SPOILER-SAFE GUARANTEE: No plot points were harmed in the making of this review.

On a technical level there was nothing wrong with Assassin’s Creed. As a germinal set of ideas there was nothing wrong with Assassin’s Creed. In terms of repetitiousness and stupendously bizarre rules of play, there was quite a lot wrong with Assassin’s Creed. Dozens of nonsensical niggles in fact: the gallop button that gets you chased down and summarily executed by Jerusalem five-0, the lunatics that barge you to the floor in the city streets for no purpose other than to frustrate, the need to spend ten minutes running down from the top of a mountain at the beginning of every mission, the amazing super assassin parkour powers that were shared by every lowly guard in the world. The list goes on, and feeling like a deaf burglar at his hearing, none of it made a whole lot of sense to us.

You’ve already looked at the score. You already know that we think this game is brilliant. So before we get into the good stuff, let’s square away the whinging. There is still one – special emphasis to be placed on the next two words – very minor gameplay element whose inclusion is beyond our comprehension. A facet to the gameplay that is a little, well – for want of a better word – French. Bards. They act in place of the aforementioned lunatics and deliberately place themselves in your path. Even adjusting your course sees them whip around the side of you and block your way whichever direction you face, strumming away on their lyres without a care in the world, as if this is the kind of behaviour that’s not going to hurt the gameplay.

After failing to circumvent them, we began stabbing them on sight; a move which quickly led to us losing synchronisation because, historically speaking, Ezio didn’t kill innocents, even though there is nothing innocent about these trite little bastards. Switching our tack to punching them in the face seemed to solve the problem at some cost to our notoriety – a line of sight system which works similarly to GTA IV’s. Their inclusion in the game serves no purpose other than as a nuisance to the player, for which reason we find them entirely baffling. But, minor gripes are exactly that, and this one is King Canute before an unstoppable tide of goodly gaming.

As you will no doubt know if you’ve followed the game’s development with any interest, you fill the shoes of one Ezio Auditore di Firenze; a loveable rogue chiselled from the same block as the most recent Prince Of Persia, albeit delivering the kind of caricatured Italian accent usually reserved for foam puppets who sell pasta sauce. The early sensation that you’re playing a renaissance-skinned version of Aladdin quickly drains away, however, as Ezio sets about fighting, killing, and philandering. But for reasons we won’t reveal, the mood changes dramatically over the first couple of hours as he’s unavoidably sucked into the life of an assassin and set on the path to revenge.

… continued