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| From: UBI Soft
List Price: $29.99
Buy Used: $12.85
You Save: $17.14 (57%)
New (42) Used (70) from $12.85
Rating:  231 reviews
Sales Rank: 256
Platform: Xbox 360
Genre: Action Games
ESRB: Mature
Media: Video Game
Edition: Standard
Autographed: No
Memorabilia: No
Batteries Included: No
Age: 17 - 20 years
Operating System: Xbox 360
Shipping Weight (lbs): 3
Dimensions (in): 0.1 x 0.1 x 0
MPN: 52339
UPC: 008888523390
EAN: 0008888523390
ASIN: B000P46NMK
Release Date: November 13, 2007
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Shipping: Expedited shipping available
Condition: Complete with original disc(s), case, and manual. In stock and ships right now!
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 26-30 of 231
 Cool graphics hide terrible plot January 22, 2008
Melissa E. Ohmstede
6 out of 14 found this review helpful
I beat this game in like 10 hours. Not including the brutally two hour long tutorial. Your first mission is cool, but when you realize you only got like 8 more and they are just like it, it's a huge letdown. This whole game was a huge letdown. Side missions are the same, and boring. And the big plot twist is obvious from the opening scene. So I turned around and sold it to make my most of my money back, instead of waiting to spend more money when they release downloads. Don't buy this game, it's a waste of money. Rent it, cause it can be fun, but you can beat over the weekend and return it.
Not a buyer in my opinion March 23, 2008
Z. Hunter (CA)
6 out of 8 found this review helpful
I bought this game a long time ago and put the disc in my Xbox 360 thinking I would enjoy it. After a week or so, it became so repetitive and linear that I got tired of playing it and sold it for $30 to my brother who has moved out. After a while he wanted to give it back because he didn't like it either, and I just got it back today from him and put it in to see if I would like it if I played it over again. I didn't. Like I said, the gameplay is too repetitive and the quests are the same every time: assassinate, save a citizen being bullied by guards, pickpocket to get throwing knives, and interrogate people which means just hitting them until they tell you the information. And you spend your free time only jumping from building to building and occasionally killing guards. You can get away effortlessly, just climb a building and hide in a roof garden or a haystack on the ground. Not to mention the difficulty for this game is incredibly easy, you can take on as many as 30 guards and not die. If they made it so it had quests and side quests like Elder Scrolls IV Oblivion, I would like it much more because those quests were so different and fun, they keep you occupied and entertained. Ubisoft kind of ruined this game, I've anticipated it far before it was released and am disappointed. Not to sound disrespectful, but they focused too much on making the outstanding graphics that they didn't include much of the fun factor in it.
I've been trying to play it again and get the achievements for my 360, that is the only thing keeping me motivated.
 Assassins Deja Vu April 27, 2008
Robert Mobbs (Toronto, ON, Canada)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
Assassins Creed is, to flip a common phrase, five pounds of gameplay in a ten-pound sack. It has been repeatedly criticized for being repetitive but its repetitive nature is simply a facet of how its small amount of content contrasts with the grand stage on which it is presented. This isn't too surprising as it's the most common problem with 'open world' games. It's also the general result of people cashing in on a trend.
Do you remember lens flare? When lens flare was the big gimmick, everybody just had to have it. Sometimes they wanted you to notice their great lens flare so bad that they'd literally blind you with it. They even did it in first person. Disregarding the fact that the human eye doesn't lens flare like a camera, the problem with the lens flare fad was that it was a checkbox feature that hindered the gameplay.
The same problem can be seen with a lot of open-world games, like Burnout and Assassins Creed. In AC the open world is more often a burden than a blessing. You will spend more time getting to your mission area than doing your mission. And that time will not be fun.
You are given two choices in AC: either travel slowly and discreetly so as not to alert bad guys, or run. Walking is not a real option. You would never get anywhere. So you have to run but it still takes forever, made worse by the fact that you have to keep the right trigger down the whole time.
For some reason running tends to tick off soldiers. This is another source of aggravation in AC as the soldiers, all wearing full body armor while you wear a tunic, all run faster than you. They run almost as fast, on foot, as a horse in full gallop. Even more hilariously they will follow your acrobatic moves step-for-step. Makes you feel a little less special.
