Assassin’s Creed

Reviewed on: Xbox 360 Also on: PS3, PC

History Lesson

Assassin’s Creed is like a well-intentioned, meticulously prepared, enthusiastic college essay gone slightly awry. If the topic of the essay is the Crusades, the students are Ubisoft Montreal. This team’s latest effort has been handed in right before deadline and any history professor will come to the conclusion that the essay is rushed, lacks a strong focused direction, has a few glaring spelling and grammatical errors and is rather repetitive in parts. However, a prof’s intuition would twig that a great deal of preparation, effort and interest in the subject matter has gone into the essay and marks the paper up proportionately. A B+ for the usual A grade student.

Ubisoft Montreal appears to have spent the majority of their efforts on preparation and come deadline time they didn’t have enough invested in the actual content.

History Repeating

The Assassin’s Creed team has admirably created a startling well-realized depiction of the Holy Lands circa 1191, the time of the Third Crusade. The three cities of Damascus, Acre and Jerusalem along with the surrounding Kingdom are a joy to behold and it’s quite obvious that the games artists and designers went to great lengths to immerse the player in their surroundings.

While the ground level is populated by believable crowded city scenes, the rooftops and beyond provide stunning views of the sprawling cities below. One of the greatest thrills of the game is to climb to the very top of a mammoth cathedral to get an eagle eye view of the city and surrounding countryside. Rather than slowly climbing down again you can thankfully take death defying leaps of faith into bundles of straw below you. These viewpoints are cleverly placed into the game as the player needs to climb the majority of them to find the points of interest.

Assassin’s Creed suffers however from a case of style over substance. While the game world’s surroundings are truly exceptional and standard setting for the industry, the game play content is underwhelming at times. While it is fun to climb around the cities at first it gets a bit repetitive by the tail end of the game and you find yourself rushing from one viewpoint to the other to get it over and done with.

What’s worse is the collection of information on your nine assassination targets, which is pretty much the same process for all of them. These missions range from pick-pocketing, listening in on conversations, to doing favours for fellow assassins. Most of the information they give you never seems to genuinely benefit you in your assassination attempt and leaves you with the impression that you’re doing these tasks because the game forces you to rather than for a narrative advancement. A choice in being able to construct your own assassination strategy would have been infinitely more rewarding. It’s these aspects of the game that give the strongest impression that most of the development time was spent creating the game’s world while the gameplay mechanics were hurriedly put into place as time ran out.

Shakin’ That Ass-assin

Once you successfully take out your target you face the wrath of the city guards. You can either choose to fight or flee across the city from them.

Choosing to fight brings up the game’s combat sequences which are fairly basic and you’ll soon get the hang of them. The combat is fairly average and pales in comparison to games such as Nintendo’s Zelda series. Locking on to your enemies is not without its problems and a tendency to button mash can see you through to victory.

If you decide to run then the guards will vehemently chase you on ground and on rooftops. The A.I. can prove bemusing in these instances as guards can spot you from ground level metres away running across rooftops, yet they can’t seem to figure out that you may be hiding in the curtain veiled huts conveniently placed around the cities’ rooftops. They will amusingly jump to their deaths from high in an attempt to apprehend you, while they are oblivious to your presence when in disguise with the scholars.

Other issues with A.I. crop up with glitches causing some civilians to continuously walk into walls, while I’ve even fought guards hovering in mid-air!

Kid's got potential

This review might seem overly critical of a generally well received game, yet it is due more to the disappointment in what clearly could have been a tighter and more accomplished experience, than it being a poor game. It didn’t live up to its full potential, yet there is still much to admire. The sound design employed is top class. The music perfectly complements the Middle Eastern setting and dynamically shifts through the various cut scenes and set pieces within the game. The sound effects are spot on in creating the atmosphere of the countryside and cities, while the voice acting is generally of a very high standard.

The setting and storyline exceeds the usual videogame presentations and I for one enjoyed the Crusade and futuristic settings. The plot has a Dan Brown secret societies slant to it and it serves the setting well.

To recall that disappointing history essay, what begins as a great read soon loses focus and ends up being repetitive and underdeveloped. Strictly speaking for the game, there’s enough in place to keep you going to the end and give you faith in the potential of an inevitable sequel that will smooth over the flaws and entertain more evolved gameplay. Despite the games underachievement, it is still heartily recommended as a must play experience and a startling showcase of next gen technology.

Cian.

P.S. Isn't Jade lovely.

