So, it's out for the consoles, though you PC gamers may have to wait a while.
I was pretty excited about AC. I bought from Gamestop despite having the option of renting it from Gamefly. Here are my impressions:
It's a great game for capturing the childlike thrill of being the robber in a game of cops & robbers. Much of the excitement in AC is derived from the chase, which is a sharp contrast to most stealth-assassin games where once an alert is raised, you might as well reload your game. You can jump through merchant stands, get allies to harass your pursuers, dive into haystacks, hide in the crowd, and quickly access rooftops and make daring leaps down in order to make good your escape. This is not a platformer where you're expected to arrange your jumps carefully to avoid over or undershooting where you want to go (a la Crash Bandicoot). The game assumes that if you're jumping a gap, you aren't trying to leap to leap to your death (or, to put it a different way, the game assumes that sending players to their death because of over/undershooting isn't all that fun of a game element).
Combat is pretty fun, with some nifty weapon selections and combat techniques. You have to time your offensive maneuvers, either follwoing them up in sequence with when they strike, or timing them to counter your opponents' strikes. It works well, and it's nice to know your assassin can fight his way out of a bad situation.
The control scheme dovetails with one I'd thought of many years back. There's a head button for perception-based actions, a foot button for movement-based actions, a weapon-hand button for attacks, and an empty-hand button for grabbing things (including people, who you can bowl into others). Couple those buttons with another button that, based on whether or not it's depressed, dictates whether your action "low profile" (stealth-oriented) or "high-profile" (combat-oriented), and it's a pretty flexible scheme. It's worthy of imitation.
The most hotly-debated aspect of AC is the scheme for performing assassinations. The designers want you to prepare carefully an assassination, gathering intel on your target's base of operations, behavior patterns, affiliations, and so forth in order to plan out the perfect kill. Thus, you are required to perform at least two investigation tasks before the assassins' bureau will authorize an assassination (there are six available for each target).
There are a couple problems with this. The first is that many players don't see the value in doing the investigation tasks. They think they're just meeting a prerequisite in order to move forward, and ignore the information they gain as many D&D gamers igore the DM's reading of "boxed text". Once they've decided the payoff stinks, they re-evaluate the enjoyability of performing the task, and that's where the second problem comes in. Good game design dictates that once the player masters the basics, the gameplay should get deeper. Unfortunately, AC does not throw many curveballs. One eavesdropping or interrogation is pretty much like the next, and that's where the complaints of repetitiveness find ground.
Personally, I don't mind the investigations. Rather, I find that the great letdown was provided in the area of exploration. "Verticality" was the big buzz word with AC, with its promise of being to climb up on just about anything in sight. The game delivers on this promise in spades, offering up unparalleled new avenues for exploring the environment. But in all the jaw-dropping, people made one big erroneous assumption: that if they explored, there would be something worth finding. There isn't. No side quests, no power-ups, no unlockable bonus content. What do they offer? Flags. Lame-o, pointless flags that do nothing. It's a crying shame.
I was pretty excited about AC. I bought from Gamestop despite having the option of renting it from Gamefly. Here are my impressions:
It's a great game for capturing the childlike thrill of being the robber in a game of cops & robbers. Much of the excitement in AC is derived from the chase, which is a sharp contrast to most stealth-assassin games where once an alert is raised, you might as well reload your game. You can jump through merchant stands, get allies to harass your pursuers, dive into haystacks, hide in the crowd, and quickly access rooftops and make daring leaps down in order to make good your escape. This is not a platformer where you're expected to arrange your jumps carefully to avoid over or undershooting where you want to go (a la Crash Bandicoot). The game assumes that if you're jumping a gap, you aren't trying to leap to leap to your death (or, to put it a different way, the game assumes that sending players to their death because of over/undershooting isn't all that fun of a game element).
Combat is pretty fun, with some nifty weapon selections and combat techniques. You have to time your offensive maneuvers, either follwoing them up in sequence with when they strike, or timing them to counter your opponents' strikes. It works well, and it's nice to know your assassin can fight his way out of a bad situation.
The control scheme dovetails with one I'd thought of many years back. There's a head button for perception-based actions, a foot button for movement-based actions, a weapon-hand button for attacks, and an empty-hand button for grabbing things (including people, who you can bowl into others). Couple those buttons with another button that, based on whether or not it's depressed, dictates whether your action "low profile" (stealth-oriented) or "high-profile" (combat-oriented), and it's a pretty flexible scheme. It's worthy of imitation.
The most hotly-debated aspect of AC is the scheme for performing assassinations. The designers want you to prepare carefully an assassination, gathering intel on your target's base of operations, behavior patterns, affiliations, and so forth in order to plan out the perfect kill. Thus, you are required to perform at least two investigation tasks before the assassins' bureau will authorize an assassination (there are six available for each target).
There are a couple problems with this. The first is that many players don't see the value in doing the investigation tasks. They think they're just meeting a prerequisite in order to move forward, and ignore the information they gain as many D&D gamers igore the DM's reading of "boxed text". Once they've decided the payoff stinks, they re-evaluate the enjoyability of performing the task, and that's where the second problem comes in. Good game design dictates that once the player masters the basics, the gameplay should get deeper. Unfortunately, AC does not throw many curveballs. One eavesdropping or interrogation is pretty much like the next, and that's where the complaints of repetitiveness find ground.
Personally, I don't mind the investigations. Rather, I find that the great letdown was provided in the area of exploration. "Verticality" was the big buzz word with AC, with its promise of being to climb up on just about anything in sight. The game delivers on this promise in spades, offering up unparalleled new avenues for exploring the environment. But in all the jaw-dropping, people made one big erroneous assumption: that if they explored, there would be something worth finding. There isn't. No side quests, no power-ups, no unlockable bonus content. What do they offer? Flags. Lame-o, pointless flags that do nothing. It's a crying shame.
Last edited:
