Assassin's Creed overview

 

Assassin’s Creed, what an absolute travesty of a franchise. It all started off so well with the first instalment putting the player in the shoes a medieval Assassin, and I think the capitalization on that word is correct because this is the actually historical Order of Assassins of the crusader times. The plot wasn’t much in Assassin’s Creed 1 but the game was more focused on the gameplay, where you explore a medieval crusader city, gather information about your target, and carefully assassinate your target. There was some underlying plot-line regarding a powerful weapon of some ancient and advanced civilisation, but does anyone really care? No, it’s just a through line to connect your 9 assassination missions throughout the game.

As perfectly fine and serviceable the AC game was, I’ve never found myself able to complete it for a second time, because the game is fairly repetitive with your pre-assassination information-gathering activities limited to eavesdropping, pick-pocketing, and beating the shit out of people for information, which can get a bit laborious after the first 3 or 4 missions. But any complaints you could lobby against the AC 1 was addressed in the follow-up, aptly named Assassin’s Creed 2.

Assassin’s Creed 2 took the player from the Crusades to Renaissance Italy, in the shoes of some poncy Italian rich teenager living a life of idyllic wholesomeness running errands with his mother, making important deliveries for his father, collecting feathers for his weird little brother, doing parkour with his older brother, beating the shit out of his sister’s cheating boyfriend, and of course fucking his neighbour’s daughter. Unfortunately one morning, one of his delivery missions for his father gets his father and brothers executed by a long-time family friend for some made-up charge, no doubt and Ezio (oh, yeah, that’s your name in this game, should have mentioned that earlier) finds himself embroiled in an ancient secret conflict between the ancient order of Templars and Assassins, the latter of which your family is revealed to be involved in.

One of advantages plot-wise of AC2 over AC1 is that AC2 is a personal story of Ezio’s vengeance for his families’ misfortune, while Altair (that’s the guy from the first game, I seem to be really bad with names today) was just given a bunch of missions to do. None of Altair’s missions mean anything to him personally, except perhaps in regaining a sense of honour after getting another assassin killed, whereas with Ezio, his family have just been torn apart by the Templars and the story is more about getting revenge than anything else.

The series continued with the story of Ezio in the third instalment, Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood, which is more of the same from Assassin’s Creed 2, so there’s not much to talk about. The fat man you beat up at the end of the AC2 is still around and now his incestuous children are getting into the Templar-Assassin conflict as well. ACB used to be my favourite Assassin’s Creed game, and probably still is but I just don’t really think much about this series anymore. It was my favourite, mainly because it takes place in a single city and feels more contained that the AC2, although AC2 does have the more interesting assassination missions as you slowly unravel a web of conspiracy, while in ACB, your first assassination missions has you kill some random executioner because he was being mean to some grieving passer-by. What an inspiring story.

Assassin’s Creed: Revelations came next and, in my opinion, is when the series started plummeting downhill fast. Revelations is about... actually, what the fuck is it about? Breaking into a library? That’s more or less all I can remember. It does delve into the history of the Assassin Order a little, but mainly regarding what happened to Altair after the end of the first game, and there not really much to talk about there. No great secret is revealed, or at least none that are worth remembering.

After Revelations, came Assassin’s Creed 5 which was called Assassin’s Creed 3, Ubisoft not understanding how numbers work. I do hate it when companies start fucking with the numbering of sequels, because Brotherhood and Revelations are main entries in the series; they carry on that other plot that I conspicuously haven’t mentioned yet through from Assassin’s Creed 2 to Assassin’s Creed 3; but the 5^th main entry in the series is called Assassin’s Creed 3? That doesn’t make any sense!!

Anyway, Assassin’s Creed 3 is the one that made me abandon the franchise, because it was even more boring than Revelations was. I remember Benjamin Franklin turning up in such a way that said “This game would now like to introduce to your the famous historical figure Benjamin Franklin”, but other than that all I remember is training to be an Assassin... in the fifth game of the series. I spent hours at these fucking training missions when I had already gone through 4 games of being a master Assassin. This bored me so much that I didn’t finish it. I just didn’t care anymore. Revelations had bored me as well, but at least I managed to drag myself to the finish point of that game, but AC3? There was no chance.

After that came Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag which I heard was actually really good, but I wasn’t going to be suckered into the series again, and seeing as the new found good-ness was dropped for the next game, I saw no reason to pick it up until recently. After Black Flag came Rogue, which I’m not sure if we count it as a main game, but whatever; then came Unity, and then Syndicate, then some cheap shitty 2d games or something like that, then Origins, and finally Odyssey; and apparently there’s a Viking based game coming out soon. I’ve heard that all of these (apart from the 2D ones) are all just more of the same: a big sandbox map with a dull story, and a fuck-ton of...

...oh, fuck, I forgot about the collectables in these fucking games, that was fucking nuts. Starting all the way back in the good one, AC2, the shear amount of collectables in this franchise is almost suffocating. Actually, there were about 600 flags for you to collect in the first game, but you could probably get through to the very end without even noticing because the game doesn’t seem to care either. But in AC2, now there’s feathers to collect, animus sequences to solve, treasure chests to loot, house upgrades to purchase, Assassin seals to find, codex pages to discover and all that again plus a whole lot more for every successive entry in the series. With all this garbage littering the game maps, the word “suffocating” becomes an understatement.

On to the thing that actually inspired this article, which I hinted at a paragraph and a half ago, I recently decided to give Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag a try. I heard that you play a pirate in this game and the bulk of the gameplay is pirating with ship combat. And for what it’s worth, that part of the game is really good fun. Unfortunately the interesting pirate game in Chimera’d (“Chimera” should have a verb form, so I’m inventing it) into an Assassin’s Creed game. The ship combat is fun, even going ashore can be fun if the activities involved are pirate related, such as the bit early on where you clamber over an island into a small cove in order to steal an enormous Spanish galleon was a tremendous amount of fun. But wondering around Havana playing Assassin’s Creed is really, really boring and just not fun in the slightest. During the entire Havana part, all I could think was “When am I gonna get to go back to my ship and do some more ship-combat.

To conclude my mini-review of Black Flag I would say that it’s overrated for what it is. It’s true that there is a really fun game in there but at its core it still wants to be a boring Assassin’s Creed game and not a fun pirate-themed adventure game. If Ubisoft had deciding not to make another Assassin’s Creed game but instead have Monkey Island: the Action-Adventure, but not called it Monkey Island (obviously), then yes, it would have been a fun game.

Now, I’ve been talking about the Assassin’s Creed series for over two pages now, without even mentioning one of the most significant parts, and it’s a part that should have been left on the cutting room floor. I’ve made a lot of complaints against this series over the course of this article, but I would forgive everything, everything, if they would just drop the fucking future plot. Every game in this fucking series is has the framing device of some gormless dork in the near future reliving the memories of an ancestor housed in their own DNA; and it is soooooooo dull. It’s one of the things that actually made me quite Black Flag in the end, because my exciting pirate-adventure was interrupted by some future plot narrative about some cunt I didn’t care about doing some cunty thing I didn’t care about that ultimately put me into a coma.