I hate this game. I mean, I really fucking hate this game. I have not played a single game in recent memory that was as infuriating, as rage-inducing, as this steaming pile of shit. It has been years since I have felt the urge to throw a controller, but Assassin’s Creed pushes me to the brink with ease. How a series that has spanned numerous sequels and spin-offs ever sprouted from such a terrible, repetitive, clunky first attempt is beyond words.
I knew the original Assassin’s Creed was repetitive. I knew it was grindy. I knew the combat wasn’t amazing and the traversal was finicky. But none of my grinding through section after section of Acre, Jerusalem, and Damascus ever prepared me for the shit-fest that the compat would devolve to in the later stages of the game.
I’m speaking of course to the tried-and-true (but no less shitty) method of increasing the difficulty by merely increasing the frequency you have to fight, and the quantity of soldiers you encounter at once. By the time you’re unlocking the final areas of each major city, not even saving a citizen is a simple task, as confronting the group of three or four will no doubt alert every nearby guard within a hundred feet. This will quickly escalate from a group of four to a group of ten or eleven within a few seconds. Every, fucking, time. What was already becoming pretty repetitive because you’d done dozens of times already now takes twice as long because you have to murder an entire platoon of soldiers every time you cause an alert. Add to this the shitty canned animations that lock you into a combat system that, despite playing all the tutorials, never really seemed to do what I wanted it to. You can counter enemy attacks, but the game doesn’t seem to actually give the player the option of which counter to do. When you have a bunch of standard soldiers you need to quickly dispatch in order to get the bigger guys one-on-one, it’s pretty damn frustrating to keep punching them in the fucking stomach instead of running them through with your blade. The only option after that is to slice at them while they’re down, which is challenging because the fucking combat lock de-selects that enemy when they fall. So you’ll either swipe at them to finish them off, or swing wildly in another direction as the combat camera chooses someone else.
All of these frustrations came to a head in Memory Block 6 when I had to fight a group of Templars at a funeral. After what must have been at least 15 attempts, I finally was able to get the jump on the lead Templar, which can only be defeated using the assassin’s blade. The problem was whittling down the group of templars to only the boss, then counter-attacking to knock him down, then immediately switching to the assassin’s blade and attacking before he got up again. All of which the game doesn’t tell you is the only option. Swinging at him with your sword will only miss. Awesome design.
Finally defeating him revealed that he was a she, and not really the target I was after. So Altair let her go. Fucking wonderful. Altair kills every messenger and informant on the street without recourse, yet lets go the one person I really, really wanted to land a killing blow on? That’s fun. Thanks for the payoff, Ubisoft.
Fortunately, that was the most frustrating hump to get over. After that, the resulting battles were fairly easy. The final boss battle was laughably easy, but I’m actually thankful for it. I don’t know if I would’ve had it in me to grind through another frustrating fight.
The takeaway from this is that I can finally put this game to rest and move on to other games in the series. While I know the AC games continued to have their ups and downs, the fact that this first game is widely regarded as the worst holds a little bit of solace. It will probably take me the better part of the winter to make any decent headway in this particular backlog barbecue, but unless I can get a better job and actually afford new games, it’s what’s on my plate right now.
