting it out with the cops ends badly very quickly, you have to run.

Also, your health continually recharges, even in the thick of battle. So it's not like you hit a low health point where you really have to get away; you just stand around holding block for awhile and eventually you're okay. Enter the Matrix used this idea, but any of the Agents that you fought in that game were practically unkillable, so once again you had an actual reason to run away, fight aggressively, and feel suspense any time one of them pursued you. In Assassin's Creed the hero is too good for the world he's pitted in, and it's like watching Superman being chased by a guy with a bat.

I might keep playing it to see if the plot goes anywhere, but it looks like it's going to a predictable and unexciting place, so it's not really a draw. I'll probably just give it back when I head home this weekend, maybe see if I can trade for Ninja Gaiden II.