Assassins Creed is many things; a stunning game engine that's a pleasure to look at, an adventure through historically accurate recreations of medieval cities, a complex yet easy to master free-running game, a 'stealth' adventure, an open-world game where you can go anywhere at any time, a digital slice of countryside which you can leisurely ride your horse through gazing at it's glorious vistas, a social stealth game where you can blend into crowds of NPCs, a brutally violent sword fighting simulator, a hand-to-hand combat simulator, a story driven by a huge overarching conspiracy theory that needs unravelling before time runs out, and an assassination game where you must use all your available unlocked skills and equipment to take out your target.
The game engine is indeed a glorious thing to behold; cities feel like actual places, brought to life by crowds of NPCs full of complex architecture which you can scale and use as vantage points to plan you next mission. Cities where you can see the dirt baked into the textures that give a sense of weighting and place. Cities where restricted areas at truly dangerous if a patrolling guard notices you being somewhere you shouldn't be and and decides to confront you (a guard who could be dangerous despite your vast arsenal of deadly weaponry). Cities where the post-processed-colour-filters give a completely different feel to each of them, from golden-green soft and warm hues give way to muted grey-blue oppressive tones.
But the thing that amazed me the most about this title (other than having a specific button which when pressed made your horse rear up on it's hind legs which was great, but had no in-game effect at all) is the fluid animation and the control you had over Altaïr.
The genuine WOW moment came when I miss timed a jump between buildings and fell through the air, only to land (painfully) on a small stone column between spiked metal fences. This column was around 7ft tall, but in a restricted area. A wandering guard decided to investigate the noise and called out to me questioning what I was doing and why I was on top of a wall I had no business being on. I targeted him with my controller and selected my hidden blade. A single button press had Altaïr launching from the column to carry out and Ariel Assassination move, where he uses the victims body to break his landing whilst thrusting his hidden blade into his neck meaning instant death. The WOW moment didn't come from me instigating this move, or watching it play out, it came from the fact that I had landed on a seeming duff, nondescript piece of level architecture that I probably shouldn't have been able to even get to, but the game, with it's fluidity of movement STILL allowed my to make this brutal jump and resulting kill. It's at this point I took a step back and admired what Ubisoft had managed to create...
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