Assassin's Creed is one of those games that seems like it could be the answer to your gaming prayers right out of the gate. It is designed beautifully, with great regard taken into each of the levels themselves. The characters are well thought out and surprisingly historically accurate, and the motion, animation, and overall game play are not only original but extremely well executed.
The game takes place in 12th Century Middle East in a marvelously rendered world where each of the city levels has been conceived and rendered with stunning quality, and from what I understand, is also significantly accurate to the setting. This really had the potential to be one of the best games to come out for 2007, and it did deliver on a number of fronts; unfortunately, Assassin's Creed has too many deterring factors that, after gaining a nice head of steam, allow it to fall flat on its face.
Without getting into too much detail, as stated above, the graphics are outstanding and you need but to play the game to see it for yourself. But frankly, WHO CARES? Graphics are nice but if the game play is lousy then it's a bad game no matter how much eye candy you put into it. All games are pretty anymore. You really have to do something sensationally bad to make an ugly game these days.
The controls are by no means intuitive, but are almost rhythmic and once you get the hang of it and dispose of your button mashing tendencies, become quite favorable. However, with each level there are different objectives to achieve, which at any random time you will simply abandon your stealthy assassin ways for the sheer fun of stabbing a random soldier in the throat just to pick a fight with his buddies. All for the lucent joy of slaughtering them single handedly due to the ridiculously sluggish AI, followed by the giddiness of easily skipping along the rooftops looking for one of the many convenient hiding places. All of which accounts for the majority of fun in the game, but even still starts to get old after a while.
Next, the development team for Ubisoft really put some time into this one and created a believable fictional story that tied in nicely with factual characters and even coincides with their historical disappearances. Alas, while the story is captivating at times, it is far too drawn out in places when the average game player simply wishes to get on with things. And flail the buttons all you want, you cannot advance until you've heard it all. They do eventually throw in an interesting plot twist towards the end but by this point, you just don't care anymore.
The character voice acting is for the most part, well done, with the unfortunate exception of our “hero,” Altair, whose voice acting didn't just fall short, but was exasperatingly weak. Speaking with an American accent, which the game does try to explain, semi-jokingly to the audience, through Altair, the reason for this phenomenon, but it's an explanation that in my opinion is merely an excuse for the lousy delivery. Added to the annoyance are repeating lines which show up at random times, in the same voice, but put to different faces all throughout the game.
Finally, the ending of the game is just weak sauce. What begins as missions of stealth and hiding from your adversaries by blending in with crowds of people and hiding in bales of hay, ends in a blood bath of nothing more than hack and slashing your way through waves of easily defeat-able soldiers in order to arrive at your final conflict. One redeeming factor is that the ending leaves the story WIDE open for an inevitable sequel, which if done correctly, will pick up the slack where this game falters and become the game it has the potential to be.
Ultimately, I think this game IS a lot of fun to play, for the first 20 hours or so, but eventually it becomes repetitious and boring and doesn't even have a good payoff at the end.