Assassin's Creed - Xbox 360

Assassin's Creed was the second Xbox 360 game I ever played. I owned Assassin's Creed before I even owned a 360. I bought it to play on my brother's recently purchased 360. I remember being blown away by the graphics of the opening cinematic. It was about that point that I realized I needed my own Xbox 360. Within the week I had purchased a 360 and a spiffy new HDTV to play it on.

People have always complained about Assassin's Creed. It was repetitive, the climbing was sometimes kind of wonky, you switched between Altaïr and Desmond way too much. I didn't see this. I loved every minute of the game. Was it repetitive? Sure, but it was fun as hell so I didn't care. Was the climbing sometimes wonky? I didn't know, up until this point I had never played a game where you could climb like that. Everything was so interesting and new that I didn't care if occasionally you made a misstep and fell. And I never felt that traveling between the two time periods did anything but add to the story.

That was my first playthrough. My second playthrough I had a change of opinion.

The first thing I noticed... how repetitive it actually was. Gone were the days that I was just happy assassinating people. After about the first two assassinations all I could think was "I have to do this again?" I went from helping every person I came across, climbing every vantage point I could find, to just doing what needed to be done to get the next assassination just so I could forward the game progress. It was the same thing over and over. It became a grind.

All of the sudden every other game I had played that had a climbing mechanic felt vastly superior. It wasn't just that occasionally Altaïr would fall from a ledge. It's that occasionally Altaïr would do the exact opposite of what I had just told him to do. It was like occasionally Altaïr would get a deathwish and decide he didn't feel the need to live any longer. "Want me to jump to that ladder? Screw you, I'm jumping down three stories into a crowd of angry guards!" The climbing wasn't horrible but felt somewhat antiquated and occasionally difficult to control. It wasn't just the climbing. On more then one occasion Altaïr would draw the wrong weapon (even though I knew I picked the right one) or would just refuse to draw his sword. I have no idea what the problem was but it quickly became annoying. Also once you learned to counter fights became way too easy. I could take on a hundred guards simply by blocking and countering and eventually kill them all. What's the fun in that?

I still don't have a major problem of the switching between Altaïr and Desmond. Occasionally it did feel a little out of place, or slowed down the action, but overall I still don't see why so many people hated this aspect of the game.

The game just didn't hold the same wonder that it did the first time around. It was the same game, I was just looking at it through different eyes. Long gone was ability to overlook some of the more glaring problems this game had. Towards the end I was playing the game to beat it, not because I was necessarily enjoying myself. The repetitiveness of the game finally got to me.

So what are my second thoughts on Assassin's Creed? Well, it was good... but not great. It certainly didn't feel as fresh and entertaining the second time around. However, that doesn't make it a bad game. It still find some enjoyment in it, and assassinating people can be very entertaining. If you haven't played it before I would say that you should give it a try, but I'm not sure that it's worth a second playthrough.

Squid.