I've Never Run

But once you hit the seventh mission, the timed stealth murder sprees become trial and error, simply hoping you can make your hits before some random guard bumps into you, forcing you to redo the entire mission. They're not long, but it's an irritant to repeat the same mini-mission over and over again. More disappointing, chances to explain why your target deserves to die are passed up for simple chatter. Each mini-mission's cut-scene is merely exposition, always telling instead of showing.

Missions in free-roaming, open-world games give the player a sense of direction, a sense of not being lost in the world. Ideally they help bring the player more fully into the world as well. Uncovering clues does none of that, with each mission of a given type being nearly identical to the ones before and the ones coming after, except for the flavor text. We actually got a deep, gotta-catch-them-all pleasure out of getting every clue, freeing every citizen, and really taking over a city's district, but these repetitive missions still come off as glorified collectables.

Once you actually go to kill your target, all those clues you've gathered are unlikely to help much. You'll either jump right in and kill every living thing in the target area or kill your target and sprint out, depending on your play style. You won't be waiting for a specific guard to pass because you've bribed him, sneaking in as an archer, or any of the other million things that could have been cool rewards for successfully investigating your target. You'll just go in, kill your mark, and leave.

Combat allows you to use your sword, throwing knives, assassin's blade, and fists to try to get through guards and the like. Combat revolves around rhythm, either attacking and then pressing attack again the moment the two blades make contact, or fighting defensively and hitting the counter-attack button at just the right moment. Both methods grant an instant kill with an amazing little kill animation as your reward.

Creed's animation system really pays off in combat, where you don't just get the usual canned animation sets. If an enemy is coming in right down his center line and you counter successfully, you'll see Altair actually dance around the blade and come inside it. Morale systems also come into play, letting you set up combinations like killing a guard captain to mop up his suddenly broken squad, or driving a particularly aggressive enemy away from a pack so that you can fling instant-kill throwing knives at the rest of your enemies.

I'll Never Hide

In theory, as the agile and quick Altair, you can make a kill, sprint to the rooftops, and (once you've broken the pursuit's line of site) hide in some pre-arranged point. Visiting local sync points marks these hiding spots as blue dots on your mini-map, whether they are rooftop gardens, quiet benches or bales of hay. The downer here is that there's no way to tell if you're running towards a rooftop garden (and safety) or an unreachable bench or bale of hay. Height markers would have made a huge difference.

The stealth points don't make a lot of sense, either. If we were chasing someone onto a rooftop and then lost him, we would take 10 seconds to push the curtains out of the way on the rooftop garden and see if he was in there. We also wouldn't, for example, keep trying to climb up a ladder if a man with a sword slashed our faces off every time we tried. The guard AI does its best to keep up, but the need for "stealth" spots that they pointedly ignore kills the illusion of Altair being competent. He's just got idiot enemies. Exploits like cutting down enemies as they come up a ladder, or simply hanging back while 30 guards surround you knowing they'll attack one, maybe two at a time, don't help matters.

As for Altair and the sci-fi trappings of the game, we're not going to spoil those for you. But remember the feeling of meeting Gordon Freeman in the beginning of Half-Life? This is the opposite feeling. It's possible that there would be some way to have a character who you can relate to less than Altair, but we're not sure how. His triumphs, his failures, his growing skill and self-understanding all play out like watching a puppet show.

Some tweaking of the story and presentation could have helped all that, but as it stands, we related more to our gun barrel in Halo multiplayer than we did to Altair, particularly since the actual creed of the assassins is utter and complete hypocrisy. The game largely justifies sending you out to murder men because the first tenet of the creed is to not kill innocents. But who decides that your targets -- or, for that matter, any guard unlucky enough to cross your blade -- are guilty? Well, not a jury of their peers.

We find ourselves drifting as we attempt to sum up Assassin's Creed, trying to cover the free-running, the fighting, the stealth, and the story itself. Unfortunately, this is symptomatic of Assassin's Creed; each element of the game sacrifices too much in order to squeeze other major elements in. Instead of a true stealth engine, you have awkward "hide spots" to accommodate the free roaming. Combat is either too easy or too hard, lacking the brilliance of a dedicated action title. And the free-roaming, bound as it is to mission objectives that would be fine in a more linear game, is just unsatisfying. Each element of the game is individually interesting, but as a whole the package feels incomplete and patchwork more than innovative. With Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft has tried to jump start its next monster franchise. Unfortunately, what it's ended up with is a Frankenstein: powerful and wondrous to behold, but not quite what it was aiming for.