Because sneaking is your best weapon in Assassin’s Creed you will need to use the crowd and the city to your advantage. As many have seen in the videos the crowd system in the game is a beast upon itself. Altair can use the crowd to hide in but the crowd will also call him out if he is spotted on top of a building or get in the way when running away from a sentry guard. The best thing to do is usually take a higher route when running from an enemy, try to avoid the crowded streets if at all possible. While it doesn’t work as well as the PR folks originally promised it does show some pretty intuitive ideas and can help Altair out of a jam. The real masterpiece comes in the city itself because every wall can be climbed and every roof able to be crossed. Even though the control scheme takes a lot of getting used to once it is mastered climbing to the tip tops of the city will come with ease and running across rooftops or rafters will be a piece of cake. Some of the achievements will take you to corners of the map otherwise thought impossible to get to but with a little brainwork and determination anything is possible. The developers were able to build a system that allows Altair to practically grab onto anything and use it as a stepping-stone. This means at any point in the game turning towards a random wall and scaling up thousands of feet is a real possibility.
There are a few viewpoints that everyone who plays this game needs to find just to see the beauty that is Assassin’s Creed and the hidden unlockables could fill up an entire page. The cities are huge in their scale and every single inch can be explored. If you can see it than you can go there and touch it. This is one of the best parts about the game as I spent most of my time doing this, not doing the repetitive gameplay stuff that the developers wanted me to waste my time with. Almost all of this running and climbing is done automatically and the only thing the player needs to do is hold down a specific button. There were moments in the game that I really enjoyed Altair handling like a race car but most of the time I was wishing for a much more conventional route. I have always been one for innovation but only if it works, in Assassin’s Creed it doesn’t work out as much as it does. When you’re not sneaking around, or if you happen to get spotted you have a choice of either running or fighting. Because both involve a somewhat awkward control scheme I advise you just do what you think is best. The fighting system is one of the few high points in the game and you will do plenty of it throughout the 8 or so hours of gameplay. It is obvious the developers are more fans of the old-school style fighting than the new-school Jet Li way. The entire fighting system in Assassin’s Creed is based around a parry and attack technique that if mastered can be used to slay multiple enemies with insanely cool effects.
Back in the day (when Assassin’s Creed takes place) good soldiers knew how to parry, defend, and then counter-attack their enemies. This is how fighting works in the game and it works very well. No longer will a few button mashes win a fight, most of the time sword fights will take a few minutes and involve a lot of blocking then attacking. The system works well and it is nice to see the developers stay true to the time period of the game. Unfortunately like the rest of the game the fighting system also gets very repetitive and “wash, rinse, and repeat”. Towards the end of the game I found myself running away from fights just to skip the process, call me a chicken but it saved me much frustration. Gamers that are brave enough to stay and face the battles, and perfect their fighting technique, will be rewarded with new moves and combos. Altair uses a sword and daggers to complete the normal fighting while using his famous “hand knife” to actually perform the final assassination. Even though each different target is different it all feels the same, like I was replaying the same first chapter over and over again only with different textures and characters. The horse riding parts of the game are very enjoyable and help to explore the mass environments, which are what gives Assassin’s Creed any weight as a good game at all.
