Assassin's Creed

So after reading the reviews and watching Gabe vigorously defend it and actually talking to people who've played it, I finally got to spend a few minutes with it. Jon had been playing it for a while and he knew I was excited about it. And, though he seems far more disillusioned with it than I, we came to a similar conclusion: it's Spider-Man 2: The Video Game. Huge, expansive, meticulously detailed areas with plenty to explore and all kinds of awesome moves to pull off as you're making your way from rooftop to rooftop, but very little meat beyond the initially fantastic experience. It's hard to put into words just how well the game handles, just how beautiful and full of life the city is, just how lifelike the most minuscule detail is. But in this expertly crafted world -- a testament to what good game design can accomplish -- there just isn't anything to do. Granted, I haven't played any of the main story, but I've come to believe the reviews calling it repetitive.

Spider-Man 2 was the same: a huge, living city for you to go berserk with the revolutionary web-swinging gameplay in, but an awful story and boring, repetitive sandbox missions. I figure that Assassin's Creed should be played in the same way I play Spider-Man 2: play it until you get bored, then put it down for a couple of months before picking it up again, by which time the experience will be refreshed. This solution doesn't excuse the lack of content -- but everything else about the game does.

Ironically, this week also saw me partaking in a real-life game of Assassin. Funny how these things work out, huh? I held out for two and a half days before being stabbed in the back by a close friend. Needless to say ... I can't call him that anymore.