You can choose to fight them, but fighting is pretty much button-mashing. The best move is to wait for their attack and counter as it's usually an insta-kill. Once you get the patterns down it's hard to lose a fight.
That's another issue. You're supposed to be an assassin, not a T-1000. There's no incentive to be stealthy and sneak. And that's probably good, because really there's no way to be stealthy and sneak. You can just 'blend' with the crowd and walk in a praying pose. But there's no crawl. No corner peek. The game doesn't feel stealthy at all.
What stealth is present is auto-pilot. Press the button to sneak in to the fortified building through the front door in the middle of a group of guys all dressed differently from you. Push towards the bench to hide in plain sight from your pursuers. Dive into a bale of hay.
That's really the biggest problem with the game: that it never makes you feel like an assassin. I felt like a mass murderer, like a killer robot sent back in time with but one purpose: to do the same mini-missions over and over again.
Even with all the mentions I don't feel enough has been made of the repetition. It will drive you bonkers. It's not a matter of 'ADD' gamer versus 'patient' gamer. It's just the same five or six things over and over. In every area you have to climb some towers, pickpocket a guy, beat a guy to get information, eavesdrop, save some civilians, and off some figurehead. Over and over.
And the payoffs are always the same. The towers are all from the same small set of geometry. The pickpocket is just a follow-and-button-press, you get the item and the guy looks right at you and asks "Who did that?" and runs away. To interrogate you punch the guy a few times and he tells you another name, then you kill him. Eavesdropping just requires you to sit on the bench and look at the two guys who will wait forever for you to do just that, and you hear the conversation. The civilians will be harassed over and over with the same dialogue until you save them, at which point they'll repeat one of three 'thank you' speeches.
The assassinations themselves are incredibly lame. It is rarely an issue to get near the target, except for being pushed around by those idiotic grunting shirtless guys (seriously), and when you kill the target you and he soul clutch for like ten minutes while he tells you his boring life story.
Tying it all together is a wet paper bag of a story that has you randomly popping out of the real game to wander pointlessly around a futuristic lab and hear sophomoric dystopian-authoritarian speeches from some scientist gasbag. In this part of the game you will do exciting things like sleep! and listen to irrelevant conversation through your bedroom wall! and so on. The sad thing is that at times it's a welcome respite from the game-world story which is the most long-winded, overbearing, and pointless series of lectures and diatribes I've yet to see in a video game. And that says a lot, because I played Metal Gear Solid 3.
Whenever someone tries to tell me that games are just like great literature, I want to strap them down Clockwork Orange style and make them play games like Assassins Creed. Not everything works in every medium. That's why there was no Tom Bombadil singing his stupid song in the Lord of the Rings movies. You have to learn how to make something work in the medium in which you present it, or have the grace to leave it out.
The writers of Assassins Creed must have been paid by the word. The story is delivered in massive concrete blocks of thudding dialog and pretentious speechifying. And for each chunk you are locked in a little pen, only able to slightly move the camera, spin in a circle, and/or occasionally change the POV.
The game is also a little buggy and very unpolished in random areas. Things got off to a bad start for me in the first cutscene, in which for some reason one of the actors kept bouncing up and down while standing on flat ground and speaking. Animations and the camera routinely clip through objects. The camera constantly gets obstructed during key moments, particularly in fights. Altair and his horse have weird motion bugs that cause them to jitter on objects or teleport short distances. Your stays in 'the construct' can be incredibly long or very short, both of which have problems. The long stays are boring because you have nothing to do - it's just an empty room. The short stays result in the audio tips being cut off midway, right after the intriguing proposition, such as "In large fights where you are dying repeatedly, to win you can ..." and then the level finishes loading.
The controls are a little complex, but that's easy to master. What hurts is that they're spotty. Sometimes you'll end up bouncing off a wall to your death. I've jumped to my death off 'leap of faith' perches by accident, which is supposed to be impossible. And too many common items are modular - requiring the triggers to be down - resulting in hand-cramping sessions of gameplay. If developers are going to keep requiring triggers to be depressed the triggers have to have a lock position, like a gas nozzle.
