[XBOX360] Assassin's Creed

It's alright so far. I'm three kills in, and I'm entertained, but generally a little let down by the whole thing.

1. The Kingdom is awesome on an atmospheric level, but actually traversing it gets tedious. When I'm on a horse, I like to gallop through environments, not trot slowly past constant smatterings of guards.

2. The "Save the Citizen" missions get old. When I first read about the game, my assumption was that by helping the people of the city, you'd be engaging in a large variey of different mini-missions and tasks. Like delivering medicine from one end of the city to the other, or catching a purse-snatcher, or maybe just sitting down and playing a townsperson in a simplified chess-like strategy game. Not just finding a group of soldiers harassing a random civilian and killing them...ten times in each district.

3. I wish there was a bit more to the Interrogation missions. Just following somebody for a while and beating them up in an alley gets stale. Altair should corner them in a dark alcove and jam his hidden blade into some non-vital but supremely painful spot in their torso. Then, the actual mechanics of "interrogating" the person should involve balancing pressure and twisting mechanics to inflict just enough pain to squeeze info out of them, but not make them start screaming incoherently in agony. Something more interesting like that.

4. The assassinations themselves need to be more focused than they are. I like the whole open-ended idea, but maybe the kills in this game leave too much to your imagination. Take the second hit, for example. Upon completing the investigations, you learn that the recommended way of approaching the kill is to get on the roof, sneak between the patrolling guards and drop into the courtyard inside the hospital walls. Yeah...you could do that...or just blend in with the Scholars standing right outside the gate and saunter past the guards.

It's cool that you've got so much freedom in the game, but that kind of shit completely defeats the challenge of the major kills. Why go through the longer, more arduous process of the roof approach when you can just slink right past the fortress defenses without so much as a raised sword?

In addition to that, the marks themselves need to be more hardcore. You should essentially be forced to take them out with stealth. The first kill, I tried sneaking up on his ass, and he saw me coming. He unsheathed his sword, fought me, and I killed him. Lame. When a target spots you during the big kill, you should be knee-deep in shit. You should be forced to hone your stealth and speed, and be punished gravely for failure. Why go for stealth when you can just hack away at the big kills and endure a lot less headache?

5. The escape scenarios needed to be a lot more focused. Basically, all they amount to is city-wide "informed" status that doesn't end. The guards should set up thick defenses at specific points, intended to block your easiest route back to the Bureau. On top of that, in my opinion, climbing on the roof during an escape should have been made to spell near-certain death. The volume of rooftop guards should have been increased sevenfold, and they should all be programmed to pepper your ass with arrows on sight. As it is, escaping after a kill amounts to climbing on the nearest roof and running like hell for the bureau. All of the Mercenary groups you spawn from doing the Citizen missions go to waste.

In general, the game is decent. Ubi had a lot of great ideas. Ideas that stretched far and offered a lot. However, basically none of the ideas implemented in this game were explored to a depth they deserved. So, what you wind up with is a diverse but shallow game.