Assassins Creed Director’s Cut Review (PC)
Think back to high school, and you remember the popular girl that became prom queen. Everything about the woman from what you could see was perfect. Looks, the walk, the attitude, it was all there. But at one point in the evening, when you had the nerve to go talk to her, you got the true sense of what she was like – dull and a little snooty. Well, that is almost a perfect comparison for how you feel by the time you get to the end of Assassins Creed. It looks great, has some solid fighting and acrobatic mechanics, and a great story, but you get a sense of boring and dull with all activities in-between.
Assassins Creed tells the story of Altair, the top assassin in the Assassins Guild. While on an assignment, you make a series of costly errors that end up costing Altair his standing in the guild, along with all of his high end weaponry. From here, you are tasked with performing a series of assassinations, to make up for you arrogance, but all is not what it seems as there is a mystery linking all of your victims that you will need to solve to find the true purpose of your mission.
Game mechanics are very smooth in this port, with the controls mapping rather nicely from a gamepad to a mouse keyboard setup. There have been some complaints from users that the controls seem clunky, I felt they were rather easy to grasp, to the point of making the game a bit easy. The game only uses WASD movement controls, along with using the Q, E, Shift and Space keys. The mouse is used for free look, attacking and selecting a secondary action. The controls are very fluid, and respond quite nicely, allowing for some really cool movement and combat combinations. If the gamepad is still your control of choice, you can use your gamepad to control Altair.
Combat is highly stylized and really shows off the power of the engine. If you can use your mouse controls proficiently, you can string together some awesome looking combinations that will take out several enemies at one time. It is a huge payoff for those that practice the combat tutorials, and learn the controls. You don’t need to be this good to win, but it makes it look so much better if you learn it.
Sometimes you look for a good way to define the look of a game that feel unique, but to put it simply, Assassins Creed is drop dead gorgeous. Jerusalem, Acre, Damascus and Masyaf are all modeled in painstaking detail, along with the accompanying countryside. Walking into a city, exposes you to a visual feast on the eyes, with cobblestone roads, claustrophobic building design, and shifting light patterns with the clouds floating above. The detail in all of the textures in every city has a real gritty and used look to them, giving the player an immersion into the Crusades era of these cities. Climbing up a tower in any of these cities gives the player a visual cue to how expansive these cities can be in size. Even up high in the sky, you can still see the detail far below, which shows off the power of the engine. Character features are good, but when matched to the world they are in, they have an average quality to them. Altair and some of the other, main characters seem a little more beefed up in terms of detail, but they are totally outclassed and outshined by the world you exist in while playing Assassins Creed.
One thing that might take some out of the game is that you are a traveler into the past, instead of the game being in the past. Your journeys into the Crusades are controlled by a corporation that is looking for something in the past. This rather jarring plot change from everything we have heard in the previews will take some right out of the mystique of the game, while others will accept it as a way to further the story. No worries, it is not a spoiler, as you find out about this five minutes into the game, but it should be known ahead of time, as it can affect your immersion into the game.
Sound in the game is a very mixed bag. The music that you hear in the game is another example of the excellence that is Jesper Kyd. It seems that everything the man touches in gaming turns into solid gold. The problem is that it outshines the voice overs in the game. While everyone gives a fair performance, your character, Altair, sounds like a guy full of sour grapes, constantly on the verge of whining. I found myself wanting to skip the cut scenes towards the end as the dialogue really started to grate on my nerves. The sounds of the cityscapes as you walk through them are a fine example of immersion to the highest degree. Cities always sound full of bustling around, never settling for a quiet moment. Beggars swarm you for money, while merchants call out to sell their latest wares. Guards also call out your position when you are detected. All of it just resonates very nicely as you would expect in a large city.
Lack of multiplayer does not hurt the game, as there are many activities to keep you busy for many hours after the main game is finished. I put about 15 hours into the main story, and still could put another 10-15 into it, finding all the flags that are hidden in every city, or doing the unfinished investigations (you only need to finish a couple of the six to seven that are available for each assassination). There is so much to do in the game, that by the time you have done everything, you will have more than your money’s worth.
The game is not without its faults. While the game ran smooth on my machine, it is a Quad Core 6600, with 2GB RAM, and a Nvidia 8800GT with 512MB of RAM. I got 25-35 frames per second while playing at 1920×1200, but results have varied, due to the games straight port from the 360. There has been no attempt to clean up the code in any way for the PC, a normal practice by Ubisoft for their ports. Also, while you are an assassin, and making yourself invisible should be a goal to achieve, there is no real penalty for killing every guard in site. As a matter of fact, I found it easier to just kill at will instead of sneaking around. Towards the end, you are a battle machine, and will have no difficulty taking out dozens of guards in your escape, a far cry from the shadow stalking of a true stealthy assassin. Also, while you have a few more mission types to find your assassination target, they still become tedious by the end of the game, making you want to get them done quickly.
While Assassins Creed gives the player an intriguing story, along with hyper-realistic environments, average voice acting and high system requirements bring the game down a few notches from its high perch. The added mission types add to the mix, but their boredom factor does not improve things. The game strives for lofty goals, but falls a bit short from obtaining the results. Assassins Creed Director’s Cut on the PC gets a 3.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.
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