Gameplay (cont.)

Occasionally, you will engage into chase sequences where you are either chasing your target after he's spotted you or running away after making your kill. In these situations, you can take advantage of all that you know of the surrounding city streets and jump on boxes, swing from handy poles etc. in order to avoid the crowd on the streets and get away (or reach your target) as quickly as possible. The graphics effects in these situations are top-notch, focussing the image on the 'background' while blurring everything on the 'foreground', thus focussing your attention to where you are going rather than where you are at the moment. Similarly, everything that you see on the screen can potentially be exploited by you – the decorative knobs on the walls are not merely fancy textures but something that Altair can actually take a hold of and climb up along.

In case you are running away from guards, your main goal is to get out of the direct line of sight. This is indicated on the screen by an indicator that stays red when you are seen by someone and turns yellow when you've broken the line of sight. Once you've done that, the smartest move is to hide as quickly as possible - by making a leap of faith and landing into a wagon filled with hay, for example. This will leave the soldiers dumbfounded while you giggle gleefully in your chosen hiding place. Another option is to assume the role of an ordinary citizen, walk around slowly with your head down, pretending to be a monk while the guards are looking for someone far more sinister.

The movement in the game world is made easier by the fact that most of the jumps and climbs that Altair makes are automatic. If you run off the edge of the roof and there's something that Altair can jump towards (the next rooftop, for example), Altair will be smart enough to make that jump and not wait for you to press a button on your keyboard. Likewise, he will stop running if there's nothing to jump towards. Thus, the challenge is not about hitting the correct keys in the correct sequence, but in planning your route and taking advantage of your surroundings.

As Altair engages in this full-time job, he's often in danger of getting hurt. Following the same realistic design of the game world and the characters, there's no health bar to tell you how much 'energy' you have left. Instead, if an enemy manages to deliver a fatal blow to you, you will be quite dead. You have some nifty combat moves to make the chance of events as rare as possible, including blocks and parries as well as grapples that allow you to throw a person away from you and landing a lethal blow on his back before he can recover.

Overall

All in all, Assassin's Creed is clearly worth being the most expected game of 2007. Although personally, I'd have appreciated a similar game set wholly in the time period in question (no futuristic elements), I'm still pretty darn excited about this game. There's some cleaning up still to be done with the graphic effects (bodies floating in air etc.), but it is clear to me that the developers at Ubisoft know what they are doing and we need not worry about the gameplay aspects of the title. Assassin's Creed will be out in November this year and available as a regular or a special collector's edition.