This was my Christmas present from
herooftheage, and now that my XBox 360 is repaired (actually, replaced), I've been playing it on and off for the last few weeks.
The game is (largely) set during the Third Crusade. You play an Assassin (*really* O.G.) who is sent on various missions to kill both Crusaders and their opponents. These Assassins are purportedly good guys who only kill for the greater good, to bring about 'peace'. Of course, the bad guys (Templars) say pretty much the exact same thing, so we're in a pretty gray zone, morally speaking.
The gameplay is a combination of stealth and action. The stealth is only moderately engaging, but you don't have to do very much of it. The action, on the other hand, is superb! The game's big selling point is the movement system. Your character can effortlessly scale almost any building, and leap with ease from rooftop to rooftop. The control scheme is good, and the animation is peerless. Seriously, playing this makes every other game's avatar animation look like bad marionette work in comparison. The bar has been raised a *lot*.
In addition to your primary missions, the world is full of things to do and see. The levels are huge, sprawling, and non-linear. There are collectables to find, citizens to rescue, pockets to pick, cathedrals to scale, and other optional challenges to undertake. I find these free-roaming sections actually more fun than the 'story' missions.
All that said, the game is not without down sides. Cutscenes, while not numerous after the opening, are unskippable and lengthy. The combat, while visually very appealing, is not very tactically engaging. And, ye gods, the frame story...
Remember how I said that this game was *mostly* set in the Third Crusade? Actually, those sequences are all genetic memories being relived via computer stimulation by a descendant of the protagonist who lives in modern times. This lets them get away with a fairly detailed HUD without breaking their fiction, but still jars at me. The modern-day protagonist is *also* an assassin, who has been kidnapped by mad scientists who want to get a specific secret out of his genetic memories. We don't know much about him at the start, as his story also starts in media res. And very early on, my story-sense tingled, suggesting that even the 'modern' storyline is a genetic memory, and there's an external frame around that waiting to be revealed. All very 'French'.
(Digression: French videogames have acquired a reputation for a certain degree of artsy surrealism. This leads to the word 'French' being used as an adjective within the industry. BioShock was a 'French' game, despite being made in Quincy.)
Later: I have now finished the game. The final twist was not nearly as cool as I had hoped. The modern-day frame story got no closure, just dropped some tantalizing hints about a sequel, then stopped dead. I still enjoyed the base gameplay enough that I want to *play* that sequel (if it ends up getting made), but the story really disappointed.
During the course of the game, I had an interestingly evolving relationship with one specific sound effect, which I document here because of the game design insights involved. When semi-alert guards are watching you, there is an insistent beeping noise, which rises in frequency the more alert the guard is. At the beginning of the game, I found this to be incredibly annoying, intrusive, and useless. Also ubiquitous, as you have to travel through areas which are heavily seeded with guards. As I played more, I started to realize why (I thought) they had done it: to punish players for not using the game's stealth mechanic. But this was clearly a bad move, since a) moving slowly in stealth mode isn't generally fun, b) even during the beeping, the guards didn't usually become alerted, and c) running like a madman to escape alerted guards *is* fun.
Roughly halfway through the game, things gradually changed. It turns out that, in a fairly typical move, the designers had tuned down the reaction times of the guards for the early sections of the game, to allow players time to learn the systems in a less punishing environment. Once they turned those reactions back up to what the 'meat' of the game meant them to be, my reaction to the 'alert alarm' changed radically. Now, the noise *couldn't* be ubiquitous; whenever it happened, I either needed to go into stealth mode (which makes the beeping shut up), or *very* soon the guards would go into full combat mode (which also turns off the beeping). The insistent nature of the alarm was no longer annoying, but welcome, as it was a clear indicator that my state was going to change soon, one way or another. With all the game systems in place, stealth mode also becomes more interesting; there are more ways for it to fail, and more significant consequences *for* failure. You still don't want to spend lengthy periods in stealth mode, but the time you *do* spend in it is more suspenseful
So what's the takeaway lesson here? If your games scales in difficulty over time (as most do), then you need to make sure that your feedback mechanisms scale appropriately with them. When they made the early game more forgiving in terms of gameplay, they inadvertently made this one feedback element more punishing.
Later: Hm, seems it wasn't (just) a late / early thing; it was also a country / city thing. The alert mechanic doesn't work well when the player is on horseback. You *want* to gallop, but always alert guards when you do. I mistook the problem for an early/late one because the game allows for instant travel between 'known' cities, so by the end of the first act, you no longer have to travel by horse -- until one sequence shortly before the end, when you have to go somewhere new, and the alarm proves just as annoying as ever.
So here's the new takeaway lesson: when you have radically different gameplay modes, feedback that works well for one may not work for another, at least not without radical retuning.