CGI resident evil movie: First Trailer

RESIDENT EVIL DEGENERATION TRAILER
Uploaded by PANZERDRAKO

Produced by Capcom themselves, so it's doubtfull to be as big a cock-up as
the Paul Anderson movies.

Resident Evil-Umbrella Chronicles & zapper review

Being a huge fan of both the Resident Evil series and arcade style lightgun shooters such as the House of the Dead, Umbrella Chronicles is a game that I have been anticipating for quite a bit. Much of this anticipation was tinged with the fear that the game could potentially be terrible (see capcoms tragic previous resident evil lightgun efforts, dead aim and the complete cack that is Resident Evil survivor), so its great to announce the game is somewhat of a triumph.

Firstly, its long, offering around eight hours gameplay to see it through the main story (which is alot for a genre that can traditionally be rather shallow) add to this the alternative routes through the levels, secret files to unlock and customizable weaponry and the great co-op and you have a game that offers alot of replay value.

The game one of the first to offer support for the Wii zapper, which a welcome addition to the Wii's expansive list of peripheral's. despite nintendo's intentions of ensuring it bears no resemblance to a real gun, its comfortable to use and adds to the gameplay rather than hindering it. The Zapper itself takes a bit of getting used to if switching from remote and nunchuk controls as the button layout is different. Another negative point is the incredibly shoddy clip which holds the nunchuck in place as its easily broken. Though its hard to complain when the zapper itself is bundled with the tremendous Link's crossbow training

Resident Evil: the Umbrella Chronicles: 8/10

Wii Zapper & Crossbow training: 7.5/10

The Week in Videogames

Mario Kart stage announced in smash brothers brawl. Is there anything this game wont have.
In a week where it seems like Manhunt 2 is a little closer to a european launch, it seems No more Hero's is going to feature black pixels insted of full on blood and decapitions in our shoddy region. Another win for the Daily Mail brigade.

Pokemon Snap arrives on the virtual console so you can relive its whole hour of gameplay all over agin.

Halo 3- shifting opinions

Ok, my first blog post, and my first review. The topic? The first game or movie to gross $300m in it's first weekend, Halo 3.
When i had first intended to review this game about two weeks ago, being the kind of ratings-obsessed person that i am, i was thinking i'd give it at least a 9; possibly not one the all-time greats like ocarina of time or deus ex, but not very far off either. The second game i played on a 56" hd-ready tv, i was initially blown away by it's beauty, especially in 1 player w/o the split-screen (tho the player models were a bit less impressive than the scenary, which, bar the slightly jaggy edges, was magnificient).
In addition, the a couple of problems that annoyed me so much when playing the first two games seem to have been fixed. Firstly, masterchief (a stupid name, but it's too late to fix that) can now turn his head faster than the average pensioner. In previous installments, the look sensitivity had to be maxed out to make things bearable. One thing that previously couldn't be fixed, was the zimmer-frame speed at which masterchief ran. Thankfully, masterchief now moves faster than a one-legged OAP.
Here's my theory for the more youthful masterchief: cloning. "Spartans" (the space-marine type uber-soldier which masterchief is one of) are cloned on earth and shipped off to the battlefield in sub-light speed ships. Thus, by the time he reached the settings of the first 2 games, masterchief was almost 100 and kept alive by his biohazard suit's built-in life support (i wonder what happens if he needs to use the toilet mid-mission.... probably some sort of hatch). Of course, the third game is on earth, some no shipping was necessary, so the Spartan in Halo 3 is still young.

Another huge improvement was the fact that the 360's controller is much more logically designed and user-friendly than the hideous controller used for the first xbox (especially the original behemoth). The fact that i played the game shortly after trying the rather disappointingly monotonous Dead Rising didn't do my opinion of the game any harm either.

With all these improvements made it possible for me to fully appreciate all the features that, on paper at least, made the first two games sound like a lot of fun; the co-op mode, the numerous and varied guns and grenad, the tanks, jeeps and hovercopter-things and the larges set-piece battles with an impressive number of allies.

Since then, two weeks have passed, and the fact that there's only ten hours of play in the normal difficulty setting means has meant that it gets a bit repetitive after a while, though changing the difficulty does spice things up quite a bit, so it still highly replayable, though i found the levels featuring the endless hordes of The Flood to be, for the most part, mindnumbingly boring and dull enough the first time round.
Overall though, it's still a very entertaining game, so I'm thinking 7 1/2- 8 out of 10, so let's say 7.75/10 :) .

uncensored kills from Manhunt 2

I cant see why it was banned.