Premise: You switch between two characters, Altair (an assassin from 1191, situated in the middle of the Crusades) and Desmond (Altair’s descendant living in a dystopian future of sorts).  Desmond has been forced into using a machine called the ANIMUS in order to relieve his genetic memories of Altair’s life in 1191 in order to gain knowledge of certain items.  Most of the game is spent in the role of Altair, and you’re a very busy assassin who spends far too much time killing people other than your intended assassination targets. 

Why did I bother playing it?: It came free with the console, and wasn’t a football game, so I thought it was worth taking a look.

Characters: They all seem to have the personalities of blocks of wood; the few that don’t even repeat the same phrases are included in this simile, and it’s impossible to really care what happens to a single one of them.  Actually, I feel sorry for the blocks of wood, so I retract the simile and will choose something that can’t hurt me: the characters appear to be like plankton in the sea, only less useful. 

Gameplay: I can’t help but feel the controls might be a tad easier on the hands when played on a PC, but what the player is presented with is badly planned on the 360, and creates the classic cry of ‘I didn’t press that button! Don’t f****** do that!’ But the controls are not the worst part.

This game suffers from a severe sense of repetition.  There’s no creativity in the way you gain information about your targets (all nine of them); how you avoid being detected by city guards and highway guards before, during and after assassinations; how you have to repeatedly face down multiple targets (guards) again and again (and I thought assassins’ abilities to blend would stop this sort of recurring situation); how the people in the cities of the Holy Land responds to you… 

A normal target run as Altair involves the following: your mentor tells you so-so has to be killed in so-so, you go to so-so and the head of the local assassin’s bureau either berates you on your failings or helps you a little; you go out into the city and find out three pieces of information out of a possible six in the earlier part of the game to be declared able of killing your target by the local bureau, and a full six out of six is needed later on to be declared fit for duty.  This information gathering exercise does not change with each target.  Before, during and after succeeding you have the option of finding all ‘view points’ in the city and saving all the citizens who are currently being harassed by guards: finding viewpoints helps you find your six sources of information and the locations of the citizens in trouble.  Helping citizens either gives you groups of scholars who you can hide amongst and walk about as one, or big gruff blokes who will harass the guards for you when you’re running for your ‘life’ from said guards.

Oh, and during all this time you have the option of trying to gather up as much random flags in the city as you can, and killing members of The Knights Templar.  Just to get your achievements up. 

Remember, you’ll probably be running away from the guards a lot of the time, and running up, down, between and over buildings as well.  A great deal of the time.  Plus you don’t die, you just ‘desynchronize’ and get loaded back into the ANIMUS.

What could have been improved: If the gameplay was not so repetitive, I would call for the game to not end so soon, and not with so little catharsis, but seeing as how I had to force myself to continue playing it after the first three assassinations, I don’t want to put this upon anyone.  So the repetitive play should go.  The controls should be made more manageable; and killing people should be more creative, I found the weaponry limited, and considering that poisonings have played such a huge part in most assassinations over the ages, the weapons were a bit pointless at times (one of the targets is obviously fond of his food for instance).

Facing down multiple enemies should not have been so ungainly; the guys and gals at Ubisoft should have taken a leaf out of Midway’s book and their handling of multiple enemies in MK: Shaolin Monks. 

Time between Desmond and Altair should have been more equally split and Desmond should have been able to do more in the game’s present other than talk with one character and sneak about the lab.  If the game had been you started playing as Altair and stayed as so for half, not realising you were in the ANIMUS, and then you woke up as Desmond, and trained in Altair’s abilities it would have been great.  Yes, it has free roaming with Altair but nothing as impressive as many RPGs.

Overall: This game is not worth the time of day: it is boring to the core, and there are far more engaging sci-fi games on the current and previous console generations and on PC.  Don’t bother with this.  I want my life back.