Assassin's Creed

The year is 1191 and you are Altair of the Secret Society of Assassins. It is the time of the Third Crusade, and even while the great Muslim leader Saladin (a hero to modern Islam but also a possible origin to its more militant side) concentrates his power at Jerusalem, the Knights following Richard the Lion-Hearted (who spent so much of his life out crusading that he could barely speak English, they say) have taken hold of nearby war-torn Acre. Control of the region fluctuates even as Knights Templar and other secret organizations make hidden machinations behind the scenes. The developers of Assassin’s Creed should be commended for choosing and recreating such an interesting stage in history. Too bad they managed to make the actual game here both highly repetitive and mind-numbingly dull.

First Impressionsby Tanx - Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Altair isn’t very good at being an Assassin. The first thing he does in the game is violate all the tenets of his creed. Once in action, his behavior remains dubious, even as he slowly learns compassion and humility (the moralizing in this game is remarkable, especially as you play a character who randomly slays hundreds of people on a regular basis… hey, those guards have families too!) Altair constantly scales nearby buildings, ascribing to him the earliest Parkour obsession on record. If this doesn’t draw enough attention to himself, Altair can’t say no to a street brawl, and spends a good amount of his time fighting the same group of soldiers with the same techniques over and over and over again.

To be a successful and sneaky assassin, you have to be that kind of forgettable person who goes unnoticed in a crowd… not so for our hero, who draws every drunk, mendicant and cretin to him without fail. And as the game gives no reward for sneakiness in eliminating your major assassination targets, every big mission devolves into a street fight just like the plethora you got into on the way to your goal. Fight, fight, fight, climb, climb, climb. Never has a great control scheme and beautiful background been used to less engaging effect.

So the gameplay wasn’t great, despite fantastic controls… but hey, the historical setting in this game is really neat, so let’s discuss that. The Assassins, or Hashashin, were a real secret society founded in Persia in the year 1090 by Hasan ibn al-Sabah and they lasted until 1272 or so, by which time the invading Mongol hordes had pretty much obliterated them. The game goes out of its way to avoid controversy, from the disclaimer at the load screen that a “multicultural” team put the story together, to the dropping of any mention of Hash. The assassins were famous for drug use, both as a method to control their ranks and in preparation for killing a target. Assassin’s Creed does depict another famous Assassin technique, having members jump off of cliffs in a show of loyalty to their leader. Of course, there is no historical record that I know of that says there were bails of hay for said assassins to land in.

Another thing Assassin’s Creed has right is the idea of a mountain fortress. The Hashashin founded cliff-side citadels all over the Middle East, with the most famous one being the castle Alamut or “the Eagle’s Nest” hidden in the mountains of Turkey. It is said that the founder Hasan himself managed to win Alamut from its former ruler by converting all of the guy’s household servants to the Assassin’s cause. Hasan was a fair man, however, and after stealing Alamut he paid the former owner for it in full. Alamut remained in Hashashin hands for many generations, even after one ruler went a little nuts, declared himself Caliph and decreed that the world was coming to an end.

The world of Assassin’s Creed is full of other historical factions and special interest groups such as slave traders, German-speaking Teutonic knights and many frazzled merchants. You have your Knights Templar, or Knights of the Temple. These guys were a kind of military enforcement charged with keeping pilgrims to the Holy Land safe on their journey. Due to political clout, large funding and wide distrust, the Templars have come to be thought of as an Illuminati Society, still existing today and pulling strings to achieve… well, most sensibly it would be Christian conquest of the Middle-East, but generally these things are simplified down to World Conquest.

Less known are the Knights Hospitaler, a kind of militant Red Cross stationed in Acre. There were some attempts to merge the Knights Hospitaler with the Templars that never panned out, and these guys also fell apart when Acre returned to Muslim control in 1291. Interestingly, there was a recent article in Science that found that the bacteria causing Dysentery was not present in the cesspools of Acre, but it was present in the Hospitaler latrines, giving evidence to the suspicion that the disease was prevalent amongst the crusaders and not the locals. Beware of the medical care the Hospitalers have to dish out!

As if this wasn’t enough, the developers decided to throw in a secret encapsulating story that I won’t spoil for you and an early appearance of the Ark of the Covenant. The Ark contains two “second draft” intact tablets each of which holds the ten commandments (these were made new by Moses after he smashed the first set.) If you read the Book of Hebrews, the Ark also has a jar of manna, the rod of Aaron and, in later documents, maybe a chrysolite sphinx. I leave it to the reader to look up the supposed magical properties of each of these items, but of interest the ark would, at the very least, kill on contact anyone from eleven of the twelve original tribes of Israel (only the Levi were allowed to handle it) although this danger does not seem to exist for heathens other than Nazis (as we saw in Raiders of the Lost Ark.) The ark also causes animals to break out in song and makes a magical humming noise that leads to victory on the battlefield. As a final note about the Ark, it is interesting to note that it served as a useful intermediate stage between polytheistic idol worship and monotheism… a material object, the so-called “throne of God” to focus peoples’ attention.

I’m pretty happy that Assassin’s Creed inspired me to look up this stuff again, but if you are feeling a bit bogged down, we’ll finish with a reminder from my evil cousin Cotangentx, who suggests you check out the wall-humping soldier video at YouTube… in case, like for him, that’s more your speed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kwywtvQRkg4

Played For: about 40 hour