The Assassin's Creed Series: Assassin's Creed 1

Nostalgia

Having generally been an Assassin's Creed fan since the very first game came out, I've played every main installment (which I define as being a game primarily released on X-Box, PlayStation and PC) that has been released. My fandom of the series has had its ups and downs according to the journey Ubisoft has taken us on with every release, but as of this day I am firmly a fan.

Having 100% completed Assassin's Creed Odyssey at the beginning of 2020, I found myself thinking back through the entire series and having a craving to play again through the first installment.

The first Assassin's creed game was released on 13th November 2007. Yes, it really was that long ago! Back then I had more time to dedicate to gaming, so I was one of those folks that was eagerly anticipating this new genre of game for months and bought it during initial release.

The Special Edition box for AC1

I bought the special release edition which came in a metal box, which I don't actually recall cost me much more than the vanilla release (how times have changed). I played through the game and loved it and when I learned that a second AC game was going to be developed, I was all in.

Back to the Present

Although I no longer had the original copy I bought back then (probably given to some charity shop years ago, I have no idea), it turns out I had a copy of the game in my Steam library, probably bought in some Steam sale of yesteryear for a couple of quid.

So I played through it all and 100% completed it (again). Recalling difficulties finding all the flags in previous playthroughs, I made sure I had the flag maps and checked off each flag as I found it, to remove the annoyance I had one time where I found 99 out of 100 flags in the main hub area and then had to go through all the locations again with a map, one by one, to find the last one. I avoided that this time.

In fact, I had so much fun playing through AC1 again, I decided to not only review it for my blog, I also decided to start playing through the entire sequence again and review them one by one.

So here begins my review of the Assassin's Creed Series, beginning with the original Assassin's Creed game.

Assassin's Creed Review

The historical protagonist, Altaïr

First of all, let's talk about the setting of AC1. You control an Assassin named Altaïr (pronounced al-tie-ear), trained to be an Assassin from birth and becoming a Master Assassin at 24, by far the youngest person to ever achieve the rank. However, his huge achievement combined with his youth cause Altaïr to be incredibly arrogant, and the game opens to how his recklessly casual attitude causes a mission to catastrophically fail with the death of a colleague. Altaïr is stripped of his rank and told he must repeat his training and rise through the ranks, whilst embarking on missions to undo the damage he has done, in the hope that this will teach him the humility he so deperately needs.

I'm not sure how cliché the "main character loses all of his abilities and must start again" trope was in 2007, but of course it is a very familiar mechanic to most serious gamers these days...

And so you guide Altaïr on his journey to redemption, and whilst on this journey, start finding out that everything is not as it seems, regarding the Assassin's order, their arch enemies the Templars, or even the basic assumptions of the world we live in!

Alongside this historical adventure is also a modern-day parable. Is it the player that is guiding and tracing the steps of Altaïr? No it isn't, it's actually the present-day figure of Desmond Miles who is acting out Altaïr's adventure and the player's direct Avatar is Desmond. So the player is playing the role of a modern day protagonist playing the role of a historical protagonist. It might sound confusing, but it really isn't. What happens is that you periodically swap between controlling Altaïr and controlling Desmond, unravelling the multi-game plot that is the main point of the AC series up to AC3. Unlike the open-world parkour, this parallel of modern day man tied with historical ancestor has been done before, but the way they are tied together is new. Desmond Miles is a descendant of Altaïr. As Desmond has the same DNA, a machine called an Animus can be used to walk through Desmond's genetic memory and view firsthand what Altaïr did centuries ago. However, the Animus isn't perfect, specific points in time can't be immediately viewed. Instead, one has to find a significant event close to the critical time and then "walk through" Altaïr's actions in order to progress to the point in time you actually want to see. So essentially, Desmond has to play at being Altaïr in order for the Animus to get to the point in time which is of interest.

If it sounds complicated, it's not, I'm just not doing a very good job of explaining it.

The real Masyaf Castle in northwestern Syria

The Assassin's base is set in Masyaf, a genuine place in the world, and likely chosen for the game because the Assassin Order is based on the Hashshashin (Wikipedia article), whose Syrian headquarters was in Masyaf castle. Thus begins the basis of the lore of the entire Assassin's Creed Series. Almost all game settings, lore and characters are based on some facet of real world history and there is a lot of educational information in the series which is genuinely true. However, of course artistic licence is used in abundance for the convenience of the plot. It's easy to develop enough interest to look up which elements are true and which elements are just AC fiction!

Returning to the game itself, although the AC style of game is an entrenched genre these days, younger players should realise that open-world parkour was not a gaming thing before the first Assassin's Creed game, AC1 was truly groundbreaking; a game where you could go anywhere, run around an entire town, climb up any building, kill enemies in a number of different ways. Of course there were limits to that, you couldn't climb up any building, and you were roped off from various areas until you unlocked them, but it was still an amazingly open world compared to anything that came before it. The other thing it's important to realise is that this parkour combined with great stealth mechanics as well. The stealth itself wasn't amazing and new, but how it combined with the parkour was.

