Nerdtales

Welcome to the Crusades

Today I came by a rental shop that is actually right around the corner of my appartement. I went in actually looking for a nice Bluray movie for the evening. I came out with Assassin’s Creed in my hands. This is one of the occassions where I feel really bad about myself, that I always have to take the shiny things with me, although I already have so much other stuff. Or in this, I have still so many games left to play. I have rented it until Monday, enough time to see, why the game was scored lower than the hype led to me to expect.

Much to my surprise, the game started off in a laboratory of today. My character was lying on some sort of an examination table, obviously not knowing what he was doing there. I was pretty much confused, as I expected the game to play like 1000 years earlier with me controlling a kick-ass assassin. But the scientist and his lady assistant explained, with lot’s of mumbo jumbo, that everybody has a genetic memento of his forefathers and that they need some part of the genetic memento of my character’s forefather 1000 years ago, which was an assassin. Yeah, right. So they hook that sad guy up to a machine which takes me now 1000 years back in the holy land, during the crusades.

After some tutorial yadayada, I finally got to play… sort of. Altair, the assassin I play, was together with two other assassins on a mission to recover a treasure. They were just entering some sort of cave as it turns out, that what they were after was the ark of the covenant. Too bad the crusaders came first, and although the other two guys warn me not to, I am on my way to kill the boss of the crusaders. Actually I tried not to, but this game is straight forward and leaves you no choice. The assassination failed and I got pushed out of the cave, the entrance collapsed and my mates were lost inside. After some jumping around I made it back to my home town.

My master was not so fond of my failure to deliver the treasure, but before he could punish me, the crusaders attacked the town and I had to help to fight the back. Which was fun for the first 3 crusaders I killed, but it got old pretty fast. In the end, fighting is not much more than button mashing. The combokills are a joke and the counterattacks make the whole experience very easy. What was nice about the fight against the crusaders though was the scene it, where I fake-jumped to death and sneaked behind the enemy’s lines to trigger a trap. Awesome stuff.

Back in the tower I got a mighty kick in the ass from my master, who basically punished me to climb the career ladder of an assassin up again. I still would like to know, how he could take away my learned skills… oh whatever. So I was an apprentice again, and my first mission was to find out who betrayed the order of the assassin’s and helped the crusaders by opening the gates of the town. So I sneaked around town. Actually at first I climbed around town. Climbing up house and juming over the roofs is so much fun. It gives a sense of freedom. In such moments Assassin’s Creed feels like the best sandbox game ever.

The sneak mission was pretty cool, as I had to overhear somebody, then I stole a letter from a merchant and finally I had to interrogate another guy to get the information about the traitor. With my first mission accomplished my master regained some trust in Altair, and sent him to Damascus to assassinate a weapon’s dealer.

But I will write that up tomorrow, as it is actually 6:30 am here right now and I am pretty tired.