So overall I can't say it's a bad game. It's just repetitive, dull, and easy, with a control scheme that fatigues your hands and a story that fatigues the rest of you. Now I understand why there are so many used copies available at every game store. There's just not enough game there.
More Anti-Religious Garbage November 21, 2007
J. Crismore (Fishers, IN United States)
5 out of 18 found this review helpful
It was fun for the first few missions. There are several problems with this game. First, it is not truly a freedom of movement game like Oblivion or Grand Theft Auto. The story really follows linear missions and deviating from them really isn't any fun. Second, there are odd cuts in the graphics that are both intentional and unintentional. Movement on horse looks incorrect, some jumps are obviously missed, but the game moves your character so you make the jump, and some fight scenes (such as when countering a grab) have an odd cut very much in the flavor of Dirk the Daring in the old Dragon's Lair game.
The fourth problem is the most obvious and the one I have the most issue with. The story line become very anti-religious quickly. Regardless of the warning at the beginning of the game that it was created by a cross-religious team of experts, I believe the game follows an athiestic evangelistic path.
I was very dissatisfied with the gameplay, but the added storyline agenda just made me angry with my purchase.
Fun but a little Overhyped November 24, 2007
Mkapa (Cleveland, OH)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Assassin's Creed is a pretty good game with minor flaws. Of course im not saying that this is a bad game, it's just that i expected more from this game
First of all, the game has a really deep story. At first i thought the entire game was going to take place in Crusader Jerusalem. Instead, the game has sort of a Matrix like story in which you switch between Desmond in the modern world, and Assassin Altair in 12th century Jerusalem (Desmond's ancestor). The entire plot of the game revolves around these two people. A team Scientist who kidnapped Desmond are trying to find something about Altair's past. So they invited this machine that allows them to look into his ancestor's memories. You really can't do much while playing Desmond, almost all of the games action takes place with Altair and Desmond is just for story purposes.
The graphics are a huge selling point for this game. The detail of each city is great..as they all seem to have a separate personality and architecture. Climbing a tower for the first time gives you the impression of just how small you are in this massive world. The dream like feeling and glitches of the adamus machine also add to the games depth
Music and sound are also great. I love the prayers in the background. As well as the gasp of passersby as you push a dead body off of a roof. Just about every citizen you pass will react to you in some way. Some will beg for coins while others will threaten you.
Gameplay is what ended up hurting this game. Fighting in this game is basically just button mashing. The AI will block just about every one of your blows, and only die after repeated button mashing. You later learn the ability to do counter attacks. These attacks allow for one hit kills. Although cool looking, it makes for an easy fight. Fighting large groups of enemies is somewhat frustrated, as each time Altair gets hit, he stumbles around like a drunk. It's probably better to run and hide then fight enemies in later stages. This can be accomplish by hiding in a hey stack (which for some reason seems to be conveniently stacked everywhere!) or by dodging into ally ways. Speaking of running, Altair never gets tired of running. You can spirit 100% of the time and except for tripping every once awhile never have to worry about guards catching up to you. It's extremely unbalanced in terms of AI vs player. You won't die much in early stages of the game.
The missions themselves are also somewhat of a disappointment. Besides your standard assassin missions, their are side quest you can do to help win the support of local citizens. What i hate about this, is the fact that in every city it's the same quest with the same rewards. Every city has a viewpoint quest (in which you climb to towers and look around), and save citizen quest. Saving citizens will award you a group of scholars you can hide in or a group of vigilantes that will help distract guards who are chasing you. In every city this will be the same award, and in every city the only side quest will be "Save Citizens" or "Climbing Towers". Climbing towers is fun for the first 10 minutes then it gets really stale..same goes for saving citizens
In order to assassinate your target you got to dig up info on him. So you basically have to do repetitive missions to dig up enough info on your target. This includes interrogation, or informer, or pickpocketing, or eavesdropping. It will always be one of these four and never anything different. Given that every side quest and every assassin mission is somewhat the same. The game has no replay value whatsoever
So whether your doing side missions or your assassin mission. You're going to be doing something repetitive.
Other then that a pretty good game. I like the bold new step and risk that Ubisoft took, as i know that anything that isn't a FPS is hard to sell now and days. Though im not 100% impressed cause we already of stealth games out there, so it's not first of it's kind.
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