Assassin's Creed did a fantastic job of combining these mechanics together, and rightly attracted rave reviews at the time.

One of the things you will realise if you play it for the first time today, is how recognisable the mechanics are compared to all the other AC games up to Syndicate. Even with the major revamps that Origins went through to change the gameplay in the series from that point, you can still recognise a lot of the same gameplay mechanics in action. Assassin's Creed 1 holds up very well against the later games in terms of enjoying the general gameplay. Sure, lots of features in later games are missing, but rather than feel restricted, it makes the game just feel simpler. I didn't get frustrated that I couldn't do "action X" or use "tried and tested technique Y" that I mastered in later games, and in fact some mechanics are welcome in their absence (like stealth eavesdropping missions).

Synchronising high viewpoints to reveal areas of the map is a mechanic that persists through the entire series

The Steam version contains all the updates that were applied to the game after initial release. One of the main criticisms of the initial release were that the side missions were very formulaic and repetitive, with there only actually being 4 different types of side mission, and you got to repeat these several times over in each city. An update to the game doubled the types of side missions to 8. Playing through the game now, I found the side missions to not be repetitive at all and a welcome addition to the main quests rather than it feeling like a tacked on distraction.

In actual fact, the side missions were completely tacked onto the initial release. Have a read of this Push Square article to read more about it. As the game stands today, you would never have guessed.

As you may expect, the graphics from a 2007 game are simple, but they have generally aged very well. The main issue is probably that the geometry of the landscape is quite basic, very box like buildings, lots of angles on "round" surfaces, you can especially see this when you get the panoramic sweeps of the city from high up viewpoints (as seen in the screenshot in this article). But the textures and character movements hold up well enough. A huge plus side is that even the most basic on-board graphics chips in any desktop or laptop today is going to run AC1 extremely well, and any AMD or nVidia graphics card will barely be taxed, your fans may not even speed up at all!

Sound also stands up well, you don't get the background hustle and bustle of citizens like you do in modern games, but it is not an empty soundscape. Also, you'll likely recognise the various Animus jingles if you've played any of the other earlier AC games.

The simplicity of the gameplay compared to more recent AC games (before or after Origins) is somewhat of a joy. There is a period in the series where the games really get bogged down with an overload of different mechanics, weapons to get which barely seem to make any difference, a million different collectibles to unlock some trifle or feed completionists like myself. You've got the main missions, the side missions, which actually are relevant to the main objectives and the flags, and that's it. The core game is probably a similar length to Assassin's Creed 2, but the simplicity of the side missions means 100% completing AC1 doesn't start taking time up to the point where you start feeling it is a chore.

Worth Playing Today?

I highly recommend a play through of AC1 to anyone who has enjoyed any of the other games in the series. If you have somehow never played any AC game and are considering giving one a go, then it's worth considering starting at the first one. You'll pick it up super cheap these days and if you like AC1, you've got a real treat ahead of you when you start playing AC2. You might even find out how people who were there at the beginning, like me, ended up getting roped into being fans of the entire series.

AC1 ro AC4 releases, in order.

It's also worth playing AC1 as an introduction to the general mechanics as well as the lore. Although AC2 is better in every way, if you skip AC1 you'll miss out on some key plot elements of the series up to the end of AC3. Also, as you expect, the gameplay of each installment of the series builds upon the previous game, so it's an excellent introduction to understanding the game mechanics as they develop

I enjoyed playing through AC1 so much, I decided to replay through all the games again in sequence. I'll also play the handheld/mobile releases that have since also been released on the main consoles and PC. I'll be posting reviews of each game after I finish them with a view to how they stand up in time, how they compare to their predecessors in the series and the highlights of what each game brought to the series, good and bad.

Review Score

At the end of every review, I'll be scoring each game out of 5 in relation to the other games in the series. Therefore, the highest score of 5 will go to those games that are the best in the series, and the lowest score of 1 to the worst.

For Assassin's Creed, I believe this is a game that stands up to the test of time in many ways. Okay, against modern games, it is actually quite basic, but as I said before, in the context of the Assassin's Creed games I think this just means simplicity, and this simplicity means that a lot of the repetition that dogs later games in the series isn't there. The biggest "grind" in the game is collecting the flags, and that is not a subtask that does stand up to the test of time, with no way to highlight where they are in the game except by going up to high points and using Eagle vision. If you've collected, for example, 80 out of the 100 flags in the hub level, there is no realistic way you are going to find the rest of them without a guide.

Also, I do give this game the benefit of the context in which it was released, which is that there were no other games like it. As the first of its sub-genre, Assassin's Creed gets a lot right and not much wrong. I spent a long time thinking between whether to give it a 3 or a 4, and in the end, against the context of other games in the series, I give it a 4.

Next up, Assassin's Creed 2!